ST. JOHN AND ST. PAUL

OF the three “seeming pillars,” John appears to have taken no part in the synod at Jerusalem, or if he did it was not sufficiently decisive to be recorded. He belonged, it is clear, at this time to the Church of the Circumcision, and, so far as we know, this was the only occasion on which he was thrown into the society of St. Paul. But we have St. Paul’s express testimony—in the only passage in which he is mentioned in the Epistles—that he recognised his apostolate; and the Apocalypse, his earliest writing, so far from showing that irreconcilable hatred to the doctrines of St. Paul which has been assumed on grounds inconceivably frivolous, and repeated subsequently with extraordinary recklessness, offers a close parallelism to St. Paul’s Epistles in thoughts and principles, which is all the more striking from the marked differences of tone and expression. We are calmly assured, without even the condescension of an attempted proof, that the “false Jew,” the “false Apostle,” the “false prophet,” the “Balaam,” the “Jezebel,” the “Nicolas,” the “chief of the synagogue of Satan,” alluded to in the Apocalypse,1 are as indubitably intended for St. Paul as are the savage allusions covertly made to him under the name of Simon the Magician in the Pseudo–Clementines. Now, on what basis is this conclusion founded? Simply on the resemblance in tone of a spurious Ebionite romance (the Clementines) to the phrases, “those which say they are Apostles and are not,” “those which say they are Jews and are not,” and the allusions to some who held the doctrine of Balaam, and of “that woman Jezebel,” who taught people “to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.” It is true that there were Judaisers who attacked St. Pauls claim to be an Apostle; but to assert that St. John was one of them is to give the direct lie to St. Paul, while to class St. Paul with them “that say they are Jews and are not” is to falsify the most notorious facts concerning one who was a Pharisee of Pharisees, and a Hebrew of the Hebrews. Again, to assert boldly that St. Paul ever taught people to eat things offered to idols, or anything which could be so described without the grossest calumny, is a distinct contradiction of his own words, since he expressly warned his converts not to do this, and assigns for his warning the very reason that to do so would be “to cast a stumbling–block before the children of Israel.”2 In fact, though St. Paul would have denied that to eat them was wronginitself, his concessions on this point went very little beyond those which are sanctioned in the Talmud itself.3 Once more, what conceivable excuse could there be for saying that St. Paul ever taught men “to commit fornication”?—a sin against which, whether literally or metaphorically understood, he has urged considerations more deeply seated, more likely to touch the heart, more likely to bind the conscience, than all the other writers in the New Testament put together. That even in earliest days there did spring up antinomian sects which were guilty of such accursed teaching, we know from Church history, and find traces even in the sacred writers; and it is therefore probable that the allusions of the Apocalypse are as literal as the Old Testament analogies to which St. John no less than St. Paul refers.4 That “the fornication” of the Apocalypse means “mixed marriages” there is not even a shadow of reason to believe, nor if it did would there be any ground for saying that St. Paul encouraged them. Though he used, on that as on all such topics, the language of wisdom and of charity, the whole tendency of his teaching is to discourage them.5 Moreover, if Paul had been aimed at, and if St. John, the Apostle of Love, really had been the slanderous and rabid Judaiser which these allusions would then imply, it is inconceivable that no word should be said about the points respecting which, to a Judaiser, he must have seemed infinitely more assailable—namely, St. Paul’s very low estimate of circumcision, and his declared conviction that by the works of the Law no man can be justified in God’s sight. Now, in the Apocalypse neither circumcision, nor the Law, nor Moses, nor oral tradition are once so much as mentioned or alluded to, while redemption by the blood of the Lamb, and the universality of that redemption as extending to “every kindred and tongue and people and nation,”6 are asserted as absolutely and unconditionally as they could have been by Paul himself. Further, it needs but a casual study of St. John and St. Paul to see that “Jesus Christ” is in both of them the divine secret and the fundamental conception of all Christianity. St. John at this time was the more contemplative, the less prominently active, St. John of the Gospels, “The hidden fires of his nature” had not yet “burst out into a flame.” Two incidents preserved for us in the Gospels had indeed shown that those fires were there;7 but it was not till James the Lord’s brother, and Peter, and Paul himself had passed away that he became the bold and uncompromising leader whose counsels were as oracles to the Asian Church. Nevertheless, we may be sure that St. John was not found among the opponents of St. Paul. That opposition is always connected with the adherents and the influence of James. During the lifetime of Jesus James had not fully accepted His mission, and seems only to have been converted by the Resurrection. He had not therefore lived, as the other Apostles had lived, in daily contact with the mind and influence of Jesus, and was in consequence more deeply imbued with the beliefs of his early Jewish training, and less entirely permeated in intellect by the breath of the new life. But Peter and John, more than any living men, must have known what was the mind of Christ. We know that they were one in heart, and we may be sure that they who had gone together to visit and confirm the detested Samaritans and witness their participation in the gifts of the Holy Ghost, would be little likely to look with rabid jealousy on the equal freedom of a yet wider extension of the Kingdom of God.