00. THE EARLIER EPISTES OF ST. PAUL
THE EARLIER EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL THEIR MOTIVE AND ORIGIN BY
KIRSOPP LAKE TO THE SENATUS ACADEMICUS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS
PREFACE THE difficulty which undoubtedly attends any attempt to understand the Epistles of St. Paul is largely due to the fact that they are letters; for the writer of a letter assumes the knowledge of a whole series of facts, which are, as he is quite aware, equally familiar to his correspondent and to himself. But as time goes on this knowledge is gradually forgotten, and what was originally quite plain becomes difficult and obscure; it has to be rediscovered from stray hints and from other documents by a process of laborious research, before it is possible for the letters to be read with anything approaching to the ease and intelligence possessed by those to whom they were originally sent. It is necessary to reconstruct the story of the motive and origin of the letters, and create a picture of the background of thought and practice against which they were set in the beginning. The following pages are an attempt to do this for the earlier Epistles of St. Paul. I have not tried to give a description of St. Paul’s own thoughts—I trust that I may attempt this task later—but to reconstruct the background, a knowledge of which renders it possible to read the Epistles with intelligence; and for this purpose two main types of problems have been attacked. In the first place, an effort has been made to deal with the literary and critical questions introductory to these letters, concerning their integrity, destination, and history. These problems are often somewhat tedious, but they acquire interest if they are seriously studied, and in any case they cannot be neglected by those who desire to have a real grasp of the nature of early Christian literature.
Secondly, attention has been given to the intricate question of the world of religious thought to which the earliest Gentile Christians belonged—the world of the Hellenistic Mystery Religions. This is much more difficult, and much more important, but has as yet been much less adequately studied than the more purely literary questions. Students of the New Testament have been somewhat slow to grasp its importance, or to make use of the rich material which has been given by classical and archaeological scholars, such as (if I may mention two names out of a great number) Cumont and Reitzenstein.
Nevertheless, I have no fear but that the immediate future will make good the remissness of the past. The study of the religious life of the Graeco-Roman world as a whole is now fully recognized to be absolutely necessary if we do not wish our notions about early Christianity to be a mere caricature of the truth.
There is, however, one subsidiary point to which I have drawn attention in more than one chapter, and desire to emphasize once more,—the psychological aspect of religion. To understand the history of religions we must understand the psychology of religious men. I have endeavoured in the following pages to use what knowledge of psychology I possess, but I am confident that this method ought to be extended far more widely. The difficulty is due to our ignorance of co-ordinated facts, and this again is partly caused by the unnatural limitation of the modern study of theology.
We desire to arrive at an intelligent understanding of religion; we grow old and weary in the study of texts and inscriptions, and we do well, for they have much to teach us; but we forget that religion is to be found in men, not in manuscripts, and we need to take a lesson from our brothers the doctors. They are the students of the body, as we are of the soul; they make the centre of their work the study of the body as it is found here and now, and their use of the books of past generations is always subsidiary to that study. It is the fatal mistake of the theologian to think that he can do otherwise, and understand the soul from the study of ancient books. Our great need at present is the study of the living soul, and I venture to say this, because it is, among other more important things, very necessary for the study of those Epistles on which I am writing.
KIRSOPP LAKE.
Leiden, September, 1911 TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.The Outline Given in Acts of Events in St. Paul’s Life II.The Judaistic Controversy, the Gentile Converts, and the Background of Gentile Christianity Appendix - The Text of the Apostolic Decrees III.The Epistles to the Thessalonians IV.Corinth Appendix I. - The Apocryphal Correspondence of St Paul with the Corinthians Appendix II. - Glossolalia and Psychology V.The Epistle to the Galatians Appendix I. - Galatia, Kingdom and Province Appendix II. - The Text of Acts 12.25 Appendix III. - St. Paul’s Journey to Arabia VI.The Epistle to the Romans; The Church at Rome Appendix I. - The Textual Evidence of the Group DEFG VII.Conclusion