can be fully revealed. An over-impatient expectation or sudden rumour of the approach of the apprehended catastrophe had, it seems, produced a panic; and the writer's object is to calm disquietude by shewing that a whole series of events must first occur; that Christ could not come until Antichrist had come,-that the latter could not come until after a great preliminary revolution, consisting first in a falling away or apostacy, and then the removal of the hinderer or "Kaтеxwv." All this suggests a later κατεχων.” date than that of the apostle; and Baur thinks that the circumstances remarkably agree with the panic described by Tacitus as propagated "throughout Asia and Achaia" by a rumoured return of Nero from the East. Recollecting how the Apocalypse represents Nero as the eighth king, who was also of the prior seven, and who was to return in the character of Antichrist, the imagery borrowed from Daniel as to the "mystery of iniquity" will signify the Roman power, and the cotemporary "hinderer" will be the reigning Emperor Vespasian, the seventh king of Revelations, and consequently beyond the view of St. Paul. Other circumstances point to the same inference. As in Acts, the adversaries of Christianity are no longer Judaising Christians but "Jews;"5 and when it is added that they "had filled up the measure of their iniquities until wrath had come upon them to the uttermost," it is scarcely possible to avoid concluding that the siege of Jerusalem was already a past event. And when at the close the writer speaks of the apostle's signature as an ordinary token of genuineness, we are led to ask how could he have used such language as to his established practice in the very first epistle he ever wrote; how can

1 2 Thess. ii. 2.

* Hist. 2, 8.

2 Tübingen Jahrbücher, vol. xiv. p. 154. 4 Rev. xvii. 5, 10, 11.

5 1 Thess. ii. 15. Denunciations of the Jews in Christian writings,-so unlike the feeling expressed by St. Paul in his genuine letters (Rom. ix. 3, etc.) may be regarded as a sure sign of later origin.

• 2 Thess. iii. 17.

precedent and habit be thought to have existed antecedently to act; how could he have so early anticipated the rise of a spurious Pauline literature, or have thought it necessary to put his audience on their guard before any fictitious letters could have existed? No one would cry "beware of forgery" at the first issuing of the genuine article, before there could be a suspicion of a counterfeit, before any false pretenders could be expected in the field; but it appears from 2 Thess. ii. 2, that forgeries there already were, a formidable fact in regard to the authenticity of the Epistle. In the genuine letters the salutation is a mere assurance of personal regard unconnected with suspicions of forgery; to alter its meaning and divert it from its obvious purpose into a criterion of genuineness, for which, as being easily imitated, it was quite unsuited, would only occur to a later writer, who having before him a number of Pauline letters all containing an analogous formula, thought it worth while to adopt this seemingly characteristic indication, and moreover to call the attention of his readers to the circumstance.

Jowett and Hilgenfeld on " Thessalonians."

When Professor Jowett, in his work on St. Paul, dismisses Baur's inference as fallacious, we might hope to find his own view satisfactorily supported. The expectation is, however, not gratified. The external testimony to the genuineness of the Epistles is at once admitted by the Professor to be weak; and his own reasoning is accompanied with so many qualifications and apologies, that it is clear the author himself has no confidence in it. Indeed the circumstances relied on to prove the genuineness of the Epistles, are much the same as those adduced by Baur in disproof. Both writers admit the necessity of in some way separating the authorship of Thessalonians from that of

Galatians; but while Baur assigns them to different authors, Jowett attributes them to the same author in different states of feeling and at different periods of life. He assumes that St. Paul's mind, in the interval between his conversion and the date of his later labours, as alluded to in Galatians, Corinthians, etc., underwent an important change; and then proceeds upon this assumption to contrast the apostle, as self-represented in Thessalonians, with his later self, in a manner strongly suggesting that Baur's view is, after all, the truer one, and that any other than St. Paul must be the real author of these Epistles :

"The Epistles to the Thessalonians, read as witnesses of the apostle's mind and life (that is, assuming their genuineness), belong to a prior stage of his life, when he was, so to speak, not aware of the great thoughts which were afterwards, by the will of God, to grow up in him. ..

Nothing is gained by attempting to combine these Epistles artificially with the later writings. No such connection could have been present to the mind of the apostle. The real light which they receive from one another is that of contrast. Two writings of the same author could not be more different than the Epistle to the Thessalonians, and that following next in order, the Epistle to the Galatians. The latter is fervid and abrupt, full of argument and interrogation, speaking in a tone of authority, etc.; whereas the Epistles to the Thessalonians are the least impassioned of any of St. Paul's writings; they are not argumentative at all; they invite rather than command; nor are they marked by any of the apostle's deepest and most inward feelings. The difference of subject is as marked as the difference of style. No mention occurs of the great question of circumcision and uncircumcision, of faith and works, of the relation of Jew and Gentile; of death and life, etc., etc. All that we are accustomed to regard as peculiarly characteristic of the apostle, the great themes of his other Epistles, are here wanting. Instead of

them, he here dwells on the immediate coming of Christ, whom we that are alive' are to meet in the air, in a manner unlike his allusions in other places either to a future life, or to the union of the believer with Christ.-The gospel of these Epistles is not the gospel of the cross of Christ, but of the coming of Christ.

"It were hard, indeed, to suppose that the St. Paul who wrote Thessalonians, felt and thought like the same St. Paul writing to the Romans or Galatians; or to maintain that he purposely withheld and kept back in the former what in the latter he was commissioned to reveal. Such a supposition would involve the further difficulty that in the later epistles he also withheld what in the earlier formed the substance of his teaching. Are we to conceive that 'the man of sin,' and 'that which letteth'-the matters on which he preached to the Thessalonians even before he wrote to them-were still latent in his mind throughout his subsequent ministry? that he was daily living in expectation of them, but that no occasion arose in his later writings for him to allude to them again?"

Doubtless all this is extremely improbable, and so far it is impossible not to agree with Mr. Jowett. But when he goes on to argue that these incredible things really occurred, that in consequence of a great mental transformation between the date of the two writings,-so great that the author of one is no longer recognisable in the other-St. Paul is still to be considered the writer of both, we are naturally led to ask the nature of the circumstances, the date, the cause, the antecedent probability, of so great an assumed change, of which, as admitted by Mr. Jowett, we have no substantial evidence except in the very book whose authorship is questioned; in other words, in a foregone conclusion, or the circular argument,-St. Paul is to be presumed to have written Thessalonians because a great change occurred in his mind, of which the main, or rather the only proof, is Thessalonians itself. For Mr.

καινη

Jowett evidently himself feels that it is but torturing St. Paul's language-really describing the contrast between the fleshly and spiritual disposition generally, between the Christian and the non-Christian, the ideal and the sensuous, between the "Talaios aveρwπos" and the "kawn KTIOIS," when he tries to elicit from passages of this nature, (including several which are evidently ironical or hypothetical)', corroborative evidences of a subsequent change in his mind and mode of teaching, greater and more momentous than that of his first conversion; assuming moreover that his supposed prior views were propounded in a distinct series of epistles; and this in spite of the apostle's own solemn assurances in Galatians as to the absolute and exclusive nature of the gospel preached by him, and of his absolute and "immediate" adoption of it from the very first moment of his conversion !3 Mr. Jowett's argument supposes that although "more than half the apostle's ministry had elapsed ere he set his hand to Thessalonians,'-the 'first of his extant writings,'(p. 6) he was during the whole of this periodunaware of the great thoughts' which form, not only the staple of his later more important writings, but the very foundation of

The change which occurred in St. Paul's mind was the great original change by which, from the "fleshly" notion of a Jewish Messiah, he became converted to the Christian notion of a dying and risen Christ; it was a change effected not by external circumstances, but by inward conviction (Gal. i. 16; 2 Cor. iv. 6.) This is the change alluded to in the passage principally relied on by Mr. Jowett (2 Cor. v. 16) as indicating not merely a second change subsequent to the first, but also an intermediary teaching in conformity with the first stage of feeling, and preceding the gospel which St. Paul so emphatically insists upon as the only true one in Galatians and Corinthians. Mr. Jowett evidently builds far too much on the hypothetical “ ει δε και εγνωκαμεν” of the above passage, and also on the hypothetical and ironical "ei Tepitoμny et! Knpuσow" of Gal. v. 11, which in his note on the passage he rightly considers as an implied denial of a false imputation of his adversaries. The other passages cited by Mr. Jowett (1 Cor. iii. 1, and ix. 20; Philippians iii. 13, and iv. 15), afford him little help, as he indeed admits himself, when confessing that the whole issue is problematical; that the allusions are obscure, and far from sufficient to enable us to determine the meaning (pp. 10, 12, 14, 15), in short, that the period of St. Paul's life, supposed to be represented in Thessalonians, really exists nowhere except in Thessalonians itself.

2 See 2 Thess. ii. 2; iii. 17.

3 See Gal. i 7-9; ii. 16.