There were, of course, as time went on, attempts to [pg 028] explain the composition of the four main epistles and Philippians as arising by the working up together in each single epistle of two or more originals, but these were not of any real importance for the study of the Pauline doctrine. It was only a carrying out of the task suggested by Semler, when he pointed out that we have not got the letters in their original form but only as prepared for public reading by the early Church. But the constitution of the Pauline material is scarcely affected by the attempts to reconstruct these originals. They have a purely literary interest. Theology, so far as it was occupied with the study of the Pauline system, did not allow itself to be at all disquieted by the rejection of the whole of the Epistles proposed by Bruno Bauer in his “Criticism of the Pauline Letters.”_(_30_)_ Nor was its confidence shaken by the hypothesis that the letters have been worked over to a very large extent and in a very thoroughgoing fashion. Christian Hermann Weisse’s “Contributions to the Criticism of the Pauline Epistles,”_(_31_)_ which appeared in 1867, where he sets forth the justification and the principles of this method, scarcely attracted any attention, as was indeed the case with almost all the theological work of this writer. The elucidation of the details of the Pauline doctrine is vigorously pursued. An empirical definition is attempted of the terms sin, law, conscience, justification, redemption, election, and freedom. A special interest attaches to the study of the terms flesh and spirit. After Holsten had endeavoured to trace the significance of the word flesh, Lüdemann—in a brilliant work published in 1872—endeavoured to arrive at a clear idea of the Apostle’s anthropology and its place in his doctrine of salvation. There are, so runs his thesis, two conceptions of [pg 029] “flesh” in Paul. The one agrees with the naive, simple Jewish linguistic usage, and means only the natural being of man. The other is much more precise and belongs to a dualistic system of thought. In it the flesh is defined as the necessary cause of sin and corruption and as the absolute antithesis to spirit. On close examination it appears that not merely two conceptions of “the flesh” existing side by side, but two different doctrines of man’s nature, and consequently two different conceptions of redemption, are found in Paul.