ny historical training should
attach any importance to this Paul. This outsider was a Pharisee from
top to toe even after he became a Christian'--and much more to the same
effect. Nietzsche describes him as 'one of the most ambitious of men,
whose superstition was only equalled by his cunning. A much tortured,
much to be pitied man, an exceedingly unpleasant person both to himself
and to others.... He had a great deal on his conscience. He alludes to
enmity, murder, sorcery, idolatry, impurity, drunkenness, and the love
of carousing.' Renan, who could never have made himself ridiculous by
such ebullitions as these, does not disguise his repugnance for the
'ugly little Jew' whose character he can neither understand nor admire.
These outbursts of personal animosity, so strange in modern critics
dealing with a personage of ancient history, show how vividly his figure
stands out from the canvas. There are very few historical characters who
are alive enough to be hated.

It is, however, only in our own day that the personal characteristics of
St. Paul have been intelligently studied; and the most valuable books
about him are later than the unbalanced tirades of Lagarde and
Nietzsche, and the carping estimate of Renan. In the nineteenth century,
Paul was obscured behind Paulinism. His letters were studied as
treatises on systematic theology. Elaborate theories of atonement,
justification, and grace were expounded on his authority, as if he had
been a religious philosopher or theological professor like Origen and
Thomas Aquinas. The name of the apostle came to be associated with
angular and frigid disquisitions which were rapidly losing their
connexion with vital religion. It has been left for the scholars of the
present century to give us a picture of St. Paul as he really was--a man
much nearer to George Fox or John Wesley than to Origen or Calvin; the
greatest of missionaries and pioneers, and only incidentally a great
theologian. The critical study of the New Testament has opened our eyes
to see this and many other things. Much new light has also been thrown
by studies in the historical geography of Asia Minor, a work in which
British scholars have characteristically taken a prominent part. The
delightful books of Sir W.M. Ramsay have now been supplemented by the
equally attractive volume of another travelling scholar, Professor
Deissmann. A third source of new information is the mass of inscriptions
and papyri which have