The standard of indubitably genuine Pauline style is furnished, according to Weisse, by the First Epistle to the Corinthians. It bears in all its parts the stamp of the most complete integrity and genuineness. The eye which has acquired due fineness of perception by the study of this writing discovers that only the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the First to the Thessalonians, and that to Philemon, “can boast of preserving in the same purity the original apostolic text.” The Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians “have interwoven in them a regular series of interpolations, which so far efface the genuine apostolic character of the style in many places as to render it unrecognisable, and have given rise to that difficulty of disentangling the meaning which has made Romans especially a _crux interpretum,_ and by the forced artificiality, intrinsic falsity, and unnaturalness of these interpretations has made this Epistle the bane of theological study; of which, in virtue of the character of its fundamental ideas, it was fitted to be the most precious treasure.”_(_109_)_ The whole of these interpolations are, he thinks, from one and the same hand, and go back to a time previous to the ecclesiastical use of the writings. The redactor cherished withal the most respectful awe of the Apostle’s words, and has hardly deleted a single one of them. What remains after the elimination of the secondary stratum in the Epistles to the Romans and Philippians [pg 143] does not prove to be an integral whole. The latter consists of two letters to this church, the second beginning with iii. 3. With the former there has been worked up a letter to a church in Asia Minor, consisting of ix.-xi. and xvi. 1-20._(_110_)_ Weisse did not get the length of publishing the reconstructed text of the Epistles. When his pupil Sulze carried it through after his death,_(_111_)_ the prophecy which the author had put on record in his “Dogmatics” regarding his undertaking was fulfilled. It met with “universal disbelief.” In part the cause of this ill-success lay in the one-sidedness of the principle maintained by the author. Weisse confines himself entirely to “stylistic criticism.” While he recognises the possibility of a distinction between genuine and spurious based on the contents, the trains of thought, of the letters, he will have nothing to do with it. With the controversy about the genuineness of the main Epistles there began a new era of “interpolation criticism.” Daniel Völter, rendered confident by the professedly “assured results” of the criticism of the Apocalypse in regard to the distinction of sources, thinks to find in a similar procedure the solution of the Pauline problem, and hopes that it will be possible by “careful criticism” to separate the genuine from the spurious._(_112_)_