His predecessors had done their best in their treatment of the subject to conceal its fragmentary character, and [pg 113] when all was said and done had been content to put in the foreground only a few leading ideas, which could be brought under a single point of view. They worked with perspective, light and shade. Holtzmann brings all the detail into one line and places it under the same illumination. The fact that the system becomes in this way much more complicated than it had already been made by the scholarship of the period awakes in him no misgivings, but increases his confidence, since he sees in it one of those offences which needs must come. Even the objection that so complicated a system of doctrine could not have been understood in primitive Christian times does not alarm him. He anticipates it by declaring that the actual contemporaries and adherents of the Apostle could neither understand nor imitate him, even if they had wished to do so. How, indeed, could they possibly have done so! The whole of Paulinism is a “systematisation of the Christ-vision” and a “generalisation” of that which the Apostle had experienced in his own soul, and consequently ascribed to all who walk in the same way as an experience which they must necessarily undergo. “What this man with his unique spiritual endowment had experienced, felt, and thought amid influences and surroundings which could only once have arisen, could never be exactly in the same way experienced, felt, and thought by any other man.” Holtzmann, therefore, like Harnack, accepts the saying that no one ever understood Paul, with the sole exception of Marcion . . . who misunderstood him! It is not enough for him to regard the system, as had been usual among scholars since Baur, as a personal creation of the Apostle; he goes the whole way with Holsten in maintaining that the personal creation was nothing else than the interpretation of a unique personal experience. But that is to admit that no connecting links between Paulinism and primitive Christianity can be discovered; and does not that really imply an abandonment of all attempt to explain the Apostle’s doctrine? Is it [pg 114] understood at all if it is not understood in relation to primitive Christianity? What right has any one to assert that it was unintelligible to his contemporaries? Paul confidently ascribes to them an understanding of it. And how are we to explain the success which is evidenced by the establishment of the Pauline churches and the victorious struggle for freedom from the law? Can the least understood of all early Christians have exercised the greatest influence? These fundamental questions are not asked by Holtzmann. His confidence in the results already attained left no room for them.