# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S164
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

164 The Modern Theory of the Various Doctrinal Types of the New Testament.

— and the supposed opposition between the teaching of Christ and that of the
apostles was accordingly given special prominence, as being a distortion of
Christianity that had come about through the shaping influence of the age.

For primitive Christianity, or the teaching of Jesus, the sole source, on
this view, was held to be the three synoptic Gospels, and in particular the
discourses handed down in them, whereas the teaching of the apostles was
held to be contained in the Gospel of John and the remaining writings. The
principal difference, however, was found in the respective pictures of
Christ, as well as in the whole position which the person of the Redeemer
occupies in the one and in the other. In the Synoptics, it was said, He
appears merely as the promised Jewish Messiah — indeed in a spiritualized
form of the ordinary Jewish conceptions, but still in essential continuity
with the Old Testament picture of him, as the savior of the Jewish nation
from moral misery and political misfortune, as prophet, proclaiming not so
much a particular doctrine of religion as rather a pure doctrine of morals,
and finally as a martyr specially sustained by Providence for the interest
of his people and of mankind, but without the idea of a divine person
existing from eternity. Rather, the appearance of Jesus was, throughout,
purely human and therefore historical alone.

In the remaining writings of the New Testament, by contrast, it was said,
the person of the Redeemer steps into the foreground in place of the
teaching; he appears in a mysterious, pre-worldly connection with the
Father. The historical Messianic character of Jesus is transformed into
that of the metaphysical Son of God; what is set forth in these writings is
said to be not the teaching of Jesus himself, but a teaching about Jesus,
as the product of a particular interpretation of his teaching and its
mixture with foreign, Jewish-Gnostic elements. And precisely the teaching of
those apostles to which the church's doctrine of faith is accustomed
especially to trace itself back is said to stand in irresolvable
contradiction with the teaching of Christ. Only the picture of Christ and
his teaching preserved for us in the Synoptics, it was claimed, can be the
foundation of the Christian system of faith; the religion of the apostles
had already gone far beyond original Christianity and therefore belongs to
the history of dogma.

In the more detailed development of this theory, the various luminaries of
the church naturally diverged from one another on individual points. While
G. L. Bauer, the author of the "Hebrew Mythology of the Old and New
Testaments," presents the teaching of each New Testament writing
separately, others distinguished three doctrinal types within the New
Testament: the Palestinian or Jewish-Christian, the
Alexandrian-Johannine, and the Pauline — in which various phases,
however, apart from some modifications, the general basic view set forth
above is essentially always chewed over again.

As for the assessment of this theory, its appalling superficiality and
baseless arbitrariness — assertions truly extreme in their unscholarly
character — lie so plainly on the