How do the Debit and Credit of the theory stand at this point? For the credit side, it claims that the dualism of flesh and spirit is of Greek origin, but it does not get beyond the general assertion. No serious attempt has been made to demonstrate the existence of Greek conceptions in the particular aspects of the doctrine, and to explain the pessimism, the desire for death, and the ethical teaching of the Apostle as derived from the non-Jewish world of thought. That the Pauline universalism and doctrine of freedom from the law are directly inspired by the Greek spirit it no longer has the right to assert. [pg 085] In a single instance its defenders venture to point to the influence of Greek religious thought on the Apostle’s views. They seek to show that his Jewish, eschatological conception of the future life and his view of the events of the End were in time entirely transformed by it, if not actually cancelled. But the attempt to prove this from the documents has not been successful. Meanwhile the following difficulties appear. The theory is obliged to assume a dualism between Jewish and Greek elements in Paul, and to assert that on the one hand he never allowed the two systems of thought to coalesce, while on the other he never became conscious of their disparity; it has to attribute to him a capacity for combining contradictions, which allows him to maintain alongside of one another a spiritualistic doctrine of immortality and a crudely materialistic notion of resurrection without becoming aware of their incompatibility; it is logically forced to the conclusion that he set aside the Jewish eschatology, with its conceptions of judgment and condemnation, in favour of a doctrine of universal blessedness, whereas there is in the Epistles not a single hint pointing in this direction; it is forced, in order to make his statements appear “Platonic,” so to spiritualise them that the natural sense of the words disappears; it must ignore the proved fact that his doctrine of the spirit, when taken in its full compass and not confined to the antithesis of spirit and flesh, is most naturally explained as a mere development of the primitive Christian view; it must meet the objection—which it never can do—that the original apostles never discovered anything of an essentially foreign, Greek character in Paul’s views; it must, when confronted with the history of dogma, bend itself with what grace it may to the admission that Paulinism exercised no influence upon the formation of early Greek theology, and cannot therefore have been felt by the men who were concerned in that process as itself representing a first stage in the Hellenisation of Christianity. [pg 086] The theory therefore explains nothing, but creates difficulty upon difficulty. In view of this relation of its assets to its liabilities it would have no alternative but to declare itself bankrupt, had it not astutely refrained from keeping any accounts.