Jesus and Paul Author:Benjamin Wisner Bacon Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE V THE HEAVENLY INTEBCESSOR AS SEEN ANT INTEEr PBETED BY PAUL 1. Jesus as the Servant When as critical historians we take our departure from the... more » Pauline Epistles as earliest and most authentic witnesses for the origins of our religion, we discover first of all that the two ordinances of the communion . and baptism are the true Urevangelium, and that Paul'a— I Christianity is an interpretation of these. His own religious experience was indeed to his mind a miraculous intervention of God, removing the veil from his eyes so that he, like others who had experienced it before him, could see Jesus in his actual condition of glory in Heaven. But even this was not to Paul primary in any other sense than that it gave him a direct authority for his gospel and apostleship, beyond all human teaching. It did not give him a new gospel of his own to preach, hitherto unheard-of, but the same gospel which till now he had been persecuting. What he had experienced had been wrought by God in Peter before him. What he taught now was the doctrine of " gra ce " which as champion of " the law " he had persecuted before. When he refers to it in passages limited to the basic common ground, such as his rebuke of Peter at Antioch, or his declaration to the Corinthians of agreement with all the other witnesses in the common resurrection gospel, he leaves no question of its nature. " We believed on Christ Jesus that we might be forgiven our sins by faith in Christ," the faith ymbolized by baptism into his name, the faith that he tad " died for our sins according to the scriptures," nd that he had been " raised again for our justifica- ion " as the Intercessor and Reconciler of sinners to Jod; for so it had also been written of the martyred Servant, that " He maketh intercession for transgr...« less