At any rate, whether desirable or not, the longing for redemption is a fundamental fact of history, and may be shown to have emerged independently at many points. The character of Paulinism as a redemptive religion, the Pauline doctrine of human depravity, is therefore insufficient to establish dependence of Paul upon the mystery religions of the Hellenistic age. Dependence could be established only by similarity in the form in which the doctrine of depravity appears. But as a matter of fact such similarity is strikingly absent. The Pauline use of the term "flesh" to denote that in which evil resides can apparently find no real parallel whatever in pagan usage. And the divergence appears not only in terminology but also in thought. At first sight there might seem to be a parallel between the Pauline doctrine of the flesh and the Greek doctrine of the evil of matter, which appears in the Orphic sects, then in Plato and in his successors. But the parallel breaks down upon closer examination. According to Plato, the body is evil because it is material; it is the prison-house of the soul. Nothing could really be more remote from the thought of Paul. According to Paul, the connection of soul and body is entirely normal, and the soul apart from the body is in a condition of nakedness. It is true, the body will be changed at the resurrection or at the coming of Christ; it will be made more adequate for the Kingdom of God. But at any rate, there is in Paul no doctrine of the inherent evil of matter. The real starting-point of the Pauline doctrine of the flesh is to be found in the Old Testament, in the passages where "flesh" denotes human nature in its frailty. Certainly the Pauline teaching is far more highly developed than the teaching of the Old Testament. But the Old Testament provides the starting-point. The "flesh" in Paul, when it is used in its developed, ethical sense, does not mean the material nature of man; it includes rather all that man receives by ordinary generation. The contrast between "flesh" and "Spirit" therefore is not the contrast between matter and spirit; it is a contrast between human nature, of which sin has taken possession, and the Spirit of God.