The great merit of the Tübingen critic was that he allowed the texts to speak for themselves, to mean what they said. On the ground of the striking difference between Acts and Galatians regarding Paul’s relation to the original Apostles, and in view of the divisions and contentions which reveal themselves in the Epistles to the Corinthians, Baur concludes that in the early days of Christianity two parties—a Petrine party or party of the original Apostles, and a Pauline party—stood opposed to one another, holding divergent views on the subject of the redemption wrought by Christ. In the gradual adjustment of these differences he sees the development which led up to the formation of the early Catholic Church, and he traces the evidence for this process in the literature. He thinks he can show that the two parties gradually approached each other, making concessions on the one side and the other, and finally, under the pressure of a movement which was equally inimical to both of them—the Gnosticism of the early part of the second century—they coalesced into a single united Church. The recognition of the character and significance of Gnosticism makes it possible for Baur to introduce a new kind of criticism. Before him it was only possible to arrive at the negative result that a writing was not by the author to whom it was traditionally ascribed. Now, according to him, it is possible to determine to what period it belongs. It is only necessary to show what position it occupies in the process of reconciliation of the two parties, and, especially, whether it deals with speculative error. This Baur calls “positive” criticism. He applies it in the first place to the Pastoral Epistles, and argues that the heretics combated in them do not belong to primitive Christianity but are representatives of the Gnostic movement of the second century. By the “myths and genealogies” here mentioned are meant the great speculative systems which are known from Church history. The description given of the heretics is [pg 014] intentionally couched in terms which are neither too general nor too special, in order to sustain the fiction that the false doctrine arising at this later period only revives a movement which had already been attacked and defeated by Paul. That neither the assumption of a second imprisonment, nor any other possible or impossible hypothesis, can restore to the Pastorals their lost genuineness is as firm a conviction with Baur as it was with Eichhorn.