Note 8 — VII SYMBOLS OF THE MESSIAH: THE LAMB AND THE CROSS THE CHRISTIAN JESUS I THE PAULINE JESUS

An attempt is now being made to prove the contrary, citing 2 Cor. v. 16, which runs: “Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more.” The passage has been most differently explained. According to Baur the “Christ after the flesh” refers to the Jewish Messiah, the expected king and earthly Saviour of the Jews from political and social distress, in whom even Paul believed at an earlier date; and the meaning of the passage quoted is that this sensuous and earthly conception of the Messiah had given place in him to the spiritual conception (“Die Christuspartei in der kor. Gemeinde Tüb. Ztschr.,” 1831, 4 Heft, 90). According to Heinrici the “even though we have known” is not a positive assertion of a point of view which had once determined his judgment of Christ, but a hypothetical instance, which excludes a false point of view without asserting anything as to its actuality (“Komment,” 289). According to Beyschlag the passage is to be understood as asserting that Paul had seen Jesus at Jerusalem during his life on earth. But with Paul there is no talk of a mere seeing, but rather of a knowing. Lütgert disproves all these different hypotheses with the argument that the words “after the flesh” refer not to Christ but to the verb. “The apostle no longer knows any one ‘after the flesh,’ and so he no longer knows Jesus thus. At an earlier stage his knowledge of Christ was ‘after the flesh.’ At that time he did not have the spirit of God which made him able to see in Jesus the Son of God. Paul then is not protecting himself from the Jews, who denied him a personal knowledge of Jesus, but from the Pneumatics, who denied him a pneumatic knowledge of Jesus” (“Freiheitspredigt und Schwarmgeister in Korinth,” 1908, 55–58). ↑