What he aimed at he has successfully accomplished. He has worked up into one great symphony the themes and motifs of the Pauline scholarship of the post-Baur period, a symphony such as he alone, at once critic and artist, could have written. Even one who does not allow himself to be carried away by it will again and again take up the score with its subtle counterpoint and skilful instrumentation, and always find in it new beauties. Never was Holtzmann so impressive—this was to be observed even in his lectures—as in his treatment of Paulinism. Here he could grip his hearers, because he wished to do so—he who usually showed a certain dread of allowing the feeling, the enthusiasm, which glowed in him, to become perceptible when he was dealing with matters of scholarship. The system as modelled by him lives because he has breathed his own life into it. But it is not historic. He thinks to sift out and preserve what is of permanent value in the heritage left by Baur and his pupils, of whom he was proud to count himself spiritually one. In reality he leads up to a declaration of bankruptcy, and that especially in the powerful closing chapter entitled “Retrospect and Prospect.” Here he endeavours forcibly to combine into one whole the results of Pfleiderer, Holsten, and Harnack. From Pfleiderer he takes over the view of the [pg 115] wide-reaching Greek influence in Paulinism, and from Holsten he takes the theory that the system had its birth in the unique experience of the vision of Christ on the way to Damascus. Now these two views might at need be combined, though it is not quite easy to show—and this difficulty is constantly coming to light in Holtzmann—how what is in one aspect a purely subjective experience, never exactly to be repeated by any other, appears in another aspect, by a kind of miracle, as Greek religious thought, and thus becomes universally intelligible. But into this synthesis Holtzmann tries to introduce in addition Harnack’s recognition that Paulinism had no part in the formation of early Greek theology. Now Holsten and Harnack again, on their part, might be combined. The Pauline teaching, if it is referred to a unique personal experience, might well remain for the Apostle’s contemporaries and successors a book with seven seals. But Pfleiderer and Holsten and Harnack cannot all be brought together. If Paulinism was largely Greek, it must have had some influence. How is it conceivable that Greeks should not have recognised and understood the Greek spirit? The triumvirate planned by Holtzmann cannot, therefore, be brought to pass, even if Holtzmann is regarded as the connecting-link between Harnack and Pfleiderer. In defiance of all the facts of the history of dogma the last-named must assert an influence of the Pauline system upon the growth of Greek dogma, since he sees in Paul the first step in the Hellenisation of Christianity.