01.04 - PROLEGOMENA TO THE BIBLICAL LETTERS AND EPISTLES.

iv.

PROLEGOMENA TO THE BIBLICAL LETTERS AND EPISTLES.

13. The author’s purpose was to write Prolegomena to the biblical letters and epistles: it may seem now to be high time that he came to the subject. But he feels that he might now break off, and still confidently believe that he has not neglected his task. What remains to be said is really implied in the foregoing pages. It was a problem in the method of literary history which urged itself upon him; he has solved it, for himself at least, in laying bare the roots by which it adheres to the soil on which flourished aforetime the spacious garden of God—Holy Scripture. To the investigator the Bible offers a large number of writings bearing a name which appears to be simple, but which nevertheless conceals within itself that same problem —a name which every child seems to understand, but upon which, nevertheless, the learned man must ponder deeply if ever he will see into the heart of the things called by it. “Letters”! How long did the author work with this term without having ever once reflected on what it meant; how long did it accompany him through his daily task in science without his observing the enigma that was inscribed on its work-a-day face! Others may have been more knowing: the author’s experiences were like those of a man who plants a vineyard without being able to distinguish the true vine-shoots from the suckers of the wild grape. That was, of course, a sorry plight—as bad as if one were to labour upon Attic tragedies without knowing what an Attic tragedy is. One may, indeed, write a letter without necessarily knowing what a letter is. The best letter-writers have certainly not cherished any doctrinaire opinions on the subject. The ancient Greek and Latin “guides to letter-writing”⁹⁵ appeared long after Cicero: neither did the Apostles, for that matter, know anything of Halieutics. But if one is to understand those literary memorials in the Bible which have come to us under the name of “letters,” and to make them intelligible to others, the first condition is, of course, that one must have an historical comprehension of his purpose, must have previously divested the problematic term of its problematic character: οὐγὰρἐπειδὴἐπιστολὴπροσαγορεύεταιἑνικῷὀνόματι,ἤδηκαὶπασῶντῶν κατὰτὸνβίονφερομένωνἐπιστολῶνεἷςτιςἐστιχαρακτὴρκαὶμίαπροσηγορία,ἀλλὰδιάφοροι,καθὼς ἔφην.⁹⁶ If we rightly infer, from an investigation of ancient literature, that the familiar term “letter” must be broken up—above all, into the two chief categories real letter and epistle, then the biblical “letters” likewise must be investigated from this point of view. Just as the language of the Bible ought to be studied in its actual historical context of contemporary language;⁹⁷ just as its religious and ethical contents must be studied in their actual historical context of contemporary religion and civilisation⁹⁸—so the biblical writings, too, in the literary investigation of them, ought not to be placed in an isolated position. The author speaks of the biblical writings, not of the biblical literature. To apply the designation literature to certain portions of the biblical writings would be an illegitimate procedure. Not all that we find printed in books at the present day was literature from the first. A comparison of the biblical writings, in their own proper character, with the other writings of antiquity, will show us that in each case there is a sharp distinction between works which were literature from the first and writings which only acquired that character later on, or will show, at least, that we must so distinguish them from each other. This is nowhere more evident than in the case under discussion. When we make the demand that the biblical “letters” are to be set in their proper relation to ancient letter-writing as a whole, we do not thereby imply that they are products of ancient epistolography; but rather that they shall be investigated simply with regard to the question, how far the categories implied in the problematic term letter are to be employed in the criticism of them. We may designate our question regarding the biblical letters and epistles as a question regarding the literary character of the writings transmitted by the Bible under the name letters,⁹⁹ but the question regarding their literary character must be so framed that the answer will affirm the preliterary character, probably of some, possibly of all. The latter has been maintained by F. Overbeck,¹⁰⁰—at least in regard to the “letters” in the New Testament. He thinks that the Apostolic letters belong to a class of writings which we ought not to place in the province of literature at all;¹⁰¹ the writer of a letter has, as such, no concern with literature whatever,—“because for every product of literature it is essential that its contents have an appropriate literary form”.¹⁰² The written words of a letter are nothing but the wholly inartificial and incidental substitute for spoken words. As the letter has a quite distinct and transitory motive, so has it also a quite distinct and restricted public—not necessarily merely one individual, but sometimes, according to circumstances, a smaller or larger company of persons: in any case, a circle of readers which can be readily brought before the writer’s mind and distinctly located in the field of inward vision. A work of literature, on the other hand, has the widest possible publicity in view: the literary man’s public is, so to speak, an imaginary one, which it is the part of the literary work to find.¹⁰³ Though Overbeck thus indicates with proper precision the fundamental difference between the letter and literature, yet he has overlooked the necessary task of investigating whether the Apostolic letters—either as a whole or in part —may not be epistles, and this oversight on his part is the more extraordinary, since he quite clearly recognises the distinction between the letter and the epistle. He speaks, at least, of “artificial letters,” and contrasts them with “true letters”;¹⁰⁴ in point of fact, he has the right feeling,¹⁰⁵ that there are some of the New Testament letters, the form of which is quite obviously not that of a letter at all, viz., the so-called Catholic Epistles: in some of these the form of address, being so indefinite and general, does not correspond to what we expect in a letter, and, in fact, constitutes a hitherto unsolved problem. Hence he is inclined to class them along with those New Testament writings “which, in their own proper and original form, certainly belong to literature,¹⁰⁶ but which, in consideration of the paucity of their different forms, must not be thought of as qualifying the New Testament to be ranked historically as the beginning of that literature”. Easy as it would have been to characterise the “letters,” thus so aptly described, as epistles, Overbeck has yet refrained from doing this, and though he seems, at least, to have characterised them as literature, yet he pointedly disputes¹⁰⁷ the contention that Christian literature begins with “the New Testament,”—that is, in possible case, with these letters,—and he expressly says that the “artificial letter” remains wholly outside of the sphere of this discussion.¹⁰⁸

14. The present writer would assert, as against this, that “in the New Testament,” and not only there but also in the literature of the Jews as well as of the Christians of post-New-Testament times, the transmitted “letters” permit of quite as marked a division into real letters and epistles, as is the case in ancient literature generally.

14. Most investigators of the New Testament letters seem to overlook the fact that this same profound difference already manifests itself clearly in the “letters” found among the writings of pre-Christian Judaism. Looking at the writings of early Christianity from the standpoint of literary history, we perceive that Jewish literature¹⁰⁹ was precisely the literary sphere from which the first Christians could most readily borrow and adopt something in the way of forms, εἴδη, of composition.¹¹⁰ If, therefore, the existence of the εἶδος of the epistle can be demonstrated in this possibly archetypal sphere, our inquiry regarding the early Christian “letters” manifestly gains a more definite justification. Should the doubt be raised as to whether it is conceivable that a line of demarcation, quite unmistakably present in “profane” literature, should have also touched the outlying province of the New Testament, that doubt will be stilled when it is shown that this line had actually long intersected the sphere of Jewish literature, which may have been the model for the writers of the New Testament. Between the ancient epistles and what are (possibly) the epistles of early Christianity, there subsists a literary, a morphological connection; if it be thought necessary to establish a transition-link, this may quite well be found in the Jewish epistles. The way by which the epistle entered the sphere of Jewish authorship is manifest: Alexandria, the classical soil of the epistle and the pseudo-epistle, exercised its Hellenising influence upon Judaism in this matter as in others. We know not who the first Jewish epistolographer may have been, but it is, at least, highly probable that he was an Alexandrian. The taking over of the epistolary form was facilitated for him by the circumstance that already in the ancient and revered writings of his nation there was frequent mention of “letters,” and that, as a matter of fact, he found a number of “letters” actually given verbatim in the sacred text. Any one who read the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah with the eyes of an Alexandrian Hellenist, found, in Jeremiah 29:1-32 (the prophet’s message to the captives in Babylon),¹¹¹ something which to his morbid literary taste seemed like an epistle. As a matter of fact, this message is a real letter, perhaps indeed the only genuine one we have from Old Testament times; a real letter, which only became literature by its subsequent admission into the book of the Prophet. As it now stands in the book, it is to be put in exactly the same class as all other real letters which were subsequently published. In its origin, in its purpose, LXX Jeremiah 29:1-32 [MT Jeremiah 47:1-7], being a real letter, is non-literary, and hence, of course, we must not ask after a literary prototype for it. The wish to discover the first Israelitic or first Christian letter-writer would be as foolish as the inquiry regarding the beginnings of Jewish and, later, of Christian, epistolography is profitable and necessary; besides, the doctrinaire inquirer would be cruelly undeceived when the sublime simplicity of the historical reality smiled at him from the rediscovered first Christian letter—its pages perhaps infinitely paltry in their contents: some forgotten cloak may have been the occasion of it—who will say? LXX Jeremiah 29:1-32 [MT Jeremiah 47:1-7] is not, of course, a letter such as anybody might dash off in an idle moment; nay, lightnings quiver between the lines, Jahweh speaks in wrath or in blessing,—still, although a Jeremiah wrote it, although it be a documentary fragment of the history of the people and the religion of Israel, it is still a letter, neither less nor more. The antithesis of it in that respect is not wanting. There has been transmitted to us, among the Old Testament Apocryphal writings, a little book bearing the name ἐπιστολὴ Ἱερεμίου. If LXX Jeremiah 29:1-32 [MT Jeremiah 47:1-7] is a letter of the prophet Jeremiah, this is an Epistle of “Jeremiah”. Than the latter, we could know no more instructive instance for the elucidation of the distinction between letter and epistle, or for the proper appreciation of the idea of pseudonymity in ancient literature. The Greek epistolography of the Alexandrian period constituted the general literary impulse of the writer of the Epistle of “Jeremiah,” while the actual existence of a real letter of Jeremiah constituted the particular impulse. He wrote an epistle,—as did the other great men of the day: he wrote an epistle of “Jeremiah,” just as the others may have fabricated, say, epistles of “Plato”. We can distinctly see, in yet another passage, how the motive to epistolography could be found in the then extant sacred writings of Judaism. The canonical Book of Esther speaks, in two places, of royal letters, without giving their contents: a sufficient reason for the Greek reviser to sit down and manufacture them, just as the two prayers, only mentioned in the original, are given by him in full!¹¹²

Having once gained a footing, epistolography must have become very popular in Greek Judaism; we have still a whole series of Graeco-Jewish “letters,” which are unquestionably epistles. The author is not now thinking of the multitude of letters, ascribed to historical personages, which are inserted in historical works¹¹³; in so far as these are unauthentic, they are undoubtedly of an epistolary character, but they belong less to the investigation of epistolography than to the development of historical style. We should rather call to mind books and booklets like the Epistle of Aristeas, the two¹¹⁴ epistles at the beginning of the 2nd Book of Maccabees, the Epistle of “Baruch” to the nine and a half tribes in captivity, attached to the Apocalypse of Baruch,¹¹⁵ perhaps the twenty-eighth “Letter of Diogenes,”¹¹⁶ and certain portions of the collection of “letters” which bears the name of Heraclitus.¹¹⁷

15. Coming, then, to the early Christian “letters” with our question, letter or epistle? it will be our first task to determine the character of the “letters” transmitted to us under the name of Paul. Was Paul a letter-writer or an epistolographer? The question is a sufficiently pressing one, in view of the exceedingly great popularity of epistolography in the Apostle’s time. Nor can we forthwith answer it, even leaving the Pastoral epistles out of consideration, and attending in the first place only to those whose genuineness is more or less established. The difficulty is seen in its most pronounced form when we compare the letter to Philemon with that to the Romans; here we seem to have two such heterogeneous compositions that it would appear questionable whether we should persist in asking the above disjunctive question. May not Paul have written both letters and epistles? It would certainly be preposterous to assume, a priori, that the “letters” of Paul must be either all letters or all epistles. The inquiry must rather be directed upon each particular “letter”—a task the fulfilment of which lies outside the scope of the present methodological essay.¹¹⁸ But, as it is, the author may here at least indicate his opinion.

It appears to him quite certain that the authentic writings of the Apostle are true letters, and that to think of them as epistles¹¹⁹ is to take away what is best in them. They were, of course, collected, and treated as literature—in point of fact, as literature in the highest sense, as canonical—at an early period. But that was nothing more than an after-experience of the letters, for which there were many precedents in the literary development sketched above. But this after-experience cannot change their original character, and our first task must be to ascertain what this character actually is. Paul had no thought of adding a few fresh compositions to the already extant Jewish epistles, still less of enriching the sacred literature of his nation; no, every time he wrote, he had some perfectly definite impulse in the diversified experiences of the young Christian churches. He had no presentiment of the place his words would occupy in universal history; not so much as that they would still be in existence in the next generation, far less that one day the people would look upon them as Holy Scripture. We now know them as coming down from the centuries with the literary patina and the nimbus of canonicity upon them; should we desire to attain a historical estimate of their proper character, we must disregard both. Just as we should not allow the dogmatic idea of the mass to influence our historical consideration of the last Supper of Jesus with His disciples, nor the liturgical notions of a prayerbook-commission to influence our historical consideration of the Lord’s Prayer, so little dare we approach the letters of Paul with ideas about literature and notions about the canon. Paul had better work to do than the writing of books, and he did not flatter himself that he could write Scripture; he wrote letters, real letters, as did Aristotle and Cicero, as did the men and women of the Fayyûm. They differ from the messages of the homely Papyrus leaves from Egypt not as letters, but only as the letters of Paul. No one will hesitate to grant that the Letter to Philemon has the character of a letter. It must be to a large extent a mere doctrinaire want of taste that could make any one describe this gem, the preservation of which we owe to some fortunate accident, as an essay, say, “on the attitude of Christianity to slavery”. It is rather a letter, full of a charming, unconscious naivete, full of kindly human nature. It is thus that Epicurus writes to his child, and Moltke to his wife: no doubt Paul talks of other matters than they do—no one letter, deserving the name, has ever looked like another—but the Apostle does exactly what is done by the Greek philosopher and the German officer.

It is also quite clear that the note of introduction contained in Romans 16:1-27 is of the nature of a true letter. No one, it is to be hoped, will make the objection that it is directed to a number of persons—most likely the Church at Ephesus; the author thinks that he has made it probable that the number of receivers is of no account in the determination of the nature of a letter.¹²⁰ But the Letter to the Philippians is also as real a letter as any that was ever written. Here a quite definite situation of affairs forced the Apostle to take up his pen, and the letter reflects a quite definite frame of mind, or, at least, enables us to imagine it. The danger of introducing into our investigation considerations which, so far as concerns method,¹²¹ are irrelevant, is, of course, greater in this case. Some reader will again be found to contend that, in contrast to the private letter to Philemon, we have here a congregational letter: some one, again, who is convinced of the valuelessness of this distinction, will bring forward the peculiarity of the contents the letter is of a “doctrinal” character, and should thus be designated a doctrinal letter. This peculiarity must not be denied—though, indeed, the author has misgivings about applying the term doctrine to the Apostle’s messages; the “doctrinal” sections of the letters impress him more as being of the nature of confessions and attestations. But what is added towards the answering of our question letter or epistle? by the expression “doctrinal” letter—however pertinent a term? If a letter is intended to instruct the receiver, or a group of receivers, does it thereby cease to be a letter? A worthy pastor, let us say, writes some stirring words to his nephew at the university, to the effect that he should not let the “faith” be shaken by professorial wisdom; and he refutes point by point the inventions of men. Perhaps, when he himself was a student, he received some such sincere letters from his father against the new orthodoxy which was then, in its turn, beginning to be taught. Do such letters forthwith become tractates simply because they are “doctrinal”?¹²²We must carefully guard against an amalgamation of the two categories doctrinal letter and epistle. If any one be so inclined, he may break up the letter into a multitude of subdivisions: the twenty-one or forty-one τύποι of the old theorists¹²³ may be increased to whatever extent one wishes. The author has no objection to any one similarly breaking up the Pauline letters into several subdivisions, and subsuming some of them under the species doctrinal letter; only one should not fondly imagine that by means of the doctrinal letter he has bridged over the great gulf between letter and epistle. The pre-literary character even of the doctrinal letter must be maintained. This also holds good of the other Letters of Paul, even of the “great Epistles”. They, too, are partly doctrinal; they contain, in fact, theological discussions: but even in these, the Apostle had no desire to make literature. The Letter to the Galatians is not a pamphlet “upon the relation of Christianity to Judaism,” but a message sent in order to bring back the foolish Galatians to their senses. The letter can only be understood in the light of its special purpose as such.¹²⁴ How much more distinctly do the Letters to the Corinthians bear the stamp of the true letter! The second of them, in particular, reveals its true character in every line; in the author’s opinion, it is the most letter-like of all the letters of Paul, though that to Philemon may appear on the surface to have a better claim to that position. The great difficulty in the understanding of it is due to the very fact that it is so truly a letter, so full of allusions and familiar references, so pervaded with irony and with a depression which struggles against itself—matters of which only the writer and the readers of it understood the purport, but which we, for the most part, can ascertain only approximately. What is doctrinal in it is not there for its own sake, but is altogether subservient to the purpose of the letter. The nature of the letters which were brought to the Corinthians by the fellow-workers of Paul, was thoroughly well understood by thereceivers themselves, else surely they would hardly haveallowed one or two of them to be lost. They agreed, in fact, with Paul, in thinking that the letters had served their purpose when once they had been read. We may most deeply lament that they took no trouble to preserve theletters, but it only shows lack of judgment to reproach them on this account. A letter is something ephemeral, and must be so by its very nature;¹²⁵ it has as little desire to be immortal as a tete-et-tete has to be minuted, or an alms to be entered in a ledger. In particular, the temper of mind in which Paul and his Churches passed their days was not such as to awaken in them an interest for the centuries to come. The Lord was at hand; His advent was within the horizon of the times, and such an anticipation has nothing in common with the enjoyment of the contemplative book-collector. The one-sided religious temper of mind has never yet had any affection for such things as interest the learned. Modern Christians have become more prosaic. We institute collections of archives, and found libraries, and, when a prominent man dies, we begin to speculate upon the destination of his literary remains: all this needs a hope less bold and a faith less simple than belonged to the times of Paul. From the point of view of literature, the preservation even of two letters to the Corinthians is a secondary and accidental circumstance, perhaps owing, in part, to their comparative lengthiness, which saved them from immediate destruction. The Letter to the Romans is also a real letter. No doubt there are sections in it which might also stand in an epistle; the whole tone of it, generally speaking, stamps it as different from the other Pauline letters. But nevertheless it is not a book, and the favourite saying that it is a compendium of Paulinism, that the Apostle has, in it, laid down his Dogmatics and his Ethics, certainly manifests an extreme lack of taste. No doubt Paul wanted to give instruction, and he did it, in part, with the help of contemporary theology, but he does not think of the literary public of his time, or of Christians in general, as his readers; he appeals to a little company of men, whose very existence, one may say, was unknown to the public at large, and who occupied a special position within Christianity. It is unlikely that the Apostle would send copies of the letter to the brethren in Ephesus, Antioch or Jerusalem; it was to Rome that he despatched it: nor did the bearer of it go to the publishers in the Imperial City,¹²⁶ but rather to some otherwise unknown brother in the Lord—just like many another passenger by the same ship of Corinth, hastening one to that house, another to this, there to deliver a message by word of mouth, here to leave a letter or something else. The fact that the Letter to the Romans is not so enlivened by personal references as the other letters of Paul is explained by the conditions under which it was written: he was addressing a Church which he did not yet personally know. Considered in the light of this fact, the infrequence of personal references in the letter lends no support to its being taken as a literary epistle; it is but the natural result of its non-literary purpose. Moreover, Paul wrote even the “doctrinal” portions in his heart’s blood. The words ταλαίπωροςἐγὼἄνθρωπος are no cool rhetorical expression of an objective ethical condition, but the impressive indication of a personal ethical experience: it is not theological paragraphs which Paul is writing here, but his confessions.

Certain as it seems to the author that the authentic messages of Paul are letters, he is equally sure that we have also a number of epistles from New Testament times. They belong, as such, to the beginnings of “Christian literature”. The author considers the Letter to the Hebrews as most unmistakably of all an epistle. It professes, in chap. Hebrews 13:22, to be a λόγοςτῆςπαρακλήσεως, and one would have no occasion whatever to consider it anything but a literary oration—hence not as an epistle¹²⁷ at all—if the ἐπέστειλα and the greetings at the close did not permit of the supposition that it had at one time opened with something of the nature of an address as well. The address has been lost; it might all the more easily fall out as it was only a later insertion. The address is, indeed, of decisive importance for the understanding of a letter, but in an epistle it is an unessential element. In the letter, the address occupies, so to speak, the all-controlling middle-ground of the picture; in the epistle it is only ornamental detail. Any given λόγος can be made an epistle by any kind of an address. The Epistle to the Hebrews stands on the same literary plane as the Fourth Book of Maccabees, which describes itself as a φιλοσοφώτατοςλόγος; the fact that the latter seems to avoid the appearance of being an epistle constitutes a purely external difference between them, and one which is immaterial for the question regarding their literary character.—The author is chiefly concerned about the recognition of the “Catholic” Epistles, or, to begin with, of some of them at least, as literary epistles. With a true instinct, the ancient Church placed these Catholic Epistles as a special group over against the Pauline. It seems to the author that the idea of their catholicity, thus assumed, is to be understood from the form of address in the “letters,” and not primarily from the special character of their contents.¹²⁸ They are compositions addressed to Christians—one might perhaps say the Church—in general. The catholicity of the address implies, of course, a catholicity in the contents. What the Church calls catholic, we require only to call epistle, and the unsolved enigma with which, according to Overbeck,¹²⁹ they present us, is brought nearer to a solution. The special position of these “letters,” which is indicated by their having the attribute catholic instinctively applied to them, is due precisely to their literary character; catholic means in this connection literary. The impossibility of recognising the “letters” of Peter, James and Jude as real letters follows directly from the peculiarity in the form of their address. Any one who writes to the elect who are sojourners of the Diaspora in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, or to the twelve tribes which are of the Diaspora, or even to them which have obtained a like precious faith with us, or to them that are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, must surely have reflected on the question as to what means he must employ in order to convey his message to those so addressed. Quite similarly does that other early Christian epistle still bear the address to the Hebrews; quite similarly does the author of the epistle at the close of the Apocalypse of Baruch write to the nine-and-a-half tribes of the Captivity, and Pseudo-Diogenes, ep. 28,¹³⁰to the so-called Hellenes. The only way by which the letters could reach such ideal addresses was to have them reproduced in numbers from the first. But that means that they were literature. Had the First Epistle of Peter,¹³¹ for instance, been intended as a real letter, then the writer of it, or a substitute, would have had to spend many a year of his life ere he could deliver the letter throughout the enormous circuit of the countries mentioned. The epistle, in fact, could only reach its public as a booklet; at the present day it would not be sent as a circular letter in sealed envelope, but as printed matter by book-post. It is true, indeed, that these Catholic Epistles are Christian literature: their authors had no desire to enrich universal literature; they wrote their books for a definite circle of people with the same views as themselves, that is, for Christians; but books they wrote. Very few books, indeed, are so arrogant as to aspire to become universal literature; most address themselves to a section only of the immeasurable public—they are special literature, or party literature, or national literature. It is quite admissible to speak of a literary public, even if the public in question be but a limited one—even if its boundaries be very sharply drawn. Hence the early Christian epistles were, in the first instance, special literature; to the public at large in the imperial period they were altogether unknown, and, doubtless, many a Christian of the time thought of them as esoteric, and handed them on only to those who were brethren; but, in spite of all, the epistles were designed for some kind of publicity in a literary sense: they were destined for the brethren. The ideal indefiniteness of this destination has the result that the contents have an ecumenical cast. Compare the Epistle of James, for instance, with the Letters of Paul, in regard to this point. From the latter we construct the history of the apostolic age; the former, so long as it is looked upon as a letter, is the enigma of the New Testament. Those to whom the “letter” was addressed have been variously imagined to be Jews, Gentile Christians, Jewish Christians, or Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians together; the map has been scrutinised in every part without any one having yet ascertained where we are to seek—not to say find—the readers. But if Diaspora be not a definite geographical term, no more is the Epistle of “James” a letter. Its pages are inspired by no special motive; there is nothing whatever to be read between the lines; its words are of such general interest that they might, for the most part, stand in the Book of Wisdom, or the Imitation of Christ. It is true, indeed, that the epistle reveals that it is of early Christian times, but nothing more. There is nothing uniquely distinctive in its motive, and hence no animating element in its contents. “James” sketches from models, not from nature. Unfortunately there has always been occasion, among Christians, to censure contentions and sins of the tongue, greed and calumny; indignation at the unmercifulness of the rich and sympathy with the poor are common moods of the prophetic or apostolic mind; the scenes from the synagogue and the harvest-field are familiar types —the epistle, in fact, is pervaded by the expressions and topics of the aphoristic “wisdom” of the Old Testament and of Jesus. Even if it could be demonstrated that the writer was alluding to cases which had actually occurred, yet we cannot perceive how these cases concern him in any special way; there is no particular personal relation between him and those whom he “addresses”. The picture of the readers and the figure of the writer are equally colourless and indistinct. In the letters of Paul, there speaks to us a commanding personality—though, indeed, he had no wish to speak to us at all; every sentence is the pulse-throb of a human heart, and, whether charmed or surprised, we feel at least the “touch of nature”. But what meets us in the Epistle of James is a great subject rather than a great man, Christianity itself rather than a Christian personality. It has lately become the custom, in some quarters, to designate the book as a homily. We doubt whether much is gained by so doing, for the term homily, as applied to any of the writings of early Christianity, is itself ambiguous and in need of elucidation; it probably needs to be broken up in the same way as “letter”. But that designation, at least, gives expression to the conviction that the book in question is wholly different in character from a letter. In the same Way, the recognition of the fact that the Catholic Epistles in general are not real letters, is evinced by the instinctive judgment passed on them by the Bible-reading community. The Epistle of James and particularly the First Epistle of Peter, one may say, are examples of those New Testament “letters” which play a most important part in popular religion, while the Second Letter to the Corinthians, for instance, must certainly be counted among the least-known parts of the Bible. And naturally so; the latter, properly speaking, was adapted only to the needs of the Corinthians, while later readers know not what to make of it. They seek out a few detached sayings, but the connection is not perceived; in it, truly, they find some things hard to be understood. But those epistles were adapted to Christians in general; they are ecumenical, and, as such, have a force the persistence of which is not affected by any vicissitude of time. Moreover, it also follows from their character as epistles that the question of authenticity is not nearly so important for them as for the Pauline letters. It is allowable that in the epistle the personality of the writer should be less prominent; whether it is completely veiled, as, for instance, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, or whether it modestly hides itself behind some great name of the past, as in other cases, does not matter; considered in the light of ancient literary practices, this is not only not strange, but in reality quite natural.—Finally, we may consider the Pastoral Epistles and the Seven Messages in the Apocalypse in regard to the question whether they are epistles. Though it seems to the author not impossible that the former have had worked into them genuine elements of a letter or letters of Paul, he would answer the question in the affirmative. The Seven Epistles of the Book of Revelation, again, differ from the rest in the fact that they do not form books by them-selves, nor constitute one book together, but only a portion of a book. It is still true, however, that they are not letters. All seven are constructed on a single definite plan,—while, taken separately, they are not intelligible, or, at least, not completely so; their chief interest lies in their mutual correspondence, which only becomes clear by a comprehensive comparison of their separate clauses: the censure of one church is only seen in its full severity when contrasted with the praise of another.

16. There is now no need, let us hope, of demon strating that the distinction between letters and epistles does not end in mere judgments as to their respective values. We would be the last to ignore the great value of, say, the Epistle of James or the Epistles of Peter; a comparison of these writings with the Epistle of Jeremiah, for example, and many of the Graeco-Roman epistles, would be sufficient to guard us against that. In regard to the latter, one must frequently marvel at the patience of a public which could put up with the sorry stuff occasionally given to it as epistles. The more definitely we assign to the New Testament epistles a place in ancient epistolography, the more clearly will they themselves convince us of their own special excellence. But our distinction proves itself, as a principle of method, to be of some importance in other respects, and we may, in conclusion, gather up our methodological inferences in brief form as follows (some of these have already been indicated here and there).

(1) The historical criticism of early Christian writings must guard against conceiving of the New Testament as a collection of homogeneous compositions, and must give due weight to the pre-literary character of certain parts of it. The literary portions must be investigated in regard to their formal similarity with Graeco-Latin and Jewish literature; further, this line of connection must be prolonged well into the Patristic literature. The much-discussed question, whether we should view the whole subject as the History of Early Christian Literature or as the Introduction to the New Testament, is a misleading one; the alternatives contain a similar error, the former implying that some, the latter that all, of the constituent parts of the New Testament should be considered from a point of view under which they did not originally stand: the former, in regarding even the real letters as literature; the latter, in seeking its facts in a historical connection in which they did not take their rise. The history of the collection and publication of the nonliterary writings of primitive Christianity, and the history of the canonisation of the writings which subsequently became literature, or were literary from the first, constitute, each of them, a distinct field of study.

(2) The letters of Paul afford a fixed starting-point for the history of the origin of the early Christian “letters”. We must ask ourselves whether it is conceivable that the literary temperament and the epistles which were its outcome can be older than the letters of Paul.

(3) The collection and publication¹³² of the letters of Paul was indirectly influenced by the analogy of other collections of letters¹³³ made in ancient times.¹³⁴ The only possible motive of such collecting and publishing was reverential love. Once the letters of Paul had been collected and treated as literature, they in turn, thus misconceived, produced a literary impulse. We must, then, carefully weigh the possibility that their collection and publication may form a terminus post quem for the composition of the early Christian epistles.

(4) The sources by means of which we are enabled to judge of the knowledge of the New Testament letters which was possessed by Christians of the post-apostolic period, the so-called testimonia, and specially the testimonia e silentio, have an altogether different historiacl value according as they relate to letters or epistles.¹³⁵ The silentium regarding the letters (most striking of all, externally considered, in the Book of Acts), is really explained by the nature of the letter as such, and cannot be employed as an evidence of spuriousness. A. silentium, on the other hand, regarding epistles is, on account of their public character, to say the least, suspicious. The distinction between letters and epistles has also perhaps a certain importance for the criticism of the traditional texts.

(5) The criticism of the Letters of Paul must always leave room for the probability that their alleged contradictions and impossibilities, from which reasons against their authenticity and integrity have been deduced, are really evidences to the contrary, being but the natural concomitants of letter-writing. The history of the criticism of Cicero’s letters,¹³⁶ for instance, yields an instructive analogy. The criticism of the early Christian epistles must not leave out of account the considerations which are to be deduced from the history of ancient epistolography.

(6) The exegesis of the letters of Paul must take its special standpoint from the nature of the letter. Its task is to reproduce in detail the Apostle’s sayings as they have been investigated in regard to the particular historical occasions of their origin, as phenomena of religious psychology. It must proceed by insight and intuition, and hence it has an unavoidable subjective cast. The exegesis of the early Christian epistles must assume a proper historical attitude with regard to their literary character. Its task is not to penetrate into the knowledge of creative personalities in the religious sphere, but to interpret great texts. As the element of personality is wanting in its object, so must that of subjectivity disappear from its procedure.

(7) The value of the New Testament “letters,” as sources for the investigation of the Apostolic age, varies according to their individual character. The classic value of the letters of Paul lies in their being actual letters, that is to say, in their being artless and unpremeditated; in this respect also, they resemble those of Cicero.¹³⁷ The value of the epistles as sources is not to be rated so highly, and, in particular, not for the special questions regarding the “constitution” and the external circumstances of Christianity; many details are only of typical value, while others, again, are but literary exercises, or anticipations of conditions not yet fully realised.

(8) In particular, the New Testament letters and epistles, considered as sources for the history of the Christian religion in its early period, are of different respective values. The letters of Paul are not so much sources for the theology, or even for the religion, of the period, as simply for the personal religion of Paul as an individual; it is only by a literary misconception that they are looked upon as the documents of “Paulinism”. The result of their criticism from the standpoint of the history of religion can be nothing more than a sketch of the character of Paul the letter-writer, and not the system of Paul the epistolographer; what speaks to us in the letters is his faith, not his dogmatics; his morality, not his ethics; his hopes, not his eschatology—here and there, no doubt, in the faltering speech of theology. The early Christian epistles are the monuments of a religion which was gradually accommodating itself to external conditions, which had established itself in the world, which received its stimulus less in the closet than in the church, and which was on the way to express itself in liturgy and as doctrine.—

“The Hero who is the centre of all this did not himself . . . become an author; the only recorded occasion of his having written at all was when he wrote upon the ground with his finger, and the learning of eighteen centuries has not yet divined what he then wrote.”¹³⁸ If Jesus is the gospel, then it must hold good that the gospel is non-literary. Jesus had no wish to make a religion; whoever has such a wish will but make a Koran. It was only lack of understanding on the part of those who came after (die Epigonen) which could credit the Son of Man with the writing of epistles—and to a king to boot! The saints are the epistles of Christ.¹³⁹ Nor did the Apostle of Jesus Christ advocate the gospel by literature; in point of fact, the followers of Christ learned first to pray and then to write—like children. The beginnings of Christian literature are really the beginnings of the secularisation of Christianity: the gospel becomes a book-religion. The church, as a factor in history—which the gospel made no claim to be—required literature, and hence it made literature, and made books out of letters; hence also at length the New Testament came into existence. The New Testament is an offspring of the Church. The Church is not founded upon the New Testament; other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. The gain which accrued to the world by the New Testament carried with it a danger which Christianity—to the detriment of the spirit of it—has not always been able to avoid, viz., the losing of itself as a literary religion in a religion of the letter.