The form of a letter to the Galatians was given to the work, according to Steck’s hypothesis, “because the literary _genre_ of Apostolic letters held an established position; and since the churches at Rome and Corinth already had their Epistles, the Galatian province, familiar in connexion with the first missionary journey in Acts, suggested itself as the appropriate scene of the struggle, since it was there that the Apostle had first had to suffer from the persecutions of the Jews. As the Epistle to the Galatians followed on the three other main epistles, and the Epistle to the Romans had already selected as its time and place the last visit of the Apostle to Corinth, shortly before his arrest at Jerusalem, the time of the Roman imprisonment suggested itself as the situation of the writer to be implied in the Epistle. During his imprisonment Paul receives news of the threatened, and in part already accomplished, falling away of the Galatian churches from his Gospel, and feeling himself about to take leave of the world he directs to the wavering churches this letter as the purest and most intense expression of his heart and mind.” The main Epistles originated about the years 120-140. The elements from which they are worked up may be ten or twenty years earlier. A final redaction may have taken place even subsequently to 140. Why, exactly, the school of thought which created this literature took Paul as its patron, it is, according to van Manen, impossible to explain. He holds that the historic Apostle had as little to do with Paulinism as John the Apostle with the theology of the Fourth Gospel. Steck, on the other hand, is inclined to admit the historical justification of this connexion. For him, it is to be held as certain that Paul was the first to “open the door of the Christian salvation freely to the Gentiles.” The doctrine [pg 134] of justification by faith must therefore already in some shape or other have formed part of his preaching. Only the strictly systematic and sharply anti-Jewish development of the doctrine was supplied by the later school. Steck is therefore here, as on some other points, more conservative and less “critical” than van Manen. Nevertheless the differences are not very noticeable in comparison with the extent of the views which they share. Theology of the post-Baur period generally had ignored Bruno Bauer; it would willingly have treated in the same way those who took up his work again. Since this was not possible, and references to “wild hypotheses” and “rash, wrong-headed critics” did not completely suffice to dispose of them, the authorities great and small had necessarily to undertake a refutation, which they prudently confined to the most pressing and the easiest points. The discussions were for the most part carried on in periodicals. A work on the other side of an importance at all corresponding to those of Loman, Steck, and van Manen was not forthcoming._(_103_)_ [pg 135]