(a) Philosophical preoccupation with the various types of cultural activities on an idealistic basis (Johann Gottfried Herder, G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gustav Droysen, Hermann Steinthal, Wilhelm Wundt); (b) legal studies (Aemilius Ludwig, Richter, Rudolf Sohm, Otto Gierke); (c)
philology and archeology, both stimulated by the romantic movement of the first decades of the nineteenth
century; (d) economic theory and history (Karl Marx, Lorenz von Stein, Heinrich von Treitschke, Wilhelm Roscher, Adolf Wagner, Gustav Schmoller, Ferdinand Tonnies); (e) ethnological research (Friedrich Ratzel, Adolf Bastian, Rudolf Steinmetz, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Hermann Steinthal, Richard Thurnwald, Alfred Vierkandt, P. Wilhelm Schmidt), on the one hand; and historical and systematical work in theology (church history, canonical law — Kirchenrecht), systematic theology (Schleiermacher, Richard Rothe), and philosophy of religion, on the other, prepared the way during the nineteenth
century for the following era to define the task of a sociology of religion and to organize the material gathered by these pursuits.7 The names of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart, and Georg Simmel — all students of the above - mentioned older scholars — stand out.
Those who do not believe that Paul can have written the Pastoral Epistles must remember (1) the difficulty of proving non-authenticity by statistics, (2) the genuine gaps in the knowledge we possess about early Christianity in the first
century, and (3) the warning possibly provided by a parallel case in classical
philology: