1. THOSE who maintain the advanced classic culture of St. Paul, rely on the fact that he quotes from and alludes to Greek and Roman writers.
Three quotations are incessantly adduced. One is the hexameter written by the Cretan poet Epimenides in such stern and contemptuous depreciation of the character of his own countrymen—
Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, κακὰ θηρία, γαστέρες ἀργαί1.
(“Liars the Cretans aye, ill monsters, gluttonous idlers.”)
Another is the half–hexameter in which he reminds his audience, in the speech on the Areopagus, that certain also of their native poets had said—
Τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν.2
(“For we are also his offspring.”)
A third is the moral warning to the Corinthians—
Φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρηστὰ ὁμιλίαι κακά;3
(“Evil communications corrupt good manners;”) or it may, perhaps, be more correctly rendered, “Evil associations destroy excellent characters.”
Now, if we look a little closer at these quotations, we shall see how very little proof they furnish of anything more than the most superficial acquaintance with Greek writers. The first of them is just such a current national characterisation4 as might pass everywhere from mouth to mouth, and which St. Paul might very well repeat without having read a line of the poem of Epimenides on Oracles, or Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus, in both of which it occurs.5 The second is a recognised commonplace of heathen insight, to which many parallels might be quoted, but which is found in Cleanthes6 nearly in the form in which St. Paul quotes it. The actual quotation is from one of those tedious poems which were most in vogue at this period, the Phœnomena of Aratus.7 With the writings of this poet St. Paul may have become acquainted, both because they are entirely harmless—which is more than can be said of almost any other Pagan production which was popular at that time—and because Aratus was a Cilician, and very probably a Tarsian.8 The third was one of those common sententious pieces of morality which had passed into a proverb, and which in all probability Menander, in his Thais, had appropriated from some lost tragedy of Euripides. St. Paul is far more likely to have heard it used in common parlance, or to have seen it inscribed on one of the Hermæ at Tarsus or Athens, than to have read it in Menander, or even—as Socrates9 and Chrysostom seem to think—in one of the Greek tragedians. It is further remarkable about these quotations, first, that allthreeof them were so current, they are found in at least two poets each; and next, that two of them occur at the very beginning of HymnstoZeus. If any collection of Hymns to Zeus was to be found on any bookstall at Athens, it is exactly the kind of book into which St. Paul’s human sympathies may have induced him to dip in support of his liberal and enlightened view that God had revealed Himself even to the heathen, to a degree sufficient for their happiness and their salvation, had they chosen to make use of the light they had.10 A third very remarkable point is that in the quotation from Menander or Euripides, whichever it may have been, the great majority of the best MSS. read χρηστὰ, not χρήσθʼ11—a reading which may therefore be regarded as certainly genuine, since no one would have dreamt of altering the correct metre, if it had been given in the original manuscript. Now if such be the case, it seems to indicate that the ear of St. Paul was unfamiliar with—or, which comes to the same thing, was indifferent to—even so common a rhythm as that of the iambic verse. Our conclusion, therefore, is that St. Paul’s isolated quotations no more prove a study of Greek literature than the quotation of such a national epigram as
“Ingleseitalianato,Diavoloincarnato,”
or of such a line as
“Lasciateognisperanzavoich’entrate,”
would necessarily prove that an English writer was a proficient in the literature of Italy, or had read the poems of Dante. St. Paul was a man of remarkable receptivity, and, as we have seen, an habitual quoter. Except in Epistles intended for readers to whom Old Testament quotations would have been unintelligible, he can hardly write five sentences in succession without a Biblical reference. The utter absence of any similar use of even the noblest of the classic writers, is a proof either that he had intentionally neglected them, or that, at any rate, they had left little or no mark on an intellect so sensitive to every cognate influence. For that it was not only the Scriptures of the Jewish canon which thus clung to his retentive memory, is apparent from the free use which he makes of the Book of Wisdom, and perhaps of other books of the Jewish Apocrypha.12 It is also traceable in the extent to which he is constantly haunted by a word,13 and in the new and often rare expressions which are found in every one of the Epistles,14 and which show us a mind keenly susceptible to impressions derived from the circumstances around him, and from the intercourse of those among whom he was habitually thrown.
2. But though the Greek culture of Tarsus had little or no influence on the current of the Apostle’s thoughts, it would be a mistake to suppose that it produced no influence at all on his life or on his style. Besides the direct quotations, there is more than one isolated passage which may be the distant echo of classical reminiscences. Such, for instance, is the apologue of the self–asserting members in 1 Cor. 12., which reminds us at once of the ingenious fable of Menenius Agrippa;15 and the fearful metaphor of Rom. 7:24, which has less probably been held to refer to a true story of the family of Regulus.16 And it is far from improbable that it was in some “class of rhetoric” at Tarsus that the Apostle acquired the germs, at any rate, of that argumentative habit of mind, that gift of ready extempore utterance, and that fondness for chiasmus, paronomasia, paraleipsis, oxymoron, litotes, and other rhetorical figures, which characterise his style.17 It was there, too, that he may have learnt that ready versatility, that social courtesy, that large comprehensiveness, that wide experience and capacity for dealing with varied interests and intricate matters of business, which made him, in the high and good sense of the word, a true gentleman, a Christian man of the world. He was, in heart and feeling, an ideal specimen of what the Greeks called the καλὸς κὰγαθος—“fair and good”—and his intercourse with polished Greeks may have tended to brighten that spirit of “entirely genuine Attic urbanity”18—a spirit more flexible and more charming than natural Semitic dignity—which breathes in every line of the Epistle to Philemon.
3. It is a remarkable proof of this natural liberality that, in spite of the burning hatred of idolatry which we have already noticed, he is yet capable of looking with sympathy, and even admiration, on some of those nobler and more innocent aspects of heathen life which his countrymen indiscriminately condemned.19 The hallowing of heathen symbols, the use of metaphors derived from heathen life for the illustration of Christian truths and Christian duties, is a very remarkable feature of the style of St. Paul. There were few of the crimes of Herod which the strict Pharisees had regarded with more undisguised horror and hatred than his construction of a theatre at Cæsarea; yet St. Paul quite freely, and without misgiving, adopting a metaphor which would have caused a shudder to any Palestinian Pharisee, compares the transient fashion of the world to the passing scene of a theatrical display, and in other places turns the whole Universe into a theatre, on the stage of which were displayed the sufferings of the Apostles as a spectacle to angels and to men.20 We recognise, too, the more liberal son of the Dispersion—the man whose thoughts have been enlarged by travel and by intercourse with men of other training and other race—in the apparently vivid sympathy with which St. Paul draws some of his favourite metaphors from the vigorous contests of the Grecian games.21 Those games constituted the brightest, the most innocently attractive feature of Hellenic life. During his long stay at Ephesus and at Corinth he had doubtless witnessed those wrestling bouts, those highly–skilled encounters of pugilism, those swift races to win the fading garlands of laurel or pine, which, for some of his heathen converts, and particularly for the younger among them, could not at once have lost their charm. We can well imagine how some young Ephesian or Corinthian might have pressed St. Paul to come with him and see the struggle and the race; and how, for one whose sympathies were so vividly human, there would have been a thrilling interest in the spectacle of those many myriads assembled in the vast stadium—in the straining eyes and eager countenances and beating hearts—in the breathless hush with which they listened to the proclamations of the herald—in the wild–eyed charioteers bending over their steeds, with the hair blown back from their glowing faces—in the resounding acclamations with which they greeted the youthful victor as he stepped forward with a blush to receive his prize. Would these fair youths do so much, and suffer so much, to win a poor withering chaplet of pine and parsley, whose greenness had faded before the sun had set, and would they use no effort, make no struggle, to win a crown of amaranth, a crown of righteousness which could not fade away? And that, too, when here the victory of one was the shame and disappointment of all the rest, while, in that other contest, each and all might equally be victors, and the victory of each be a fresh glory to all who were striving for the same high prize?22 And as such thoughts passed through his mind there was no Judaic narrowness, but a genial sympathy in his soul, and a readiness to admire whatever was innocent and beautiful in human customs, when he wrote to his converts of Corinth—“Know ye not that they which run in a stadium run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run that ye may grasp.23 Now every one that striveth is temperate in all things; they, however, that they may receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. I, then, so run, not as uncertainly; so box I, as one who beateth not the air; but I bruise my body with blows and enslave it, lest perchance, after making proclamation to others, I myself should prove to be a rejected combatant.”24
4. But it was not only with Greek customs that St. Paul became familiar during his residence at Tarsus. It is clear that he must also have possessed some knowledge of Roman law. His thoughts often have a juridical form. He speaks of the “earnest–money” of the Spirit; of the laws of inheritance; of legal minority; of the rights of wives and daughters.25 The privileges and the prestigeconferred upon him by his rights of Civitaswould have inevitably turned his thoughts in this direction. The Laws of the Twelve Tables had defined the authority which might be exercised by fathers over sons even after they have come of age (patria potestas) in a manner which Gaius tells us was peculiar to Roman jurisprudence, with the single exception that it also existed among the Galatœ. If this means the Galatians it would give peculiar significance to the illustration in Gal. 4:1, which in any case proves St. Paul’s familiarity with Roman institutions which had no existence among the Jews. So, too, we are told by Sir H. Maine that “a true power of testation” was nowhere provided for in the Jewish Code of Laws, and that the Romans “invented the will.” Yet to the rules of testamentary bequests, and their irrevocability in certain cases, St. Paul seems to make an express allusion (Gal. 3:15). Again, he gives prominence to the Roman idea of artificial “adoption,” even to the extent of making an apparent reference to the fact that a son, fully adopted, abandoned the domestic rites (sacra) of his own family, and attached himself to those of his new parent (Gal. 4:5; Eph. 1:5).26
5. We may select one more passage—though in this case it involves no admiration or sympathy—to show how accurately the customs of the Pagan life had been observed by St. Paul in that varied experience which made him, in the best sense, a citizen of the world. It is a passage which, from the absence of this knowledge, has often been entirely misunderstood. It occurs in 2 Cor. 2:14–16: “Now thanks be to God, who always leadeth us everywhere in triumph27 in Christ, and who by us maketh manifest the odour of the knowledge of Him in every place. For we are to God a sweet odour of Christ among those who are being saved, and among those who are perishing. To the latter we are an odour of death to death, to the former an odour of life to life.”
Here, though the details of the metaphor are intricately involved the general conception which was in the thoughts of the Apostle, and swayed his expression, is derived from the customs of a Roman triumph. It was one main feature of such “insulting vanities” that the chief captives were paraded before the victor’s path, and sweet odours were burnt in the streets while his car climbed the Capitol.28 But when he reached the foot of the Capitoline hill there was a fatal halt, which, in the utter deadness of all sense of pity, might be a moment of fresh exultation to the conqueror, but which was death to the captive; for at that spot the captives ceased to form any part of the procession, but were led aside into the rocky vaults of the Tullianum, and strangled by the executioner in those black and fetid depths. And thus the sweet odours, which to the victor—a Marius or a Julius Cæsar—and to the spectators were a symbol of glory and success and happiness, were to the wretched victims—a Jugurtha or a Vercingetorix—an odour of death. Reminded of this by his use of the words “leadeth us in triumph,” St. Paul for an instant fancies himself a captive before the chariot of God—a captive in connexion with Christ; and then another passing fancy strikes him. The preachers of Christ are like that burning incense whose perfume filled the triumphant streets,29 but they were not an odour of life and hope to all. As light is light yet pains the diseased eye, as honey is honey yet palls on the sated taste,30 so the odour retained its natural fragrance, although to many—through their own sins and wilfulness—it might only breathe of death. The tidings of salvation were glad tidings, but to the guiltily hardened and the wilfully impenitent they might prove to be tidings of wrath and doom.31
Little, perhaps, did it occur to St. Paul as he wrote those words, that the triumph of God, in which he was being led along from place to place as a willing victim, might end for him also in the vaults of that very Tullianum32—the description of which must have been mingled in his thoughts with the other details of the Roman pomp—and that if not from the Mamertine, yet from some other Roman prison he would only be dragged forth to die.