The existence of a written Gospel is also implied. All the passages in the Epistles which recall sayings of the Lord, and what the Epistles to the Corinthians in particular have to tell us about the institution of the Lord’s Supper and the resurrection of Jesus, make, they think, the impression of having been drawn from Luke, or an earlier Gospel which is one of his sources. Steck and van Manen are even inclined to hold that in Rom. ii. 16 and xvi. 25 the words “my Gospel” refer to a written Gospel, as indeed the Church Fathers also thought. That the four main Epistles cannot all be from the same hand is, they think, manifest from the differences between them. Further, the order in which they were written can, these writers think, be recognised. This order does not agree with that generally accepted, since the Epistle to the Galatians is not placed before Corinthians and Romans, but concludes the series. Steck endeavours to give a detailed proof that it was written after Romans and presupposes the latter. Wherever in Galatians there appear gaps and obscurities, a glance at Romans always, he affirms, gives the desired explanation. The more strongly the opposition to the law comes to expression, the later is the writing in question to be placed in the series of the Pauline writings, in which a development is traceable. Another point to which the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics attach importance is to discover criteria by which various strata can be distinguished in the main Epistles themselves. They propose to regard the Epistles to the Corinthians as fragments of Pauline literature which have gradually been worked up together into letters. In regard to the letter to the Romans, van Manen holds that it originally consisted, roughly speaking, of chapters [pg 131] i.-viii., and was only gradually extended to its present form._(_102_)_ It is also, these critics consider, certain that a number of hands have been at work on the letters, and that the increasingly anti-Jewish tendency shows us the direction followed by the efforts of the Pauline school. Steck and van Manen assume that the teaching represented in the Epistles is of a Greek character. They think they can show that the Pauline school were influenced by Philo and Seneca, and seek to explain Paulinism as an “attempt to spiritualise primitive Christianity.” Essentially, they think, it belongs to Gnosticism, since it sets aside the “authority of tradition” and derives all knowledge, without historical mediation, from the revelation of the Spirit, and conceives of this knowledge as a system. The deification of Jesus Christ which is represented in the letters is also to be regarded as Greek and Gnostic. By these observations Steck and van Manen are inevitably led to the decisive consideration regarding “time and space.”