rous verses which can be compared with verses in St.
Paul's Epistles, particularly in Romans and Ephesians.[1] We must not
fail to notice in passing, that if this Epistle, which manifestly
belongs to the 1st century, does actually quote Ephesians, as some
affirm, the authenticity of Ephesians is thereby very strongly
corroborated. But in any case the similarity between the Epistle and
St. Paul's writings cannot be reasonably urged against its genuineness.
The once popular theory that St. Paul held a fundamentally different
conception of Christianity from that held by St. Peter has completely
broken down. There is not a shred of evidence for believing that the
semi-Christian Jews who lived in Palestine in the 2nd century
represented St. Peter's {239} type of Christianity, or that the
teaching of St. Peter excluded the deep teaching of St. Paul. He was
susceptible to external influences, and he may have caught the tone of
St. Paul while living in a community which St. Paul had so profoundly
influenced. This tone seems to mark 1 Peter.

But a further point must be mentioned in this connection. Modern
writers have too readily adopted the habit of labelling certain
expressions and doctrines as Pauline and assuming that St. Paul
_originated_ them. No doubt the apostle of the Gentiles possessed a
mind as original as it was fertile. But it is at least reasonable to
suppose that a common creed and a common training produced similar
habits of thought in many cultivated and eager minds. St. Paul himself
frequently writes as if his readers, even those who had not seen his
face, were quite familiar with a treasury of words and ideas which he
employs. We cannot legitimately argue that he was the first and only
coiner of such words and ideas. For instance, the phrase "in Christ,"
which we have quoted above, is often said to have been directly
borrowed from St. Paul. But the idea of abiding in Christ is implied
in Matt. and Mark, and expounded in John. It reaches back to the Old
Testament idea of abiding "in God" (Ps. lvi. 4; lxii. 7; Isa. xlv. 25).
It would be quite natural in any Christian who had adequately realized
the truth of the Incarnation. We can therefore repudiate without
hesitation the assertion that the writer is more affected "by the
teaching of Paul than of Jesus." The imagery employed by the writer is
of a distinctive character. It is almost entirely derived from the Old
Testament, and is narrower in its