"THE MIND OF PAUL."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 253, 24 October 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

"THE MIND OF PAUL."

MODERNISTS' WRITINGS. (By S.) A book has recently been published by Jonathan Cape which will appeal to lay readers who are interested in the subject, but one which is more suitable for ministers and advanced students of divinitiy. It is called "The Mind of Paul," and is the work of Irwin Edman. It is the substance of a series of lectures that were delivered by Professor Edman in the spring of 1933 under the auspices of the department of religion of Columbia University. Frankly modernist, it gives a survey of what modernist thinkers have written about Paul with the object of conveying to the reader a clear idea of his mind and personality. Philosophical rather than theological, it makes no pretensions to originality or scholarship or to what the professor calls "theological enthusiasms." It is really a study in religious interpretation in the light of what such thinkers as Loisy and Deissmann have written, and to Loisy in particular the professor seems to be indebted for the views he expresses. In five chapters he discusses Paul and his interpreters (meaning by his interpreters these writers and others of their school), Paul and Judaism, Jesus and Paul, Paul and the mystery religions, and the mystical Christianity of Paul. Loisy, however, was too suspicious of everything savouring of the supernatural to be counted an authority on Paul, and Deissmann was by no means very profound in his thinking. It is a pity Mr. Edman did not go further afield in his researches and give us the benefit of what competent men have said who were not "lost in philological minutiae" or merely interested in "making theological points." He is of opinion that Paul changed the Christianity of Jesrts —so changed it, indeed, as to have made himself its real founder. He has no doubt about it. But there is another school of writers, to whom he makes practically no refer- - ence, who are of opinion that Jesus could not well have set forth the Gospel in the same perspective as a devoted disciple could do, and that it wa« Paul, of all His followers, who best .understood and reproduced His thought. And that is the view of most Christian people. He makes a good deal ; and it is very interesting, of the mystery religions, and Paul's supposed indebtedness to them. As I read the chapter I wondered what Principal Benney would have said had he been alive to read it. In one of his letters to Sir William Robertson Nicoll he caustically remarked that there was no subject on which more "confident nonsense" had ever been written. All through, the professor thinks and writes of Paul the "natural" man. There is little or no suggestion that he was in anl degree spiritually enlightened, still less inspired. Put otherwise, the professor has no thought of any continuity between Jesus and Christianity. His exegesis in connection with one passage in the Gospels is rather strange. Jesus, he says, "could counsel the rendering to Caesar that which was Caesar's; because He did not doubt that Caesar's power would not last very long." Does he really think that that was why gave the counsel ? One wonders, too, what exactly the words "the innocence .and simplicity of Jesus' teaching" connote. The book, though its arguments are not as convincing as Professor Edman appears to think, is well and concisely written, and makes interesting ad suggestive reading. There is a bibliography at the end, and an index.