SAUL THE PHARISEE

Ζηλωτὴς ὑπάρχων τῶν πατρικῶν μου παραδόσεων.— GAL. 1:14; ACTS 22:3.

Κατὰ τὴν ἀκριβεστάτην αἵρεσιν τῆς ἡμετέρας θρησκείας ἔζησα Φαρισαῖος.—ACTS 26:5.

IF the gathered lore of the years between the ages of thirteen and thirty–three has left, as it must inevitably have left, unmistakable traces on the pages of St. Paul, how much more must this be the case with all the moral struggles, all the spiritual experiences, all those inward battles which are not fought with earthly weapons, through which he must have passed during the long period in which “he lived a Pharisee”?

We know well the kind of life which lies hid behind that expression. We know the minute and intense scrupulosity of Sabbath observance wasting itself in all those abhôthand toldôth—those primary and derivative rules and prohibitions, and inferences from rules and prohibitions, and combinations of inferences from rules and prohibitions, and cases of casuistry and conscience arising out of the infinite possible variety of circumstances to which those combinations of inference might apply—which had degraded the Sabbath from “a delight, holy of the Lord and honourable,” partly into an anxious and pitiless burden, and partly into a network of contrivances hypocritically designed, as it were, in the lowest spirit of heathenism, to cheat the Deity with the mere semblance of accurate observance.1 We know the carefulness about the colour of fringes, and the tying of tassels, and the lawfulness of meats and drinks. We know the tithings, at once troublesome and ludicrous, of mint, anise, and cummin, and the serio–comic questions as to whether in tithing the seed it was obligatory also to tithe the stalk. We know the double fasts of the week, and the triple prayers of the day, and the triple visits to the Temple. We know the elaborate strainings of the water and the wine, that not even the carcase of an animalcula might defeat the energy of Levitical anxiety. We know the constant rinsings and scourings of brazen cups and pots and tables, carried to so absurd an extreme that, on the occasion of washing the golden candelabrum of the Temple, the Sadducees remarked that their Pharisaic rivals would wash the Sun itself if they could get an opportunity. We know the entire and laborious ablutions and bathings of the whole person, with carefully tabulated ceremonies and normal gesticulations, not for the laudable purpose of personal cleanliness, but for the nervously strained endeavour to avoid every possible and impossible chance of contracting ceremonial uncleanness. We know how this notion of perfect Levitical purity thrust itself with irritating recurrence into every aspect and relation of ordinary life, and led to the scornful avoidance of the very contact and shadow of fellow–beings, who might after all be purer and nobler than those who would not touch them with the tassel of a garment’s hem. We know the obtrusive prayers,2 the ostentatious almsgivings,3 the broadened phylacteries,4 the petty ritualisms,5 the professorial arrogance,6 the reckless proselytism,7 the greedy avarice,8 the haughty assertion of pre–eminence,9 the ill–concealed hypocrisy,10 which were often hidden under this venerable assumption of superior holiness. And we know all this quite as much, or more, from the admiring records of the Talmud—which devotes one whole treatise to handwashings,11 and another to the proper method of killing a fowl,12 and another to the stalks of legumes13—as from the reiterated “woes” of Christ’s denunciation.14 But we may be sure that these extremes and degeneracies of the Pharisaic aim would be as grievous and displeasing to the youthful Saul as they were to all the noblest Pharisees, and as they were to Christ Himself. Of the seven kinds of Pharisees which the Talmud in various places enumerates, we may be quite sure that Saul of Tarsus would neither be a “bleeding” Pharisee, nor a “mortar” Pharisee, nor a “Shechemite” Pharisee, nor a “timid” Pharisee, nor a “tumbling” Pharisee, nor a “painted” Pharisee at all; but that the only class of Pharisee to which he, as a true and high–minded Israelite, would have borne any shadow of resemblance, and that not in a spirit of self–contentment, but in a spirit of almost morbid and feverish anxiety to do all that was commanded, would be the Tell–me–anything–more–to–do–and–I–will–do–it Pharisee!15

And this type of character, which bears no remote resemblance to that of many of the devotees of the monastic life—however erroneous it may be, however bitter must be the pain by which it must be accompanied, however deep the dissatisfaction which it must ultimately suffer—is very far from being necessarily ignoble. It is indeed based on the enormous error that man can deserve heaven by care in external practices; that he can win by quantitative goodness his entrance into the kingdom of God; that that kingdom is meat and drink, not righteousness and peace and joy in believing. Occasionally, by some flash of sudden conviction, one or two of the wisest Doctors of the Law seem to have had some glimmering of the truth, that it is notby works of righteousness, but only by God’s mercy, that man is saved. But the normal and all but universal belief of the religious party among the Jews was that, though of the 248 commands and 365 prohibitions of the Mosaic Law some were “light” and some were “heavy,”16 yet that to one and all alike—not only in the spirit but in the letter—not only in the actual letter, but in the boundless inferences to which the letter might lead when every grain of sense and meaning had been crushed out of it under mountain loads of “decisions”—a rigidly scrupulous obedience was due. This was what God absolutely required. This, and this only, came up to the true conception of the blameless righteousness of the Law. And how much depended on it! Nothing less than recovered freedom, recovered empire, recovered pre–eminence among the nations; nothing less than the restoration of their national independence in all its perfectness, of their national worship in all its splendour; nothing less than the old fire upon the altar, the holy oil, the sacred ark, the cloud of glory between the wings of the cherubim; nothing less, in short, than the final hopes which for many centuries they and their fathers had most deeply cherished. If but one person could only for one day keep the whole Law and not offend in one point— nay, if but one person could but keep that one point of the Law which affected the due observance of the Sabbath— then (so the Rabbis taught) the troubles of Israel would be ended, and the Messiah at last would come.17

And it was at nothing less than this that, with all the intense ardour of his nature, Saul had aimed. It is doubtful whether at this period the utter nullity of the Oral Law could have dawned upon him. It sometimes dawned even on the Rabbis through the dense fogs of sophistry and self–importance, and even on their lips we sometimes find the utterances of the Prophets that humility and justice and mercy are better than sacrifice. “There was a flute in the Temple,” says the Talmud, “preserved from the days of Moses; it was smooth, thin, and formed of a reed. At the command of the king it was overlaid with gold, which ruined its sweetness of tone until the gold was taken away. There were also a cymbal and a mortar, which had become injured in course of time, and were mended by workmen of Alexandria summoned by the wise men; but their usefulness was so completely destroyed by this process, that it was necessary to restore them to their former condition.”18 Are not these things an allegory? Do they not imply that by overlaying the written Law with what they called the gold, but what was in reality the dross and tinsel of tradition, the Rabbis had destroyed or injured its beauty and usefulness? But probably Saul had not realised this. To him there was no distinction between the relative importance of the Written and Oral, of the moral and ceremonial Law. To every precept—and they were countless—obedience was due. If it could be done, he would do it. If on him, on his accuracy of observance, depended the coming of the Messiah, then the Messiah should come. Were others learned in all that concerned legal rectitude? he would be yet more learned. Were others scrupulous? he would be yet more scrupulous. Surely God had left man free?19 Surely He would not have demanded obedience to the Law if that obedience were not possible! All things pointed to the close of one great aeon in the world’s history, and the dawn of another which should be the last. The very heathen yearned for some deliverer, and felt that there could be no other end to the physical misery and moral death which had spread itself over their hollow societies.20 Deep midnight was brooding alike over the chosen people and the Gentile world. From the East should break forth a healing light, a purifying flame. Let Israel be true, and God’s promise would not fail.

And we know from his own statements that if external conformity were all—if obedience to the Law did not mean obedience in all kinds of matters which escaped all possibility of attention—if avoidance of its prohibitions did not involve avoidance in matters which evaded the reach of the human senses—then Saul was, touching the righteousness of the Law, blameless, having lived in all good conscience towards God.21 Had heput the question to the Great Master, “What shall I do to be saved?” or been bidden to “keep the commandments,” it is certain that he would have been able to reply with the youthful ruler, “All these have I kept from my youth,” and—he might have added—“very much besides.” And yet we trace in his Epistles how bitterly he felt the hollowness of this outward obedience—how awful and how burdensome had been to him “the curse of the Law.” Even moral obedience could not silence the voice of the conscience, or satisfy the yearnings of the soul; but these infinitesimal Levitisms, what could they do? Tormenting questions would again and again arise. Of what use was all this? from what did the necessity of it spring? to what did the obedience to it lead? Did God indeed care for the exact size of a strip of parchment, or the particular number of lines in the texts which were upon it, or the way in which the letters were formed, or the shape of the box into which it was put, or the manner in which that box was tied upon the forehead or the arm?22 Was it, indeed, a very important matter whether “between the two evenings” meant, as the Samaritans believed, between sunset and darkness, or, as the Pharisees asserted, between the beginning and end of sunset? Was it a matter worth the discussion of two schools to decide whether an egg laid on a festival might or might not be eaten?23 Were all these things indeed, and in themselves, important? And even if they were, would it be errors as to these littlenesses that would really kindle the wrath of a jealous God? How did they contribute to the beauty of holiness? in what way did they tend to fill the soul with the mercy which was better than sacrifice, or to educate it in that justice and humility, that patience and purity, that peace and love, which, as some of the prophets had found grace to see, were dearer to God than thousands of rams and ten thousands of rivers of oil? And behind all these questions lay that yet deeper one which agitated the schools of Jewish thought—the question whether, after all, man could reach, or with all his efforts must inevitably fail to reach, that standard of righteousness which God and the Law required? And if indeed he failed, what more had the Law to say to him than to deliver its sentence of unreprieved condemnation and indiscriminate death?24

Moreover, was there not mingled with all this nominal adoration of the Law a deeply–seated hypocrisy, so deep that it was in a great measure unconscious? Even before the days of Christ the Rabbis had learnt the art of straining out gnats and swallowing camels. They had long learnt to nullify what they professed to defend. The ingenuity of Hillel was quite capable of getting rid of any Mosaic regulation which had been found practically burdensome. Pharisees and Sadducees alike had managed to set aside in their own favour, by the devices of the “mixtures,” all that was disagreeable to themselves in the Sabbath scrupulosity. The fundamental institution of the Sabbatic year had been stultified by the mere legal fiction of the prosbol. Teachers who were on the high road to a casuistry which could construct “rules” out of every superfluous particle had found it easy to win credit for ingenuity by elaborating prescriptions to which Moses would have listened in mute astonishment. If there be one thing more definitely laid down in the Law than another it is the uncleanness of creeping things, yet the Talmud assures us that “no one is appointed a member of the Sanhedrin who does not possess sufficient ingenuity to prove from the written Law that a creeping thing is ceremonially clean;”25 and that there was an unimpeachable disciple at Jabne who could adduce one hundred and fifty arguments in favour of the ceremonial cleanness of creeping things.26 Sophistry like this was at work even in the days when the young student of Tarsus sat at the feet of Gamaliel; and can we imagine any period of his life when lie would not have been wearied by a system at once so meaningless, so stringent, and so insincere? Could he fail to notice that they “hugely violated what they trivially obeyed?”

We may see from St. Paul’s own words that these years must have been very troubled years. Under the dignified exterior of the Pharisee lay a wildly–beating heart; an anxious brain throbbed with terrible questionings under the broad phylactery. Saul as a Pharisee believed in eternity, he believed in the resurrection, he believed in angel and spirit, in voices and appearances, in dreaming dreams and seeing visions. But in all this struggle to achieve his own righteousness—this struggle so minutely tormenting, so revoltingly burdensome—there seemed to be no hope, no help, no enlightenment, no satisfaction, no nobility— nothing but a possibly mitigated and yet inevitable curse. God seemed silent to him, and heaven closed. No vision dawned on his slumbering senses, no voice sounded in his eager ear. The sense of sin oppressed him; the darkness of mystery hung over him; he was ever falling and falling, and no hand was held out to help him; he strove with all his soul to be obedient, and he was obedient—and yet the Messiah did not come.

The experience of Saul of Tarsus was the heartrending experience of all who have looked for peace elsewhere than in the love of God. All that Luther suffered at Erfurdt Saul must have suffered in Jerusalem; and the record of the early religious agonies and awakenment of the one is the best commentary on the experience of the other. That the life of Saul was free from flagrant transgressions we see from his own bold appeals to his continuous rectitude. He was not a convert from godlessness or profligacy, like John Bunyan or John Newton. He claims integrity when he is speaking of his life in the aspect which it presented to his fellow–men, but he is vehement in self–accusation when he thinks of that life in the aspect which it presented to his God. He found that no external legality could give him a clean heart, or put a right spirit within him. He found that servile obedience inspired no inward peace. He must have yearned for some righteousness, could he but know of it, which would be better than the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. The Jewish doctors had imagined and had directed that if a man did not feel inclined to do this or that, he should force himself to do it by a direct vow. “Vows,” said Rabbi Akibha,27 “are the enclosures of holiness.” But Saul the Pharisee, long before he became Paul the Apostle, must have proved to the very depth the hollowness of this direction. Vows might be the enclosures of formal practice; they were not, and could not be, the schooling of the disobedient soul; they could not give calm to that place in the human being where meet the two seas of good and evil impulse28—to the heart, which is the battle–field on which passionate desire clashes into collision with positive command.

Even when twenty years of weariness, and wandering, and struggle, and suffering, were over, we still catch in the Epistles of St. Paul the mournful echoes of those days of stress and storm—echoes as of the thunder when its fury is over, and it is only sobbing far away among the distant hills. We hear those echoes most of all in the Epistle to the Romans. We hear them when he talks of “the curse of the law.” We hear them when, in accents of deep self–pity, he tells us of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit; between the law of sin in his members, and that law of God which, though holy and just and good and ordained to life, he found to be unto death. In the days, indeed, when he thus writes, he had at last found peace; he had wrung from the lessons of his life the hard experience that by the works of the law no man can be justified in God’s sight, but that, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And though, gazing on his own personality, and seeing it disintegrated by a miserable dualism, he still found a law within him which warred against that inward delight which he felt in the law of God— though groaning in this body of weakness, he feels like one who is imprisoned in a body of death, he can still, in answer to the question, “Who shall deliver me?” exclaim with a burst of triumph, “I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”29 But if the Apostle, after he has found Christ, after he has learnt that “there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus”30 still felt the power and continuity of the inferior law striving to degrade his life into that captivity to the law of sin from which Christ had set him free, through what hours of mental anguish must he not have passed when he knew of no other dealing of God with his soul than the impossible, unsympathising, deathful commandment, “This do, and thou shalt live!” Couldhe “this do”? And, if he could not, what hope, what help? Was there any voice of pity among the thunders of Sinai?31 Could the mere blood of bulls and goats be any true propitiation for wilful sins?

But though we can see the mental anguish through which Saul passed in his days of Pharisaism, yet over the events of that period a complete darkness falls; and there are only two questions, both of them deeply interesting, which it may, perhaps, be in our power to answer.

The first is, Did Saul in those days ever see the Lord Jesus Christ?

At first sight we might suppose that the question was answered, and answered affirmatively, in 1 Cor. 9:1, where he asks, “Am I not an Apostle? Have I not seen Jesus, our Lord?” and still more in 2 Cor. 5:16, where he says, “Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more.”32

But a little closer examination of these passages will show that they do not necessarily involve any such meaning. In the first of them, St. Paul cannot possibly be alluding to any knowledge of Jesus before His crucifixion, because such mere external sight, from the position of one who disbelieved in Him, so far from being a confirmation of any claim to be an Apostle, would rather have been a reason for rejecting such a claim. It can only apply to the appearance of Christ to him on the way to Damascus, or to some similar and subsequent revelation.33 The meaning of the second passage is less obvious. St. Paul has there been explaining the grounds of his Apostolate in the constraining love of Christ for man. He has shown how that love was manifested by His death for all, and how the results of that death and resurrection are intended so utterly to destroy the self–love of His children, so totally to possess and to change their individuality, that “if any man be in Christ he is a new creation.” And the Christ of whom he is here speaking is the risen, glorified, triumphant Christ, in whom all things are become new, because He has reconciled man to God. Hence the Apostle will know no man, judge of no man, in his mere human and earthly relations, but only in his union with their risen Lord. The partisans who used, and far more probably abused, the name of James, to thrust their squabbling Judaism even into the intercourse between a Paul and a Peter, and who sowed the seeds of discord among the converts of the Churches which St. Paul had founded, were constantly underrating the Apostolic dignity of Paul, because he had not been an eye–witness of the human life of Christ. The answer of the Apostle always was that he too knew Christ by an immediate revelation, that “it had pleased God to revealHisSonin him that he might preach Christ among the Gentiles.”34 The day had been when he had known “Christ according to the flesh”—not indeed by direct personal intercourse with Him in the days of His earthly ministry, but by the view which he and others had taken of Him. In his unconverted days he had regarded Him as a mesîth—an impostor who deceived the people, or at the very best as a teacher who deceived himself. And after his conversion he had not perhaps, at first, fully learnt to apprehend the Plenitude of the glory of the risen Christ as rising far above the conception of the Jewish Messiah. All this was past. To apprehend by faith the glorified Son of God was a far more blessed privilege than to have known a living Messiah by earthly intercourse. Even if he had known Christ as a living man, that knowledge would have been less near, less immediate, less intimate, less eternal, in its character, than the closeness of community wherewith he now lived and died in Him; and although he had known Him first only by false report, and then only with imperfect realisation as Jesus of Nazareth, the earthly and human conception had now passed away, and been replaced by the true and spiritual belief. The Christ, therefore, whom now he knew was no “Christ after the flesh,” no Christ in the days of His flesh, no Christ in any earthly relations, but Christ sitting for ever at the right hand of God. To have seen the Lord Jesus with the eyes was of itself nothing—it was nothing to boast of. Herod had seen Him, and Annas, and Pilate, and many a coarse Jewish mendicant and many a brutal Roman soldier. But to have seen Him with the eye of Faith—to have spiritually apprehended the glorified Redeemer—that was indeed to be a Christian.

All the other passages which can at all be brought to bear on the question support this view, and lead us to believe that St. Paul had either not seen at all, or at the best barely seen, the Man Christ Jesus. Indeed, the question, “Who art Thou, Lord?”35 preserved in all three narratives of his conversion, seems distinctly to imply that the personal appearance of the Lord was unknown to him, and this is a view which is confirmed by the allusion to the risen Christ in 1 Cor. 15. St. Paul there says that to him, the least of the Apostles, and not meet to be called an Apostle, Christ had appeared last of all, as to the abortive–born of the Apostolic family.36 And, indeed, it is inconceivable that Saul could in any real sense have seen Jesus in His lifetime. That ineffaceable impression produced by His very aspect; that unspeakable personal ascendency, which awed His worst enemies and troubled the hard conscience of His Roman judge; the ineffable charm and power in the words of Him who spake as never man spake, could not have appealed to him in vain. We feel an unalterable conviction, not only that, if Saul had seen Him, Paul would again and again have referred to Him, but also that he would in that case have been saved from the reminiscence which most of all tortured him in after days—the undeniable reproach that he had persecuted the Church of God. If, indeed, we could imagine that Saul had seen Christ, and, having seen Him, had looked on Him only with the bitter hatred and simulated scorn of a Jerusalem Pharisee, then we may be certain that that Holy Face which looked into the troubled dreams of Pilate’s wife—that the infinite sorrow in those eyes, of which one glance broke the repentant heart of Peter—would have recurred so often and so heartrendingly to Paul’s remembrance, that his sin in persecuting the Christians would have assumed an aspect of tenfold aggravation, from the thought that in destroying and imprisoning them he had yet more openly been crucifying the Son of God afresh, and putting Him to an open shame. The intense impressibility of Paul’s mind appears most remarkably in the effect exercised upon him by the dying rapture of St. Stephen. The words of Stephen, though listened to at the time with inward fury, not only lingered in his memory, but produced an unmistakable influence on his writings. If this were so with the speech of the youthful Hellenist, how infinitely more would it have been so with the words which subdued into admiration even the alien disposition of Pharisaic emissaries? Can we for a moment conceive that Paul’s Pharisaism would have lasted unconsumed amid the white lightnings of that great and scathing denunciation which Christ uttered in the Temple in the last week of His ministry, and three days before His death? Had St. Paul heard one of these last discourses, had he seen one of those miracles, had he mingled in one of those terrible and tragic scenes to which he must have afterwards looked back as events the most momentous in the entire course of human history, is there any one who can for a moment imagine that no personal reminiscence of such scenes would be visible, even ever so faintly, through the transparent medium of his writings?

We may, then, regard it as certain that when the gloom fell at mid–day over the awful sacrifice of Golgotha, when the people shouted their preference for the murderous brigand, and yelled their execration of the Saviour whose day all the noblest and holiest of their fathers had longed to see, Saul was not at Jerusalem. Where, then, was he? It is impossible to answer the question with any certainty. He may have been at Tarsus, which, even after his conversion, he regarded as his home.37 Or perhaps the explanation of his absence may be seen in Gal. 5:11. He there represents himself as having once been a preacher of circumcision. Now we know that one of the characteristics of the then Pharisaism was an active zeal in winning proselytes. “Ye compass sea and land,” said Christ to them, in burning words, “to make one proselyte; and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of Gehenna than yourselves.”38 The conversion which changed Paul’s deepest earlier convictions left unchanged the natural impulse of his temperament. Why may not the same impetuous zeal, the same restless desire to be always preaching some truth and doing some good work which marked him out as the Apostle of the Gentiles,39 have worked in him also in these earlier days, and made him, as he seems to imply, a missionary of Pharisaism? If so, he may have been absent on some journey enjoined upon him by the party whose servant, heart and soul, he was, during the brief visits to Jerusalem which marked the three years’ ministry of Christ on earth.

2. The other question which arises is, Was Saul married? Had he the support of some loving heart during the fiery struggles of his youth? Amid the to–and–fro contentions of spirit which resulted from an imperfect and unsatisfying creed, was there in the troubled sea of his life one little island home where he could find refuge from incessant thoughts?

Little as we know of his domestic relations, little as he cared to mingle mere private interests with the great spiritual truths which occupy his soul, it seems to me that we must answer this question in the affirmative. St. Paul, who has been very freely charged with egotism, had not one particle of that egotism which consists in attaching any importance to his personal surroundings. The circumstances of his individual life he would have looked on as having no interest for any one but himself. When he speaks of himself he does so always from one of two reasons—from the necessity of maintaining against detraction his apostolic authority, or from the desire to utilise for others his remarkable experience. The things that happened to him, the blessings and privations of his earthly condition, would have seemed matters of supreme indifference, except in so far as they possessed a moral significance, or had any bearing on the lessons which he desired to teach.

It is, then, only indirectly that we can expect to find an answer to the question as to his marriage. If, indeed, he was a member of the Sanhedrin, it follows that, by the Jewish requirements for that position, he must have been a married man His official position will be examined hereafter; but, meanwhile, his marriage may be inferred as probable from passages in his Epistles. In 1 Cor. 9:5 he asks the Corinthians, “Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other Apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Kephas?” This passage is inconclusive, though it asserts his right both to marry, and to take a wife with him in his missionary journeys if he thought it expedient.40 But from 1 Cor. 7:8 it seems a distinct inference that he classed himself among widowers; for, he says, “I say, therefore, to the unmarriedand widows, it is good for them if they abide (μείνωσιν) even as I.” That by “the unmarried” he here means “widowers”—for which there is no special Greek word—seems clear, because he has been already speaking, in the first seven verses of the chapter, to those who have never been married.41 To them he concedes, far more freely than to the others, the privilege of marrying if they considered it conducive to godliness, though, in the present state of things, he mentions his own personal predilection for celibacy, in the case of all who had the grace of inward purity. And even apart from the interpretation of this passage, the deep and fine insight of Luther had drawn the conclusion that Paul knew by experience what marriage was, from the wisdom and tenderness which characterise his remarks respecting it. One who had never been married could hardly have written on the subject as he has done, nor could he have shown the same profound sympathy with the needs of all, and received from all the same ready confidence. To derive any inference from the loving metaphors which he draws from the nurture of little children42 would be more precarious. It is hardly possible that Paul ever had a child who lived. Had this been the case, his natural affection could hardly have denied itself some expression of the tender love which flows out so freely towards his spiritual children. Timothy would not have been so exclusively “his own true child” in the faith if he had had son or daughter of his own. If we are right in the assumption that he was married, it seems probable that it was for a short time only, and that his wife had died.

But there is one more ground which has not. I think, been noticed, which seems to me to render it extremely probable that Saul, before the time of his conversion, had been a married man. It is the extraordinary importance attached by the majority of Jews in all ages to marriage as a moral duty, nay, even a positive command, incumbent on every man.43 The Mishna fixes the age of marriage at eighteen,44 and even seventeen was preferred. The Babylonist Jews fixed it as early as fourteen.45 Marriage is, in fact, the first of the 613 precepts. They derived the duty partly from the command of Gen. 1:28, partly from allusions to early marriage in the Old Testament (Prov. 2:17; 5:18), and partly from allegorising explanations of passages like Eccl. 11:6; Job 5:24.46 The Rabbis in all ages have laid it down as a stringent duty that parents should marry their children young;47 and the one or two who, like Ben Azai, theoretically placed on a higher level the duty of being more free from incumbrance in order to study the Law, were exceptions to the almost universal rule. But even these theorists were themselves married men. If St. Paul had ever evinced the smallest sympathy with the views of the Therapeutæ and Essenes —if his discountenancing of marriage, under certain immediate conditions, had been tinged by any Gnostic fancies about its essential inferiority— we might have come to a different conclusion. But he held no such views either before or after his conversion;48 and certainly, if he lived unmarried as a Jerusalem Pharisee, his case was entirely exceptional.