“Be bold as a leopard, swift as an eagle, bounding as a stag, brave as a lion, to do the will of thy Father which is in heaven.”—PESACHIM, f. 112, 2.
CALMED by retirement, confirmed, it may be, by fresh revelations of the will of God, clearer in his conceptions of truth and duty, Saul returned to Damascus. We need look for no further motives of his return than such as rose from the conviction that he was now sufficiently prepared to do the work to which Christ had called him.
He did not at once begin his mission to the Gentiles. “To the Jew first” was the understood rule of the Apostolic teaching,1 and had been involved in the directions given by Christ Himself.2 Moreover, the Gentiles were so unfamiliar with the institution of preaching, their whole idea of worship was so alien from every form of doctrinal or moral exhortation, that to begin by preaching to them was almost impossible. It was through the Jews that the Gentiles were most easily reached. The proselytes, numerous in every city, were specially numerous at Damascus, and by their agency it was certain that every truth propounded in the Jewish synagogue would, even if only by the agency of female proselytes, be rapidly communicated to the Gentile agora.
It was, therefore, to the synagogues that Saul naturally resorted, and there that he first began to deliver his message. Since the Christians were still in communion with the synagogue and the Temple—since their leader, Ananias, was so devout according to the law as to have won the willing testimony of all the Jews who lived in Damascus3—no obstacle would be placed in the way of the youthful Rabbi; and as he had been a scholar in the most eminent of Jewish schools, his earliest appearances on the arena of controversy would be awaited with attention and curiosity. We have no reason to suppose that the animosity against the Nazarenes, which Saul himself had kept alive in Jerusalem, had as yet penetrated to Damascus. News is slow to travel in Eastern countries, and those instantaneous waves of opinion which flood our modern civilisation were unknown to ancient times. In the capital of Syria, Jews and Christians were still living together in mutual toleration, if not in mutual esteem. They had been thus living in Jerusalem until the spark of hatred had been struck out by the collision of the Hellenists of the liberal with those of the narrow school — the Christian Hellenists of the Hagadôth with the Jewish Hellenists of the Halacha. To Saul, if not solely, yet in great measure, this collision had been due; and Saul had been on his way to stir up the same wrath and strife in Damascus, when he had been resistlessly arrested4 on his unhallowed mission by the vision and the reproach of his ascended Lord.
But the authority, and the letters, had been entrusted to him alone, and none but a few hot zealots really desired that pious and respectable persons like Ananias—children of Abraham, servants of Moses—should be dragged, with a halter round their necks, from peaceful homes, scourged by the people with whom they had lived without any serious disagreement, and haled to Jerusalem by fanatics who would do their best to procure against them the fatal vote which might consign them to the revolting horrors of an almost obsolete execution.
So that each Ruler of a Synagogue over whom Saul might have been domineering with all the pride of superior learning, and all the intemperance of flaming zeal, might be glad enough to see and hear a man who could no longer hold in terror over him the commission of the Sanhedrin, and who had now rendered himself liable to the very penalties which, not long before, he had been so eager to inflict.
And had Saul proved to be but an ordinary disputant, the placidity of Jewish self–esteem would not have been disturbed, nor would he have ruffled the sluggish stream of legal self–satisfaction. He did not speak of circumcision as superfluous; he said nothing about the evanescence of the Temple service, or the substitution for it of a more spiritual worship. He did not breathe a word about turning to the Gentiles. The subject of his preaching was that “Jesus is the Son of God.”5 At first this preaching excited no special indignation. The worshippers in the synagogue only felt a keen astonishment6 that this was the man who had ravaged in Jerusalem those who called on “this name,”7 and who had come to Damascus for the express purpose of leading them bound to the High Priest. But when once self–love is seriously wounded, toleration rarely survives. This was the case with the Jews of Damascus. They very soou discovered that it was no mere Ananias with whom they had to deal. It was, throughout life, Paul’s unhappy fate to kindle the most virulent animosities, because, though conciliatory and courteous by temperament, he yet carried into his arguments that intensity and forthrightness which awaken dormant opposition. A languid controversialist will always meet with a languid tolerance. But any controversialist whose honest belief in his own doctrines makes him terribly in earnest, may count on a life embittered by the anger of those on whom he has forced the disagreeable task of re–considering their own assumptions. No one likes to be suddenly awakened. The Jews were indignant with one who disturbed the deep slumber of decided opinions. Their accredited teachers did not like to be deposed from the papacy of infallible ignorance. They began at Damascus to feel towards Saul that fierce detestation which dogged him thenceforward to the last day of his life. Out of their own Scriptures, by their own methods of exegesis, in their own style of dialectics, by the interpretation of prophecies of which they did not dispute the validity, he simply confounded them. He could now apply the very same principles which in the mouth of Stephen he had found it impossible to resist. The result was an unanswerable proof that the last œon of God’s earthly dispensations had now dawned, that old things had passed away, and all things had become new.
If arguments are such as cannot be refuted, and yet if those who hear them will not yield to them, they inevitably excite a bitter rage. It was so with the Jews. Some time had now elapsed since Saul’s return from Arabia,8 and they saw no immediate chance of getting rid of this dangerous intruder. They therefore took refuge in what St. Chrysostom calls “the syllogism of violence.” They might at least plead the excuse—and how bitter was the remorse which such a plea would excite in Saul’s own conscience—that they were only treating him in the way in which he himself had treated all who held the same opinions. Even–handed justice was thus commending to his own lips the ingredients of that poisoned chalice of intolerance which he had forced on others It is a far from improbable conjecture that it was at this early period that the Apostle endured one, and perhaps more than one, of those five Jewish scourgings which he tells the Corinthians that he had suffered at the hands of the Jews. For it is hardly likely that they would resort at once to the strongest measures, and the scourgings might be taken as a reminder that worse was yet to come. Indeed, there are few more striking proofs of the severity of that life which the Apostle so cheerfully—may, even so joyfully—endured, than the fact that in his actual biography not one of these five inflictions, terrible as we know that they must have been, is so much as mentioned, and that in his Epistles they are only recorded, among trials yet more insupportable, in a passing and casual allusion.9
But we know from the example of the Apostles at Jerusalem that no such pain or danger would have put a stop to his ministry. Like them, he would have seen an honour in such disgrace. At last, exasperated beyond all endurance at one whom they hated as a renegade, and whom they could not even enjoy the luxury of despising as a heretic, they made a secret plot to kill him.10 The conspiracy was made known to Saul, and he was on his guard against it. The Jews then took stronger and more open measures. They watched the gates night and day to prevent the possibility of his escape. In this they were assisted by the Etlinarch who supplied them with the means of doing it. This Ethnarch was either the Arab viceroy of Hareth, or the chief official of the Jews themselves,11 who well might possess this authority under a friendly prince.
There was thus an imminent danger that Saul would be cut off at the very beginning of his career. But this was not to be. The disciples “took Saul”12—another of the expressions which would tend to show that he was exceptionally in need of help—and putting him in a large rope basket,13 let him down through the window of a house which abutted on the wall.14 It may be that they chose a favourable moment when the patrol had passed, and had not yet turned round again. At any rate, the escape was full of ignominy; and it may have been this humiliation, or else the fact of its being among the earliest perils which he had undergone, that fixed it so indelibly on the memory of St. Paul. Nearly twenty years afterwards he mentions it to the Corinthians with special emphasis, after agonies and hair–breadth escapes which to us would have seemed far more formidable.15
Here, then, closed in shame and danger the first page in this chequered and sad career. How he made his way to Jerusalem must be left to conjecture. Doubtless, as he stole through the dark night alone—above all, as he passed the very spot where Christ had taken hold of him, and into one moment of his life had been crowded a whole eternity—his heart would be full of thoughts too deep for words. It has been supposed, from the expression of which he makes use in his speech to Agrippa, that he may have preached in many synagogues on the days which were occupied on his journey to Jerusalem.16 But this seems inconsistent with his own statement that he was “unknown by face to the churches of Judæa which were in Christ.”17 It is not, however, unlikely that he may sometimes have availed himself of the guest–chambers which were attached to Jewish synagogues; and if such was the case, he might have taught the first truths of the Gospel to the Jews without being thrown into close contact with Christian communities.
In any case, his journey could not have been much prolonged, for he tells us that it was his express object to visit Peter, whose recognition must have been invaluable to him, apart from the help and insight which he could not but derive from conversing with one who had long lived in such intimate friendship with the Lord.