Recall the Phaedo of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations.  In them the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself—­a yearning which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the Hellenic pessimism.  For, as Pfleiderer very well observes (Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage, 3.  Berlin, 1896), “no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people changed so completely their idea of the value of life.  The Hellenism which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed.”  Nirvana is an Hellenic idea.

Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery of death—­a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the entrance into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity.  The discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.

Such a discovery—­that of immortality—­prepared as it was by the Judaic and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian discovery.  And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus, the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee.  Paul had not personally known Jesus, and hence he discovered him as Christ.  “It may be said that the theology of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology.  For him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus,” says Weizsaecker (Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche.  Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).  He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus he could say, “Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ.  The important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died and had risen again, and not what he did in his life—­not his ethical work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality.  And he it was who wrote those immortal words:  “Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection from the dead?  But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain....  Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.  If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (I Cor. xv. 12-19).