Colossians on their side necessarily postulate the authenticity of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The critics thus mutually undermine each other's foundations, and render their entire labours extremely suspicious. According to Mayerhoff the Epistle to the Colossians is to be considered an abstract of the Epistle to the Ephesians, composed in perhaps the second century, and with which the polemical part is interwoven by the author in order to combat with apostolic authority heretics that were hateful to him. This representation certainly furnishes a not altogether inconceivable motive for the transformation of an apostolical epistle; whereas the opposite assertion, that the Epistle to the Ephesians is a detailed new-modelling of the Epistle to the Colossians, can allege no possible object for such an undertaking, because in that case the polemical element, which was certainly the usual motive for such forgeries under apostolical names, must have purposely and directly been eradicated from the Epistle to the Colossians. But such an assumption as Mayerhoff's could, in opposition to the unanimous testimony of the ancient church from the earliest times, claim recognition only by adducing decisive and clear evidence that the Epistle to the Colossians was not Paul's, and that therefore the ancient tradition of the church must be rejected. We scarcely need mention that Mayerhoff has been able to point out nothing of the sort. In the first section of his work he is occupied with the relation of the Epistle to the Colossians to the rest of Paul's epistles in respect of language. The style of the Epistle to the Colossians has hitherto been viewed by the sharpest-sighted critics as bearing, beyond a question, the impress of Paul's manner. Mayerhoff is of another opinion. But the way in which he seeks to shew the difference in style between this epistle and the genuine epistles of Paul, proves that he proceeded in this inquiry on totally untenable principles. In p. 12 he thinks it worthy of consideration that the words ἀποκαλύπτω, ἀποκάλυψις, ὑπακούω, ὑπακοή, ἄρα, διό, διότι, ἔτι, οὐκέτι, μηκέτι, are not found in the Epistle to the Colossians; that yáp occurs but six times in it, whereas it occurs seventeen times in the Epistle to the Philippians, twenty-four times in the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, forty times in that to the Galatians, one hundred and seventy times in that to the Corinthians, one hundred and fifty times in that to the Romans. He who can take account of such pure accidents, and that so seriously that he counts how often yáp occurs in each epistle, pronounces on himself the sentence of incapacity for giving his vote on the affinity or difference of style. In an epistle of but few chapters then only can anything be inferred from anas λeyóueva and similar deviations, when they are found in those modes of expression for which the author is acknowledged to have coined standing formulas, and even then they have demonstrative force only when they can be ad

duced in connexion with other decisive arguments. Such Mayerhoff, in the second section of his essay (p. 42, seq.), thinks are found in the anomalous modes of thought and representation which are supposed to distinguish the Epistle to the Colossians from the genuine epistles of Paul. He begins here with the remark that the style in the Epistle to the Colossians entirely wants the life, freshness, and force which distinguish the genuine epistles of Paul. "In the latter," says Mayerhoff, "Paul pursues a strict logical order in the dogmatical part, but, tired with the conflict between the crowd of ideas and the spirit of systematizing" (!), he then allows himself to be carried away in the hortatory part of the epistles, so that in it everything is mixed together. In the Epistle to the Colossians, on the other hand, it would seem to be just the contrary; the hortatory part is quite logically arranged, but the doctrinal exhibits a confused intermixture. We can oppose nothing more cogent to this remark than in the following Commentary on this epistle to prove the close connexion of the dogmatical part also, just as we, in respect to the hortatory parts of the other epistles, have already sufficiently shewn, or shall in those yet to be explained, by pointing out the excellent method which pervades them, the complete untenableness of Mayerhoff's assertion. While in early times the church of Christ particularly admired the Epistle to the Colossians on account of the richness of its profound and condensed ideas, Mayerhoff discovers poverty of ideas in it (p. 46), and then finds too (p. 59, seq.), “although the doctrine of the epistle is essentially Paul's, in individual points more or less deviation from the doctrine of his genuine epistles." On this point too we abstain from all further remarks here, as the exposition itself will give us sufficient opportunity to shew the complete identity of the doctrine of this epistle with Paul's general system of doctrine.

To this is subjoined in the third section of Mayerhoff's essay the comparison of the two epistles, to the Colossians and to the Ephesians, which, as has been already remarked, results in favour of the Epistle to the Ephesians, in direct opposition to the inquiries of De Wette and other critics. To every unprepossessed person the impossibility of proving the one or the other of these epistles to have been copied from a genuine one of Paul's will by these contradictions have been made clear enough, and the authenticity of both has thus only been confirmed anew. A refutation of this section would be possible only by a special following up of the comparison of the two epistles instituted by Mayerhoff, which obviously cannot be un

*Erasmus, the great connaisseur of antiquity, judged differently; tonat fulgurat, meras flammas loquitur Paulus, says he of this epistle. Böhmer likewise finds, in his " Isagoge in Epist. ad Coloss.," the style in the Epistle to the Colossians viva, pressa, solida, nervis plena, mascula (1. c. page 160).

dertaken here. But by whomsoever it may be instituted, it will never leave behind it a satisfactory impression in all points, since it is certainly true that, as we have already seen in the Introduction to the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, this epistle is at once closely allied to that, and more brief; and the assertion that this shorter epistle was made by an officious person by means of an unskilful abridgement of the longer one will ever be scarcely refutable in the eyes of those who see or choose to see poverty of intellect in abundance of intellect, and a want of connexion in the strictest order.

There remains, then, but the fourth and last section, in which Mayerhoff treats of the false doctrine in the Epistle to the Colossians. Here he seeks to shew that this false doctrine is that of Cerinthus, and, as that heretic did not live till after the apostle's time, therefore the Epistle to the Colossians cannot be by Paul. Now, that would certainly be a just conclusion if the premises were capable of proof; we should then have an historical point which we could oppose to the uninterrupted tradition ascribing the origin of this epistle to Paul. We should thus come out of the airy regions of socalled internal arguments (i. e., of merely subjective opinion) to the firm ground of history. But, as Mayerhoff himself confesses (p. 5) that Baur's attack on the authenticity of the pastoral epistles, on the ground that the doctrine of the Marcionites is combated in them, fails when the inadmissibility of that single assumption is pointed out, which, as Mayerhoff owns, has been already done by Baumgarten; so too will his arguments against Paul's authorship of the Epistle to the Colossians fail, on the single proof being brought that the false doctrine designated in it has no necessary connexion with Cerinthus' gnosis. That demonstration we attempt in what follows, after we have more accurately weighed the characteristics which the Epistle to the Colossians gives of the false doctrine spread among its first readers, as also the different hypotheses which have been advanced on the subject.

§ 2. OF THE FALSE DOCTRINE SPREAD IN COLOSSÆ.

The circumstance which caused the Apostle Paul to write to the Christians in Colossæ, who were not personally known to him, was the spread of serious errors in doctrine among them, as also in the neighbouring church in Laodicea (Col. iv. 16), to whom Paul had also written, and, it is extremely probable, with the same design of warning them, as he commands that both epistles, which might be complements of each other, should be read at both places. Paul had, no doubt, received information of those false doctrines through Epaphras, who, as has been already observed, was then with Paul, VOL. V.-11

and, as founder of the Colossian church, stood in the nearest relation to it. In Col. iv. 12 Paul remarks, in delivering salutations to the Colossians from Epaphras, that Epaphras is earnest in prayer for them, that they, grounded in God's will, may stand firm against all temptations. It does not appear from this epistle in what manner this false doctrine may have been spread in Colossæ. Paul does not say that persons from without had brought it thither, nor does he name any individuals who defended it; he does not even strictly separate the heterodox from the orthodox believers, but speaks to the whole body of the Colossian church, as if both the heretics and those that remained faithful were still in church-fellowship. This is especially shewn by Col. ii. 20 : εἰ ἀπεθάνετε σὺν Χριστῷ ἀπὸ τῶν στοιχείων τοῦ κόσμου, τί ὡς ζῶντες ἐν κόσμῳ δογματίζεσθε; We cannot here suppose that the false teachers merely are addressed, with an exclusion of the rest of the church; for such a separation of two elements is nowhere indicated. The exhortations go on without interruption, and always refer to the whole church. A later writer would certainly not have selected this form of representation; he would have made the heretics appear rigorously separated from the orthodox believers, and combated them as 'standing out of communion with the church. Paul writes here perfectly in accordance with the first beginnings of the Christian life. The first symptoms only of heretical doctrine shewed themselves in Colossæ. Paul hastened to suppress them in the bud and to bring back the misguided to the right way. He had no grounds for deducing those errors from an evil intention; he saw their origin in inexperience and weakness; therefore he does not directly apply severe measures, exclusion from communion with the church, and the like, but he proceeds forbearingly. He views and treats the misguided as still members of the church, and seeks to bring them back to the truth by a gentle exposure of their errors. The matter had assumed a totally different aspect some years later when Paul wrote his pastoral letters at the end of his life. Then the evil intention of the false teachers had been brought clearly to light, and Paul dared therefore no longer permit unseasonable gentleness to sway him. The diseased members were now obliged to be removed in order to keep the whole frame sound.

From this position of the Colossian false teachers towards the church it may now be already inferred that no elaborate system can be supposed in them. The enthusiastic element which existed in the character of the Phrygian people, and which had found vent for itself under heathenism in the fanatical worship of Cybele, produced similar phenomena on the reception of Christianity, as the Montanism which arose in Phrygia in the second century shews. The Phrygians had received Christianity as a religion endowed with mighty spiritual powers, but without entirely renouncing with true

self-denial their previous predilections; by which means there afterwards arose mixtures of truth and falsehood, such as meet our view in Paul's sketch of the errors there. Moreover, in this part of Asia Minor the oriental and occidental elements were blended; numerous Jews, with their different sects, were settled there ;* a propensity to speculations on the world of spirits was generally diffused, and that not only in the form of Greek philosophy, but also in that of the Oriental theosophy. Nothing was therefore more natural than that Christianity, entering that fermented mass, should be eagerly received by the excited populace, but also capriciously disfigured. Before we, however, look closer into the character of the Colossian false teachers, we must answer the preliminary question, "Are all the traits mentioned by Paul to be supposed united in the same persons, or are they men of totally different tendencies of mind, whom he combats ?" By far the most of the later critics suppose the former; Heinrichs alone insists that there were in Colossæ not merely false teachers of one class, but Judaists, Gnostics, and other heretics, side by side. We must allow that the representation in our epistle by no means justifies the confidence with which the moderns suppose but one sect in Colossæ. If our epistle were addressed to a numerous church, as was that of Rome, it would be even more natural to suppose that Paul wished to warn them against various erroneous opinions. For he nowhere says that the same persons teach all that he blames; since he, as we have seen, always writes to the church as such, not to individuals in it, it appears absolutely grounded in the nature of the case that he ranges the errors to be avoided side by side, without its thence following that the same persons entertain them. We might even fancy that at ii. 16, 17 two tendencies, the Judaizing and the Gnostic, are distinguished, as Paul, after the un ovv ris, begins anew, undeìç iμãç, к. T. λ, and intimates by that means that he makes a transition to something fresh. However, neither that passage, nor any other in the Epistle to the Colossians, decidedly disproves the assumption that all the traits mentioned by Paul were combined in the same persons; and if we consider that Colossæ was a small place, in which many opinions can scarcely have been propagated, and that the pastoral epistles introduce us to perfectly similar false teachers in Ephesus and Crete, in whom kindred heretical elements appear combined as in the Colossians, it certainly becomes probable that the same persons taught all that Paul reprehends; but we cannot go beyond the probability. If we, after this, consider the separate features of the portrait

* According to Josephus (Arch. xii. 3) Antiochus the Great had brought 2,000 Jewish families from Babylon and Mesopotamia to Phrygia, and made them settle there; he expected of them protection against the unruly native population.