hold the genuineness of the Epistle to Titus may appeal to ii. 13: ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς δόξης του μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, where grammatical considerations certainly favor the application of both appellatives, μeyáλov θεοῦ and σωτῆρος, which are connected by καὶ under a common article, to the same person, thus supporting the rendering of the Revised Version: "The appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ."

There are two related points in Paul's teaching which create a certain difficulty in view of the representations which we have considered, and which are often urged as requiring a different conclusion from that towards which the passages just reviewed seem to point. The first is the description of Christ as standing in an order of dependence or subordination to God. The principal passages are, 1 Cor. iii. 23: "God is the head of Christ," as Christ is the "head of man" and the husband the "head of the wife"; 1 Cor. xv. 24-28, where Christ is spoken of as "delivering up the Kingdom to God, even the Father" and as finally becoming himself subjected to God "that God may be all in all." The second point is the description of Christ's lordship or glory as a gift conferred on him by the Father, e.g. the Kupióτηs of Christ is graciously bestowed upon him (exapíoaтo avτ@) as a reward of his self-humiliation (Phil. ii. 9-11); Christ died and rose "that he might reign (or be Lord, Kvρievon) of both the dead and the living" (Rom. xiv. 9). Many times his resurrection is ascribed to the power of God (Rom. vi. 4; 1 Cor. vi. 14; 2 Cor. xiii. 4). Moreover, the indwelling in him of the fulness of Deity is ascribed to a free act of God: "It pleased (evdóknσev) [the Father] that in him should all the fulness (πâν тò πλńρwμa) dwell” (Col. i. 19).

The thoughts presented in these passages are not to be minimized or explained away. Christ is placed in a

(St. Paul's Conception of Christ, p. 143) express themselves doubtfully. For the exegetical considerations on both sides, see the articles by Drs. T. Dwight and E. Abbot in the Journal of the Society for Biblical Literature and Exegesis, 1881. Dr. Abbot's article is reprinted in his Critical Essays.

secondary relation to God. But in all these passages, as it appears to me, the apostle is approaching the subject from the historic side, rather than stating what Christ is in himself. Exaltation and lordship are bestowed upon him as a reward of his redemptive work. He has come to his throne by the way of the cross. His surrender of the Kingdom to the Father when his redemptive work shall be complete and his own subjection to God seem to refer to the completion of his function as Saviour. He will surrender his commission as Redeemer when his work is complete, so that, in contrast to the mediatorial rule of Christ, God may be the immediate ruler in all the subjects of his Kingdom. "The fulness" of all divine power to bless and save is, indeed, represented as bestowed upon. Christ in his glorification. But this description does not necessarily conflict with the possession by Christ of an essential pre-temporal glory. The apostle certainly did not regard the two ideas as mutually exclusive, since he has clearly expressed them both. John has reported a word of Jesus which combines the two: "Glorify thou me at thy side with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (xvii. 5). It is quite unwarranted to use the idea of God's glorification of Christ following his redemptive work as a means of discrediting his possession of a glory with God before the world was. In the mind of Paul these two ideas went together and were the counterparts of each other. Nor does it appear that they are in logical conflict except for a Christology which approaches them with purely humanitarian presuppositions.

It would unduly extend the limits of this chapter to review at length the various speculations of critics respecting the sources and motives of Paul's Christology. Ménégoz explains it by reminding us that the apostolic age was the period of the incubation of Gnosticism. Notions of emanations, incarnations, and hierarchies of supernatural beings filled the air. Alexandrian speculations

1 "The sonship of Jesus to God is for Paul a metaphysical relation of essence, grounded in his pre-temporal being with the Father, and in his spiritual nature." Lipsius on Gal. iv. 4 in the Hand-Commentar.

(ἐξ

upon such subjects became known to the Jews of the Dispersion. Thus was prepared a soil in which such theories as that of the Logos, the firstborn Son of God and the head of all creation naturally sprang up. Christian thought adopted and worked over for its own purposes the conceptions of its opponents.1 A favorite supposition of many modern writers, e.g. Baur, Dorner, Holsten, Hilgenfeld, Hausrath, Harnack, and Holtzmann, is that Paul adopted the Philonic notion of the ideal, heavenly man, and conceived Christ as existing before his incarnation as an archetypal man. On behalf of this view appeal is made to 1 Cor. xv. 47: "The second man is of heaven" (e oupavov) — a passage which, as we have seen, is referred by most recent interpreters, not to the preexistent, but to the glorified Christ. This view is sometimes combined with certain Jewish elements of thought, such as the personification of the divine word and wisdom.2 Beyschlag reduces Paul's Christology to a personification of a principle of revelation in God which, he thinks, was due to his unwarranted confounding of an idea with a person. All the elements of Paul's teaching which go beyond a purely humanitarian view of Christ are speculative additions. When these are subtracted, what remains is this: Christ is the ideal man who stands in absolute communion with God and in whom God fully dwells. As we are here concerned only with the exposition and not with the refutation of Paul's Christology, we have no occasion to discuss this theory. Respecting the theories that Paul's Christology was due to the reaction upon him of Gnostic ideas or was borrowed from Philo, I regard them as singularly destitute of proof and intrinsically improbable. Paul approached the subject of Christ's person from his knowledge of him as a historic personality, supplemented by his vivid sense of his exaltation to heavenly glory. He developed his view of Christ

1 See Le Péché, pp. 199-204.

2 See Pfleiderer, Der Paulinismus, pp. 115-123; Beyschlag, N. T. Theol. II. 63 sq.; 79 sq. (Bk. IV. ch. iii. §§ 7, 11).

3 Op. cit. II. 60-88 (Bk. IV. ch. iii. §§ 6-13).

over against the errors which were rife at Colossæ, and, to some extent, in terms derived from these speculations. He no doubt saw fully realized in Christ the Old Testament personifications of God's word and wisdom, but it is quite gratuitous to seek the motives of his Christology either in Philo or in Gnosticism.1

1 Weizsäcker says: "We need not turn to Philo's notion of the heavenly man, as ideal man; a conception existing in Palestinian theology is sufficient." "In any case, Paul has stated that he came from heaven, and therefore was previously existent there." Apos. Age, I. 145.

CHAPTER VII

THE DEATH OF CHRIST

THE crucifixion of Jesus was, for the first disciples, the principal obstacle to belief in his messiahship. After their recovery of faith in him through the resurrection, their chief problem was, how to reconcile his death with his messiahship and to show that the former was essential to the latter. The unbelieving Jews still continued to dwell on the contradiction between an ignominious death and the Messianic vocation. This was "the stumblingblock of the cross" (Gal. v. 11; 1 Cor. i. 23). They seem to have reasoned thus: Jesus is an impostor, for had he been the true Messiah, he could not have suffered the accursed death of the cross. His death is the supreme proof that he is not the Messiah.

We have seen in the study of the primitive apostolic theology how the earliest Christians sought to parry this objection. At first they charged the death of Jesus upon the Jews as a crime and, later, sought in the Old Testament some explanation of it as a part of his Messianic work. But the apostle Paul was, so far as we know, the first man who grappled boldly with this problem and sought to prove that the death of Jesus on the cross was the culmination of his saving work and the crowning glory of his Messianic vocation. To the primitive Church. the death of Jesus presented itself more as a problem, an event to be explained and defended against the view (taken of it by the Jews. To Paul it was the chief glory of the Christian faith, the fact of supreme significance, the primary means of salvation. They came at the subject from the standpoint of the popular Jewish Messianic expectations which they had shared; he approached it in