Σκεῦος ἐκλογῆς μοι ἐστὶν οὗτος.—ACTS 9:15
OF the twelve men whom Jesus chose to be His companions and heralds during the brief years of His earthly ministry, two alone can be said to have stamped upon the infant Church the impress of their own individuality. These two were John and Simon. Our Lord Himself, by the titles which He gave them, indicated the distinctions of their character, and the pre–eminence of their gifts. John was called a Son of Thunder; Simon was to be known to all ages as Kephas, or Peter, the Apostle of the Foundation stone.1 To Peter was granted the honour of authoritatively admitting the first uncircumcised Gentile, on equal terms, into the brotherhood of Christ, and he has ever been regarded as the main pillar of the early Church.2 John, on the other hand, is the Apostle of Love, the favourite Apostle of the Mystic, the chosen Evangelist of those whose inward adoration rises above the level of outward forms. Peter as the first to recognise the Eternal Christ, John as the chosen friend of the living Jesus, are the two of that first order of Apostles whose names appear to human eyes to shine with the brightest lustre upon those twelve precious stones, which are the foundations of the New Jerusalem.3
Yet there was another, to whom was entrusted a wider, a more fruitful, a more laborious mission; who was to found more numerous churches, to endure intenser sufferings, to attract to the fold of Christ a vaster multitude of followers. On the broad shoulders of St. Peter rested, at first, the support and defence of the new Society; yet his endurance was not tested so terribly as that of him on whom fell daily the “care of all the churches.” St. John was the last survivor of the Apostles, and he barely escaped sharing with his brother the glory of being one of the earliest martyrs; yet even his life of long exile and heavy tribulations was a far less awful trial than that of him who counted it but a light and momentary affliction to “die daily,” to be “in deaths oft.”4 A third type of the Apostolate was necessary. Besides the Apostle of Catholicity and the Apostle of Love, the Church of Christ needed also “the Apostle of Progress.”
In truth it is hardly possible to exaggerate the extent, the permanence, the vast importance, of those services which were rendered to Christianity by Paul of Tarsus. It would have been no mean boast for the most heroic worker that he had toiled more abundantly than such toilers as the Apostles. It would have been a sufficient claim to eternal gratitude to have preached from Jerusalem to Illyricum, from Illyricum to Rome, and, it may be, even to Spain, the Gospel which gave new life to a weary and outworn world. Yet these are, perhaps, the least permanent of the benefits which mankind has reaped from his life and genius. For it is in his Epistles—casual as was the origin of some of them—that we find the earliest utterances of that Christian literature to which the world is indebted for its richest treasures of poetry and eloquence, of moral wisdom and spiritual consolation. It is to his intellect, fired by the love and illuminated by the Spirit of his Lord, that we owe the first systematic statement, in their mutual connection and inter–dependence, of the great truths of that Mystery of Godliness which had been hidden from the ages, but was revealed in the Gospel of the Christ. It is to his undaunted determination, his clear vision, his moral loftiness that we are indebted for the emancipation of religion from the intolerable yoke of legal observances—the cutting asunder of the living body of Christianity from the heavy corpse of an abrogated Levitism.5 It was he alone who was God’s appointed instrument to render possible the universal spread of Christianity, and to lay deep in the hearts of European churches the solid bases of Christendom. As the Apostle of the Gentiles he was pre–eminently and necessarily the Apostle of freedom, of culture, of the understanding; yet he has, if possible, a higher glory than all this, in the fact that he too, more than any other, is the Apostle who made clear to the religious consciousness of mankind the “justification by faith” which springs from the mystic union of the soul with Christ—the Apostle who has both brought home to numberless Christians in all ages the sense of their own helplessness, and pointed them most convincingly to the blessedness and the universality of that redemption which their Saviour wrought. And hence whenever the faith of Christ has been most dimmed in the hearts of men, whenever its pure fires have seemed in greatest danger of being stilled, as in the fifteenth century— under the dead ashes of sensuality, or quenched, as in the eighteenth century, by the chilling blasts of scepticism, it is mostly by the influence of his writings that religious life has been revived.6 It was one of his searching moral precepts— “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying”—which became to St. Augustine a guiding star out of the night of deadly moral aberrations.7 It was his prevailing doctrine of free deliverance through the merits of Christ which, as it had worked in the spirit of Paul himself to shatter the bonds of Jewish formalism, worked once more in the soul of Luther to burst the gates of brass, and break the bars of iron in sunder with which the Papacy had imprisoned for so many centuries the souls which God made free.
It has happened not unfrequently in the providence of God that the destroyer of a creed or system has been bred and trained in the inmost bosom of the system which he was destined to shake or to destroy. Sakya Mouni had been brought up in Brahminism; Luther had taken the vows of an Augustinian; Pascal had been trained as a Jesuit; Spinoza was a Jew; Wesley and Whitefield were clergymen of the Church of England. It was not otherwise with St. Paul. The victorious enemy of heathen philosophy and heathen worship had passed his boyhood amid the heathen surroundings of a philosophic city. The deadliest antagonist of Judaic exclusiveness was by birth a Hebrew of the Hebrews. The dealer of the death–wound to the spirit of Pharisaism was a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees;8 had been brought up from his youth at Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel;9 had been taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers; had lived “after the most straitest sect” of the Jewish service.10 As his work differed in many respects from that of the other Apostles, so his training was wholly unlike theirs. Their earliest years had been spent in the villages of Grennesareth and the fisher–huts on the shores of the Sea of Galilee; his in the crowded ghetto of a Pagan capital. They, with few exceptions, were men neither of commanding genius nor strongly marked characteristics; he was a man of intense individuality and marvellous intellectual power. They were “unlearned and ignorant,” untrained in the technicalities, inexperienced in the methods, which passed among the Jews for theologic learning; he had sat as a “disciple of the wise”11 at the feet of the most eminent of the Rabbis, and had been selected as the inquisitorial agent of Priests and Sanhedrists because he surpassed his contemporaries in burning zeal for the traditions of the schools.12
This is the man whose career will best enable us to understand the Dawn of Christianity upon the darkness alike of Jew and Gentile; the man who loosed Christianity from the cerements of Judaism, and inspired the world of Paganism with joy and hope. The study of his life will leave upon our minds a fuller conception of the extreme nobleness of the man, and of the truths which he lived and died to teach. And we must consider that life, as far as possible, without traditional bias, and with the determination to see it as it appeared to his contemporaries, as it appeared to Paul himself. “For if he was a Paul,” says St. Chrysostom, “he also was a man,”—nay, more than this, his very infirmities enhanced his greatness. He stands infinitely above the need of indiscriminate panegyric. If we describe him as exempt from all human weakness—if we look at his actions as though it were irreverence to suppose that they ever fell short of his own ideal—we not only describe an impossible character, but we contradict his own reiterated testimonies. It is not a sinless example which we are now called upon to contemplate, but the life of one who, in deep sincerity, called himself “the chief of sinners;” it is the career of one whose ordinary life (βίος) was human, not divine—human in its impetuosity, human in its sensibilities, human, perhaps, in some of its concessions and accommodations; but whose inner life (ζωὴ) was truly divine in so far as it manifested the workings of the Spirit, in so far as it was dead to the world, and hid with Christ in God.13 It is utterly alien to the purpose and manner of Scripture to present to us any of our fellow–men in the light of faultless heroes or unapproachable demi–gods. The notion that it is irreverent to suppose a flaw in the conduct of an Apostle is one of those instances of “false humility” which degrade Scripture under pretence of honouring it, and substitute a dead letter–worship for a living docility. From idealised presentments of the lives of our fellow–servants,14 there would be but little for us to learn; but we do learn the greatest and most important of all lessons when we mark in a struggling soul the triumph of the grace of God—when we see a man, weak like ourselves, tempted like ourselves, erring like ourselves, enabled by the force of a sacred purpose to conquer temptation, to trample on selfishness, to rear even upon sins and failures the super structure of a great and holy life,—to build (as it were) “the cities of Judah out of the ruined fortresses of Samaria.”15
It may seem strange if I say that we know the heart of St. Paul to its inmost depths. It is true that, besides a few scattered remnants of ecclesiastical tradition, we have but two sources whence to derive his history—the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles of Paul himself; and the day has gone by when we could at once, and without further inquiry, assume that both of these sources, in the fullest extent, were absolutely and equally to be relied on. Since Baur wrote his Paulus, and Zeller his Apostelgeschichte, it has become impossible to make use of the Acts of the Apostles, and the thirteen Epistles commonly attributed to St. Paul, without some justification of the grounds upon which their genuineness is established. To do this exhaustively would require a separate volume, and the work has been already done, and is being done by abler hands than mine. All that is here necessary is to say that I should in no instance make use of any statement in those Epistles of which the genuineness can still be regarded as fairly disputable, if I did not hope to state some of the reasons which appear sufficient to justify my doing so; and that if in any cases the genuineness or proper superscription of any Epistle, or part of an Epistle, seems to me to be a matter of uncertainty, I shall feel no hesitation in expressing such an opinion. Of the Acts of the Apostles I shall have various opportunities to speak incidentally, and, without entering on any separate defence of the book against the assaults of modern critics, I will at present only express my conviction that, even if we admit that it was “an ancient Eirenicon,” intended to check the strife of parties by showing that there had been no irreconcilable opposition between the views and ordinances of St. Peter and St. Paul;—even if we concede the obvious principle that whenever there appears to be any contradiction between the Acts and the Epistles, the authority of the latter must be considered paramount;—nay, even if we acknowledge that subjective and artificial considerations may have had some influence in the form and construction of the book;—yet the Acts of the Apostles is in all its main outlines a genuine and trustworthy history. Let it be granted that in the Acts we have a picture of essential unity between the followers of the Judaic and the Pauline schools of thought, which we might conjecture from the Epistles to have been less harmonious and undisturbed; let it be granted that in the Acts we more than once see Paul acting in a way which from the Epistles we should àpriorihave deemed unlikely. Even these concessions are fairly disputable; yet in granting them we only say what is in itself sufficiently obvious, that both records are confessedly fragmentary. They are fragmentary, of course, because neither of them even professes to give us any continuous narrative of the Apostle’s life. That life is—roughly speaking—only known to us at intervals during its central and later period, between the years A.D. 36 and A.D. 66. It is like a manuscript of which the beginning and the end are irrecoverably lost. It is like one of those rivers which spring from unknown sources, and sink into the ground before they have reached the sea. But more than this, how incomplete is our knowledge even of that portion of which these records and notices remain! Of this fact we can have no more over–whelming proof than we may derive from reading that “Iliad of woes,” the famous passage of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where, driven against his will by the calumnies of his enemies to an appearance of boastfulness of which the very notion was abhorrent to him, he is forced to write a summary sketch of what he had done and suffered.16 That enumeration is given long before the end of his career, and yet of the specific outrages and dangers there mentioned no less than eleven are not once alluded to in the Acts, though many others are there mentioned which were subsequent to that sad enumeration. Not one, for instance, of the five scourgings with Jewish thongs is referred to by St. Luke; one only of the three beatings with Roman rods; not one of the three shipwreeks, though a later one is so elaborately detailed; no allusion to the night and day in the deep; two only of what St. Clement tells us were seven imprisonments.17 There are even whole classes of perils to which the writer of the Acts, though he was certainly at one time a companion of St. Paul, makes no allusion whatever—as, for instance, the perils of rivers, the perils of robbers, the perils in the wilderness, the perils among false brethren, the hunger, the thirst, the fasting, the cold, the nakedness. And these, which are thus passed over without notice in the Acts, are in the Epistles mentioned only so cursorily, so generally, so unchronologically, that scarcely one of them can be dwelt upon and assigned with certainty to its due order of succession in St. Paul’s biography. If this, then, is the case, who can pretend that in such a life there is not room for a series of events and actions—even for an exhibition of phases of character—in the narrative, which neither did nor could find place in the letters; and for events and features of character in the letters which find no reflection in the narrative? For of those letters how many are preserved? Thirteen only—even if all the thirteen be indisputably genuine—out of a much larger multitude which he must undoubtedly have written.18 And of these thirteen some are separated from others by great intervals of time; some contain scarcely a single particular which can be made to bear on a consecutive biography; aud not one is preserved which gives us the earlier stage of his views and experiences before he had set foot on European soil. It is, then, idle to assume that either of our sources must be rejected as untrustworthy because it presents us with fresh aspects of a myriad–sided character; or that events in the narrative must be condemned as scarcely honest inventions because they present no primâfacieaccordance with what we might otherwise have expected from brief and scattered letters out of the multiplex correspondence of a varied life. If there were anything in the Acts which appeared to me irreconcilable with, the certain indications of the Epistles, I should feel no hesitation in rejecting it. But most, if not all, of the objections urged against the credibility of the Acts appear to me—for reasons to be hereafter given— both frivolous and untenable. If there are any passages in that book which have been represented as throwing a shade of inconsistency over the character of the great Apostle, there is no such instance which, however interpreted, does not find its support and justification in his own undoubted works. If men of great learning, eminence, and acuteness had not assumed the contrary, it might have seemed superfluous to say that the records of history, and the experiences of daily life, furnish us with abundant instances of lives narrated with perfect honesty, though they have been presented from opposite points of view; and of events which appear to be contradictory only because the point of reconcilement between them has been forgotten. Further than this, the points of contact between the Acts and the Epistles are numberless, and it must suffice, once for all, to refer to Paley’s Horœ Paulinœ in proof that even the undesigned coincidences may be counted by scores. To furnish a separate refutation of all the objections which have been brought against the credibility of the Acts of the Apostles, would be a tedious and interminable task; but the actual narrative of the following pages should exhibit a decisive answer to them, unless it can be shown that it fails to combine the separate data, or that the attempt to combine them has led to incongruous and impossible results.
I believe, then, that we have enough, and more than enough, still left to us to show what manner of life Paul lived, and what manner of man he was. A biography sketched in outline is often more true and more useful than one that occupies itself with minute detail. We do not in reality know more of a great man because we happen to know the petty circumstances which made up his daily existence, or because a mistaken admiration has handed down to posterity the promiscuous common–places of his ordinary correspondence. We know a man truly when we know him at his greatest and his best; we realise his significance for ourselves and for the world when we see him in the noblest activity of his career, on the loftiest summit, and in the fullest glory of his life. There are lives which may be instructive from their very littleness, and it may be well that the biographers of such lives should enter into detail. But of the best and greatest it may be emphatically asserted that to know more about them would only be to know less of them. It is quite possible that if, in the case of one so sensitive and so impetuous as St. Paul, a minute and servile record had preserved for us every hasty expression, every fugitive note, every momentary fall below the loftiest standard, the small souls which over rejoice at seeing the noblest of their race degraded, even for an instant, to the same dead level as themselves, might have found some things over which to glory. That such must have been the result we may infer from the energy and sincerity of self–condemnation with which the Apostle recognises his own imperfections. But such miserable records, even had they been entirely truthful, would only have obscured for us the true Paul—Paul as he stands in the light of history; Paul as he is preserved for us in the records of Christianity; Paul energetic as Peter, and contemplative as John; Paul the hero of unselfishness; Paul the mighty champion of spiritual freedom; Paul a greater preacher than Chrysostom, a greater missionary than Xavier, a greater reformer than Luther, a greater theologian than St. Thomas of Aquinum; Paul the inspired Apostle of the Gentiles, the slave of the Lord Jesus Christ.