Teichmann professes to have demonstrated the [pg 076] Hellenisation of the Pauline eschatology. What he actually shows is what it would have become if it had really undergone Greek influence. Not one of his “results” can be proved from the Apostle’s letters. Where is there a single word to suggest that the Apostle abandoned the conception of the judgment and that of predestination to life or to damnation? Where does he ever speak of universal blessedness? Where does he hint at the possibility that mankind as a whole is to be converted to belief in Christ between the parousia and the delivery of all authority into the hands of God, and will thereupon receive the Spirit? What grounds are there for supposing that he gives up the idea of the parousia as superfluous? In his zeal to discover antinomies and trace developments, Teichmann forgets to take account of the most elementary facts. He asserts, for instance, that in I Thessalonians those who arise from the dead enter the kingdom of God in their earthly bodies. But from the Jewish Apocalyptic and from the teaching of Jesus it clearly appears that the resurrection included within itself a transformation of this creaturely corporeity into a glorified corporeity. It would not do for Teichmann to remember this. He is bound, even where he represents the Apostle as still wholly under the sway of Jewish conceptions, to bring him into an inconceivable opposition to these in order that the transformation which is taught in I Corinthians xv.—entirely in accordance with Jewish eschatology—may be represented as derived from the Greek doctrine of the Spirit. Without intending it, he thus supplies the most brilliant refutation of the theory of the Hellenisation of the Pauline eschatology. He engaged battle on ground on which Pfleiderer and his school had incautiously ventured forth in the heat of action, and he has to find by experience that he is unable to make good a single position. A Hellenisation of the eschatology is quite impossible to prove. Kabisch turns out to have been right. The [pg 077] Apostle holds on this point too vigorous and too clear a language. But if that be so, the theory that the doctrine of flesh and spirit is Greek is itself most seriously imperilled. Teichmann felt, and therein he was more logical and consistent than the rest, that if there were any Hellenistic ideas in Paulinism they must necessarily have attacked and displaced the Jewish eschatology. Pfleiderer’s view that the two could have subsisted side by side without—except in the case of 2 Corinthians v. I ff.—influencing and interpenetrating one another is an untenable theoretical hypothesis. From the whole range of the history of thought no analogy could be produced for this harmonious coexistence of two different worlds of thought.