ho can say whether
Hellenism had already a share in its conception--required that the
missionary to the Greeks should become a Greek and that believers should
come to know, "all things are yours, and ye are Christ's." Paul, as no
doubt other missionaries besides him, connected the preaching of Christ
with the Greek mode of thought; he even employed philosophic doctrines
of the Greeks as presuppositions in his apologetic,[90] and therewith
prepared the way for the introduction of the Gospel to the Graeco-Roman
world of thought. But, in my opinion, he has nowhere allowed that world
of thought to influence his doctrine of salvation. This doctrine,
however, was so fashioned in its practical aims that it was not
necessary to become a Jew in order to appropriate it. (10) Yet we cannot
speak of any total effect of Paulinism, as there was no such thing. The
abundance of its details was too great and the greatness of its
simplicity too powerful, its hope of the future too vivid, its doctrine
of the law too difficult, its summons to a new life in the spirit too
mighty to be comprehended and adhered to even by those communities which
Paul himself had founded. What they did comprehend was its Monotheism,
its universalism, its redemption, its eternal life, its asceticism; but
all this was otherwise combined than by Paul. The style became Hellenic,
and the element of a new kind of knowledge from the very first, as in
the Church of Corinth, seems to have been the ruling one. The Pauline
doctrine of the incarnate heavenly Man was indeed apprehended; it fell
in with Greek notions, although it meant something very different from
the notions which Greeks had been able to form of it.

_Supplement_ 4.--What we justly prize above all else in the New
Testament is that it is a union of the three groups, Synoptic Gospels,
Pauline Epistles,[91] and Johannine writings, in which are expressed the
richest contents of the earliest history of the Gospel. In the Synoptic
Gospels and the epistles of Paul are represented two types of preaching
the Gospel which mutually supplement each other. The subsequent history
is dependent on both, and would have been other than it is had not both
existed alongside of each other. On the other hand, the peculiar and
lofty conception of Christ and of the Gospel, which stands out in the
writings of John, has directly exercised no demonstrable influence on
the succeeding development--with the exception of one peculiar mo