“Cogitemus ipsum Paulum, licet caelesti voce prostratum et instructum, ad hominem tamen missum esse, ut sacrameuta perciperet.”—AUG. De Doctr. Christ., Prol.
To re–visit Jerusalem must have cost the future Apostle no slight effort. How deep must have been his remorse as he neared the spot where he had seen the corpse of Stephen lying crushed under the stones! With what awful interest must he now have looked on the scene of the Crucifixion, and the spot where He who was now risen and glorified had lain in the garden–tomb! How dreadful must have been the revulsion of feeling which rose from the utter change of his present relations towards the priests whose belief he had abandoned, and the Christians whose Gospel he had embraced! He had left Jerusalem a Rabbi, a Pharisee, a fanatic defender of the Oral Law; he was entering it as one who utterly distrusted the value of legal righteousness, who wholly despised the beggarly elements of tradition. The proud man had become unspeakably humble; the savage persecutor unspeakably tender; the self–satisfied Rabbi had abandoned in one moment his pride of nationality, his exclusive scorn, his Pharisaic preeminence, to take in exchange for them the beatitude of unjust persecution, and to become the suffering preacher of an execrated faith. What had he to expect from Theophilus, whose letters he had perhaps destroyed? from the Sanhedrists, whose zeal he had fired? from his old fellow–pupils in the lecture–room of Gamaliel, who had seen in Saul of Tarsus one who in learning was the glory of the school of Hillel, and in zeal the rival of the school of Shammai? How would he be treated by these friends of his youth, by these teachers and companions of his life, now that proclaiming his system, his learning, his convictions, his whole life—and therefore theirs no less than his—to have been irremediably wrong, he had become an open adherent of the little Church which he once ravaged and destroyed?
But amid the natural shrinking with which he could not but anticipate an encounter so full of trial, he would doubtless console himself with the thought that he would find a brother’s welcome among those sweet and gentle spirits whose faith he had witnessed, whose love for each other he had envied while he hated. How exquisite would be the pleasure of sharing that peace which he had tried to shatter; of urging on others those arguments which had been bringing conviction to his own mind even while he was most passionately resisting them; of hearing again and again from holy and gentle lips the words of Him whom he had once blasphemed! Saul might well have thought that the love, the nobleness, the enthusiasm of his new brethren would more than compensate for the influence and admiration which he had voluntarily forfeited; and that to pluck with them the fair fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, long–suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance—would be a bliss for which he might cheerfully abandon the whole world beside. No wonder that “he assayed to join himself to the disciples.”1 His knowledge of human nature might indeed have warned him that “confidence is a plant of slow growth”—that such a reception as he yearned for was hardly possible. It may be that he counted too much on the change wrought in human dispositions by the grace of God. The old Adam is oftentimes too strong for young Melancthon.
For, alas! a new trial awaited him. Peter, indeed, whom he had expressly come to see, at once received him with the large generosity of that impulsive heart, and being a married man, offered him hospitality without grudging.2 But at first that was all. It speaks no little for the greatness and goodness of Peter—it is quite in accordance with that natural nobleness which we should expect to find in one whom Jesus Himself had loved and blessed—that he was the earliest among the brethren to rise above the influence of suspicion. He was at this time the leader of the Church in Jerusalem. As such he had not been among those who fled before the storm. He must have known that it was at the feet of this young Pharisee that the garments of Stephen’s murderers had been laid. He must have feared him, perhaps even have hidden himself from him, when he forced his way into Christian homes. Nay, more, the heart of Peter must have sorely ached when he saw his little congregation slain, scattered, destroyed, and the cœnobitic community, the faith of which had been so bright, the enthusiasm so contagious, the common love so tender and so pure, rudely broken up by the pitiless persecution of a Pupil of the Schools. Yet, with the unquestioning trustfulness of a sunny nature—with that spiritual insight into character by which a Divine charity not only perceives real worth, but even creates worthiness where it did not before exist—Peter opens his door to one whom a meaner man might well have excluded as still too possibly a wolf amid the fold.
But of the other leaders of the Church—if there were any at that time in Jerusalem—not one came near the new convert, not one so much as spoke to him. He was met on every side by cold, distrustful looks. At one stroke he had lost all his old friends; it seemed to be too likely that he would gain no new ones in their place. The brethren regarded him with terror and mistrust; they did not believe that he was a disciple at all.3 The factswhich accompanied his alleged conversion they may indeed have heard of; but they had occurred three years before. The news of his recent preaching and recent peril in Damascus was not likely to have reached them; but even if it had, it would have seemed so strange that they might be pardoned for looking with doubt on the persecutor turned brother—for even fearing that the asserted conversion might only be a ruse to enable Saul to learn their secrets, and so entrap them to their final ruin. And thus at first his intercourse with the brethren in the Church of Jerusalem was almost confined to his reception in the house of Peter. “Other of the Apostles saw I none,” he writes to the Galatians, “save James the Lord’s brother.” But though he saw James, Paul seems to have had but little communion with him. All that we know of the first Bishop of Jerusalem shows us the immense dissimilarity, the almost antipathetic peculiarities which separated the characters of the two men. Even with the Lord Himself, if we may follow the plain language of the Gospels,4 the eldest of His brethren seems, during His life on earth, to have had but little communion. He accepted indeed His Messianic claims, but he accepted them in the Judaic sense, and was displeased at that in His life which was most unmistakably Divine. If he be rightly represented by tradition as a Legalist, a Nazarite, almost an Essene, spending his whole life in prayer in the Temple, it was his obedience to Mosaism—scarcely modified in any external particular by his conversion to Christianity—which had gained for him even from the Jews the surname of “the Just.” If, as seems almost demonstrable, he be the author of the Epistle which bears his name, we see how slight was the extent to which his spiritual life had been penetrated by those special aspects of the one great truth which were to Paul the very breath and life of Christianity. In that Epistle we find a stern and noble morality which raises it infinitely above the reproach of being “a mere Epistle of straw;”5 but we nevertheless do not find one direct word about the Incarnation, or the Crucifixion, or the Atonement, or Justification by Faith, or Sanctification by the Spirit, or the Resurrection of the Dead. The notion that it was written to counteract either the teaching of St. Paul, or the dangerous consequences which might sometimes be deduced from that teaching, is indeed most extremely questionable; and all that we can say of that supposition is, that it is not quite so monstrous a chimera as that which has been invented by the German theologians, who see St. Paul and his followers indignantly though covertly denounced in the Balaam and Jezebel of the Churches of Pergamos and Thyatira,6 and the Nicolaitans of the Church of Ephesus,7 and the “synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie,” of the Church of Philadelphia.8 And yet no one can read the Epistle of James side by side with any Epistle of St. Paul’s without perceiving how wide were the differences between the two Apostles. St. James was a man eminently inflexible; St. Paul knew indeed how to yield, but then the very points which he was least inclined to yield were those which most commanded the sympathy of James. What we know of Peter is exactly in accordance with the kind readiness with which he received the suspected and friendless Hellenist. What we know of James would have led us àpriori to assume that his relations with Paul would never get beyond the formal character which they wear in the Acts of the Apostles, and still more in the Epistle to the Galatians. But let it not be assumed that because there was little apparent sympathy and co–operation between St. Paul and St. James, and because they dwell on apparently opposite aspects of the truth, we should for one moment be justified in disparaging either the one or the other. The divergences which seem to arise from the analysis of truth by individual minds are merged in the catholicity of a wider synthesis. When St. Paul teaches that we are “justified by faith,” he is teaching a truth infinitely precious; and St. James is also teaching a precious truth when, with a different shade of meaning in both words, he says that “by works a man is justified.”9 The truths which these two great Apostles were commissioned to teach were complementary and supplementary, but not contradictory of each other. Of both aspects of truth we are the inheritors. If it be true that they did not cordially sympathise with each other in their life–time, the loss was theirs; but, even in that case, they were not the first instances in the Church of God—nor will they be the last— in which two good men, through the narrowness of one or the vehemence of the other, have been too much beset by the spirit of human infirmity to be able, in all perfectness, to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
The man who saved the new convert from this humiliating isolation—an isolation which must at that moment have been doubly painful—was the wise and generous Joseph. He has already been mentioned in the Acts as a Levite of Cyprus who, in spite of the prejudices of his rank, had been among the earliest to join the new community, and to sanction its happy communism by the sale of his own possessions. The dignity and sweetness of his character, no less than the sacrifices which he had made, gave him a deservedly high position among the persecuted brethren; and the power with which he preached the faith had won for him the surname of Barnabas, or “the son of exhortation.”10 His intimate relations with Paul in after–days, his journey all the way to Tarsus from Antioch to invite his assistance, and the unity of their purposes until the sad quarrel finally separated them, would alone render it probable that they had known each other at that earlier period of life during which, for the most part, the closest intimacies are formed. Tradition asserts that Joseph had been a scholar of Gamaliel, and the same feeling which led him to join a school of which one peculiarity was its permission of Greek learning, might have led him yet earlier to take a few hours’ sail from Cyprus to see what could be learnt in the University of Tarsus. If so, he would naturally have come into contact with the family of Saul, and the friendship thus commenced would be continued at Jerusalem. It had been broken by the conversion of Barnabas, it was now renewed by the conversion of Saul.
Perhaps also it was to this friendship that Saul owed his admission as a guest into Peter’s house. There was a close link of union between Barnabas and Peter in the person of Mark, who was the cousin11 of Barnabas, and whom Peter loved so tenderly that he calls him his son. The very house in which Peter lived may have been the house of Mary, the mother of Mark. It is hardly probable that the poor fisherman of Galilee possessed any dwelling of his own in the Holy City. At any rate, Peter goes to this house immediately after his liberation from prison, and if Peter lived in it, the relation of Barnabas to its owner would have given him some claim to ask that Saul should share its hospitality.—Generous as Peter was, it would have required an almost superhuman amount of confidence to receive at once under his roof a man who had tried by the utmost violence to extirpate the very fibres of the Church. But if one so highly honoured as Barnabas was ready to vouch for him, Peter was not the man to stand coldly aloof. Thus it happened that Saul’s earliest introduction to the families of those whom he had scattered would be made under the high auspices of the greatest of the Twelve.
The imagination tries in vain to penetrate the veil of two thousand years which hangs between us and the intercourse of the two Apostles. Barnabas, we may be sure, must have been often present in the little circle, and must have held many an earnest conversation with his former friend. Mary, the mother of Mark, would have something to tell.12 Mark may have been an eyewitness of more than one pathetic scene. But how boundless would be the wealth of spiritual wisdom which Peter must have unfolded! Is it not certain that from those lips St. Paul must have heard about the Divine brightness of the dawning ministry of Jesus during the Galilæan year—about the raising of Jairus’ daughter, and the Transfiguration on Hermon, and the discourse in the synagogue of Capernaum, and the awful scenes which had occurred on the day of the Crucifixion? And is it not natural to suppose that such a hearer—a hearer of exceptional culture, and enlightened to an extraordinary degree by the Holy Spirit of God—would grasp many of the words of the Lord with a firmness of grasp, and see into the very inmost heart of their significance with a keenness of insight, from which his informant might, in his turn, be glad to learn?
It must be a dull imagination that does not desire to linger for a moment on the few days during which two such men were inmates together of one obscure house in the city of Jerusalem. But however fruitful their intercourse, it did not at once secure to the new disciple a footing among the brethren whose poverty and persecutions he came to share. Then it was that Barnabas came forward, and saved Saul for the work of the Church. The same discrimination of character, the same charity of insight which afterwards made him prove Mark to be a worthy comrade of their second mission, in spite of his first defection, now made him vouch unhesitatingly for the sincerity of Saul. Taking him by the hand, he led him into the presence of the Apostles—the term being here used for Peter,13 and James the Lord’s brother,14 and the elders of the assembled church—and there narrated to them the circumstances, which either they had never heard, or of the truth of which they had not yet been convinced. He told them of the vision on the road to Damascus, and of the fearlessness with which Saul had vindicated his sincerity in the very city to which he had come as an enemy. The words of Barnabas carried weight, and his confidence was contagious. Saul was admitted among the Christians on a footing of friendship, “going in and out among them.” To the generosity and clear–sightedness of Joseph of Cyprus, on this and on a later occasion, the Apostle owed a vast debt of gratitude. Next only to the man who achieves the greatest and most blessed deeds is he who, perhaps himself wholly incapable of such high work, is yet the first to help and encourage the genius of others. We often do more good by our sympathy than by our labours, and render to the world a more lasting service by absence of jealousy, and recognition of merit, than we could ever render by the straining efforts of personal ambition.
No sooner was Saul recognised as a brother, than he renewed the ministry which he had begun at Damascus. It is, however, remarkable that he did not venture to preach to the Hebrew Christians. He sought the synagogues of the Hellenists in which the voice of Stephen had first been heard, and disputed with an energy not inferior to his. It was incumbent on him, though it was a duty which required no little courage, that his voice should be uplifted in the name of the Lord Jesus in the places where it had been heard of old in blasphemy against Him. But this very circumstance increased his danger. His preaching was again cut short by a conspiracy to murder him.15
It was useless to continue in a place where to stay was certain death. The little Galilæan community got information of the plot. To do the Jews justice, they showed little skill in keeping the secret of these deadly combinations. It was natural that the Church should not only desire to save Saul’s life, but also to avoid the danger of a fresh outbreak. Yet it was not without a struggle, and a distinct intimation that such was the will of God, that Saul yielded to the solicitations of his brethren. How deeply he felt this compulsory flight, may be seen in the bitterness with which he alludes to it16 even after the lapse of many years. He had scarcely been a fortnight in Jerusalem when the intensity of his prayers and emotions ended in a trance,17 during which he again saw the Divine figure and heard the Divine voice which had arrested his mad progress towards the gates of Damascus. “Make instant haste, and depart in speed from Jerusalem,” said Jesus to him; “for they will not receive thy testimony concerning Me.” But to Saul it seemed incredible that his testimony could be resisted. If the vision of the risen Christ by which he had been converted was an argument which, from the nature of the case, could not, alone, be convincing to others, yet it seemed to Saul that, knowing what they did know of his intellectual power, and contrasting his present earnestness with his former persecution, they could not but listen to such a teacher as himself. He longed also to undo, so far as in him lay, the misery and mischief of the past havoc he had wrought. But however deep may have been his yearnings, however ardent his hopes, the answer came brief and peremptory, “Go! for I will send thee forth afar to the Gentiles.”18
All reluctance was now at an end; and we can see what at the time must have been utterly dark and mysterious to St. Paul,—that the coldness with which he was received at Jerusalem, and the half–apparent desire to precipitate his departure—events so alien to his own plans and wishes, that he pleads even against the Divine voice which enforced the indications of circumstance—were part of a deep providential design. Years afterward, when St. Paul “stood pilloried on infamy’s high stage,” he was able with one of his strongest asseverations to appeal to the brevity of his stay in Jerusalem, and the paucity of those with whom he had any intercourse, in proof that it was not from the Church of Jerusalem that he had received his commission, and not to the Apostles at Jerusalem that he owed his allegiance. But though at present all this was unforeseen by him, he yielded to the suggestions of his brethren, and scarcely a fortnight after his arrival they—not, perhaps, wholly sorry to part with one whose presence was a source of many embarrassments—conducted him to the coast town of Cæsarea Stratonis19 to start him on his way to his native Tarsus. Of his movements on this occasion we hear no more in the Acts of the Apostles; but in the Epistle to the Galatians he says that he came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, but remained a complete stranger to the churches of Judæa that were in Christ, all that they had heard of him being the rumours that their former persecutor was now an evangelist of the faith of which he was once a destroyer; news which gave them occasion to glorify God in him.20
Since we next find him at Tarsus, it might have been supposed that he sailed there direct, and there remained. The expression, however, that “he came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia,” seems to imply that this was not the case.21 Syria and Cilicia were at this time politically separated, and there is room for the conjecture that the ship in which the Apostle sailed was destined, not for Tarsus, but for Tyre, or Sidon, or Seleucia, the port of Antioch. The existence of friends and disciples of Saul in the Phœnician towns, and the churches of Syria as well as Cilicia,22 point, though only with dim uncertainty, to the possibility that he performed part of his journey to Tarsus by land, and preached on the way. There is even nothing impossible in Mr. Lewin’s suggestion23 that his course may have been determined by one of those three shipwrecks which he mentions that he had undergone. But the occasions and circumstances of the three shipwrecks must be left to the merest conjecture. They occurred during the period when St. Luke was not a companion of St. Paul, and he has thought it sufficient to give from his own journal the graphic narrative of that later catastrophe of which he shared the perils. The active ministry in Syria and Cilicia may have occupied the period between Saul’s departure in the direction of Tarsus, and his summons to fresh fields of labour in the Syrian Antioch. During this time he may have won over to the faith some of the members of his own family, and may have enjoyed the society of others who were in Christ before him. But all is uncertain, nor can we with the least confidence restore the probabilities of a period of which even the traditions have for centuries been obliterated. The stay of Saul at Tarsus was on any supposition a period mainly of waiting and of preparation, of which the records had no large significance in the history of the Christian faith. The fields in which he was to reap were whitening for the harvest; the arms of the reaper were being strengthened, and his heart prepared.