Note 27 — VII SYMBOLS OF THE MESSIAH: THE LAMB AND THE CROSS THE CHRISTIAN JESUS I THE PAULINE JESUS

“There was already in their minds a faith in a divine revealer, a divine-human activity, in salvation to be obtained through sacraments.”27 Among the neighbouring heathen peoples for a very long time, and in Jewish circles at least since the days of the prophets, there had existed a belief in a divine mediator, a “Son of God,” a “First-born of all creation,” in whom was made all that exists, who came down upon earth, humbled himself in taking on a human form, suffered for mankind a shameful death, but rose again victorious, and in his elevation and transfiguration simultaneously renewed and spiritualised the whole earth.28 Then Paul appeared—in an age which was permeated as no other with a longing for redemption; which, overwhelmed by the gloom of its external relations, was possessed with the fear of evil powers; which, penetrated with terror of the imminent end of the world, was anxiously awaiting this event and had lost faith in the saving power of the old religion—then he gave such an expression to that belief as made it appear the only means of escape from the confusion of present existence. Can the assumption of an historical Jesus in the sense of the traditional conception really be necessary, in order to account for the fact that men fled impetuously to this new religion of Paul’s? Is it even probable that the intelligent populations of the sea-ports of Asia Minor and Greece, among whom in particular Paul preached the Gospel of Jesus, would have turned towards Christianity for the reason that at some time or other, ten or twenty years before, an itinerant preacher of the name of Jesus had made an “overpowering” impression on ignorant fisher-folk and workmen in Galilee or Jerusalem by his personal bearing and his teachings, and had been believed by them to be the expected Messiah, the renowned divine mediator and redeemer of the world? Paul did not preach the man Jesus, but the heavenly spiritual being, Christ.29 The public to which Paul turned consisted for the most part of Gentiles; and to these the conception of a spiritual being presented no difficulties. It could have no strengthening, no guarantee, of its truth, through proof of the manhood of Jesus. If the Christians of the beginning of our own historical epoch had only been able to gain faith in the God Christ through the Man Jesus, Paul would have turned his attention from that which, to him, particularly mattered; he would have obscured the individual meaning of his Gospel and brought his whole religious speculation into a false position, by substituting a man Jesus for the God-man Jesus as he understood him.30