That Paul’s thinking follows the lines of Old Testament conceptions is self-evident. The only question is whether the motive forces which make their appearance in his gospel are derived in some way or other from the Old Testament Scriptures. That is not the case. In working up the primitive Christian views he does not have recourse to the ideas of the ancient Judaism. Nowhere does Paul attach himself to these. He takes no ideas from the Old Testament with a view to giving them a new development, [pg 045] but uses only what he can take from it ready formed. His new discovery rests on a different basis. The Law and the Prophets serve only to supply him with the Scriptural arguments, positive and negative, of which he stands in need. On the essential nature of the distinctively Pauline world of thought the Old Testament therefore throws no light. This negative result is not, indeed, everywhere clearly formulated. There are some students of Paulinism who simply ignore it. Heinrici, in the preface to his study of 2 Corinthians (1887), ventures on the assertion that in Paul the “spirit of Old Testament prophecy” triumphs over contemporary Judaism. And he is not the only one who clings to the illusion that much help is to be gained from the Old Testament for the understanding of the Apostle’s world of thought. By way of proof they cite every possible parallel, even the most remote. But the disproportion between the amount of the material offered and the smallness of the result established tells against them. That Paul is a child of late Judaism only began to be generally taken into account when its world of thought was made known to theology by Schürer’s “History of New Testament Times,”_(_44_)_ and Weber’s “System of Palestinian Theology in the Early Synagogues.”_(_45_)_ But even after this most scholars shared a certain disinclination to recognise a real connexion between the Apostle’s world of thought and that of late Judaism. Heinrici, who in [pg 046] his study in the Corinthian Epistles gives great attention to the question regarding the source of his ideas, definitely denies that “the intellectual and religious forces of Late Judaism exercised a dominant influence” on the Apostle. He holds, like many others, that Paul, passing over his own time, grasped hands with the classical Judaism of the prophets, and that one source of his strength is to be found in this fact. This prejudice is to be explained by the low estimation in which late Judaism had always been held by theologians. It was identified, without examination, on the one hand with “fantastic apocalyptic views,” and on the other with a “soulless Rabbinism.”