6 his mission itself; that these grander and higher thoughts were all engendered during the four or five years at the utmost' (p. 6) intervening between Thessalonians and Galatians; and that after all, the difference so greatly separating the apostle from himself was not of such a nature as to have allowed of his agreeing with the other apostles, since from the first he was the apostle of the Gentiles (p. 14) !” Who, after duly considering these suggestions, will not rather be disposed to sympathise with Mr. Jowett's latent suspicion that they are "fanciful and far-fetched," (p. 11) than to adopt his expressed inference, and to see that they are adduced only to give colour to the assumed genuineness of Thessalonians which are thus made to "fitly come in," or to obtain a natural place in the mental life of the apostle. Perhaps considering the general weakness of his argument, the vain effort to make an untenable distinction (p. 12), the ineffectual denial of the allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem,1 the qualifications and confusions everywhere, the Professor may be disposed to withdraw in some subsequent edition an evidently hesitating opinion, especially when he discovers that he had Baur's theory before him only in its first form as expressed in the work on St. Paul, not the more precise statement of it subsequently given in the fourteenth volume of the Tübingen Journal for 1855. 2 An attempted reply to Baur, recently put forth by Dr. Hilgenfeld in his "Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Theologie," in favour of the first Thessalonian Epistle, seems in 1 1 Thess. ii. 16. Prof. Jowett says, "wrath is come upon them to the uttermost," means "wrath or reprobation of God;" and therefore could not mean temporal punishment! Also that the words imply not a past event, but a prophecy. But then epare or ep0ake is a past tense, implying, according to Mr. Jowett himself in his note on the passage, "has come upon them to the uttermost," in short, "a past historical event."-See p. 63, compared with p. 20. 2 Thus the professor says that the 2nd Epistle to the Thessalonians, which, according to him, expresses St. Paul's meaning in the first stage of his ministry, is in harmony with the later Epistles, i.e., the third series of Pauline literature, p. 13. 3 For 1862, p. 225 sq. THESSALONIANS. like manner rather to confirm by its feebleness the argument controverted. Hilgenfeld complains of Baur for going too far; and while admitting the four first Epistles to be the allimportant ones by which all other Pauline works must be judged, insists on substituting the sacred number of seven genuine letters, including Philemon, Philippians, and 1st Thessalonians, for what he calls the heathen "Tetractys" of Baur. His reasons are singularly weak. The high encomia passed on the Thessalonian converts, which Baur thought applicable only to a long-established community,1 he attributes to polite exaggeration, which must not, he says, be too nicely weighed. The boast as to an independent livelihood, which Baur treated as copied from Corinthians,3 may well, says Hilgenfeld, have been repeated, as well as the circumstances occasioning it; for why should not the apostle have been several times exposed to the same aspersions, and have repeated the same defence? Among the many efforts made to escape the seemingly obvious reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 1 Thess. ii. 16, Hilgenfeld's are by no means the happiest; most of them rather tend to strengthen the inference disclaimed. Ritschl would evade the difficulty by repudiating the passage as an interpolation; Lünemann contends that "es Teλos" means εις τελος” not the end or destruction of the Jews, but the uttermost extremity of Divine anger. This construction is rejected by Hilgenfeld as ungrammatical; but his own suggestion is not more fortunate. He says that St. Paul here uses the past tense, "eplaσev," in reference to the future, because he so confidently anticipates the impending futurity as to be justified in speaking of it, not only as present, but as actually past; and he refers to certain instances (1 Thess. i. 10, and 2 Thess. ii. 9), where a present tense is used in anticipation of a future event. In regard to the announcement in 1 1 Thess. i. 7, 8. 2 1 Thess. ii. 9. 3 1 Cor. ix. 11; x. 33; 2 Cor. vii. 2; viii. 20; xi. 7; xii. 13. • Compare Teλos τns opуns, in Wisdom xii. 27. ch. iv. 13 sq., as to the "second coming" and condition of the dead, he remarks,-"The whole passage so entirely agrees with 1 Cor. xv. 23, 51, that we get a clear and satisfactory idea of the apostle's eschatological expectations only by combining the two accounts; so far from being unfavourable to St. Paul's authorship, the language confirms it, since only in the early Christian age could the anxieties here alluded to have been felt." But the question is not as to the early Christian age in general, but as to the particular section of it included within St. Paul's lifetime; and the "perfect knowledge" attributed to the Thessalonians in the passage next cited (1 Thess. v. 2), would indicate a longer familiarity with Christian opinions than allowed by the chronology. So that when Hilgenfeld concludes by reiterating his admission that the letter under review, though not unworthy of the apostle, is not to be compared in importance and fertility of thought with the four principal ones, that St. Paul seems here "not to have yet arrived at the full maturity of his logical powers" and of his "apostolical consciousness," here again we have the apostle paradoxically divided from himself, and find Baur's justification in the unwilling admissions of his opponent. Ephesians and Colossians. The Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians are still more decidedly at issue with their reputed age than Thessalonians. After it had been shown in the case of the $6 Antilegomena" that apocryphal writings exist in the Canon-in the case of the "Pastorals" that there are pseudo-Pauline epistles-it would not seem surprising that the list of spurious writings should turn out to be still more numerous. De Wette, in the year 1843, first ventured, to the great scandal of theologians, to pronounce Ephesians to be a mere derivative amplification of Colossians; and unquestionably the two epistles exhibit so close a material, and even verbal, agreement, that it is impossible not to recognise the copyist, and to infer that either Ephesians has been enlarged from Colossians, or Colossians abridged from Ephesians. But it is not to be supposed that one so full of thought and energy as St. Paul should deliberately copy himself; or that he should have made about the same time so very similar a communication to two communities situated so near to each other. Nor on fairly considering the subject can it appear likely that the language ascribed to the apostle in these epistles was used by him at all. St. Paul, for instance, could hardly have addressed the Ephesians in such terms as in Ephes. i. 15, iii. 2, after having so long personally known them; he would not in the midst of his incessant and ill-requited toils have spoken of himself—in conjunction, too, with the other apostles whose co-operation he elsewhere so pointedly declaims—as an already realised "foundation;" he would not have specifically appropriated to the apostles, himself included, the appellation "ayo," an epithet often so used in post-apostolic times, but never in apostolic; he would not have altered the natural word "eλaxisos,"3 into the affected "eλaxisoтepos ;"4 he could not at so early a period have had occasion to raise a warning voice,-not merely against schisms or "divisions," but against contending sects and doctrines.5 But the general argument and allusions of both these epistles carry us beyond the limits of apostolic times to an age when primitive simplicity had already been corrupted, and when orthodoxy was engaged in a struggle to disentangle the "true wisdom" from gnostic speculation. Both epistles are, in fact, strangely replete with gnostic ideas and terminology. Christ is described not only as progressively exalted, but as originally 66 1 Ephes. ii. 20. 4 Ephes. iii. 8. 6 2 Ephes. iii. 5. 6 By the "rudiments of this world;" see ii. 3, 8. 7 Coloss. ii. 3. 3 1 Cor. xv. 9. 5 Ephes. iv. 14. Ephes. i. 8; iii. 3; Coloss. i. 9; words 66 66 66 66 the pre-existent source of all being, the centre of the spiritual universe, the leader of the regular gradations of a celestial hierarchy, consisting of "thrones," "dominions," etc. Nothing like this occurs in the genuine Pauline letters ; it is only to be found in the systems of the Valentinian gnostics. The genuine letters certainly allude to Christ's eventual exaltation, and to the inability of any power, natural or supernatural, to sever us from him ;3 but this language is quite general, falling far short of the representations here given of Christ's hierarchical supremacy over the varied gradations and rulers of the spiritual world. Among the gnostics alone is to be traced the source of those elaborate metaphysical speculations which treated all things as a progressive "œconomy" or dispensation of spiritual emanation and return. The constantly recurring "Pleroma," σε σοφία, μυςήριον, γνωσις, aloves,"-lead to the same inference; and it may be noticed in passing that in Ephes. ii. 2, the "Æon of this world" is not to be translated, as in our version, "course of this world," but as the personified equivalent of what follows, namely the Prince of the power of the air, the Cosmocrator or devil of Valentinus. The chief distinction between gnosticism and these epistles is that here the "pleroma" is specially identified with Christ instead of God, and that the general purpose is more hierarchical than metaphysical, metaphysical speculation being subordinated to hierarchical purpose; as where the spiritual union or return of all things is contemplated politically instead of cosmically, or when "ecclesia" is substituted for "oopia" as the adjunct or "oruyos" of Christ. The great object of the letters is to promote ecclesiastical organisation by pointing to Christ as pre-existent source of all being, presiding over the varied gradations of the 1 Comp. Irenæ. 1, 4, 5, 3 Rom. viii. 38. 5 Comp. Ephes. vi. 12. 66 Theodoret. Fab. 1, 7. |