If it be assumed, so runs their argument, that Christianity was in its real origin a Jewish sect which had liberal ideas in regard to the law and directed its expectation towards the Messiah, the antinomian sections of the Epistles represent documents of that period. The present form of the letters is due to the fact that a later “Churchman”—the authors call him _Paulus episcopus,_ and think that he may have served as model for the Paul of Acts—worked into them the second, milder set of ideas. At the time when Pierson and Naber launched this hypothesis, A. D. Loman had just finished the series of “Quaestiones Paulinae” which he threw out in the [pg 125] _Theologisch Tijdschrift_ of 1882-1886._(_93_)_ The battle began in earnest. Loman confines himself to dealing with the external arguments, and only proposes to examine how far the assumption that these letters were written by the Apostle in primitive Christian times can or cannot be proved from the early witnesses. His decision is negative. But his calmly written yet wonderfully living study shook two other thinkers out of their security, and compelled them to carry on the work of destruction to a further point. Steck_(_94_)_ and van Manen_(_95_)_ undertook the task of supplementing the external arguments, of presenting the internal arguments by means of an analysis of the letters, and of offering a detailed hypothesis regarding the origin of the Pauline literature. [pg 126] In respect of external arguments the three scholars combine to urge the following considerations:— Acts, they argue, knows nothing of any literary activity of Paul; and it tells us nothing of the conflicts which these letters, if we are to believe their own evidence, called forth. When the Tübingen school set up the axiom that Acts is less trustworthy than the Epistles, they made things easy for themselves. There are weighty arguments to support the opposite opinion. That the moment a mission to the heathen was undertaken the question of the observance of the law must come up is clear. The most natural thing to happen would be that it should come up for discussion on purely practical lines and should take the form: how much must the Gentile Christians take over of the Commandments in order that the Jewish believers might have table-fellowship and social intercourse with them? This is the form of the problem which Acts presupposes, and it gives us in the account of the so-called Apostolic Council a decision in accordance therewith. The Epistle to the Galatians, on the other hand, asserts that the question of the validity of the law as such was raised at that time, and that Paul and the original apostles agreed to divide the spheres of their mission work into Gentile and Jewish. About the most pressing need, the establishment of a _modus vivendi_ in mixed churches, nothing was done. This representation is much less natural than the other.