sition to his Judaizing opponents, who had in certain matters appealed to the original apostles against him, he emphasizes his agreement with Peter and the rest. But even the Judaizers had had no objection to Paul’s way of regarding Jesus as the object of faith; about that matter there is not in the Epistles the least suspicion of any debate. About the place of the Mosaic law in the Christian life there was discussion, though even with regard to that matter the Judaizers were entirely unjustified in appealing to the original apostles against Paul. But with regard to the attitude toward Jesus the original apostles had evidently given not even the slightest color for an appeal to them against the teaching of Paul. Evidently in making Jesus the object of religious faith—the thing that was the heart and soul of Paul’s religion—Paul was in no disagreement with those who had been apostles before him. Had there been such disagreement, the “right hand of fellowship,” which the pillars of the Jerusalem Church gave to Paul (Gal. ii . 9), would have been impossible. The facts are really too plain. The whole of early Christian history is a hopeless riddle unless the Jerusalem Church, as well as Paul, made Jesus the object of religious faith. Primitive Christianity certainly did not consist in the mere imitation of Jesus.
But was this “faith in Jesus” justified by the teaching of Jesus Himself? The question has really been answered in Chapter II. It was there shown that Jesus most certainly did not keep His Person out of His gospel, but on the contrary presented Himself as the Saviour of men. The demonstration of that fact was the highest merit of the late James Denney. His work on “Jesus and the Gospel” is faulty in some respects; it is marred by an undue concessiveness toward some modern types of criticism. But just because of its concessiveness with regard to many
