The Making of the New TestamentBacon, Benjamin Wisner
Religion
The Making of the New Testament
Bacon, Benjamin Wisner
Bible. New Testament -- Introductions
not find reflections of the sense of Son ship. They would find only a
supplementary Law, a new and higher set of rules. In the story they
would not discover the Pauline view of the pre-existent divine Wisdom
tabernacling in man, producing a second Adam, as elder brother of a new
race, the children and heirs of God. They would take the mysticism of
Paul and bring it down to the level of the man in the street. Jesus
would be to them either a completely superhuman man, approximating the
heathen demi-god, a divinity incognito; or else a man so endowed with
"the whole fountain of the Spirit" as to exercise perpetually and
uninterruptedly all its miraculous functions. The story of the cross
would be hidden behind the prodigies.
Least of all could the importation of apocalyptic prophecy do justice to
the Pauline doctrine of the 'last things.' True, Paul is himself a
'prophet,' thoroughly imbued with the fantastic Palestinian doctrines.
He, too, believes in a world-conflict, a triumph of the Messiah over
antichrist. More particularly in one of his very earliest epistles (2nd
Thessalonians) we get a glimpse into these Jewish peculiarities. But
these are always counterbalanced in Paul by a wider and soberer view,
which tends more and more to get the upper hand. His doctrine of
spiritual union with Christ, present apprehension of "the life that is
hid with Christ in God," a doctrine of Greek rather than Hebrew
parentage, prevails over the imagery of Jewish apocalypse. In the later
epistles he expects rather to "depart and be with Christ" than to be
"caught up into the air" with those that are alive and remain at the
'Coming.' So even if Paul did have occasion again and again to defend
his Jewish resurrection-doctrine against the Greek disposition to refine
it away into a mere doctrine of immortality, his remedy is not a mere
falling back into the crudities of Jewish millenarianism. Least of all
could he have sympathized with the nationalistic, and even vindictive
spirit of Rev. iv.-xxi., with its great battle of Jerusalem helped by
Messiah and the angels, against Rome helped by Satan and the Beast.
Paul's doctrine of the resurrection of the "body" by "clothing" of the
spirit with a "tabernacle" derived "from heaven," his hope of a
messianic Kingdom which is the triumph of humanity under a "second
Adam," has its apocalyptic traits. It is a victory over demonic enemies,
"spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places"; but it has the
reserve of an educated Pharisee against the cruder forms of Jewish
prophecy. It shows the mind of the cosmopolitan Roman citizen and
philosophic thinker, not merely that of the Jewish Zealot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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