On the other hand, the general considerations which led them to adopt this hypothesis have not been in any way invalidated. The illegitimate Tübingen critics share with the legitimate school the presupposition that Paulinism signifies a Hellenisation of the Gospel; they are also at one with their adversaries in regarding this unproved and unprovable assumption as proved. The difference is that they do not follow the others in their second exhibition of naïveté—that of regarding this Greek religious faith as being coincident with primitive [pg 137] Christianity, but demand space and time for a development of this character. But the two wrestlers have the same chain about their feet; whichever of them throws the other into the water must drown along with him. That they are both involved in the same fundamental view of Paulinism sometimes comes to the consciousness of the post-Baur theology and its radical opponents. In a momentary aberration of this kind Heinrici ventures to praise Bruno Bauer for having discovered the relationship of Paul to the religious life of the ancient world, and is prepared to see his weakness only in the inferences which he draws from this discovery._(_107_)_ Steck, on his part, praises Heinrici’s commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians, in which the Hellenistic element is so excellently traced, and expresses the hope that the exegete and his party will consider carefully whether the composition of this work “does not stand in an even much closer relationship to Hellenism than had previously been supposed.” The more the theologians who derive from Baur emphasise the Greek element in Paulinism the more helpless they are against the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics. For it is after all merely a matter of clearness and courage of thought whether they venture to raise the question about space and time. The moment they take this step they are lost. Nevermore can they find the way which leads back through the green pastures of sound common-sense theology, but are condemned to wander about with the revolutionaries in the wilderness of flat unreason. Wearied with problems, they come at last, like Steck and van Manen, to a condition of mind in which the wildest hypothesis appeals to them more than rational knowledge, if the latter demands the suppression of questioning. How is it conceivable that a man of the primitive Christian period could, in consequence of a purely practical controversy regarding the observance or non-observance of the law by Gentile believers, go on, as Baur and [pg 138] his successors represent—to reject the law on principle? How could it be possible that, at that time, doctrine should take a frankly Gnostic shape, and in deliberate contempt of the tradition of the historic Jesus, should, under the eyes of the men who had been His companions, appeal only to revelation?