The writer who goes furthest in this direction is Holsten. In his work on the “Gospel of Paul and of Peter”_(_37_)_ he describes how Paul, while he was persecuting the new faith, was, as a Jewish thinker, occupied with the thought of the offence of the cross and the alleged resurrection. While still a fanatical zealot “he constantly carried with him in his consciousness the elements of the Messianic faith, even though as negative and negated.” By the keenness of his theological dialectic he was compelled to imagine what the alleged facts would really signify if the belief of the disciples were justified. The “principle of the Messianic faith” was, in him, “alive in greater definiteness than even in the consciousness of the followers of the Messiah whom he persecuted.” The Messiahship of Jesus could not for him take its place as a hope and faith within the Jewish system of thought and religious life, [pg 039] but necessarily implied the destruction of what he had hitherto held to be true. Thus the persecutor had in principle thought out for himself to its ultimate consequences the revolution which would result from the acceptance of the Messiahship of Jesus. And this he translated into word and deed after he had experienced the vision on the Damascus road. Other writers take as the starting-point for their psychological arguments the passage in Romans vii., where Paul depicts the despair of the man who recognises that the law, although it is spiritual and was given with a view to life, can only in the fleshly man produce sin, condemnation, and death. What we there read concerning the struggle between the natural, powerful will of the flesh and the law, is, they think, written from the point of view of the pre-Christian consciousness of the Apostle. He had experienced this agony of soul, and it was by this that the Jewish religious attitude had been broken down in him. Therefore in his Gospel he does not desire to retain anything from the faith of his fathers. These two main lines of psychological theory are followed for a longer or shorter distance in all the works of this period. Hand in hand with this psychologising goes a tendency to modernisation. The scholars of this period spiritualise Paul’s thought. The transformation varies in extent for the different ideas. The statements about the atonement and imputed righteousness are the least affected by it. What is unintelligible in these is put down to the account of the Jewish Rabbinic mode of thought in which Paul is supposed to be held prisoner. On the other hand, the conceptions regarding union with Christ in his death and passion, and the new life in Him through the Spirit, are subjected to paraphrase and explanation until nothing of the realistic sense is left remaining. The question is not faced why Paul, if he wanted to say anything so “spiritual” and general as this, should have adopted so exaggerated, paradoxical, and materialistic a method of expression. [pg 040]