William R. Farmer's history of the debate on the Synoptic Problem contains the following footnote:

Baur answered Hilgenfeld in his Das Markuseaangeliwn, Tübingen, 1851, and the two carried on the debate for years in the Theologische Jahrbücher. This debate is worthy of thorough analysisand evaluation.

When I was invited to read a paper at this year's meeting at Tübingen with the understanding that the paper should deal if possible with some aspect of the work of the Tübingen school of the mid-nineteenth century, this seemed to be an appropriate occasion to take up Professor Farmer's challenge.

The well known passage about the “archives” and the “gospel” in Ignatius’ Letter to the Philadelphians (8.2) is one of the most intriguing glimpses given us of debate in the church early in the second century. Wide agreement about the meaning of the passage seems to have been reached, and the current view may be summarized more or less as follows: Ignatius recalls a conversation that picks up just after he had made a theological point during his visit to Philadelphia (he gives us no direct information on the subject of the discussion). His opponents had replied (according to most commentators) that if they did not find it in the “archives” (that is, the Old Testament), they did not believe it to be in the “gospel.” Ignatius had retorted that Scripture in fact supported him: “It is written” (γέγραπται). But his opponents had answered that his certainty was not well grounded: “That is just the question.” The passage concludes with a statement that may represent not so much what Ignatius said then as what he now regards as an appropriate way of ending such debates. The “archives” (he says) are Jesus Christ; or (as he rephrases it) the “inviolable archives” are Christ's cross, death, resurrection, and the faith that comes through him. If this is what the passage means, it represents a remarkable reliance on the “gospel” and the events of salvation as opposed to the formal authority of the (Old Testament) Scriptures.

No other passage of scripture recurs so frequently in allusion or quotation in the christological expressions of NT times as Ps. cx. I. In this expression we stand in continuity with christological thought from the very early beginnings of its development. The purpose of the following study is to investigate the use of Ps. cx. 1 in relationship to this development, and to examine the function and significance of its motifs at various points within the complex variety of NT christological traditions.

The Church drew no distinction between such utterances by Christian prophets (ascribed to the ascended Christ) and the sayings of Jesus in the tradition, for the reason that even the dominical sayings in the tradition were not the pronouncements of a past authority, but sayings of the risen Lord, who is always a contemporary for the Church.

Le titre donné à la présente étude s'explique ainsi: les trois textes que nous avons l'intention d'examiner (He ii. 3–4; Mc i.1 et Ac i. 1–2) ont ceci de commun qu'il y est question de ‘commencement’ sans qu'on perçoive avec netteté au premier abord ce qu'est ce commencement. La brève enquête que nous entreprenons permettra, croyons-nous, de le préciser. Nous préférons cependant adopter comme titre cette formule vague susceptible d'un sens très large: le commencement de l'économie chrétienne.

Abraham, born in Chaldaea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father's company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. … The same spirit which had carried Abraham away from his kin led him through his encounters with foreign peoples during the rest of his life; this was the spirit of self-maintenance in strict opposition to everything—the product of his thought raised to be the unity dominant over the nature which he regarded as infinite and hostile (for the only relationship possible between hostile entities is mastery of one by the other). With his herds Abraham wandered hither and thither over a boundless territory without bringing parts of it any nearer to him by cultivating and improving them. … The groves which often gave him coolness and shade he soon left again; in them he had theophanies, appearances of his perfect Object on High, but he did not tarry in them with the love which would have made them worthy of Divinity and participant in Him. He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike.

To understand the Apostle Paul's attitude to his own people, it is necessary to place it in the perspective of his interpretation of the Gospel as a whole. Two main approaches to this have been taken. There are those who see Paul's point of departure in his conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and in the transformation of the understanding of the messianic condition which this demanded. Others point out that in his epistles Paul seems to be most concerned, not with the messiahship of Jesus, but with the criticism of the Law, that Paul's call (misnamed a ‘conversion’) arose from a new insight into the meaning, function and weakness of the Law (and with this, the insight into the nature of the self), not from a new concept of messiahship. They claim that Judaism, always tolerant of diversity of belief even in messianic claimants, could absorb Paul's paradoxical doctrine of a crucified Messiah but could not overlook Paul's acceptance of Gentiles, sinners who did not observe the Law, as members of the people of God. This passed the limits of Jewish tolerance and brought down upon the Apostle the wrath of his own people. The two positions indicated are too polarized. The immediate cause of the Jewish opposition to Paul centred in the Law. But his understanding of the Law was inextricably bound up with the significance which he had come to ascribe to Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah and with the challenge that this issued to all the fundamental symbols of Jewish life. To isolate the criticism of the Law from the total messianic situation as Paul conceived it is both to exaggerate and to trivialize it. That criticism was a derivative of the place which Paul ascribed to Jesus as the Messiah.

The late seventeenth century in England is, theologically, a critical period, a time when old forms of thought and traditional methodologies were being challenged. Two theological events of the 1690s stand out as true signs of the changing times: the appearance of a number of collections of Socinian tracts, in which, in fact, the term “Unitarian” is first used in English literature. Also, in 1696, John Toland published his short but challenging Christianity Not Mysterious. In the following essay, I an interested in showing the methodological similarities and discontinuities between the Socinians and Toland, especially in regard to their scriptural interpretation and mutual insistence on the inadmissability of the concept of mystery to Christian theology.