The Origin of Paul's Religion

By John Gresham Machen

Whether desirable or not, the longing for redemption is a fundamental fact of history, and may be shown to have emerged independently at many points. The character of Paulinism as a redemptive religion, the Pauline doctrine of human depravity, is therefore insufficient to establish dependence of Paul upon the mystery religions of the Hellenistic age. Dependence could be established only by similarity in the form in which the doctrine of depravity appears. But as a matter of fact such similarity is strikingly absent. The Pauline use of the term "flesh" to denote that in which evil resides can apparently find no real parallel whatever in pagan usage. And the divergence appears not only in terminology but also in thought. At first sight there might seem to be a parallel between the Pauline doctrine of the flesh and the Greek doctrine of the evil of matter, which appears in the Orphic sects, then in Plato and in his successors. But the parallel breaks down upon closer examination. According to Plato, the body is evil because it is material; it is the prison-house of the soul. Nothing could really be more remote from the thought of Paul. According to Paul, the connection of soul and body is entirely normal, and the soul apart from the body is in a condition of nakedness. It is true, the body will be changed at the resurrection or at the coming of Christ; it will be made more adequate for the Kingdom of God. But at any rate, there is in Paul no doctrine of the inherent evil of matter.

The real starting-point of the Pauline doctrine of the flesh is to be found in the Old Testament, in the passages where "flesh" denotes human nature in its frailty. Certainly the Pauline teaching is far more highly developed than the teaching of the Old Testament. But the Old Testament provides the starting-point. The “flesh” in Paul, when it is used in its developed, ethical sense, does not mean the material nature of man; it includes rather all that man receives by ordinary generation. The contrast between “flesh” and “Spirit” therefore is not the contrast between matter and spirit; it is a contrast between human nature, of which sin has taken possession, and the Spirit of God.

Certainly, at any rate, whatever solution may be found for the intricate problem of the Pauline use of the term "flesh," the Pauline pessimism with regard to human nature is totally different from the dualistic pessimism of the Hellenistic age. It is different because it does not make evil reside in matter as such. But it is different also in a far more fundamental way. It is different in its ethical character.

The Hellenistic age was conscious of the need of salvation; and salvation, it was recognized, must come from outside of man. But this consciousness of need was not always, and not clearly, connected with questions of right and wrong. The Hellenistic age was conscious of inadequacy, of slavery to fate, of the futility of human life as it is actually lived upon the earth. Here and there, no doubt, there was also a recognition of existing moral evil, and a longing for a better life. But such longings were almost submerged amidst longings of a non-ethical kind. The mysteries were cherished for the most part not because they offered goodness but because they offered happiness.

In Paul, on the other hand, the consciousness of human inadequacy is essentially a consciousness of sin. And redemption is desired because it satisfies the hunger and thirst after righteousness. At this point the contrast with the Hellenistic mystery religions is profound. The religion of Paul is like the mystery religions in that it is a religion of redemption. But there the similarity ceases. There is certainly no such similarity in the conception of that from which men are to be redeemed as would raise any presumption of dependence in the presentation of the means of redemption. And it is dependence in the presentation of the means of redemption which alone would serve to explain the origin of the religion of Paul. It is unwarranted to argue that because Paul agrees with the mystery religions in a longing for redemption therefore he must have derived from the mystery religions his method of satisfying the longing-namely his conception of the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ. For even in the longing for redemption- to say nothing of the way of satisfying the longing—Paul was totally different from the mysteries. The longing which was aroused in the devotees of the mysteries was a longing for a happier immortality, a freedom from the pressure of fate; the longing which Paul sought to arouse in those for whom he labored was a longing for righteousness and for acceptance by the righteous God.

This difference is intimately connected with a highly significant fact—the presence in Paul of a "forensic" view of salvation. Salvation, according to Paul, is not only salvation from the power of sin; it is also salvation from the guilt of sin. Not only regeneration is needed, if a man is to be saved, but also justification. At this point, there is apparently in the mystery religions no parallel worthy of the name. At least there is none if Reitzenstein's attempt to exhibit a parallel is at all adequate; for Reitzenstein has succeeded only in setting in clearer light the enormous difference at this point between Paul and his pagan environment. The word "justify" appears, indeed, in the Hermetic corpus (xi11. 9), but as Reitzenstein himself observes, it means not "declare righteous" but "make righteous." A parallel with Paul can be set up, therefore, only if "justify" in Paul also means "make righteous." Reitzenstein actually finds such a meaning in Rom. vi. 7, and in Rom. viji. 30. But the expedient is desperate in the extreme. It will probably be unnecessary to review again the absolutely overwhelming evidence by which the word "justify" in the Pauline Epistles is shown to mean not "make righteous" but "declare righteous." Without the slightest question Paul did maintain a forensic view of salvation. The believer, according to Paul, is in himself guilty in the sight of God. But he is given a sentence of acquittal, he is "justified," because Christ has borne on the cross the curse of the Law which rightly rested upon those whom Christ died to save.

The presence of this forensic element in the teaching of Paul is universally or generally recognized; and it is usually admitted to be not Greek but Jewish. But there is a tendency among recent scholars to minimize its importance. According to Wrede, the forensic conception of salvation, the complex of ideas centering around justification apart from the works of the Law, was merely a weapon forged by Paul in the exigencies of controversy. Against the Judaizing contention for the continued validity of the Law Paul developed the doctrine that the penalty imposed by the Law upon sin was borne by Christ, so that for the believer the bondage of the Law is over. But, Wrede believes, this whole conception was of minor importance in Paul's own life; it was merely necessary in order that he might refute the Judaizers and so continue his free Gentile mission. A somewhat similar view is advocated by Bousset; Bousset believes, at least, that the forensic conception of salvation occupies a subordinate place in the thought and life of Paul. But there could be no greater mistake.

John Gresham Machen (1881-1937) was an American Presbyterian New Testament scholar, who led a revolt against modernist theology at Princeton, and founded Westminster Theological Seminary as well as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.