The earlier prophets had likened the enemy to a lion issuing from his lair, or to the wolves of the desert. One detail in Daniel, however, does not accord with the figure-these beasts come out of the sea, which is not the home of lions or leopards. This we may admit to be a survival from Babylonian mythology, which makes Tiamat, the personified ocean, the mother of all sorts of monsters. The fourth beast of Daniel also looks like a mythological monster, "a beast terrible and powerful, which had great iron teeth; it broke in pieces and stamped the residue with its feet." We are justified in saying that there is here also a possible survival from early myths. But we must remember that the gentile influence was not direct; the myths had passed into folklore and had long ceased to be recognized as what they had been in their origin. In fact it would have horrified the apocalyptic writers to think that they were in any way influenced by heathen ideas.

The Persian religion had a well-developed theory of the last things, including a judgment at the end of the present age, a resurrection of the dead, the coming of a Savior, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, and the setting-up of the kingdom of the good divinity. This scheme is known to us only through post-Christian documents, and its earlier stages are still under investigation. It is impossible to say therefore what influence it exercised on Jewish thought. In almost every respect the ideas of Daniel are less developed. Daniel knows of no personal Messiah; he expects only a partial resurrection; he ignores entirely the picturesque bridge over which according to the Mazdeans the souls are to go after death. We must conclude that direct Mazdean influence on Daniel is slight.48

The phrase "Son of Man" used by Daniel is supposed by some to be a mythological survival. The language of Daniel is "one like a son of man" which, as is well known, means simply one like a man." As was shown above, this figure is a personification like the animals which appear in the same vision. The author chooses a man to represent the restored nation of Israel in order to show that this kingdom is as superior to the empires of the world as a man is above the beasts. The only thing that needs to be explained is the

48 This is the opinion of Charles, Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, 136. This author recognizes also that the doctrine of a resurrection found in Isa., chap. 26, cannot be derived from a Persian source.

coming on the clouds of heaven. Because of this feature some scholars identify the Son of Man with an angel, perhaps Michael, the guardian angel of Israel,49 while others think of a pre-existent judge and ruler of the world, originally a god, now an emanation of the godhead.50 Neither hypothesis is convincing. The author thought of the Israel which was to receive the kingdom as dwelling at a distance from Jerusalem; that the exiles should fly as a dove to their home was a thought familiar to all readers of Deutero-Isaiah; to bring the man out of the sea whence the beasts had ascended would seem to make him no better than the heathen powers. An angelic figure would have come with the Ancient of Days, and not have waited until the judgment was past. Giving due weight to all these considerations we see that this Son of Man is explicable as an organic part of the vision and is not a loan from gentile sources.

Finally, the pre-existent Messiah of Enoch and Ezra is explicable as an exegetical development from the Son of Man of Daniel and the Son of Yahweh of the second psalm. That the apocalyptic writers busied themselves with the earlier literature needs no demonstration. The figure of the Son of Man when once interpreted of an individual was sure to attract devout speculation. The ideal pre-existence of many things became about this time a postulate of the scribes. The ideal existence of the mysterious deliverer and ruler easily objectified itself as a real existence under the wings of the divinity. In this case therefore as in the others we are not compelled to assume gentile influences to account for the exalted messianic expectation.

Our conclusion is that the messianic hope in its various forms is a product of Hebrew and Jewish religious faith. This faith rested upon the mercy and fidelity of Israel's God and on his election of a people in whom his glory should be manifested. In the struggle which this faith went through to maintain itself under heathen oppression the hope gradually developed until it reached the transcendental form which it assumes in the latest documents. Here and there, in minor details, it may have been influenced by mythological survivals, but these survivals had already passed into folklore and do not in any case affect the substance of the hope.

49 Schmidt, JBL, XIX, 22-27.

50 Clemen, Religionsgeschichtliche Erklärung des Neuen Testamentes, 117, 122.

THE PRAGMATIC ELEMENT IN THE TEACHING OF

PAUL

PROFESSOR DOUGLAS C. MACINTOSH, PH.D.

Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Conn.

Was Paul a traditionalist, a rationalist, a mystic, or a pragmatist? Or, if he was not any one of these to the exclusion of the others to what extent did he, in the construction of his ethical and theological doctrines, depend upon tradition, speculation, mystical or quasimystical experiences, and the test of practice, respectively? The present purpose is to discuss this question, with special reference to the last-mentioned element, viz., the pragmatic.

With all his anti-traditionalism, Paul owed an immense debt to tradition. From the Old Testament and Pharisaic Judaism he had derived his monotheism, predestinationism and ethical pessimism, his angelology and demonology, and his apocalyptic eschatology and messianism, none of which, perhaps, as general features of his system did he ever at any time seriously question. That he was influenced much more than he realized by the fundamental ideas of the Greek mystery-religion and by the Logos-philosophy and ethics of the Stoics, as well as by other contemporary non-Jewish and nonChristian traditions, can scarcely longer be disputed. And especially it must not be forgotten that, with all his independence, the apostle to the Gentiles was so dependent upon the primitive Christian community that, apart from its proclamation of the crucified Jesus as the risen and glorified Messiah, his conversion to Christianity is historically inconceivable. And indeed we find in Paul much more than a mere tacit acceptance of traditional elements. In the course of his polemical arguments he makes constant appeal to the Old Testament, quoting it, after the manner of the rabbis, as a verbally inspired external authority.

Bacon, The Story of Paul, 310-20; A. Meyer, Jesus or Paul? 42; J. Weiss, Paul and Jesus, 129.

2 Cf. Meyer, op. cit., 57.

But this is not to prove that Paul was a traditionalist. Indeed, in formulating his new-found Christian convictions he was much more independent than dependent. It was with clear consciousness of his break with the past that he remembered how "exceedingly jealous" he had formerly been for the traditions of his fathers (Gal. 1:14). He now made use of "the oracles of God," not so much to arrive at new conclusions as to prove his conclusions to others, and it is at most an exaggeration of the fact when Wrede says:3 "He generally extracts from Scripture that which he himself has read into it. . . . thus escaping the yoke of the letter without derogating from its sanctity" (cf. Gal. 3:16; 4:24-31; I Cor. 9:9, 10; II Cor. 8:15; Rom. 1:17; 11:9, 10). His real independence is especially manifest in his attitude toward "the law." Not only did he know himself as emancipated from its externalism; he was determined that the Gentile converts should not be entangled in the yoke of its bondage. Christ was the end of the law for righteousness to the believer. Moreover, in the matter of observing the statutes of the law, each individual Christian was to be "fully persuaded in his own mind” (Gal. 5:1; Rom. 8:4; 14:5; cf. Col. 2:4-20). More striking still is the apostle's strenuous insistence, in his letter to the Galatians (chaps. 1, 2) that he is not repeating in a traditional fashion any gospel in which he had been instructed by the first Christians, or by any man. And above all, his dependence upon the external authority of the historical Jesus himself is so slight as to constitute one of the most striking problems of New Testament study. His claim to be guided by the mind of Christ (I Cor. 2:16) is not a reference to traditional authority; he professes to know nothing of Christ "according to the flesh" (II Cor. 5:16). It is true that Paul seems not always at least to have taken special precautions to prevent Paulinism coming to be held in a merely traditional fashion; he praised the Corinthians for holding fast the traditions even as he had delivered the same to them (I Cor. 11:2), and the most striking feature of the "pastoral" epistles is the evidence which they present that a hard-and-fast Paulinistic traditionalism soon came to be established, in which the "form of sound words" received from the great apostle was regarded as of primary importance. (II Tim. 1:13). Still, so far as Paul himself was con3 Paul, 78-79.

cerned, this later development was the result of an oversight, rather than something either foreseen or intended.

If then Paul is to be thought of as being in the main an independent thinker within the realm of Christian doctrine, can this independence be attributed to a somewhat rationalistic interest in philosophical speculation? There is, it is true, a certain speculative element in the apostle's teaching. At least he was no stranger to the common human interest in consistency, rationality. His extended exposition of the parallelism and contrast between Adam and Christ, law and grace, sin and righteousness, death and life (Rom. 5:12-21), is but one of the many examples of his intricate analogical reasonings (cf. Rom. 7:1-6). He is conscious of using natural reason as a guide, and urges others to do the same (I Cor. 11:13, 14; II Cor. 5:14; cf. Acts 17:25, 29). He could, upon occasion, carry out the logical implications of his premises to the bitter end (Rom. 9:14–24). And it is not in method only, but even more in the content of his teaching, that Paul betrays the philosophical interest. He had his own world-view and philosophy of history-showing the influence of Hellenic culture, indeed, but his own, nevertheless (I Cor. 15:28; Col. 1:15-26; Eph. 1:10, 21-23; cf. Acts 17:28). And, in particu lar, in his remarkable christocentric cosmology with its incipient Logos-Christology, we have what Wernle chooses to call the first great Christian interpretation of the universe, a theology for mature Christians, a Christian gnosis resting in considerable part upon a speculative basis. 4

But it would be even more misleading to classify Paul as a rationalist than as a traditionalist. Against cases of speculation at variance with tradition can be matched instances in which tradition sets definite limits beyond which speculation must not venture (Col. 2:6-8), and the Old Testament as a source of religious knowledge is regarded as vastly superior to natural reason (Rom. 3:1). Indeed, human wisdom is, in the sphere of religion, essentially untrustworthy (I Cor. 1:17—2:5; 3:18-20), and there is danger in philosophy (Col. 2:8). "It may even be safely maintained that St. Paul scarcely ever speculated in the interests of pure knowledge and abstract truth."s

4 Beginnings of Christianity, I, 227, 333; cf. J. Weiss, Paul and Jesus, 68, 77. s Wernle, op. cit., I, 321.