He entirely depotentiates the juridical series of ideas. Moreover, he refuses to admit that Paulinism constitutes a speculative system. He assumes that the Apostle moved in a free, untrammelled fashion among the various sets of ideas and felt no real need to combine them into a unity. In addition to Ritschl, Bernhard Weiss_(_39_)_ and Willibald Beyschlag,_(_40_)_ in their New Testament Theologies, endeavour to make clear the relations between Paul and primitive Christianity from the stand-point of critical conservatism. In order to secure a broad basis for the primitive form of apostolic doctrine, they pronounce I Peter and the Epistle of James to be documents of the pre-Pauline period. The writer who makes things easiest for himself is Von Hofmann._(_41_)_ For him there is no “Pauline system [pg 042] of doctrine.” The Apostle never uttered anything that did not belong to the common doctrine of Christianity, but “according to the difference of the occasion” brought into prominence this or that aspect of the saving acts of God or of the condition of salvation, and what he thus brought forward, now under one designation now under another, he sets forth now in this relation and now in that one. Therefore this writer, who was vaunted by the orthodox as a brilliant opponent of Tübingen errors, has no scruple in working up together the Pauline ideas along with those of the other New Testament Epistles into a single whole, which he offers as apostolic doctrine. Another problem which is hardly apprehended in its full difficulty by the scholars of this period is that of the total neglect in the Pauline gospel of the proclamation of the kingdom of God and His righteousness which Jesus committed to His followers. They seem to feel no surprise at the fact that the Apostle, even where it would be the most natural thing in the world, never appeals to the sayings and commands of the Master. Many of them never touch on this question at all. Resch, however, in his collection of extra-canonical Gospel-fragments, even undertakes to show that in the Pauline letters a whole series of otherwise unrecorded sayings of Jesus are embodied, and defends the hypothesis that the Apostle had taken them from a pre-canonical Gospel which ranked for him as an authority of equal value with the Old Testament. The enigma of the untraced quotation, “What eye hath not seen, neither hath ear heard,” etc., in I Cor. ii. 9 ff., is solved by referring the “as it is written” to the written Gospel on which Paul draws._(_42_)_ It is curious that most of these authors believe that they reduce the acuteness of the problem by pointing [pg 043] out in the Epistles as many reminiscences of Synoptic sayings as possible. That, of course, only makes the matter more complicated. If so many utterances of Jesus are hovering before Paul’s mind, how comes it that he always merely paraphrases them, instead of quoting them as sayings of Jesus, and thus sheltering himself behind their authority?