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The Fundamentals Luke’s letters to Theophilus, which are popularly known as the Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles. With such clues to follow we are able to argue for the credibility of the other New Testament documents, and also for the ac curacy of the portrait painted of its central figure, the Lord Jesus Christ. Our first argument has to do with The Apologetic Value of the References, in Paul’s Epistles, to his Christian Experi ence. His theology is an outgrowth of his experience. His thinking is remarkably autobiographical. He resembles Luther in this respect as a religious teacher. His thinking is colored by tiie age in which he lives, and in such words as law, right eousness, justification, adoption, flesh, spirit, there is undying interest, if we remember the intense, tragic, moral struggle lying behind Paul’s theology. The passages in these four epistles, which exhibit most conspicuously the autobiographical character, occur in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians; and the seventh chapter of the Epistle ,to the Romans. From the former we learn that he belonged to a class which was thoroughly antagonistic to Jesus. His religion was Judaism. He was an enthusiastic in it. He says: “I advanced in the Jew’s religion beyond many of mine own age among my countrymen, being more exceed ingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” In other words he was a Pharisee of the most extreme type. His great aim in life was to become legally righteous, and thus all his prejudices, were most strongly opposed , to the new teaching. In the seventh chapter of Romans we learn that Paul in time made a great discovery. One of the command ments, the tenth, forbids rcoveting; and so he learned that a mere feeling, a state of the heart, is condemned as sin. In that hour his Pharisaism was doomed. “When the com mandment came sip revived and I died.” He discovered a world of sin within of which he had not dreamed, and legal
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