ST. PATIL.f.
PROFESSOR DEISSMANN, the well-known author of Light from the Ancient East, is a breezy writer, and his new book upon St. Paul, carefully translated by Mr. Lionel Strachey, is good, reading. In his preface he tells us that it has been written • Union and Strength : a Series of Papers on Imperial Questions. By L. S. Amery, X P. London : Edward Arnold. [12s. dd. net.] t St. Paul: a Study is Social and Religious Ili.tory. By Adolf Deissmann. Translated by L. R. M. Strachey. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [10s. 63. net.]
under the inspiration of a new teacher, "the world of the South and East, the world of St. Paul."
" Beside the Paul who has been turned into a western scholastic philosopher, beside the aristocratized, conventionalized, and modernized Paul now suffering his eighth imprisonment in the paper bondage of • Paulinism,' I would fain set the Paul, whom I think to have seen at Tarsus, Jerusalem, and Damascus, in Antioch, Lycaonia, Galatia, Ephesus, and Corinth, and whose tieeitAtO alive to me at night on the decks of Levant shipping, and to the sound of birds of passage winging their flight towards the Taurus—alive in their passionate emotion, the force of their popular appeal and their prophetic depth."
But, whatever may be the case in Germany, "Paulinism" in
England, in the sense of Pfleiderer's system, has long been dead, and the recognition that St. Paul's doctrine is largely
based upon his religions experience is accepted by all the recent writers upon the subject. So that Professor Deissmann in the many assaults upon Paulinism throughout his volume is but slaying the slain. Nor can we allow that the Professor's two journeys in the East, upon which he dilates in a picturesque chapter called " The World of St. Paul," throw much light upon our understanding of the Apostle. The Professor, like the Apostle, experienced great alternations of heat and cold, and "perils of robbers "; he became familiar with the olive-tree to which St. Paul refers ; and saw a man weaving a tent. But a little imagination would verify St. Paul's language as effectively as travel. Nor is there much help afforded by the recent archaeological discoveries which Professor Deissmann has done so much to popularize. He quotes the Egyptian papyri chiefly to show bow easily intelligible to St Paul's audiences would be his illustrations of Christian ideas from testamentary adoption and the manumission of slaves. The special merit of the book, then, does not lie where the reader would look for it, and where the author himself seems disposed to place it. It lies rather in the thoroughness of the recognition that the true key to the Epistles is St. Paul's personal experience; that he has one grand idea conveyed best by the words "in Christ" ; and that the many terms which he employs, justification, reconciliation, forgiveness, redemption, adoption, and so forth, are not distinguishable from one another like the acts of a drama, but are varied forms of expression for one single experience. The hundred pages of the chapter, " St. Paul the Christian," are, in fact, the cream of the book, and are better than anything hitherto written on St. Paul's theology. Incidentally many hints for interpretation are thrown out, one of the most useful being the suggestion that many direct antecedents of St. Paul's technical expressions in regard to faith and the Spirit may be found in the Septuagint. "The Septuagint translation represents not only in form, but also in substance, a Hellenisation of Jewish monotheism." The book contains an excellent map of the world as known to St. Paul.
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