As for those who have some inkling of the problem, their one thought is to dispose of it as rapidly as possible, instead of first exposing it in its full extent. Among them is Ritschl, who here employs all the arts and artifices of his exegesis and dialectic. That Jesus and Paul did not at bottom teach the same thing is to this undogmatic dogmatist unthinkable. In general the writers of this period are involved in the most curious confusions regarding the problem of “Jesus and Paul.” They fail to perceive that these two magnitudes are not directly comparable with one another because they think of Paul in complete isolation, and not as a feature of primitive Christianity. The differences and oppositions which reveal themselves between the teaching of Jesus and that of Paul exist also as between the teaching of Jesus and that of primitive Christianity itself. The momentous development did not arise first with Paul, but earlier, in the community of the first disciples. Their “religion” is not identical with the “teaching of Jesus,” and did not simply grow out of it; it is founded upon His death and resurrection. The “new element” was not brought into Christianity by Paul; he found it there before him, and what he did was to think it out in its logical implications. The difference of teaching between Paul and Jesus is not a difference between individuals, it is—in almost its whole extent—due to the fact that the Apostle belongs to primitive Christianity. In its false statement of the problem of Jesus and Paul the scholarship of the period after Baur shows that it has not yet succeeded in understanding the Apostle of [pg 044] the Gentiles as a phenomenon, an aspect, of primitive Christianity. There is frequent mention, in all these studies, of the Jewish roots of the Pauline thought. They attempt to explain his views, so far as possible, from the materials given in the Law and the Prophets. Some authors had been inclined to assume that in regard to his conception of the Law he did not stand wholly upon Old Testament ground, in the sense that he sometimes means by it a narrower ceremonial code of temporary validity, and sometimes a universal ethical law which has not been invalidated by the death of Christ. These confusions were put an end to by a study of Edward Grafe._(_43_)_ He shows that Paul when he speaks of the law, alike when he uses the article or does not use it, always has in mind the whole legal code, and never varies from the conviction that this has been set aside by the death and resurrection of Christ. That in Galatians the ritual aspect of the law, in Romans the ethical, is the more prominent, does not alter this fact. Nor is the consistency of the Apostle’s view annulled by the fact that in many places he formulates the negative judgment quite definitely, while in others he softens it by an admission of the historical and ethical significance of the law.