That only a very few investigators have drawn these inferences is not due to the fact that they are not justified. It was want of courage, of logical consistency, and of the necessary contempt for the rest of the facts which prevented them from making the venture. So they offered compromises, imposingly dressed out in words but inwardly untenable, and talked themselves and others into believing the impossible, namely, that a Hellenisation of the primitive Christian belief effected by Paul as an individual is really conceivable. The half-and-half theories which represent Paulinism as consisting partly of Greek, partly of Jewish ideas, are [pg 240] in a still worse case than those which more or less neglect the former element. Encumbered with all the difficulties of the Hellenising theory they become involved in the jungle of antinomies which they discover or imagine, and there perish miserably. The solution must, therefore, consist in leaving out of the question Greek influence in every form and in every combination, and venturing on the “one-sidedness” of endeavouring to understand the doctrine of the Apostle of the Gentiles entirely on the basis of Jewish primitive Christianity. That implies, in the first place, that the Pauline eschatology must be maintained in its full compass, as required by the utterances of the letters. But merely to emphasise it is not everything. The next point is to explain it. What was the scheme of the events of the End, and what answer was given by eschatological expectation to the fundamental questions which could not be avoided? Are there two resurrections or one; one judgment or two? Who are to rise again at the parousia? Does a judgment take place then? On whom is it held? What are its standards and its subject? Wherein do reward and punishment consist? What happens to the men of the surviving generation who are not destined to the Messianic kingdom? What is the relation between judgment and election? What is the fate of believers who are elect and baptised but who have fallen from grace by unworthy conduct? Can they lose their final blessedness, or are they only excluded from the Messianic kingdom? Does Paul recognise a general resurrection? If so, when does it take place? Is it accompanied by a judgment, or do only the elect rise again? When does the judgment take place at which the elect judge the angels? Not until Pauline eschatology gives an answer to all the “idle” questions of this kind which can be asked will it be really understood and explained. And it must be somehow possible, by the discovery of its inner logic, to reconstruct it from the scattered statements in the documents. [pg 241] We have no right to assume that for Paul there existed in his expectation manifest obscurities, much less that he had overlooked contradictions in it. Is there, then, any possibility of explaining the mystical doctrine of redemption and the sacramental teaching on the basis of the Jewish eschatological element?