f death, being the
death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.

Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic
and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian
discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus,
the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus,
and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology
of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For
him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for
the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsaecker (_Das
apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).
He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus
he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and
unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for
the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The
important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died
and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical
work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And
he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached
that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no
resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead,
then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our
preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.... Then they also which are
fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope
in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (I Cor. xv. 12-19).

And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe
in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be
specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that
"all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even
though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates
and Heraclitus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr--that is
to say a witness--of Christianity? No.

And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of
the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the
resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of
Christology was built up. Th