The curious thing is that Holsten, Pfleiderer, and their followers do not venture to formulate the unwelcome admission which may be read between their lines, but keep up the game with one another as if everything was going as well as heart could wish. They overdo their air of unconcern, as though from an uncomfortable sense that they might in the end lose confidence in their assertion, and so find themselves unable to explain how Paul arrived at his dualistic antithesis between flesh and spirit. For this is what it all ultimately comes to. The assertion of Greek influence is a kind of pillared portico behind which they construct the edifice of Paulinism as they understand it. The style, however, is only maintained as regards the front. What lies behind that is styleless, neither Greek nor Jewish, without plan, without character, without proportion. Those writers who wholly or partially dissent from the assumption of Greek influences carry out the same plan with the same materials, and with the same unconcern as regards the style. The only difference is that they do not conceal it by building a special façade in front of it, whether it be that, like Harnack, they have a fuller sense of the difficulties, or, like Weiss and Weizsäcker, persuade themselves that Paulinism, according to their construction of it, looks sufficiently well as it is. There is, however, one point on which Pfleiderer and his followers think that they can point to definite results of the influence of Greek ideas. They maintain that the Apostle’s eschatological expectations have been transformed by them. This has reference to the passage in 2 Cor. v. I ff. in which Paul gives expression to his desire not to be “unclothed” but to be “clothed upon.” The natural interpretation which is given by Bernard Weiss and others understands the Apostle as speaking [pg 070] of his eager desire to experience the parousia while still alive in the body, in order to share that transformation in which “what is mortal will be swallowed up by life,” and not to have to pass through a time of waiting in an intermediate state of non-being or death.