Could a Christology of this kind come into being a few years only after the death of the historical Jesus? Is an intense anti-Judaism in primitive Christian times intelligible? Can Greek, Gnostical ideas be assumed to have existed in the first generation? Steck and van Manen deny that this is possible and demand a longer period for the transformation of which the evidence lies before us. Therefore the historic Paul, [pg 132] if there ever was such a man, as is almost certainly the case, was not the creator of the Paulinism represented by the Epistles. How, then, is the origin of the letters and the doctrine to be explained? On the basis of the facts which they observe in the documents, and the consideration regarding the necessity of time and space, the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics throw out the following hypothesis. Christianity, they hold, remained at first Jewish. But as time went on, and as it spread beyond Palestine, two different tendencies manifested themselves within it. One, as the result of contact with Gentiles, and no doubt in consequence of the destruction of the Jewish State, moved in the direction of attaching less and less importance to the law, while the other maintained the older stand-point. In general the development, due to the influence of Graeco-Roman ideas, proceeded without a struggle. Its goal was a “catholicism” such as meets us in Justin. Within this “Gnostic” party, however, there appeared a school which put the question of the relation to Judaism and the law in its most trenchant form, as a question of principle, and sought to bring it to a decisive issue. Somewhere or other—perhaps in the Roman Church, perhaps in several places at the same time—where Gnostics and representatives of the older view were at odds, an open conflict broke out. The former party fought with literary weapons, dating back the controversy by means of an epistolary literature specially created for the purpose into primitive Christian times. In the course of the struggle the antithesis became more and more acute. The climax is marked by the Epistle to the Galatians. Here a “Gnostic” endeavours, with the aid of the already existing Pauline literature, and depending more particularly on Romans, to defend the stand-point of liberal Gentile Christianity against a “Jewish Christianity” which, as it seems, was “making [pg 133] headway.” “With all the force of his intellectual superiority” he scourges the tendencies of a period which was endeavouring to make Christianity once more Jewish.