There is a further point in which, according to Gunkel, Paul raises to a higher level the view which he took over. By the possession of the Spirit the primitive Church was made certain that the end of the present age was at hand and the new age was about to dawn. For the Apostle the temporal relation becomes an inner one. The Spirit is for him the earnest of the coming kingdom of God. Already in the present he calls into being the future life in believers and gives them the certainty, and to some extent even the reality, of the life which is about to dawn for them. The Pauline doctrine of the Spirit is therefore simply a development of the primitive Christian doctrine. That it was so long regarded as Greek is due, according to Gunkel, to the fact that scholars never examined it as a whole, but always confined themselves to the discussion of the dualism of spirit and flesh. This prevents the relation of the doctrine to the views of the primitive community, and especially its relation to the doctrine of the future age, from becoming apparent. One very weighty theoretic objection to the admission of Greek elements in Paulinism is passed over by its defenders in complete silence. If the thoughts developed by the Apostle of the Gentiles had grown up upon the soil of Hellenism, the original apostles and those closely associated with them would certainly have been aware of this and attacked them on that ground. From the records, however, as we have them in the letters, it appears certain that they only reproached him with his attitude towards the law, and found no other point to object to in his teaching. The primitive Christian community at Jerusalem accused him of keeping back something from his churches; it did not discover anything new and essentially foreign in his thought. In spite of the keenness of the struggle, it was never made a charge against him that he had “heathenised” the Gospel. That shows how completely out of the question the assumption of Greek influences was for his [pg 080] opponents. But the fact that his contemporaries discovered nothing of the kind in him forms a strong presumption against any such theory when brought forward in later times.