Thus, he took the liberty
of understanding certain passages in the Old Testament in a
different sense from that given them by the New Testament, and
declared St. Paul's allegorical use of the story of Sarah and
Hagar "too unsound to stand the test." He also emphatically denied
that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by St. Paul, and he did
this in the exercise of a critical judgment upon internal evidence.
His utterance as to the Epistle of St. James became famous. He
announced to the Church: "I do not esteem this an apostolic,
epistle; I will not have it in my Bible among the canonical books,"
and he summed up his opinion in his well-known allusion to it as
"an epistle of straw."
Emboldened by him, the gentle spirit of Melanchthon, while usually
taking the Bible very literally, at times revolted; but this was
not due to any want of loyalty to the old method of interpretation:
whenever the wildest and most absurd system of exegesis seemed
necessary to support any part of the reformed doctrine, Luther and
Melanchthon unflinchingly developed it.
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