HKB
should be shown for the scrupulous when asked not as of right, but as of charity; (4) radicals, who recognized no limits to their freedom save the one new commandment.
But while conflict first broke out over the mere concrete question of Gentile liberty, the real distinction of Paul's gospel from that of the older apostles was far deeper. The question as Tübingen critics conceived it concerned primarily the extent of the gospel message,--to how large a circle was it offered? Modern criticism has come to see that the difference was in higher degree a difference of quality. Paul's whole message of redemption through the cross and resurrection started from other premises than those of the Galilean apostles, and was conceived in other terms. For this reason it leads over to a new Christology. In short, the transition of Christianity from its Jewish to its Gentile form is not a mere enlargement of its field by the abolition of particularistic barriers. The background we must study for the understanding of it is not so much mere contemporary history as the contemporary history of religion. The development from the Petrine gospel broadly characteristic of the Synoptic writings, through the Pauline Epistles to that of the Johannine writings, is a transition from Hebrew to Hellenistic conceptions of what redemption is, and how it is effected. Modern criticism expresses the contrast in its distinction of the gospel of Jesus from the gospel about Jesus.