The figure of Wisdom, Windisch believes, will supply two elements in the Pauline Christ-religion which are lacking in the Messiah of the apocalypses. In the first place, it will account for the Pauline notion that Christ was active in creation, since Wisdom in Jewish belief is repeatedly represented as the assessor or even the instrument of the Creator. In the second place, it will account for the intimate relation between Paul and his Christ, since Wisdom is represented in the "Wisdom of Solomon" as entering into the wise man, and the wise man seems to be represented in Proverbs viii and in Ecclesiasticus as the mouthpiece of Wisdom.[128] [128] Windisch, _op. cit._, p. 226. But when was the identification of the Messiah with Wisdom accomplished? Was it accomplished by Paul himself after his conversion? Or was it received by Paul from pre-Christian Jewish doctrine? If it was accomplished by Paul himself after his conversion, then absolutely no progress has been made toward the explanation of the Pauline Christology. How did Paul come to identify Jesus of Nazareth with the divine figure of Wisdom? It could only have been because Jesus was such a person as to make the identification natural. But that supposition is of course excluded by the naturalistic principles with which Windisch is operating. The identification of Jesus with Wisdom at or after the conversion is, therefore, absolutely inexplicable; in substituting Wisdom for the apocalyptic Messiah as the basis of the Pauline Christology, Windisch has destroyed whatever measure of plausibility the theory of Wrede and Brückner possessed. For it is really essential to Wrede's theory that Paul before his conversion had not only believed in the existence of a heavenly being like the Son of Man of 1 Enoch, but had also expected that heavenly being to appear. Since he had expected the heavenly being to appear, it might seem to be not so absolutely inexplicable that he came to think that that being had actually appeared in the person of Jesus. But no one expected Wisdom to appear, in any more definite way than by the entrance which she had already accomplished into the hearts of wise men. The thought of an incarnation or a parousia of Wisdom is absolutely foreign to Jewish thought. What possible reason was there, then, for Paul to think that Wisdom actually had appeared and would finally appear again in the person of Jesus?