Ἠκούσπτε γὰρ τήν ἐμὴν ἀναστροφήν ποτε ἐν Ἰουδυζσμῷ, ὅτι … προέκοπτον ἐν τῷ Ἰουδαἴσμῷ ὑπέρ πολλοὺς συνηλικιώτας ἐν τῷ γένει μου.—GAL. 1:13, 14.
“Let thy house be a place of resort for the wise, and cover thyself with the dust of their feet, and drink their words with thirstiness.”—PirkeAbhôth., i. 4.
“The world was created for the sake of the Thorah.”— Nedarim, 32, 1.
“Whoever is busied in the law for its own sake is worth the whole world.”—PEREK R. MEIR, 1.
So far, then, we have attempted to trace in detail, by the aid of St. Paul’s own writings, the degree and the character of those influences which were exercised upon his mind by the early years which he spent at Tarsus, modified or deepened as they must have been by long intercourse with heathens, and with converts from heathendom, in later years. And already we have seen abundant reason to believe that the impressions which he received from Hellenism were comparatively superficial and fugitive, while those of his Hebraic training and nationality worked deep among the very bases of his life. It is this Hebraic side of his character, so important to any understanding of his life and writings, that we must now endeavour to trace and estimate.
That St. Paul was a Roman citizen, that he could go through the world and say in his own defence, when needful or possible, Civis Romanus sum, is stated so distinctly, and under circumstances so manifestly probable, that the fact stands above all doubt. There are, indeed, some difficulties about it which induce many German theologians quietly to deny its truth, and attribute the statement to a desire on the part of the author of the Acts “to recommend St. Paul to the Romans as a native Roman,” or “to remove the reproach that the originators of Christendom had been enemies of the Roman State.” It is true that, if St. Paul was a freeborn Roman citizen, his legal rights as established by the Lex Porcia1 must, according to his own statement, have been eight times violated at the time when he wrote the Second Epistle to the Corinthians;2 while a ninthviolation of those rights was only prevented by his direct appeal. Five of these, however, were Jewish scourgings, and what we have already said, as well as what we shall say hereafter, may well lead us to suppose that, as against the Jews, St. Paul would have purposely abstained from putting forward a claim which, from the mouth of a Jew, would have been regarded as an odious sign that he was willing to make a personal advantage of his country’s subjection. The Jewish authorities possessed the power to scourge, and it is only too sadly probable that Saul himself, when he was their agent, had been the cause of its infliction on other Christians. If so, he would have felt a strong additional reason for abstaining from the plea which would have exempted him from the authority of his countrymen; and we may see in this abstention a fresh and, so far as I am aware, a hitherto unnoticed trait of his natural nobleness. As to the Roman scourgings, it is clear that the author of the Acts, though well aware of the privileges which Roman citizenship entailed, was also aware that, on turbulent occasions and in remote places, the plea might be summarily set aside in the case of those who were too weak or too obscure to support it. If under the full glare of publicity in Sicily, and when the rights of the “Civitas” were rare, a Verres could contemptuously ignore them to an extent much more revolting to the Roman sense of dignity than scourging was—then very little difficulty remains in reconciling St. Paul’s expression, “Thrice was I beaten with rods,” with the claim which he put forth to the praetors of Philippi and to the chiliarch at Jerusalem. How St. Paul’s father or grandfather obtained the highly–prized distinction we have no means of ascertaining. It certainly did not belong to any one as a citizen of Tarsus, for, if so, Lysias at Jerusalem, knowing that St. Paul came from Tarsus, would have known that he had also the rights of a Roman. But Tarsus was not a Coloniaor a Municipium, but only an Urbs Libera; and this privilege, bestowed upon it by Augustus, did not involve any claim to the Civitas. The franchise may either have been purchased by Paul’s father, or obtained as a reward for some services of which no trace remains.3 When Cassius punished Tarsus by a heavy fine for having embraced the side of Antony, it is said that many Tarsians were sold as slaves in order to pay the money; and one conjecture is that St. Paul’s father, in his early days, may have been one of these, and may have been first emancipated and then presented with the Civitas during a residence at Rome. The conjecture is just possible, but nothing more.
At any rate, this Roman citizenship is not in any way inconsistent with his constant claim to the purest Jewish descent; nor did it appreciably affect his character. The father of Saul may have been glad that he possessed an inalienable right, transmissible to his son, which would protect him in many of those perils which were only too possible in such times; but it made no difference in the training which he gave to the young Saul, or in the destiny which he marked out for him. That training, as we can clearly see, was the ordinary training of every Jewish boy. “The prejudices of the Pharisaic house,” it has been said, “surrounded his cradle; his Judaism grew like the mustard–tree in the Gospel, and intolerance, fanaticism, national hatred, pride, and other passions, built their nests among its branches.”4 At the age of five he would begin to study the Bible with his parents at home; and even earlier than this he would doubtless have learnt the Shema5 and the Hallel (Psalms 113–118.) in whole or in part. At six he would go to his “vineyard,” as the later Rabbis called their schools. At ten he would begin to study those earlier and simpler developments of the oral law, which were afterwards collected in the Mishna. At thirteen he would, by a sort of “confirmation,” become a “Son of the Commandment.”6 At fifteen he would be trained in yet more minute and burdensome halachôth, analogous to those which ultimately filled the vast mass of the Gemara. At twenty, or earlier, like every orthodox Jew, he would marry. During many years he would be ranked among the “pupils of the wise,”7 and be mainly occupied with “the traditions of the Fathers.”8
It was in studies and habits like these that the young Saul of Tarsus grew up to the age of thirteen, which was the age at which a Jewish boy, if he were destined for the position of a Rabbi, entered the school of some great master. The master among whose pupils Saul was enrolled was the famous Rabban Gamaliel, a son of Rabban Simeon, and a grandson of Hillel, “a doctor of the law had in reputation among all the people.”9 There were only seven of the Rabbis to whom the Jews gave the title of Rabban, and three of these were Gamaliels of this family, who each in turn rose to the high distinction of Nası,̂ or President of the School. Gamaliel I., like his grandfather Hillel, held the somewhat anomalous position of a liberal Pharisee. A Pharisee in heartfelt zeal for the traditions of his fathers,10 he yet had none of the narrow exclusiveness which characterised Shammai, the rival of his grandfather, and the hard school which Shammai had founded. His liberality of intellect showed itself in the permission of Pagan literature; his largeness of heart in the tolerance which breathes through his speech before the Sanhedrin. There is no authority for the tradition that he was a secret Christian,11 but we see from the numerous notices of him in the Talmud, and from the sayings there ascribed to him, that he was a man of exactly the character which we should infer from the brief notice of him and of his sentiments in the Acts of the Apostles. In both sources alike we see a humane, thoughtful, high–minded, and religious man—a man of sufficient culture to elevate him above vulgar passions, and of sufficient wisdom to see, to state, and to act upon the broad principles that hasty judgments are dangerously liable to error; that there is a strength and majesty in truth which needs no aid from persecution; that a light from heaven falls upon the destinies of man, and that by that light God “shows all things in the slow history of their ripening.”
At the feet of this eminent Sanhedrist sat Saul of Tarsus in all probability for many years;12 and though for a time the burning zeal of his temperament may have carried him to excesses of intolerance in which he was untrue to the best traditions of his school, yet, since the sunlight of the grace of God ripened in his soul the latent seeds of all that was wise and tender, we may believe that some of those germs of charity had been implanted in his heart by his eminent teacher. So far from seeing any improbability in the statement that St. Paul had been a scholar of Gamaliel, it seems to me that it throws a flood of light on the character and opinions of the Apostle. With the exception of Hillel, there is no one of the Jewish Rabbis, so far as we see them in the light of history, whose virtues made him better suited to be the teacher of a Saul, than Hillel’s grandson. We must bear in mind that the dark side of Pharisaism which is brought before us in the Gospels—the common and current Pharisaism, half hypocritical, half mechanical, and wholly selfish, which justly incurred the blighting flash of Christ’s denunciation—was not the only aspect which Pharisaism could wear. When we speak of Pharisaism we mean obedience petrified into formalism, religion degraded into ritual, morals cankered by casuistry; we mean the triumph and perpetuity of all the worst and weakest elements in religious party–spirit. But there were Pharisees and Pharisees. The New Testament furnishes us with a favourable picture of the candour and wisdom of a Nicodemus and a Gamaliel. In the Talmud, among many other stately figures who walk in a peace and righteousness worthy of the race which sprang from Abraham, we see the lovable and noble characters of a Hillel, of a Simeon, of a Chaja, of a Juda “the Holy.” It was when he thought of such as these, that, even long after his conversion, Paul could exclaim before the Sanhedrin with no sense of shame or contradiction—“Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees.” He would be the more able to make this appeal because, at that moment, he was expressly referring to the resurrection of the dead, which has been too sweepingly characterised as “the one doctrine which Paul the Apostle borrowed from Saul the Pharisee.”
It is both interesting, and for the study of St. Paul’s Epistles most deeply important, to trace the influence of these years upon his character and intellect. Much that he learnt during early manhood continued to be, till the last, an essential part of his knowledge and experience. To the day of his death he neither denied nor underrated the advantages of the Jew; and first among those advantages he placed the possession of “the oracles of God.”13 He had begun the study of these Scriptures at the age of six, and to them, and the elucidations of them which had been gathered during many centuries in the schools of Judaism, he had devoted the most studious years of his life. The effects of that study are more or less traceable in every Epistle which he wrote; they are specially remarkable in those which, like the Epistle to the Romans, were in whole or in part addressed to Churches in which Jewish converts were numerous or predominant.
His profound knowledge of the Old Testament Scriptures shows how great had been his familiarity with them from earliest childhood. From the Pentateuch, from the Prophets, and above all from the Psalter, he not only quotes repeatedly, advancing at each step of the argument from quotation to quotation, as though without these his argument, which is often in reality quite independent of them, would lack authority; but he also quotes, as is evident, from memory, and often into one brief quotation weaves the verbal reminiscences of several passages.14 Like all Hellenistic Jews, he uses the Greek version of the LXX., but he had an advantage over most Hellenists in that knowledge of the original Hebrew which sometimes stands him in good stead. Yet though he can refer to the original when occasion requires, the LXX. was to him as much “the Bible” as our English version is to us; and, as is the case with many Christian writers, he knew it so well that his sentences are constantly moulded by its rhythm, and his thoughts incessantly coloured by its expressions.
And the controversial use which he makes of it is very remarkable. It often seems at first sight to be wholly independent of the context. It often seems to read between the lines.15 It often seems to consider the mere words of a writer as of conclusive authority entirely apart from their original application.16 It seems to regard the word and letter of Scripture as full of divine mysterious oracles, which might not only be cited in matters of doctrine, but even to illustrate the simplest matters of contemporary fact.17 It attaches consequences of the deepest importance to what an ordinary reader might regard as a mere grammatical expression.18 But if the general conception of this style of argumentation was due to Paul’s long training in Rabbinic principles of exegesis, it should not be forgotten that while these principles often modified the form of his expressions, they cannot in any single instance be said to have furnished the essential matter of his thoughts. It was quite inevitable that one who had undergone the elaborate training of a Rabbi—one who, to full manhood, had never dreamt that any training could be superior to it—would not instantly unlearn the reiterated lessons of so many years. Nor was it in any way necessary to the interests of religious truth that he should do so. The sort of traditional culture in the explanation of Scripture which he learnt at the feet of Gamaliel was not only of extreme value in all his controversies with the Jews, but also enriched his style, and lent fresh vividness to his arguments, without enfeebling his judgment or mystifying his opinions. The ingenuity of the Jewish Rabbi never for one moment overpowers the vigorous sense and illuminated intellect of the Christian teacher. Although St. Paul’s method of handling Scripture, undoubtedly, in its general features, resembles and recalls the method which reigns throughout the Talmud, yet the practical force, the inspired wisdom, the clear intuition, of the great Apostle, preserve him from that extravagant abuse of numerical, kabbalistic, esoteric, and impossibly inferential minutiæ which make anything mean anything— from all attempt to emulate the remarkable exegetical feats of those letter–worshipping Rabbis who prided themselves on suspending dogmatic mountains by textual hairs. He shared, doubtless, in the views of the later Jewish schools— the Tanaim and Amoraim—on the nature of inspiration. These views, which we find also in Philo, made the words of Scripture co–extensive and identical with the words of God, and in the clumsy and feeble hands of the more fanatical Talmudists often attached to the dead letter an importance which stifled or destroyed the living sense. But as this extreme and mechanical literalism—this claim to absolute infallibility even in accidental details and passing allusions—this superstitious adoration of the letters and vocables of Scripture as though they were the articulate vocables and immediate autograph of God—finds no encouragement in any part of Scripture, and very direct discouragement in more than one of the utterances of Christ, so there is not a single passage in which any approach to it is dogmatically stated in the writings of St. Paul.19 Nay, more—the very point of his specific difference from the Judæo–Christians was his denial of the permanent validity of the entire scheme of legislation which it was the immediate object of the Pentateuch to record. If it be asserted that St. Paul deals with the Old Testament in the manner of a Rabbi, let it be said in answer that he uses it to emancipate the souls which Judaism enslaved; and that he deduces from it, not the Kabbala and the Talmud—“a philosophy for dreamers and a code for mummies”20—but the main ideas of the Gospel of the grace of God.
It will be easy for any thoughtful and unprejudiced reader of St. Paul’s Epistles to verify and illustrate for himself the Apostle’s use of Scripture. He adopts the current mode of citation, but he ennobles and enlightens it.21 That he did not consider the method universally applicable is clear from its omission in those of his Epistles which were intended in the main for Gentile Christians,22 as also in his speeches to heathen assemblies. But to the Jews he would naturally address a style of argument which was in entire accordance with their own method of dialectics. Many of the truths which he demonstrates by other considerations may have seemed to him to acquire additional authority from their assonance with certain expressions of Scripture. We cannot, indeed, be sure in some instances how far St. Paul meant his quotation for an argument, and how far he used it as a mere illustrative formula. Thus, we feel no hesitation in admitting the cogency of his proof of the fact that both Jews and Gentiles were guilty in God’s sight; but we should not consider the language of David about his enemies in the fourteenth and fifty–third Psalms, still less his strong expressions “all” and “no, not one,” as Adding any great additional force to the general argument. It is probable that a Jew would have done so; and St. Paul, as a Jew trained in this method of Scriptural application, may have done so too. But what has been called his “inspired Targum” of the Old Testament does not bind us to the mystic method of Old Testament commentary. As the Jews were more likely to adopt any conclusion which was expressed for them in the words of Scripture, St. Paul, having undergone the same training, naturally enwove into his style—though only when he wrote to them—this particular method of Scriptural illustration. To them an argument of this kind would be an argumentum ex concessis. To us its argumentative force would be much smaller, because it does not appeal to us, as to him and to his readers, with all the force of familiar reasoning. So far from thinking this a subject for regret, we may, on the contrary, be heartily thankful for an insight which could give explicitness to deeply latent truths, and find in an observation of minor importance, like that of Habakkuk, that “the soul of the proud man is not upright, but the just man shall live by his steadfastness”23—i.e., that the Chaldeans should enjoy no stable prosperity, but that the Jews, here ideally represented as “the upright man,” should, because of their fidelity, live secure—the depth of power and meaning which we attach to that palmary truth of the Pauline theology that “thejustshalllivebyhisfaith.”24
A similar but more remarkable instance of this apparent subordination of the historic context in the illustrative application of prophetic words is found in 1 Cor. 14:21. St. Paul is there speaking of the gift of tongues, and speaking of it with entire disparagement in comparison with the loftier gift of prophecy, i.e., of impassioned and spiritual teaching. In support of this disparaging estimate, and as a proof that the tongues, being mainly meant as a sign to unbelievers, ought only to be used sparingly and under definite limitations in the congregations of the faithful, he quotes from Isaiah 28:1125 the verse—which he does not in this instance borrow from the LXX. version—“Withmenofother tonguesandotherlipswillIspeakuntothispeople,andyet forallthatwilltheynothearme,saiththeLord.” The whole meaning and context are, in the original, very interesting, and generally misunderstood. The passage implies that since the drunken, shameless priests and prophets, chose, in their hiccoughing scorn, to deride the manner and method of the divine instruction which came to them,26 God should address them in a wholly different way, namely, by the Assyrians, who spake tongues which they could not understand; and yet even to that instruction—the stern and unintelligible utterance of foreign victors—they should continue deaf. This passage, in a manner quite alien from any which would be natural to us, St. Paul embodied in a pre–eminently noble and able argument, as though it illustrated, if it did not prove, his view as to the proper object and limitations of those soliloquies of ecstatic spiritual emotion which were known as Glossolalia, or “the Gift of Tongues.”
One more instance, and that, perhaps, the most remarkable of all, will enable us better to understand a peculiarity which was the natural result of years of teaching. In Gal. 3:16 he says, “Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He saith not, AND TO SEEDS, as applying to many, but, as applying to one, AND TO THY SEED—who is Christ.” Certainly at first sight we should say that an argument of immense importance was here founded on the use of the Hebrew word zerá in the singular,27 and its representative the σπέρμα of the LXX.; and that the inference which St. Paul deduces depends solely on the fact that the plural, zeraím(σπέρματα), is not used; and that, therefore, the promise of Gen. 13:15 pointed from the first to a special fulfilment in oneof Abraham’s descendants. This primâ facie view must, however, be erroneous, because it is inconceivable that St. Paul—a good Hebraist and a master of Hellenistic Greek—was unaware that the plural zeraîm, as in 1 Sam. 8:15, Dan. 1:12, and the title of the Talmudic treatise, could not by any possibility have been used in the original promise, because it could only mean “various kinds of grain”—exactly in the sense in which he himself uses spermatain 1 Cor. 15:38—and that the Greek spermata, in the sense of “offspring,” would be nothing less than an impossible barbarism. The argument, therefore—if it be an argument at all, and not what the Rabbis would have called a sod, or “mystery”—does not, and cannot, turn, as has been so unhesitatingly assumed, on the fact that sperma is a singularnoun, but on the fact that it is a collectivenoun, and was deliberately used instead of “sons” or “children;”28 and St. Paul declares that this collectiveterm was meant from the first to apply to Christ, as elsewhere he applies it spiritually to the servants of Christ. In the interpretation, then, of this word, St. Paul reads between the lines of the original, and is enabled to see in it deep meanings which are the true, but not the primary ones. He does not say at once that the promises to Abraham found in Christ—as in the purpose of God it had always been intended that they should find in Christ29—their highest and truest fulfilment; but, in a manner belonging peculiarly to the Jewish style of exegesis, he illustrates this high truth by the use of a collective noun in which he believes it to have been mystically foreshadowed.30
This passage is admirably adapted to throw light on the Apostle’s use of the Old Testament. Rabbinic in form, it was free in spirit. Though he does not disdain either Amoraic or Alexandrian methods of dealing with Scripture, St. Paul never falls into the follies or extravagances of either. Treating the letter of Scripture with intense respect, he yet made the literal sense of it bend at will to the service of the spiritual consciousness. On the dead letter of the Urim, which recorded the names of lost tribes, he flashed a mystic ray, which made them gleam forth into divine and hitherto undreamed–of oracles. The actual words of the sacred writers became but as the wheels and wings of the Cherubim, and whithersoever the Spirit went they went. Nothing is more natural, nothing more interesting, in the hands of an inspired teacher nothing is more valuable, than this. mode of application. We have not in St. Paul the frigid spirit of Philonian allegory which to a great extent depreciated the original and historic sense of Scripture, and was chiefly bent on educing philosophic mysteries from its living page; nor have we a single instance of Gematria or Notarikon, of Atbash or Albam, of Hillel’s middoth or Akibha’s method of hanging legal decisions on the horns of letters. Into these unreal mysticisms and exegetical frivolities it was impossible that a man should fall who was intensely earnest, and felt, in the vast mass of what he wrote, that he had the Spirit of the Lord. In no single instance does he make one of these general quotations the demonstrative basisof the point which he is endeavouring to impress. In every instance he states the solid argument on which he rests his conclusion, and only adduces Scripture by way of sanction or support. And this is in exact accordance with all that we know of his spiritual history— of the genuineness of which it affords an unsuspected confirmation. He had not arrived at any one of the truths of his special gospel by the road of ratiocination. They came to him with the flash of intuitive conviction at the miracle of his conversion, or in the gradual process of subsequent psychological experience. We hear from his own lips that he had not originally found these truths in Scripture, or been led to them by inductive processes in the course of Scripture study. He received them, as again and again he tells us, by revelation direct from Christ. It was only when God had taught him the truth of them that he became cognisant that they mustbe latent in the writings of the Old Dispensation. When he was thus enlightened to see that they existed in Scripture, he found that all Scripture was full of them. When he knew that the treasure lay hid in the field, he bought the whole field, to become its owner. When God had revealed to him the doctrine of justification by faith, he saw—as we may now see, but as none had seen before him—that it existed implicitly in the trustfulness of Abraham and the “life” and “faith” of Habakkuk. Given the right, nay, the necessity, to spiritualise the meaning of the Scriptures—and given the fact that this right was assumed and practised by every teacher of the schools in which Paul had been trained and to which his countrymen looked up, as it has been practised by every great teacher since—we then possess the key to all such passages as those to which I have referred; and we also see the cogency with which they would come home to the minds of those for whom they were intended. In other words, St. Paul, when speaking to Jews, was happily able to address them, as it were, in their own dialect, and it is a dialect from which Gentiles also have deep lessons to learn.
It is yet another instance of the same method when he points to the two wives of Abraham as types of the Jewish and of the Christian covenant, and in the struggles and jealousies of the two, ending in the ejection of Agar, sees allegorically foreshadowed the triumph of the new covenant over the old. In this allegory, by marvellous interchange, the physical descendants of Sarah become, in a spiritualpoint of view, the descendants of Agar, and those who were Agar’s children become Sarah’s true spiritual offspring. The inhabitants of the Jerusalem that now is, though descended from Sarah and Abraham, are foreshadowed lor rejection under the type of the offspring of Ishmael; and the true children of Abraham and Sarah are those alone who are so spiritually, but of whom the vast majority were not of the chosen seed. And the proof of this—if proof be in any case the right word for what perhaps St. Paul himself may only have regarded as allegoric confirmation—is found in Isaiah 54:1, where the prophet, addressing the New Jerusalem which is to rise out of the ashes of her Babylonian ruin, calls to her as to a barren woman, and bids her to rejoice as having many more childivn than she that hath a husband. The Jews become metamorphosed into the descendants of Agar, the Gentiles into the seed of Abraham and heirs of the Promise.31
This very ranging in corresponding columns of type and antitype, or of the actually existent and its ideal counterpart—this Systoichia in which Agar, Ishmael, the Old Covenant, the earthly Jerusalem, the unconverted Jews, &c., in the one column, are respective counterparts of their spiritual opposites. Sarah. Isaac, the New Covenant, the heavenly Jerusalem. the Christian Church, &c., in the other column—is in itself a Rabbinic method of setting forth a series of conceptions, and is, therefore, another of the many traces of the influence of Rabbinic training upon the mind of St. Paul. A part of the system of the Rabbis was to regard the earth as—
“But the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to the other like more than on earth is thought.”
This notion was especially applied to everything connected with the Holy People, and there was no event in the wanderings of the wilderness which did not stand typically for matters of spiritual experience or heavenly hope.32 This principle is expressly stated in the First Epistle to the Corinthians,33 where, in exemplification of it, not only is the manna made the type of the bread of the Lord’s Supper, but, by a much more remote analogy, the passing through the waters of the Red Sea, and the being guided by the pillar of cloud by day, is described as “being baptised unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea” and is made a prefigurement of Christian baptism.34
But although St. Paul was a Hebrew by virtue of his ancestry, and by virtue of the language which he had learnt as his mother–tongue, and although he would probably have rejected the appellation of “Hellenist,” which is indeed never applied to him, yet his very Hebraism had, in one most important respect, and one which has very little attracted the attention of scholars, an Hellenic bias and tinge. This is apparent in the fact which I have already mentioned, that he was, or at any rate that he became, to a marked extent, in the technical language of the Jewish schools, an Hagadist, not an Halachist.35 It needs but a glance at the Mishna, and still more at the Gemara, to see that the question which mainly occupied the thoughts and interests of the Palestinian and Babylonian Rabbis, and which almost constituted the entire education of their scholars, was the llalacha, or “rule” and if we compare the Talmud with the Midrashim, we see at once that some Jewish scholars devoted themselves to the Hagada almost exclusively, and others to the Halacha, and that the names frequent in the one region of Jewish literature are rarely found in the other. The two classes of students despised each other. The Hagadist despised the Halachist as a minute pedant, and was despised in turn as an imaginative ignoramus. There was on the part of some Rabbis a jealous dislike of teaching the Hagadôthat all to any one who had not gone through the laborious training of the Halacha. “I hold from my ancestors,” said R. Jonathan, in refusing to teach the Hagadato R. Samlai, “that one ought not to teach the Hagada either to a Babylonian or to a southern Palestinian, because they are arrogant and ignorant.” The consequences of the mutual dis–esteem in which each branch of students held the other was that the Hagadists mainly occupied themselves with the Prophets, and the Halachists with the Law. And hence the latter became more and more Judaic, Pharisaic, Rabbinic. The seven rules of Hillel became the thirteen rules of Ishmael,36 and the thirty–three of Akibha, and by the intervention of these rules almost anything might be added to or subtracted from the veritable Law.37 The letter of the Law thus lost its comparative simplicity in boundless complications, until the Talmud tells us how Akibha was seen in a vision by the astonished Moses, drawing from every horn of every letter whole bushels of decisions.38 Meanwhile the Hagadists were deducing from the utterances of the Prophets a spirit which almost amounted to contempt for Levitical minutiæ;39 were developing the Messianic tradition, and furnishing a powerful though often wholly unintentional assistance to the logic of Christian exegesis. This was because the Hagadists were grasping the spirit, while the Halachists were blindly groping amid the crumbled fragments of the letter. It is not wonderful that the Jews got to be so jealous of the Hagada, as betraying possible tendencies to the heresies of the minîm—i.e., the Christians—that they imposed silence upon those who used certain suspected hagadistic expressions, which in themselves were perfectly harmless. “He who profanes holy things,” says Rabbi Eliezer of Modin, in the Pirke Abhôth, “who slights the festivals, who causes his neighbour to blush in public, who breaks the covenant of Abraham, and discovers explanations of the Law contrary to the Halacha, even if he knew the Law and his works were good, would still lose his share in the life to come.”40
It is easy to understand from these interesting particulars that if the Hagada and the Halacha were alike taught in the lecture–room of Gamaliel, St. Paul, whatever may have been his original respect for and study of the one, carried with him in mature years no trace of such studies, while he by no means despised the best parts of the other, and, illuminated by the Holy Spirit of God, found in the training with which it had furnished him at least an occasional germ, or illustration, of those Christian and Messianic arguments which he addressed with such consummate force alike to the rigid Hebraists and the most bigoted Hellenists in after years.41