It is nothing less than astonishing that the close affinities with the Apocalypse of Ezra do not receive any recognition. In this work there are elaborate discussions of the problems of sin, the Fall of our first parents, Election, the wrath, long-suffering, and mercy of God, the prerogative of Israel, the significance of the law, the temporal and the eternal Jerusalem, of the prospect of dying or surviving to the Parousia, the tribulation of the times of the End, and the Judgment. The close affinity between this writer and Paul strikes the eye at once. [pg 052] Writers on Paulinism are, however, so obsessed by the idea that the teaching of Paul is a “personal creation” that they cannot bring themselves to accept the view that the religious problems which struggle for solution in his letters had also occupied his Jewish contemporaries or at least a section of them._(_49_)_ The claims of Late Judaism on Paul were therefore taken to be discharged when his Rabbinic dialectic and exegesis, and to a certain extent his eschatology also, had been ascribed to it. The chapter on the future-hope which connected Paul on the one hand with Judaism and on the other with primitive Christianity, is never omitted in any account of his teaching given by the scholars of the post-Baur period. In it is collected all that the Epistles have to say regarding the parousia, the resurrection, the judgment, and the Kingdom of the Last Times. The treatment, however, is by no means thorough. Scarcely anywhere is there an attempt to arrange the scattered notices in an orderly way and bring them into relation with one another. It is taken for granted that they are inconsistent with one another, as a necessary consequence of the fantastic character of the material. That Paul may have had a clear plan of the events of the End in which all his statements can find a place, is not taken into account. These writers therefore set no limit to the admission of inconsistencies, and draw a picture which is, to put it plainly, meaningless. So far, it occurs to no one that the want of connexion may perhaps result from the fact that the separate [pg 053] statements have not been carefully examined in regard to what they actually mean, and to their mutual relations. It is taken as quite certain that the “simple” eschatology of I Thessalonians is superseded by the more complicated view of the Corinthian letters; and these in turn are not the last stage in this “development” of the Apostle’s thought. No attempt is made to get a clear idea in what order he thinks of the judgment and the resurrection of the dead, or as to whether he holds that there is one resurrection and one judgment, or a resurrection of the “righteous,” and another besides, and whether he assumes this to be accompanied by one judgment or two.