[102] As has been said above, the New Testament begins with Paul and culminates with John. One is thankful to see that Dr. Moffatt has no sympathy with the old misjudgment regarding Paul's knowledge of Greek and his incapacity for expressing himself in Greek. It is one of the curiosities and absurdities of all literature that one of the greatest masters of Greek, the man who adapted Greek to the expression of a new ethic and a new religion-not in an artificial jargon of technical terms, but in the language of the world-should have been described by so many modern scholars as unable to write Greek and as uneducated in Greek. Paul was fully conscious of the task that lay before him, viz., to express to the Greek-speaking world the Sophia of God, the wisdom or [103] philosophy that is Divine, in other words the Christ who is the Sophia of God (1 Cor. I. 24, 30). He had not merely to destroy a false Sophia (and that very purpose of destroying it sprang from his knowledge of its insufficiency and hollowness), but to explain the true Sophia. He knew that he was the philosophic architect ({sophos arxitektôn}), who had to lay the foundation on which others should build (1 Cor. III.10). Among the mature he expounded the Divine system of the true philosophy, the deep-lying scheme in which the Will of God has expressed itself, and he expounded it as a mystery, a secret truth now made plain to all (1 Cor. ii. 6, 13). He took such words as "Salvation" and "Godliness" ({sôtêria} and {eusebeia}) 1 from the mouth of the pagans and put [104] in them a new spiritual meaning. All men around him in Tarsus and in Ephesus were making vows and prayers for Salvation; and we can now still read the record of their desires on hundreds of inscribed stones; but they had never dreamed of the spiritual kind of Salvation which Paul explained to them, nor felt their need of it. It was the mission of Jesus at once to put into the hearts of men the sense of need for this Salvation, and to satisfy their need. It was the mission of Paul to make them understand the message of Jesus; and it was his Hellenic education and his understanding of the Greek nature and his power over the Greek language that fitted him for his mission, and marked him out as the Apostle of the Graeco-Roman world.

On Paul's power of expression Dr. Moffatt has some good things. On page 57 he says [105] that "more than once in Paul it becomes an open question whether he is quoting from an early Christian hymn, or developing half unconsciously the antitheses of his glowing thought: a good case in point is furnished by 1 Corinthians xv. 42 - 43. Elsewhere, however, the genuine rhetoric of the speaker is felt through the written words; they show unpremeditated art of the highest quality, as, e.g., in passages like the hymn to love (1 Cor. XIII.), or the great apostrophe and exulting paean of Romans VIII. 31 f."

In the last sentence only the word "rhetoric" jars on me, and makes me uncertain whether Dr. Moffatt has felt the quality of Paul, or is merely under the influence of modern writers: 2 I can hardly imagine that one who had ever experienced the spell of Paul could apply the word "rhetoric" to the examples which he mentions from First Corinthians and Romans. He [106] goes on to quote from Norden that "in such passages the diction of the Apostle rises to the height of Plato in the 'Phaedrus'"; and he refers to Wilamowitz, who with true insight calls Paul "a classic of Hellenism". I may complete this last reference by a fuller quotation. In his sketch of Greek literature Professor von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff assigns a high place to Paul: "That this Greek of his has no connexion with any school or any model, that it streams as best it may from the heart in an impetuous torrent, and yet is real Greek, not translated Aramaic (like the sayings of Jesus), makes him a classic of Hellenism. Now at last, at last one can again hear in Greek the utterance of an inner experience, fresh and living." That is what one feels in coming to Paul after the dreary centuries during which classical Greek seems dead, 3 though it was only re-creating and re-invigorating itself to conquer a wider world of thought.

[106] I may feel glad that the view of Paul's power as a Greek writer of the highest and most creative order, which I have for many years maintained without rousing general attention, is now being independently re-discovered in Germany and imported thence to Great Britain. There is a class of British scholars (to which I hope Dr. Moffatt does not belong) who set no value by any opinion in scholarship until it has appeared in a foreign language.

FOOTNOTES:

1 {eusebeia} appears only in the Pastoral Epistles, and that has been unscientifically made a charge against their authenticity, as if "Godliness" were an un-Pauline idea. Considering how deep Paul had seen into the pagan heart and how well he understood the pagan nature, it would be to me an incomprehensible thing that he should never have explained to the men of his own age the true nature of that "Godliness" which was in their eyes so important. Paul had often explained its nature in speech. By chance it does not come up in any of his earlier letters; but that does not prove either that he was ignorant of the idea, or that he considered it unimportant. How many things are there in his Epistles which occur only in one letter or in one group of letters.

2 He seems to have derived the term "rhetoric" from the late Professor Blass, see p.89. Blass used the term to indicate training in the schools of rhetoric, i.e., higher literature; but Dr. Moffatt employs the term in a different and modern sense.

3 Taken from Mr. Bevan's stimulating article in the "Quarterly Review," July, 1910, p. 219. It is, however, very strange that he should speak of the great Greek scholar of Berlin as recently dead.