The Origin of Paul's Religion is intended to deal, from one particular point of view, with the problem of the origin of Christianity. It is an important historical problem not only because of the large place which Christianity has occupied in the medieval and modern world, but also because of certain unique features which even the most unsympathetic and superficial examination must detect in the beginnings of the Christian movement. The problem of the origin of Christianity is also an important practical problem. Rightly or wrongly, Christian experience has ordinarily been connected with one particular view of the origin of the Christian movement; where that view has been abandoned, the experience has ceased.
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John Gresham Machen. The Origin of Paul's Religion
The Origin of Paul's Religion
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER II
THE EARLY YEARS
CHAPTER III
THE TRIUMPH OF GENTILE FREEDOM
CHAPTER IV
PAUL AND JESUS[67]
CHAPTER V
THE JEWISH ENVIRONMENT
CHAPTER VI
THE RELIGION OF THE HELLENISTIC AGE
CHAPTER VII
REDEMPTION IN PAGAN RELIGION AND IN PAUL
CHAPTER VIII
THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS
FOOTNOTES:
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John Gresham Machen
e-artnow, 2020
.....
Fortunately liberalism was not the method of Paul. Paul was not a practical Christian who regarded life as superior to doctrine, and practice as superior to principle. On the contrary, he overcame the principle of Jewish particularism in the only way in which it could be overcome; he overcame principle by principle. It was not Paul the practical missionary, but Paul the theologian, who was the real apostle to the Gentiles.
In his theology he avoided certain errors which lay near at hand. He avoided the error of Marcion, who in the middle of the second century combated Jewish particularism by representing the whole of the Old Testament economy as evil and as the work of a being hostile to the good God. That error would have deprived the Church of the prestige which it derived from the possession of an ancient and authoritative Book; as a merely new religion Christianity never could have appealed to the Gentile world. Paul avoided also the error of the so-called "Epistle of Barnabas," which, while it accepted the Old Testament, rejected the entire Jewish interpretation of it; the Old Testament Law, according to the Epistle of Barnabas, was never intended to require literal sacrifices and circumcision, in the way in which it was interpreted by the Jews. That error, also, would have been disastrous; it would have introduced such boundless absurdity into the Christian use of the Scriptures that all truth and soberness would have fled.
