Peter never. Paul was the first by whom the Resurrection-experience was seen as a problem; the ecstatic awe of the young countryman changed in his brain into a conflict of spiritual principles. For what a contrast! — the struggle of Gethsemane, and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul-anguish and intellectual decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides! Paul had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism of Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes "were right" — a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus — and took up their cause against Judaism, thereby setting up as an intellectual quantity that which had previously consisted in the knowledge of an experience. An intellectual quantity — but in making his cause into this he unwittingly drove it close to the other intellectual powers, the cities of the West. In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there is no "intellect." For the old comrades it was simply not possible to understand him in the least — and mournfully and doubtfully they must have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded into a Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feeling for the true home of his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed westward, and the East he ignored. He never left the domain of the Classical city. Why did he go to Rome, to Corinth, and not to Edessa or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked only in the cities, and never from village to village?
That things developed thus was due to Paul alone. In the face of his practical energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and so the young Church took the urban and Western tendency decisively, so decisively that later it could describe the remaining heathen as "pagani," country-folk. Thus arose an immense danger that only youth and vernal force enabled the growing Church to repel; the fellah-world of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands, and the marks of that grasp are visible to-day. But — how remote already from the essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and the country-folk! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had simply not noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of its influence — and now, a generation after him, probably within the lifetime of his mother, that which had grown up out of his death had already become a centre of formative purpose for that Pseudomorphosis. The Classical City was soon the only theatre of ritual and dogmatic evolution. Eastward the community extended only furtively and unobtrusively.[1] About A.D. 100 there was already Christians beyond the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned they and their beliefs might almost have been non-existent.
- ↑ The early missionary effort in the East has scarcely been investigated and is still very difficult to establish in detail. Sachau, Chronik von Arbela (1915) and "Die Ausbreitung der Christentums in Asien" in Abh. Pr. Akad. d. Wiss. (1919); Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, II, 117, et seq.
