in thinking out the truth
about Jesus and His gospel he had "conferred not with flesh and blood."

+Inconsistency of New Testament writers with one another.+--Again, it
is somehow taken for granted that Paul and all the other New Testament
writers agree together in their theology of the Atonement. That is
quite a mistake, and the curious thing is that people should have been
so slow in finding it out. It may be instructive to some to give a
brief survey of the main points in Paul's theory of the Atonement, and
compare them with some of the others.

+The fundamental principle of its Atonement always the same.+--It would
simplify our acquaintance with Paul's modes of reasoning if we could
recognise that the truth of Atonement which he has to declare, and
which he associates so closely with the life and death of Jesus, is in
principle precisely the same as that which the writers of the Old
Testament had in mind. What that was we have already seen. It was the
assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man, and the means to
it was the principle of self-sacrifice. This is just what St. Paul set
himself to proclaim to the world, and to him the whole process centred
in Jesus, just as it does for Christian experience. But to his
presentation of the subject Paul almost of necessity had to bring the
whole apparatus of his rabbinical training. This it was which supplied
him with the most of his figures, symbols, and illustrations; but his
gospel was no more dependent upon these than--as I trust I have shown
in a previous chapter--the ancient spiritual truth of Atonement
depended upon Semitic ritual sacrifices. Paul's thought-forms were
supplied by the Old Testament and his Pharisaic education, just as the
forms in which we ordinarily express our thoughts to-day belong to the
mental atmosphere of our time. Most of the allusions in a _Times_
leading article, for example, would be lost upon an English reader five
hundred years hence unless they were carefully explained. To me one of
the most remarkable things about Jesus is the fact that He was able to
escape so completely the mental environment of the time in which, and
the people among whom, He lived His earthly life. How He managed to
deliver His peerless teaching while making so little allusion to
current Jewish modes of thought and worship is a mystery, and marks His
greatness as perhaps nothing else does. It was utterly different with
Paul; he spoke the languag