became the Catholic
Church and doctrine, and that he has appreciated the influence of the
Judaism of the Diaspora as a preparation for this Gentile Christianity.
But these valuable contributions have unfortunately been deprived of
their convincing power by a baseless criticism of the early Christian
literature, to which Christ and Paul have fallen a sacrifice. Somewhat
more cautious are the investigations of Havet in the fourth volume of Le
Christianisme, 1884; Le Nouveau Testament. He has won great merit by the
correct interpretation of the elements of Gentile Christianity
developing themselves to catholicism, but his literary criticism is
often unfortunately entirely abstract, reminding one of the criticism of
Voltaire, and therefore his statements in detail are, as a rule,
arbitrary and untenable. There is a school in Holland at the present
time closely related to Bruno Bauer and Havet, which attempts to banish
early Christianity from the world. Christ and Paul are creations of the
second century: the history of Christianity begins with the passage of
the first century into the second--a peculiar phenomenon on the soil of
Hellenised Judaism in quest of a Messiah. This Judaism created Jesus
Christ just as the later Greek religious philosophers created their
Saviour (Apollonius, for example). The Marcionite Church produced Paul
and the growing Catholic Church completed him. See the numerous
treatises of Loman, the Verisimilia of Pierson and Naber (1886), and the
anonymous English work "Antiqua Mater" (1887), also the works of Steck
(see especially his Untersuchung ueber den Galaterbrief). Against these
works see P.V. Schmidt's, "Der Galaterbrief," 1892. It requires a deep
knowledge of the problems which the first two centuries of the Christian
Church present, in order not to thrust aside as simply absurd these
attempts, which as yet have failed to deal with the subject in a
connected way. They have their strength in the difficulties and riddles
which are contained in the history of the formation of the Catholic
tradition in the second century. But the single circumstance that we are
asked to regard as a forgery such a document as the first Epistle of
Paul to the Corinthians, appears to me, of itself, to be an unanswerable
argument against the new hypotheses.]

[Footnote 53: It would be a fruitful task, though as yet it has not been
undertaken, to examine how long visions, dreams and apocalypses, on the
one hand, and t