Paul and His Interpreters: A Critical History (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Paul and His Interpreters: A Critical HistoryThe present work forms the continuation of my History of the Critical Study of the Life of Jesus, which appeared in 1906 under the title "Von Reimarus zu Wrede."Any one who deals with the teaching and the life and work of Jesus, and offers any kind of new reading of it, ought not to stop there, hut must he held under obligation to trace, from the stand-point at which he has arrived, the pathway leading to the history of dogma. Only in this way can it he clearly shown what his discovery is worth.The great and still undischarged task which confronts those engaged in the historical study of primitive Christianity is to explain how the teaching of Jesus developed into the early Greek theology, in the form in which it appears in the works of Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian and Irenaeus. How could the doctrinal system of Paul arise on the basis of the life and work of Jesus and the beliefs of the primitive community; and how did the early Greek theology arise out of Paulinism?Strauss and Renan recognised the obligation, and each endeavoured in a series of works to trace the path leading from Jesus to the history of dogma. Since their time no one who has dealt with the life of Jesus has attempted to follow this course.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.