Apart from Völter, the criticism which claims to distinguish various sources and detect interpolations is of a more innocent and guileless description. It does not plunge into the depths of the Pauline problems in the attempt to reach the firm ground that has never yet been reached, but amuses itself by determining what and how many original writings of the Apostle may have been worked up into the canonical Epistles to the [pg 148] Corinthians, Romans, and Philippians. This work, at which Semler had already made a beginning, is in itself necessary and interesting. The results, however, prove to be uncertain and contradictory, because the criteria by which the deletions, dissections, and combinations are determined, are always derived from subjective impression. The one consolation in regard to them is that any importance which attaches to these results concerns almost exclusively the pre-canonical literary history of the Epistles and does not affect our knowledge of the Pauline system. The supposed interpolations are of a subsidiary character. The text as a whole is hardly seriously affected by them. The sense is scarcely altered by the dislocations and conflations by which one critic or another restores the original letters and releases the present-day reader from the tutelage of the so inconceivably astute redactor. It remains to remark that most of the scholars who have occupied themselves with this work do not trouble themselves very much about the meaning and the connexion of Paul’s statements, but are like surgeons who think more of their skill in handling the knife than of being quite sure about the diagnosis which is to direct the incision, and therefore not seldom fall victims to the temptation of having recourse to an operation in cases where it turns out to have been unnecessary or even injurious._(_116_)_ As a work which stands much above the average of [pg 149] the usual cutting-up hypotheses we may mention Spitta’s work on Romans._(_117_)_ He distinguishes in the canonical Epistle two writings, a longer one consisting of, in the main—allowing for incidental interpolations—chapters i.-xi. with fragments from xv. and xvi., and a shorter writing which is made up of chapters xii., xiii. and xiv., with fragments of xv. and xvi. The longer one, which is the older, is supposed to have been preserved entire, the shorter is of later origin, and it lacks the introduction. The problem of the composite character of the main epistle in connexion with the address and similar questions, is solved by supposing that it is a working up of an earlier general treatise intended for Jewish Christians into a letter addressed to the Roman Gentile Christians.