The apostle Paul was the great innovator upon the Ebionite and Essenean doctrines. He was too broad and far-seeing to overlook the fact that the exclusiveness of Judaism would arrest any universal dissemination of the faith in the world. Hence he struck out boldly on his own account. He had a gospel, he declares to the Galatians, which he had received from no man; it was not “_according_ to any man,” but a distinct, differentiated matter, the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. “Let the man, or even angel, that preaches any other gospel be anathema,” he declares. He did not hesitate to denounce the Ebionist apostles, nor they in turn to set him forth as an impostor, holding the doctrine of Balaam and teaching faith without works or rites. At Antioch he withstood Peter to the face, and declares him condemned. Writing to the Corinthians, he denounces the schisms and deprecates the influence of Apollos, a Jew from Alexandria. “I, the wise architect, have laid the foundation,” says he, “but another has built upon it. That foundation is Christ.” It is very plain, however, that the Christ that he taught was rather an ideal than a literal personage. “I have seen the Lord,” he declares, and again avows that he preached “Jesus Christ and the Crucified One.” Yet when he refers to the death and resurrection he always treats of them as figurative matters, pertaining to the spiritual and not to the corporeal nature. A Christ that he had seen could but be a spiritual entity. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he declares, “neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.” This is a complete setting aside of any gross, literal sense to be given to his language. Others who received the gospel were crucified as Christ was, and rose again to a new life while yet embodied in mortal flesh. He was the type, the model, the exemplar, and they who believed were walking in his footsteps. “Know ye not,” he asks the Roman believers, “that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? We then are buried with him by this baptism into his death; so that as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we should walk in a new life. For if we have become planted together in the likeness of his death, we are also, on the other hand, in that of his resurrection: knowing this, that our old man was crucified together, that the body of sin might be made inert, that we may no longer be enslaved to sin. If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live to him; being aware that Christ having risen from the dead is no longer dying, death no longer rules him. For wherein he died, he died to sin once for all; but wherein he lives, he lives to God. So likewise reckon ye yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”