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PART I

SOURCES AND POSTULATES

CHAPTER II

THE SHAPING INFLUENCES OF PAUL'S TEACHING

BEFORE entering upon a detailed study of the ethical ideal, or highest good, which Paul conceived as the end of the Christian life, and of the manner in which he applied it to the various spheres of duty, it will be necessary to enquire what were the forces which shaped and directed the ethical outlook of the apostle, the educative influences which made him the man he was and fitted him to become the great apostle of the Gentiles? What preparation, conscious and unconscious, did he undergo for his life-work, and what ideas with regard to God and man did be bring into it from the intellectual and moral world in which he was reared? The teaching of Paul did not, like Athene from the head of Zeus, spring full-grown and perfectly equipped, from the mind of its author. It was a growth which developed by contact and antagonism with the thought of the age. It had its historical setting and environment which acted upon it and drew it forth. Some analysis, therefore, of the elements of which it is composed is the necessary preliminary to the understanding of the teaching itself. For nothing could be truer than to say with Pfleiderer that Paul's "whole past history and education acted upon and co-operated with the truth which took

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possession of his mind at his conversion, and so modified it, as to give it a tone and colour peculiar to himself." 1

Had Paul been reared amid other intellectual and social surroundings, the whole form and complexion of his teaching would have been different. His knowledge of the Old Testament, his Rabbinical training, his contact with Greek life and thought, combined with his own personal moral strivings, his individualistic temperament and intensity of nature, constituted the material to which the revelation of Christ supplied the magnetic centre. And round this centre the whole complex and diversified personality of the apostle crystallized.

In the making of every man, separable in thought although acting as one, three formative influences are at work; ancestry, environment, and personality A man is partly what his fathers have been! partly what the thought and life of his own day calls forth; but along with these two factors of heredity and environment, and -in the cases of those who have made a deep impress on history-more powerful than either, must be noted a third-the plastic personal element. It must be acknowledged that the great apostle of the Gentiles was what he was and did what he did, chiefly because of the mass and quality of those personal endowments which enabled him to mould the material given in heredity and supplied by circumstance to the one overmastering passion and all-embracing purpose of his strenuous and beneficent life. Still all three forces contribute to the making of Paul, all are important, and it is, we think possible, within limits, to discover the influence of each both in his life and in his teaching.

It is the aim of this chapter to discuss under the 1 Paulinismus, p. 4.

headings Hebrew, Hellenistic, and Christian, these three factors in the first making of the apostle. The Hebrew was obviously the chief hereditary endowment; the Hellenistic, the main contemporary influence. And surely the Christian element, since it was the power which discovered the apostle to himself, revealed the true Paul, the man within the man, and linked the human faculty to the infinite and eternal energies of the unseen, may not inappropriately represent the depths and powers of personality in the case of one whose explanation of every achievement in thought and life was the same: Yet not I but Christ that dwelleth in me."

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I.

First, then, we have to consider the ancestral element, the influence on the ethic of Paul of his Jewish descent and upbringing. The Jew in Paul was fundamental. He was Hebrew by nationality and education, Israelite by birth and creed. Born in Tarsus of Cilicia, he had a certain pride in the place of his nativity; yet it was not for the Cilician town, no mean city though it was, but for the land of his fathers, that his heart glowed. A citizen of Tarsus, he nevertheless felt as did so many of the Jews of the Dispersion, that he was an alien in a strange land. His father was probably one of those numerous Jews who had wandered from the Holy Land in pursuit of trade and had settled in one of the many centres of commerce on the Mediterranean Sea. The Jews did not readily coalesce with those among whom they dwelt, but remained in dress, food and faith a peculiar people. Sometimes, however, and this seems to have been the case in Tarsus, the Hebrew colony, or at least distinguished members of it, became

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