Schweitzer didn’t think so, but he did think that Paul prepared the ground for Hellenization. According to the summary found in Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright’s history of New Testament interpretation, Schweitzer identified the primary historical problem of Paul studies, namely to explain the transition from Jesus to Paul and from Paul to later Greek theology:

“The great and still undischarged task which confronts those engaged in historical study of primitive Christianity is to explain how the teaching of Jesus developed into the early Greek theology, in the form in which it appears in the works of Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian, and Irenaeus. How could the doctrinal system of Paul arise on the basis of the life and work of Jesus and the beliefs of the primitive community, and how did the early Greek theology arise out of Paulinism?”

Schweitzer’s own explanation focused on Pauline eschatology.

According to Schweitzer, Paul’s theology is an “eschatological mysticism,” arising from the frustrated expectation that Jesus would usher in the end of the world and the beginning of the kingdom. By mysticism, he means the confidence that one is “In Christ,” and therefore “raised above this sensuous, sinful, and transient world” in order to inhabit already a “transcendent” world. Through Christ, the future is experienced in the present, the eternal within the temporal.

For Schweitzer, Paul’s letters are confusing because he is employing two incompatible systems at the same time. The fundamental system is the eschatological mysticism, with its focus on union with Christ; the “subsidiary crater, which has formed within the rim of the main crater” is the doctrine of righteousness through faith.

This explains how Paul’s theology could produce the Hellenism of the following generations. Paul is not a Hellenizer, but his mysticism is ripe for it, and “his successors had little alternative to d what they did,” since they “found a non-Hellenistic doctrine . . . which was ripe for Hellenization” and went about Hellenizing it.