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Judaic and legalistic form of faith in the Messiah and that conception,
introduced by Paul, of a world-religion free from the law. Out of this
conflict, which lasted a hundred and fifty years, went forth the
Catholic Church. The monuments of this struggle and witnesses of this
process of growth are the New Testament writings, most of which were
produced in the second century. The only documents which we have which
were written before A.D. 70, were the four great Epistles of Paul, those
to the Galatians, to the Romans, and to the Corinthians, together with
the Apocalypse.

Many details in Baur's view are now seen to have been overstated and
others false. Yet this was the first time that a true historical method
had been applied to the New Testament literature as a whole. Baur's
contribution lay in the originality of his conception of Christianity,
in his emphasis upon Paul, in his realisation of the magnitude of the
struggle which Paul inaugurated against Jewish prejudices in the
primitive Church. In his idea, the issue of that struggle was, on the
one hand, the freeing of Christianity from Judaism and on the other, the
developing of Christian thought into a system of dogma and of the
scattered Christian communities into an organised Church. The Fourth
Gospel contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the
gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy. The
Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily in the
phenomenal world in the person of Jesus. It enters into conflict with
the darkness and evil of the world. This speculation is but thinly
clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus. That an account completely
dominated by speculative motives gives but slight guarantee of
historical truth, was for Baur self-evident. The author remains unknown,
the age uncertain. The book, however, can hardly have appeared before
the time of the Montanist movement, that is, toward the end of the
second century. Scholars now rate far more highly than did Baur the
element of genuine Johannine tradition which may lie behind the Fourth
Gospel and account for its name. They do not find traces of Montanism or
of paschal controversies. But the main contention stands. The Fourth
Gospel represents the beginning of elaborate reflexion upon the life and
work of Jesus. It is what it is because of the fusion of the ethical and
spiritual content of the revelation in the personality of Jesus, with