Note (return) — Chapter II

5. After the appearance of Paul, the earliest communities were greatly exercised by the question as to how believers obtain the righteousness which they possess, and what significance a precise observance of the law of the Fathers may have in connection with it. While some would hear of no change in the regulations and conceptions which had hitherto existed, and regarded the bestowal of righteousness by God as possible only on condition of a strict observance of the law, others taught that Jesus as Messiah had procured righteousness for his people, had fulfilled the law once for all, and had founded a new covenant, either in opposition to the old, or as a stage above it. Paul especially saw in the death of Christ the end of the law, and deduced righteousness solely from faith in Christ, and sought to prove from the Old Testament itself, by means of historical speculation, the merely temporary validity of the law and therewith the abrogation of the Old Testament religion. Others, and this view, which is not everywhere to be explained by Alexandrian influences (see above p. 72 f.), is not foreign to Paul, distinguished between spirit and letter in the Mosaic law, giving to everything a spiritual significance, and in this sense holding that the whole law as νομος πνευματικος was binding. The question whether righteousness comes from the works of the law or from faith, was displaced by this conception, and therefore remained in its deepest grounds unsolved, or was decided in the sense of a spiritualised legalism. But the detachment of Christianity from the political forms of the Jewish religion, and from sacrificial worship, was also completed by this conception, although it was regarded as identical with the Old Testament religion rightly understood. The surprising results of the direct mission to the Gentiles would seem to have first called forth those controversies (but see Stephen) and given them the highest significance. The fact that one section of Jewish Christians, and even some of the Apostles, at length recognised the right of the Gentile Christians to be Christians without first becoming Jews, is the clearest proof that what was above all prized was faith in Christ and surrender to him as the saviour. In agreeing to the direct mission to the Gentiles the earliest Christians, while they themselves observed the law, broke up the national religion of Israel, and gave expression to the conviction that Jesus was not only the Messiah of his people, but the redeemer of humanity.84 The establishment of the universal character of the Gospel, that is, of Christianity as a religion for the world, became now, however, a problem, the solution of which, as given by Paul, but few were able to understand or make their own.