It is complicated by the fact that our only information about the beliefs of the primitive Church comes from Paul. His writings are the first—and indeed the only—witnesses which we possess upon the point, since the First Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of James give us information at best about a non-Pauline, certainly not about a pre-Pauline Christianity. The standard by which the primitiveness of Paul’s Christianity has to be measured and tested has, therefore, in the first place to be arrived at by the method of arguing backward from itself. Nevertheless, the difficulty is not so great as it appears when thus theoretically stated. The most general features of the earliest dogma can be found without difficulty in the Epistles. These consisted in the belief in the Messiahship of the Jesus who had died and risen again, and in the expectation of His parousia in the immediate future. Moreover, the problem as a whole is simplified by the fact that the second of the fundamental questions has been clearly answered by the history of Pauline study. The answer is this: Paulinism and Hellenism have in common their religious terminology, but, in respect of ideas, nothing. The Apostle did not Hellenise Christianity. His conceptions are equally distinct from those of Greek philosophy and from those of the Mystery-religions. The affinities and analogies which have been alleged cannot stand an examination which takes account of their real essence and of the different way in which the ideas [pg 239] are conditioned in the two cases. Neither Baur nor the theology which owes allegiance to him, nor the students of Comparative Religion, have succeeded in proving their assertions. It is also interesting to observe that those who undertake to explain Paul by the aid of the Graeco-Oriental Mystery-religions, entirely deny the philosophic Hellenism which a more conventional theological opinion has found in him; so that it is a case of Satan’s being driven out by Beelzebub. On the other hand, the Comparative study of Paulinism has the merit of having made an end of the “spiritualising” and “psychologising” which were practised for a whole generation. The impossibility of anything in the nature of a Hellenic gospel being present in Paul appears from the fact, that every view of this kind when thought out in its logical implications must arrive at a point where it has to do violence to historical tradition. It became apparent that it is impossible for a Hellenised Paulinism to subsist alongside of a primitive Christianity which shared the Jewish eschatological expectations. One must either, as the Ultra-Tübingen critics did, transplant the Epistles and the doctrine from the primitive period to the second century, or, as some of the votaries of Comparative Religion have endeavoured to do, explain primitive Christianity as a product of Graeco-Oriental syncretism.