The Book of Wisdom and Philo are Stoic in their mode of thought, but Paul is not so. It is inconceivable how the Stoic _heimarmene_ can have been brought into connexion with the Pauline doctrine of predestination. The philosophic conception of fate thinks of the world-process as an unbroken chain of cause and effect in which also the actions of living beings have their place. Pauline foreordination is a pure will-act of God, non-rational and non-moral, and has to do with the ultimate issues of existence, not with the vicissitudes of life. To see a connexion between the two doctrines of predestination is as unjustifiable as it would be to identify the cosmic conflagration of the Pauline eschatology with that of the Stoic theory. Paulinism has, in general, a different spirit from that of the Stoa. Its author is moved by the fear of death and corruption and yearns for a new being. To the Stoic such ideas are, as “passion,” contemptible. He reckons—as you may read in Marcus Aurelius—with the present world as the only one there is, and with the present life as the only one which he has to live. [pg 099] Whatever views and conceptions are brought up for comparison, the result is always the same—that Paulinism and Greek thought have nothing, absolutely nothing, in common. Their relation is not even one of indifference, they stand opposed to one another. Had the Apostle been influenced by Hellenism in any shape or form, he could never have conceived his system in the way he did. Nevertheless it is possible to understand how theology came to class his doctrine as Greek. The mysticism which enters into it bears a certain analogy to that which springs from Greek religious thought and feeling. Since Judaism, itself guileless of any mysticism, produced nothing of the kind, could not create out of itself anything of the kind, the only possible alternative seemed to be to explain it as due to Greek influences, and to explain the essential character of Paulinism in accordance with this hypothesis. But this road leads to an impasse. In this way it is possible only to misinterpret the mysticism of the Apostle, not to understand it. Critical theology is confronted with the at first apparently inexplicable fact that there has arisen on Jewish-Christian soil a system of thought which externally has all the air of being a twin formation to that of Greek religious mysticism, but inwardly has nothing whatever to do with it. The actual result of the study of Paulinism in the post-Baur period is therefore wholly negative, and it must become evident that it is so the moment any one attempts to substitute references and proofs for mere assertions. This the scholars of that period avoided doing; they were prevented from making the attempt by the scientific instinct of self-preservation. [pg 100] IV H. J. HOLTZMANN _Heinrich Julius Holtzmann._ Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen Theologie. 1897. Vol. ii., 532 pp. On Paulinism, 1-225.