husk; and whether it exhaustively expresses his own thinking on a definite point of doctrine, or is perhaps only one of the ways in which he views it,—a view and an estimate of one side of the matter. And as to divination, without which there can be no such thing as history, because without a certain reading between the lines the sources, always scanty and fragmentary, never yield a living whole, where could it be more indispensable, used with all possible caution, than just here,here, where the object is to elicit a view of the world from the discourses of Jesus handed down to us in a concise selection, or from the fugitive writings of His disciples, consisting at most of but a few pages, and that view of the world in each case assuming an individual form. If beyond dispute Jesus gave His teaching with greater fulness than the reproduction of it in the Gospels, if the apostles have, from a much more many-sided world of ideas, used particular trains of thought to meet particular circumstances, the task of correspondingly reproducing the primitive Christian doctrine from the New Testament imperatively demands that we should not merely render the trains of thought that lie before us, but also that from bare hints, from what is unspoken but implied in the didactic utterance, we should guess at the world of thought of the biblical teachers.

Another characteristic feature of that treatment, which is more literary than historical, is the way in which Weiss' Manual sets up almost as many systems of doctrine as there are books in the New Testament, while justice is not done to the teaching of Jesus. The Pauline system is treated in four parts, according to the Thessalonian Epistles, the four great doctrinal and controversial Epistles, the Epistles of the captivity, and, finally, the Pastoral Epistles; while the teaching of Jesus is briefly discussed, not according to the four Gospels, but only according to a supposed oldest source (the Synoptists). That seems to me an excess and a deficiency. We expect from a New Testament theology, above all, an account of the teaching of Jesus, not merely so far as it is the presupposition of the apostolic systems, as Weiss regards it, but a presentation of the teaching of Jesus for its own sake. The teaching of Jesus is to us a main fact of New Testament theology, if not precisely the main fact, which, as

a matter of course, should be treated according to all the accounts of it that we have, not merely according to an account conjectured by the critic to be the oldest, not even according to the Synoptists merely, if we regard the Gospel of John as an apostolic report-as Dr. Weiss does. As to the Pauline system, on the other hand, we do not want a doctrinal abstract from the several types of the apostle's letters, but a survey as far as possible of the Pauline world of ideas, in their connection, their unity and many-sidedness, and therefore we must, here also, take collectively all the genuine documents we have. If we get the impression that the doctrinal thoughts of the apostle continued to develop in particular points, we must note that in its place, but we must not on that account build the Pauline system of doctrine three or four times. In that case we would have to extract it directly from each several Epistle, as there may be perceived certain differences between the Epistle to the Romans and that to the Galatians. But the distinction— and we make this remark not so much against Weiss' book as quite generally-must be kept within limits if the total impression of the subject is not to suffer and become distorted. While it is certainly right to keep separate, not only the teaching of Jesus and that of the apostles, but also the teaching of James, Peter, Paul, and John, and to consider each of them, not according to an abstract dogmatic scheme, but from his peculiar point of view, it is as certainly incumbent on us to throw into bold relief the great amount of unison in all these different doctrinal utterances. Such a unison exists, and in a larger measure than our onesided modern method of hunting after formal differences is willing to admit. The men of the New Testament were conscious of proclaiming a uniform gospel, though in different tongues, and it is the duty of New Testament theology to give a presentation of this unity in its diversity.

Weiss has undoubtedly adopted his peculiar method in view of the present condition of questions concerning New Testament Introduction. He has very adroitly taken all the views of modern criticism into account in his arrangements. While he contests the whole of these critical judgments, even in the case of the Pastoral Epistles and the Second Epistle of

Peter, yet he himself gives countenance to doubts about the Gospel of John by excluding it from the sources of our knowledge of the teaching of Jesus, and likewise to attacks on the Pauline Epistles of the captivity, by separating them from the great doctrinal and controversial Epistles. And who could deny that the present state of criticism of the New Testament writings furnishes peculiar difficulties for biblical theology, and that this theology must take fitting account of that condition of the question of sources? Yet I am of opinion that the historian has not to be guided by foreign judgments about his sources, at least not by those which he regards as decidedly false, but that he must lay at the basis of his structure his own well-considered opinion on the matter. If I regarded the Pastoral Epistles as nonPauline, or the Second Epistle of Peter as spurious, I should then make no use of them in my presentation of Pauline or Petrine systems of doctrine, but would have to take notice of them in those passages of my history of doctrine where I fancied them to have arisen, and would therewith prove the correctness of my view of history. And if I regarded the Gospel of John as a genuine record of the teaching of Jesus, I would have to make use of it for the knowledge of this teaching, and not merely turn it to account as an expression of its author's ideas. Not that we are, on that account, to take no notice of the important distinction between the synoptic and Johannine account of the teaching of Jesus. I may regard the Gospel of John as decidedly apostolic, and yet recognise that his reports of speeches have passed through a strong medium of subjective reconstruction. I will therefore give a separate account of the teaching of Jesus according to the Synoptists and John, and so leave the biblico-theological records to be settled by the yet undecided controversy about the Gospel of John. In the same way, I may consider it possible that the Apocalypse and the Gospel of John belong to the same author, and yet guard against treating the doctrinal contents of both as material of the same Johannine system of doctrine. The critical question is too largely an open one, and, on the other hand, the circle of ideas in the two writings is too diverse to warrant us in treating as a harmonious world of ideas that which, at anyrate, could only

belong to very different stages of development of the same author.

This already decides certain main questions regarding the systematic arrangement of our material. We will not only distinguish the teaching of Jesus from that of His apostles, but also the teaching of Jesus according to the Synoptists and according to John, and not only keep apart a primitive apostolic, a Pauline and Johannine system of doctrine, but also treat quite separately the doctrinal system of the Apocalypse and also of James, First Peter, and the Epistles to the Hebrews. We may be in doubt as to the order of succession of the doctrinal systems of the Epistles, especially if we regard them, as a whole, as productions of the same first century. A purely chronological succession cannot be exhibited, as we are anything but certain as to the earlier or later origin of some of the Scripture writings. The comparatively late composition of one of these writings would not, however, prove that the mode of thought underlying it could not have been matured just as early or earlier than that of a younger contemporary who happened to write before. A succession according to the lower or higher degree of doctrinal development seems therefore to be the preferable one. The moving principle of the development of early Christian doctrine is the need of an understanding with Judaism. This characteristic would give us a rising gradation of ever more richly developed modes of teaching. Paul, the strictest arbiter between Judaism and Christianity, and at the same time the most doctrinal of the New Testament writers, would then necessarily close the series, and even the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Johannine system, and, still more, James and Peter, would have their place before him. And this succession, opposed as it would be to the modern critical tendency, would, in point of fact, have the advantage of truly setting forth, in comparison with Paul, the inner affinity between the mode of thought of the primitive apostles on the one hand, and the Epistle to the Hebrews and Johannine writings on the other: an affinity notwithstanding great differences really exists, though as a rule it is not recognised. Nevertheless, that point of view of an understanding with Judaism does not yet give a satisfactory principle of division, as the need for it, in the case of

the Christians, falls into the background after the destruction of Jerusalem: even decidedly post-Pauline systems of doctrine, and in comparison with Paul, of a less developed character, may be unaffected by this need. And thus a certain accommodation between the chronological arrangement, and that according to tenor seems to be necessary. It is best to place the great Pauline system of doctrine in the middle of the apostolic age, to which at anyrate it belongs in time, and to let it be preceded by a primitive apostolic stage, and followed by one more developed. We shall hardly be contradicted if we construct the latter group from the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apocalypse, and other Johannine remains; but there will not be the same readiness to allow us to place the discourses of the earlier part of the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of James, and First Peter before Paulinism. We might, in fact, hesitate about the position of the First Epistle of Peter, not so much on account of the prevalent attacks on its genuineness, as because, even on the assumption of its genuineness, it is probably of post-Pauline date, and not unaffected by Paul in its mode of teaching. However, this mode of teaching still seems predominantly pre-Pauline, related to that of James no less than that of Paul. It stands to the Petrine speeches of the Acts of the Apostles in a relation of the simplest development of their mode of thought, so that the reasons preponderate for placing it-just where the historical Peter stoodmidway between James and Paul. There still remains in this arrangement of New Testament doctrinal systems a residue which yields no coherent presentation of Christianity, but only elements of such a presentation: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so far as they are not mere narrators, but disclose some views of their own, the Epistle of Jude, the Second Epistle of Peter, and the Pastoral Epistles. We shall gather up in a closing group the doctrinal elements which appear in these writings as fragmentary witnesses of a common Christian view, partly of the apostolic and partly of the immediately post-apostolic period; a supplement to the great original doctrinal formation of the apostolic circle, and the natural transition to the doctrinal development of the old Catholic period.