It is to be remembered that the Apocalypse of Ezra, which shows in its own way such depth, while it is derived from the Scribal theology of the first century, is as little to be explained from what on the basis of the later literature we think of as the Rabbinism of the period as are the Pauline Epistles. Had this writing not been preserved, it would never have occurred to anyone that at that time men belonging to the circle of the Scribes had been tormented in this way by the primary problems of religion, and had brought the questions arising out of them into such close relations with eschatology. Further, it is to be taken into account that Palestinian Scribism, even though it was an independent entity, did not, at the time when it has to be considered in connexion with Paul, exist in absolute exclusiveness, but maintained relations with Jewish Hellenism. The latter worked on a basis of ideas which it had in large measure taken over from Rabbinism and held in common with the latter. This relationship becomes in the case of Philo clearly apparent. With him one can never tell where the “Rabbinist” ends and the Hellenist begins. But if the theology of the Scribes stood in any kind of relation with Jewish Hellenism, it cannot have been so poor in ideas and unspiritual as it appears in the later tradition. [pg 050] Even the discourses of Jesus, in spite of the polemical picture which they give of it, create the impression that He had to do with a Rabbinism which was interested in really religious questions, even though it showed itself incapable of rising to the height of the simple piety to which His preaching of the Kingdom of God and the repentance necessary thereto made its appeal. It seems therefore probable that the Epistles of Paul and the Apocalypse of Ezra, along with its satellite the Apocalypse of Baruch, are witnesses to a Rabbinism, or a movement within its sphere, of which the Rabbinic tradition which later became fixed in written form gives us no information. What should we know of the moving forces of the Reformation as they manifest themselves in Luther’s works of the year 1521, if we were dependent for our information on the Lutheran scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How would we think of the Reformation as a whole if we possessed only these witnesses? With all due respect to the vaunted faithfulness of Rabbinic tradition, which after all we are not in a position to check, was it capable of preserving the record of a period of living thought? Is an oral tradition ever capable of doing so?