How he came to draw it is not explained by Holtzmann, any more than by the scholars of the post-Baur period generally. The assumption that the Apostle experienced along with the vision an ethical crisis which set him free from the law, is a psychological hypothesis about which the letters have nothing whatever to say. It does not even prove what it professes to prove. Exactly how the abrogation of the law is supposed to be effected by the death and resurrection of Christ is not obvious. It is to be remarked, too, that Paul always treats the abolition of the law as a logical conclusion, not as a psychological experience. In other connexions, too, Holtzmann often has recourse to Holsten’s expedient of taking what is unintelligible in the Apostle’s statements as accounted for by the Damascus vision. In this way the doctrine of the “new creature” is made to go back to a “personal experience,” and “a perception so keen as to be apprehended by the senses, of the destruction of the law of sin in the members.” “The complex of new ethical powers, motives, duties, [pg 106] and aims . . . which formed itself in him has as its centre the risen Christ who had appeared to him in that moment as light, to be henceforth the vital centre and the guiding star of his individual life. . . . Hence the ‘new creation.’ It is a simple generalisation and application of this personal experience to cover all analogous cases, since now all baptized persons appear as, on the negative side, dead to sin, on the positive side as walking in a ‘newness of life’ corresponding to the resurrection.” So Holtzmann. Paul, however, never speaks of his theory of the new creature as if he were expressing by it the generalisation and objectivation of an inner experience, but represents it as being logically and actually involved in the death and resurrection of the Lord for those who believe in him, and regards his own renewal as only a special case of the general law which operates in all the believing elect. That is just the characteristic and unintelligible thing about Paulinism, that its creator does not seem to have the faintest consciousness of holding up his personal experiences as something to be imitated, but presents his whole system as something that immediately and objectively grows out of the facts, something which can be examined by the higher, but in its own way logical understanding from which “gnosis” is derived. To treat his Damascus “experience” as a source of theoretic knowledge, as is done by modern theology, in order to be dispensed from rendering any account to ordinary or philosophic thought, would have been out of the question for an unsophisticated mind such as his, and indeed for the mental attitude of antiquity in general. Of Paul’s objective statements Holtzmann always, in order to be able to interpret them, makes something subjective.