As a young rabbi from the West, and a pupil of one of the most famous of the Tannaim, he had persecuted the Christians qua Jewish sectaries. Then, after an awakening of the sort that often happened in those days, he turned to the numerous small cult-communities of the West and forged out of them a Church of his own modelling: so that thenceforward, the Pagan and the Christian cult-Churches evolved in parallel, and with constant reciprocal action, up to Iamblichus and Athanasius (about A.D. 330). In the presence of this great ideal, Paul had for the Jesus-communities of Jerusalem a scarcely veiled contempt. There is nothing in the New Testament more express and exact than the beginning of the Epistle to the Galatians; his activity is a self-assumed task; he has taught how it pleased him and he has built how it pleased him. Finally, after fourteen years, he goes to Jerusalem in order, by force of his superior mentality, his success, and his effective independence of the old comrades of Jesus, to compel them there to agree that his, Paul's, creation contained the true doctrine. Peter and his people, alien to actualities, failed to seize and appreciate the far-reaching significance of the discussion. And from that moment the primitive community was superfluous.
Paul was a rabbi in intellect and an apocalyptic in feeling. He recognized Judaism, but as a preliminary development. And thus there came to be two Magian religions with the same Scriptures (namely, the Old Testament), but a double Halakha, the one setting towards the Talmud — developed by the Tannaim at Jerusalem from 300 B.C. onwards — and the other, founded by Paul and completed by the Fathers, in the direction of the Gospel. But, further, Paul drew together the whole fullness of Apocalypse and salvation-yearning then circulating in these fields[1] into a salvation-certainty, the certainty immediately revealed to him and to him alone near Damascus. "Jesus is the Redeemer and Paul is his Prophet" — this is the whole content of his message. The analogy with Mohammed could scarcely be closer. They differed neither in the nature of the awakening, nor in prophetic self-assuredness, nor in the consequent assertion of sole authority and unconditional truth for their respective expositions.
With Paul, urban man and his "intelligence" come on the scene. The others, though they might know Jerusalem or Antioch, never grasped the essence of these cities. They lived soil-bound, rural, wholly soul and feeling. But now there appeared a spirit that had grown up in the great cities of Classical east, that could only live in cities, that neither understood nor respected the peasant's countryside. An understanding was possible with Philo, but with
- ↑ Of this he was fully aware. Many of his deepest intuitions are unimaginable without Persian and Mandæan influences (e.g., Romans vii, 22.24; 1 Corinthians xv, 2.6; Ephesians v, 6, et seq., with a quotation of Persian origin. See Reitzenstein, Das iran. Erlös.-Myst., pp. 6, 133, et seq.). But this does not prove familiarity with Persian-Mandæan literature. The stories were spread in these days as sagas and folk-tales were amongst us. One heard about them in childhood as things of daily hearsay, but without being in the least aware of how deeply one was under their spell.
