rated. We have now to notice the influence
of that doctrine upon the development of Christologic speculation.

In neither or the four genuine epistles of Paul is Jesus described
as superhuman, or as differing in nature from other men, save in his
freedom from sin. As Baur has shown, "the proper nature of the Pauline
Christ is human. He is a man, but a spiritual man, one in whom spirit
or pneuma was the essential principle, so that he was spirit as well
as man. The principle of an ideal humanity existed before Christ in
the bright form of a typical man, but was manifested to mankind in the
person of Christ." Such, according to Baur, is Paul's interpretation
of the Messianic idea. Paul knows nothing of the miracles, of the
supernatural conception, of the incarnation, or of the Logos. The Christ
whom he preaches is the man Jesus, the founder of a new and spiritual
order of humanity, as Adam was the father of humanity after the flesh.
The resurrection is uniformly described by him as a manifestation of the
power of Jehovah, not of Jesus himself. The later conception of Christ
bursting the barred gates of Sheol, and arising by his own might to
heaven, finds no warrant in the expressions of Paul. Indeed, it was
essential to Paul's theory of the Messiah as a new Adam, that he should
be human and not divine; for the escape of a divine being from Sheol
could afford no precedent and furnish no assurance of the future escape
of human beings. It was expressly because the man Jesus had been rescued
from the grave because of his spirituality, that other men might hope,
by becoming spiritual like him, to be rescued also. Accordingly Paul is
careful to state that "since through man came death, through man came
also the resurrection of the dead" (1 Cor. xv. 21); a passage which
would look like an express denial of Christ's superhuman character,
were it probable that any of Paul's contemporaries had ever conceived of
Jesus as other than essentially human.

But though Paul's Christology remained in this primitive stage, it
contained the germs of a more advanced theory. For even Paul conceived
of Jesus as a man wholly exceptional in spiritual character; or, in the
phraseology of the time, as consisting to a larger extent of pneuma than
any man who had lived before him. The question was sure to arise,
Whence came this pneuma or spiritual quality? Whether the question
ever distinctly presented itself to Paul's mind cannot be determined.
Pro