Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/39

Rh the Prince of Life, Lord of all, Judge of the living and the dead, at God's right hand, the Giver of the Spirit, the fulfiller of all the promises of God. He is not the first of Christians or the best of men, but something absolutely different from this. The apostles and their converts are not persons who share the faith of Jesus; they are persons who have Jesus as the object of their faith, and who believe in God through Him.

There is an idea abroad that it does not much matter what Paul thought of Christ, because he never knew Him. He had not that acquaintance with Him during His public ministry on which, as we have seen, stress was laid in choosing a successor to Judas; his Christ, therefore, cannot but have been an ideal and theological rather than a real person. He has even been charged, on the ground of a difficult expression in one of his epistles (2 Cor. 516), with disparaging the kind of knowledge to which importance was attached in Jerusalem, and much of the modern criticism of his theology really assumes with the Pharisaic Christianity of Acts that he lacked the indispensable qualifications of an apostle. We even find scholars like Gunkel congratulating themselves on this ground that Paul's influence speedily waned. It would have been all over with Christianity as a beneficent historical force if the synoptic gospels had not come to the front and established an ascendancy in the Church which to a great extent neutralised the Pauline gospel. If the question before us were, What