But Paul could very justly object that to him also the transfigured Jesus had appeared. [499] Then they made the justification for the apostolic vocation consist in this, that an apostle must not only have seen Christ risen up, but must also have eaten and drunk with him. [500] This indeed was not applicable in the case of Judas, who in the Acts i. 16 is nevertheless counted among the apostles; and it was also never asserted of Matthias, who was chosen in the former's stead, that he had been a witness of Jesus' resurrection. Much less even does he seem to have fulfilled the condition to which advance was made in the development of the original idea, i.e., that an apostle of Jesus should have been personally acquainted with the living Jesus, that he should have belonged to the "First Apostles" and have been present as eye-witness and hearer of Jesus' words from the time of John's baptism up to the Resurrection and Ascension. [501] Now Seufert has shown that the passage of the Acts referred to is merely a construction, a transference of later conditions to an earlier epoch; and that the whole point of it is to paralyse Paul's mission to the Gentiles and to establish the title of the Jew-Christians at Jerusalem as higher than that of his followers. If with this purpose, as Seufert showed, the organisation of the Apostleship of Twelve arose--an organisation which has no satisfactory basis or foundation in the Gospels or in the Pauline epistles--then it is from this purpose also that we can find cause for the God Jesus to become a human founder of the apostleship. "An apostle was to be only such an one as had seen and heard Jesus himself, or had learnt from those who had been his immediate disciples. A literature of Judaism arose which had at quite an early stage the closest interest in the historical determination of Jesus' life; and this formed the lowest stratum on which our canonical Gospels are based." [502] Judaism in general, and the form of it at Jerusalem in particular, needed a legal title on which to base its commanding position as contrasted with the Gentile Christianity of Paul; and so its founders were obliged to have been companions of Jesus in person, and to have been selected for their vocation by him. For this reason Jesus could not remain a mere God, but had to be drawn down into historical actuality. Seufert thinks that the tracing of the Apostleship of Twelve back to an "historical" Jesus, and the setting up of the demand for an apostle of Jesus to have been a companion of his journeying, took place in Paul's lifetime in the sixth, or perhaps even in the fifth decade. [503] In this he presupposes the existence of an historical Jesus, while the Pauline epistles themselves contain nothing to lead one to believe that the transformation of the Jesus-faith into history took place in Paul's lifetime. In early Christianity exactly the same incident took place here, on the soil of Palestine and at Jerusalem, as took place later in