But the new conception does not in fact displace the old, although it is diametrically opposed to it. Pfleiderer has to admit that Paul, even in the writings of the latest period, advances without misgiving the doctrine of the “awakening of the whole man from the sleep of death,” just as if the new doctrine of “the presence with the Lord beginning immediately after death” were not in existence, although it is the outcome of long years of mental struggle. Pfleiderer, however, is prepared to accept even this portentous fact also, and to go on contentedly believing that Paul lived in a kind of mental twilight which is at once Jewish-eschatological and Greek-spiritualistic. He expresses this euphemistically by speaking of the Pauline eschatology as “hovering between the Pharisaic hope of the here and the Greek hope of the hereafter.” The way to a scientific understanding of Paulinism lies, therefore, for Pfleiderer through a _credo quia absurdum._ By his assertions about 2 Cor. v. I ff. he had brought the assumption of Hellenistic ideas in Paul into a dangerous position. Previously when a student of the subject had stated it to be his view that the sharp antithesis of flesh and spirit was Greek, there was no way in which this belief could be countered. If he was, further, convinced that the Apostle’s brain was so organised that he could at the same time think consistently along two separate lines, Greek-spiritualistic and Jewish-eschatological, without noticing their divergence and without ever mingling the two sets of ideas, a mind accustomed to work by the methods of historical criticism was similarly powerless against views arrived at as if by revelation. Pfleiderer, however, makes the mistake of referring [pg 074] to a matter of fact when he asserts that the Apostle’s conception of a life after death became Hellenised. Thereupon controversy about the Greek element in Paul rages furiously over 2 Cor. v. I ff.—it was only now that controversy had become possible. The simple wording of the passage is against Pfleiderer, for its subject is not the soul’s being “at home with Christ,” but the Apostle’s longing for the parousia. Pfleiderer himself would never have arrived at his exposition had it not been for the laudable desire to produce at last some tangible example of the influence of Greek thought upon the Apostle’s ideas.