Note (return) — Chapter III

The authority which the Apostles in this way enjoyed, did not, in any great measure, rest on the remembrance of direct services which the twelve had rendered to the Gentile Churches: for, as the want of reliable concrete traditions proves, no such services had been rendered, at least not by the twelve. On the contrary, there was a theory operative here regarding the special authority which the twelve enjoyed in the Church at Jerusalem, a theory which was spread by the early missionaries, including Paul, and sprang from the a priori consideration that the tradition about Christ, just because it grew up so quickly,190 must have been entrusted to eye-witnesses who were commissioned to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world, and who fulfilled that commission. The a priori character of this assumption is shewn by the fact that—with the exception of reminiscences of an activity of Peter and John among the εθνη, not sufficiently clear to us191—the twelve, as a rule, are regarded as a college, to which the mission and the tradition are traced back.192 That such a theory, based on a dogmatic construction of history, could have at all arisen, proves that either the Gentile Churches never had a living relation to the twelve, or that they had very soon lost it in the rapid disappearance of Jewish Christianity, while they had been referred to the twelve from the beginning. But even in the communities which Paul had founded and for a long time guided, the remembrance of the controversies of the Apostolic age must have been very soon effaced, and the vacuum thus produced filled by a theory which directly traced back the status quo of the Gentile Christian communities to a tradition of the twelve as its foundation. This fact is extremely paradoxical, and is not altogether explained by the assumptions that the Pauline-Judaistic controversy had not made a great impression on the Gentile Christians, that the way in which Paul, while fully recognising the twelve, had insisted on his own independent importance, had long ceased to be really understood, and that Peter and John had also really been missionaries to the Gentiles. The guarantee that was needed for the "teaching of the Lord" must, finally, be given not by Paul, but only by chosen eye-witnesses. The less that was known about them, the easier it was to claim them. The conviction as to the unanimity of the twelve, and as to their activity in founding the Gentile Churches, appeared in these Churches as early as the urgent need of protection against the serious consequences of unfettered religious enthusiasm and unrestrained religious fancy. This urgency cannot be dated too far back. In correspondence therewith, the principle of tradition in the Church (Christ, the twelve Apostles) in the case of those who were intent on the unity and completeness of Christendom, is also very old. But one passed logically from the Apostles to the disciples of the Apostles, "the Elders," without at first claiming for them any other significance than that of reliable hearers (Apostoli et discentes ipsorum). In coming down to them, one here and there betook oneself again to real historical ground, disciples of Paul, of Peter, of John.193 Yet even here legends with a tendency speedily got mixed with facts, and because, in consequence of this theory of tradition, the Apostle Paul must needs fall into the background, his disciples also were more or less forgotten. The attempt which we have in the Pastoral Epistles remained without effect, as regards those to whom these epistles were addressed. Timothy and Titus obtained no authority outside these epistles. But so far as the epistles of Paul were collected, diffused, and read, there was created a complex of writings which at first stood beside the "Teaching of the Lord by the twelve Apostles", without being connected with it, and only obtained such connection by the creation of the New Testament, that is, by the interpolation of the Acts of the Apostles, between Gospels and Epistles.194