This explanation is connected especially with the names of Wrede[94] and Brückner.[95] It has, however, seldom been maintained in any exclusive way, but enters into combination with other hypotheses. Indeed, in itself it is obviously insufficient; it will hardly explain the idea of redemption in the religion of Paul. But it is thought to explain, if not the idea of redemption, at least the conception of the Redeemer's person, and from the conception of the Redeemer's person the idea of redemption might in some way be derived. The hypothesis of Wrede and Brückner, in other words, seeks to explain not so much the soteriology as the Christology of Paul; it derives from the pre-Christian Jewish conception of the Messiah the Pauline conception of the heavenly Christ. In particular, it seeks to explain the matter-of-course way in which in the Epistles the Pauline Christ is everywhere presupposed but nowhere defended. Apparently Paul was not aware that his Christology might provoke dissent. This attitude is very difficult to explain on the basis of the ordinary liberal reconstruction; it is difficult to explain if the Pauline Christology was derived by a process of development from the historical Jesus. For if it had been so derived, its newness and revolutionary character would naturally have appeared. As a matter of fact, however, Paul does not regard it as anything new; he treats his doctrine of Christ as though it were firmly established and required no defense. How shall this confident attitude of the apostle be explained? It is to be explained, Wrede says, by the theology of contemporary Judaism. Paul was so confident that his conception of Christ could not be regarded as an innovation because as a matter of fact it was not an innovation; it was nothing but the pre-Christian Jewish notion of the Messiah. The Pauline conception of Christ was thus firmly fixed in the mind of Paul and in the minds of many of his contemporaries long before the event on the road to Damascus; all that happened at that time was the identification of the Christ whom Paul had believed in all along with Jesus of Nazareth, and that identification, because of the meagerness of Paul's knowledge of Jesus, did not really bring any fundamental change in the Christology itself. After the conversion as well as before it, the Christ of Paul was simply the Christ of the Jewish apocalypses. [94] See p. 26, footnote 2. [95] See p. 27, footnote 1.