Nor is the case different in regard to the picture of Paul which these two sources give us. In Acts everything is clear and simple. The Apostle appears at first rather as an assistant to Barnabas, but afterwards makes himself independent, and maintains his position in relation to the original apostles by the force of his personality, in a free but not a hostile fashion. In the letters, on the other hand, everything is unintelligible. Stress is laid on the fact that the Apostle of [pg 127] the Gentiles after his conversion has no intercourse with the original apostles and the Church, receives nothing whatever of the doctrinal tradition about Jesus, and draws his gospel entirely from revelation. The statements regarding the external facts of his life are extremely confused. After his conversion he is said to have first spent three years in “Arabia” and then to have gone to Damascus, and from there, three years after his conversion, to have paid his “visit of ceremony” to the Church at Jerusalem, during which, however, he says that he saw only Peter, and James the Lord’s brother. After that he spent fourteen years in Syria and Cilicia. Who can form a clear picture of the journeys implied in the letters, or of the relation of Paul to his churches? Who can understand the character here presented? Sometimes the Apostle is radical, sometimes conservative, sometimes bold, sometimes despairing; in small things firm, in great things weakly yielding; now violent, then again mild; in all ways full of uncertainties and contradictions. Far from arousing belief, the statements of the letters about the Apostle create difficulty upon difficulty and doubt upon doubt, if once one ventures to read them with an open mind. On the one side it seems as if a certain tendency to bring him into opposition with the original apostles made itself felt throughout, while on the other hand the traits are thrown together without any reference to an integral psychologically intelligible picture. The most natural view is, therefore, that Acts represents what is historically most authentic, while in the letters an imaginary picture is drawn, exhibiting throughout the same tendency, but composed by various hands. The external attestation in the early literature of a Pauline collection of letters, which is in any case not too brilliant, is further reduced by the radicals. The Ignatian letters are held—as they also are by the Tübingen [pg 128] school—to be spurious; and they endeavour to bring down the first epistle of Clement from the time of Domitian to the middle of the second century._(_96_)_ If all this is admitted, the first attestation of the letters is that of Marcion. What, then, is there to oppose to the view that they had their origin in Gnostic circles and were only later forced upon the Church?