The
discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the
perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the
death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.
Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic
and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian
discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus,
the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus,
and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology
of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For
him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for
the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsaecker (_Das
apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).
He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus
he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and
unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for
the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The
important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died
and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical
work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality.
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