icance a precise observance of the
law of the Fathers may have in connection with it. While some would hear
of no change in the regulations and conceptions which had hitherto
existed, and regarded the bestowal of righteousness by God as possible
only on condition of a strict observance of the law, others taught that
Jesus as Messiah had procured righteousness for his people, had
fulfilled the law once for all, and had founded a new covenant, either
in opposition to the old, or as a stage above it. Paul especially saw in
the death of Christ the end of the law, and deduced righteousness solely
from faith in Christ, and sought to prove from the Old Testament itself,
by means of historical speculation, the merely temporary validity of the
law and therewith the abrogation of the Old Testament religion. Others,
and this view, which is not everywhere to be explained by Alexandrian
influences (see above p. 72 f.), is not foreign to Paul, distinguished
between spirit and letter in the Mosaic law, giving to everything a
spiritual significance, and in this sense holding that the whole law as
[Greek: nomos pneumatikos] was binding. The question whether
righteousness comes from the works of the law or from faith, was
displaced by this conception, and therefore remained in its deepest
grounds unsolved, or was decided in the sense of a spiritualised
legalism. But the detachment of Christianity from the political forms of
the Jewish religion, and from sacrificial worship, was also completed by
this conception, although it was regarded as identical with the Old
Testament religion rightly understood. The surprising results of the
direct mission to the Gentiles would seem to have first called forth
those controversies (but see Stephen) and given them the highest
significance. The fact that one section of Jewish Christians, and even
some of the Apostles, at length recognised the right of the Gentile
Christians to be Christians without first becoming Jews, is the clearest
proof that what was above all prized was faith in Christ and surrender
to him as the saviour. In agreeing to the direct mission to the Gentiles
the earliest Christians, while they themselves observed the law, broke
up the national religion of Israel, and gave expression to the
conviction that Jesus was not only the Messiah of his people, but the
redeemer of humanity.[84] The establishment of the universal character
of the Gospel, that is, of Christianity as a religion for th