“O great Apostle! rightly now
Thou readest all thy Saviour meant,
What time His grave yet gentle brow
In sweet reproof on thee was bent.”—KEBLE.
THUS it was that at Antioch the Church of Christ was enlarged, and the views of its members indefinitely widened. For a whole year—and it may well have been the happiest year in the life of Saul—he worked here with his beloved companion. The calm and conciliatory tact of Barnabas tempered and was inspirited by the fervour of Saul. Each contributed his own high gifts to clear away the myriad obstacles which still impeded the free flow of the river of God’s grace. In the glory and delight of a ministry so richly successful, it is far from impossible that Saul may have enjoyed that rapturous revelation which he describes in the Epistle to the Corinthians, during which he was caught up into Paradise as far as the third heaven,1 and heard unspeakable words which man neither could nor ought to utter. It was one of those ecstasies which the Jews themselves regarded as the highest form of revelation—one of those moments of inspiration in which the soul, like Moses on Sinai, sees God face to face and does not die. St Paul, it must be remembered, had a work to perform which required more absolute self–sacrifice, more unwavering faith, more undaunted courage, more unclouded insight, more glorious superiority to immemorial prejudices, than any man who ever lived. It needed moments like this to sustain the nameless agonies, to kindle the inspiring flame of such a life. The light upon the countenance of Moses might die away, like the radiance of a mountain peak which has caught the colour of the dawn, but the glow in the heart of Paul could never fade. The utterance of the unspeakable words might cease to vibrate in the soul, but no after–influence could obliterate the impression of the eternal message. Amid seas and storms, amid agonies and energies, even when all earthly hopes had ceased, we may be sure that the voice of God still rang in his heart, the vision of God was still bright before his spiritual eye.
The only recorded incident of this year of service is the visit of certain brethren from Jerusalem, of whom one, named Agabus prophesied the near occurrence of a general famine. The warning note which he sounded was not in vain. It quickened the sympathies of the Christians at Antioch, and enabled the earliest of the Gentile Churches to give expression to their reverence for those venerable sufferers in the Mother Church of Jerusalem who “had seen and heard, and whose hands had handled the Word of Life.”2 A contribution was made for the brethren of Judæa. The inhabitants of that country, and more especially of the Holy City, have been accustomed in all ages, as they are in this, to rely largely on the chaluka,3 or alms, which are willingly contributed to their poverty by Jews living in other countries. The vast sums collected for the Temple tribute flowed into the bursting coffers of the Benı̂ Hanan—much as they now do, though in dwindled rills, into those of a few of the leading Ashkenazim and Ansche hod. But there would be little chance that any of these treasures would help to alleviate the hunger of the struggling disciples. Priests who starved their own coadjutors4 would hardly be inclined to subsidise their impoverished opponents. The Gentiles, who had been blessed by the spiritual wealth of Jewish Christians, cheerfully returned the benefit by subscribing to the supply of their temporal needs.5 The sums thus gathered were entrusted by the Church to Barnabas and Saul.
The exact month in which these two messengers of mercy arrived to assist their famine–stricken brethren cannot be ascertained, but there can be but little doubt that it was in the year 44. On their arrival they found the Church in strange distress from a new persecution. It is not impossible that the fury of the onslaught may once more have scattered the chief Apostles, for we hear nothing of any intercourse between them and the two great leaders of the Church of Antioch. Indeed, it is said that the alms were handed over, not to the Apostles, but to the Elders. It is true that Elders may include Apostles, but the rapid and purely monetary character of the visit, and the complete silence as to further details, seem to imply that this was not the case.
The Church of Antioch was not the sole contributor to the distresses of Jerusalem. If they helped their Christian brethren, the Jews found benefactors in the members of an interesting household, the royal family of Adiabene, whose history is much mingled at this time with that of Judæa, and sheds instructive light on the annals of early Christianity.
Adiabene, once a province of Assyria, now forms part of the modern Kurdistan. Monobazus, the king of this district, had married his sister Helena, and by that marriage had two sons, of whom the younger, Izates, was the favourite of his parents.6 To save him from the jealousy of his other brothers, the king and queen sent him to the court of Abennerig, king of the Charax–Spasini, who gave him his daughter in marriage. While he was living in this sort of honourable exile, a Jewish merchant, named Hananiah, managed to find admission into the harem of Abennerig, and to convert some of his wives to the Jewish faith. In this way he was introduced to Izates, of whom he also made a proselyte. Izates was recalled by his father before his death, and endowed with the princedom of Charrae; and when Monobazus died, Helena summoned the leading men of Adiabene, and informed them that Izates had been appointed successor to the crown. These satraps accepted the decision, but advised Helena to make her elder son, Monobazus, a temporary sovereign until the arrival of his brother, and to put the other brothers in bonds preparatory to their assassination in accordance with the common fashion of Oriental despotism.7 Izates, however, on his arrival, was cheerfully acknowledged by his elder brother, and set all his other brothers free, though he sent them as hostages to Rome and various neighbouring courts. I shall subsequently relate the very remarkable circumstances which led to his circumcision.8 At present I need only mention that his reign was long and prosperous, and that he was able to render such important services to Artabanus, the nineteenth Arsacid, that he received from him the kingdom of Nisibis, as well as the right to wear the peak of his tiara upright, and to sleep in a golden bed—privileges usually reserved for the kings of Persia. Even before these events, Helena had been so much struck with the prosperity and piety of her son, that she too had embraced Judaism, and at this very period was living in Jerusalem. Being extremely wealthy, and a profound admirer of Jewish institutions, she took energetic measures to alleviate the severity of the famine; and by importing large quantities of corn from Alexandria, and of dried figs from Cyprus, she was happily able to save many lives. Her royal bounty was largely aided by the liberality of Izates,9 whose contributions continued to be of service to the Jews long after the arrival of Saul and Barnabas with the alms which they had brought from Antioch for their suffering brethren.
It is clear that they arrived shortly before the Passover, or towards the end of March; for St. Luke fixes their visit about the time of Herod’s persecution, which began just before, and would, but for God’s Providence, have been consummated just after, that great feast. Indeed, it was à priori probable that the Apostles would time their visit by the feast, both from a natural desire to be present at these great annual celebrations, and also because that was the very time at which the vast concourse of visitors would render their aid most timely and indispensable.
They arrived, therefore, at a period of extreme peril to the little Church at Jerusalem, which had now enjoyed some five years of unbroken peace.10
Herod Agrippa I., of whom we have already had some glimpses, was one of those singular characters who combine external devotion with moral laxity. I have elsewhere told the strange story of the part which on one memorable day he played in Roman history,11 and how his supple address and determination saved Rome from a revolution and placed the uncouth Claudius on his nephew’s throne. Claudius, who with all his pedantic and uxorious eccentricity was not devoid either of kindness or rectitude, was not slow to recognise that he owed to the Jewish prince both his life and his empire. It was probably due, in part at least, to the influence of Agrippa that shortly after his accession he abolished the law of “Impiety” on which Gaius had so vehemently insisted,12 and which attached the severest penalties to any neglect of the imperial cult. But the further extension of the power of Agrippa was fraught with disastrous consequences to the Church of Christ. For the Jews were restored to the fullest privileges which they had ever enjoyed, and Agrippa set sail for Palestine in the flood–tide of imperial favour and with the splendid additions of Judæa and Samaria, Abilene, and the district of Lebanon13 to Herod Philip’s tetrarchy of Trachonitis, which he had received at the accession of Gaius.14
It is natural that a prince of Asmonæan blood,15 who thus found himself in possession of a dominion as extensive as that of his grandfather Herod the Great, should try to win the favour of the people whom he was sent to govern. Apart from the subtle policy of facing both ways so as to please the Jews while he dazzled the Romans, and to enjoy his life in the midst of Gentile luxuries while he affected the reputation of a devoted Pharisee, Agrippa seems to have been sincere in his desire to be—at any rate at Jerusalem— an observer of the Mosaic Law. St. Luke, though his allusions to him are so brief and incidental, shows remarkable fidelity to historic facts in presenting him to us in both these aspects. In carrying out his policy, Agrippa paid studious court to the Jews, and especially to the Pharisees. He omitted nothing which could win their confidence or flatter their pride, and his wife, Cypros,16 seems also to have been as much attached to the party as her kinswoman, Salome, sister of Herod the Great.17
It is clear that such a king—a king who wished to foster the sense of Jewish nationality,18 to satisfy the Sadducees, to be supported by the Pharisees, and to be popular with the multitude—could not have lived long in Jerusalem, which was his usual place of residence,19 without hearing many complaints about the Christians. At this time they had become equally distasteful to every section of the Jews, being regarded not only as fanatics, but as apostates, some of whom sat loosely to the covenant which God had made with their fathers. To extirpate the Christians would, as Agrippa was well aware, be the cheapest possible way to win general popularity. It was accordingly about the very time of the visit of the two Apostles to the Passover, as delegates from Antioch, that “he laid hands on certain of the Church to injure them; and he slew James, the brother of John, with the sword; and seeing that it was pleasing to the Jews, proceeded to arrest Peter also.”20 Thus in a single touch does St. Luke strike the keynote of Agrippa’s policy, which was an unscrupulous desire for such popularity as could be earned by identifying himself with Jewish prejudices. In the High Priests of the day he would find willing coadjutors. The priest for the time being was probably Elionæus, whom Josephus calls a son of Kanthera, but whom the Talmud calls a son of Caiaphas.21 If so, he would have been animated with an hereditary fury against the followers of Christ, and would have been an eager instrument in the hands of Herod. When such allies were in unison, and Agrippa in the very plenitude of his power, it was easy to strike a deadly blow at the Nazarenes. It was no bold Hellenist who was now singled out as a victim, no spirited opponent of Jewish exclusiveness. James, as the elder brother of the beloved disciple, perhaps as a kinsman of Christ Himself, as one of the earliest and one of the most favoured Apostles, as one not only of the Twelve, but of the Three, as the son of a father apparently of higher social position than the rest of the little band, seems to have had a sort of precedence at Jerusalem; and for this reason alone—not, so far as we are aware, from being personally obnoxious—he was so suddenly seized and martyred that no single detail or circumstance of his martyrdom has been preserved. Two words22 are all the space devoted to recount the death of the first Apostle by the historian who had narrated at such length the martyrdom of Stephen. It may be merely due to a sense of inadequacy in this brief record that Christian tradition told how the constancy and the harangues of James converted his accuser, and caused him to become a voluntary sharer of his death.23 But perhaps we are meant to see a spiritual fitness in this lonely and unrecorded end of the son of Thunder. He had stood by Jesus at the bedside of the daughter of Jairus, and on the holy mount, and in the agony of the garden; had once wished to call down fire from heaven on those who treated his Lord with incivility; had helped to urge the claim that he might sit in closest proximity to His throne of judgment. There is a deep lesson in the circumstance that he should, meekly and silently, in utter self–renouncement, with no visible consolation, with no elaborate eulogy, amid no pomp of circumstance, with not even a recorded burial, perish first of the faithful few who had forsaken all to follow Christ, and so be the first to fulfil the warning prophecy that he should drink of His bitter cup, and be baptised with His fiery baptism.
It was before the Passover that James had been doomed to feel the tyrant’s sword. The universal approbation of the fact by the Jews—an approbation which would be all the more conspicuous from the presence of the vast throngs who came to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover— stimulated the king, to whom no incense was so sweet as the voice of popular applause, to inflict a blow yet more terrible by seizing the most prominent of all the Apostles. Peter was accordingly arrested, and since there was no time to finish his trial before the Passover, and the Jews were not inclined to inflict death by their own act during the Feast, he was kept in prison till the seven sacred days had elapsed that he might then be put to death with the most ostentatious publicity.24 Day after day the Apostle remained in close custody, bound by either arm to two soldiers, and guarded by two others. Aware how irreparable would be the loss of one so brave, so true, so gifted with spiritual fervour and wisdom, the Christians of Jerusalem poured out their hearts and souls in prayer for his deliverance. But it seemed as if all would be in vain. The last night of the Feast had come; the dawn of the morning would see Peter brought forth to the mockery of trial, and the certainty of death. It seemed as if the day had already come when, as his Lord had told him, another should gird him, and carry him whither he would not. But in that last extremity God had not forsaken His Apostle or His Church. On that last night, by a divine deliverance, so sudden, mysterious, and bewildering, that to Peter, until he woke to the sober certainty of his rescue, it seemed like a vision,25 the great Apostle was snatched from his persecutors. After briefly narrating the circumstances of his deliverance to the brethren assembled in the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark the Evangelist, he entrusted them with the duty of bearing the same message to James, the Lord’s brother, and to the other Christians who were not present, and withdrew for a time to safe retirement, while Herod was left to wreak his impotent vengeance on the unconscious quaternion of soldiers.
It might well seem as though the blood of martyrdom brought its own retribution on the heads of those who cause it to be spilt. We have seen Agrippa in the insolent plenitude of his tyranny; the next scene exhibits him in the horrible anguish of his end. It was at the beginning of April, A.D. 44, that he had slain James and arrested Peter; it was probably the very same month which ended his brief and guilty splendour, and cut him off in the flower of his life.
Versatile and cosmopolitan as was natural in an adventurer whose youth and manhood had experienced every variety of fortune, Agrippa could play the heathen at Cæsarea with as much zeal as he could play the Pharisee at Jerusalem. The ordinary herd of Rabbis and hierarchs had winked at this phase of his royalty, and had managed to disintegrate in their imaginations the Herod who offered holocausts in the Temple, from the Herod who presided in amphitheatres at Berytus; the Herod who wept, because he was only half a Jew, in the Temple at the Passover, and the Herod who presided at Pagan spectacles at Cæsarean jubilees.26 One bold Pharisee—Simon by name—did indeed venture for a time to display the courage of his opinions. During an absence of Agrippa from Jerusalem, he summoned an assembly and declared the king’s actions to be so illegal that, on this ground, as well as on the ground of his Idumæan origin, he ought to be excluded from the Temple. As it was not Agrippa’s object to break with the Pharisees, he merely sent for Simon to Cæsarea, made him sit by his side in the theatre, and then asked him gently “whether he saw anything there which contradicted the law of Moses?” Simon either was or pretended to be convinced that there was no overt infraction of Mosaic regulations, and after begging the king’s pardon was dismissed with a small present.
It was in that same theatre that Agrippa met his end. Severe troubles had arisen in the relations between Judæa and the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, and since that maritime strip of coast depends entirely for its subsistence on the harvests of Palestine, it was of the extremest importance to the inhabitants of the merchant cities that they should keep on good terms with the little autocrat.27 The pressure of the famine, which would fall on them with peculiar severity, made them still more anxious to bring about a reconciliation, and the visit of Agrippa to Cæsarea on a joyful occasion furnished them with the requisite opportunity.
That occasion was the news that Claudius had returned in safety from his expedition to Britain, and had been welcomed at Rome with an outburst of flattery, in which the interested princelings of the provinces thought it politic to bear their part.28 Agrippa was always glad of any excuse which enabled him to indulge his passion for gladiatorial exhibitions and the cruel vanities of Roman dissipation. Accordingly he hurried to Cæsarea, which was the Roman capital of Palestine, and ordered every preparation to be made for a splendid festival. To this town came the deputies of Tyre and Sidon, taking care to secure a friend at court in the person of Blastus, the king’s groom of the bedchamber.29
It was on the second morning of the festival, at the early dawn of a burning day in the Syrian spring, that Agrippa gave audience to the Phœnician embassy. It was exactly the time and place and occasion in which he would be glad to display his magnificence and wealth. Accordingly he entered the theatre with his royal retinue in an entire robe of tissued silver, and taking his seat on the bêma, made to the Tyrians and Sidonians a set harangue. As he sat there the sun blazed on his glittering robe, and seemed to wrap him in a sheet of splendour. The theatre was thronged with his creatures, his subjects, the idle mob whose amusement he was supplying with profuse liberality, and the people whose prosperity depended on his royal favour. Here and there among the crowd a voice began to be heard shouting that it was a god who was speaking to them,30 a god whose radiant epiphany was manifested before their eyes. In the prime of life, and of the manly beauty for which his race was remarkable, at the zenith of his power, in the seventh year of his reign, in the plenitude of his wealth,31 an autocrat by his own position, and an autocrat rendered all but irresistible by the support of the strange being whom his supple address had saved from the dagger to seat him on the imperial throne—surrounded, too, at this moment by flatterers and parasites, and seated in the very midst of the stately buildings which Jews and Gentiles alike knew to have been conferred upon the city by the architectural extravagance of his race—the feeble intellect of Agrippa was turned by this intoxicating incense. He thought himself to be the god whom they declared. Why should not heaccept the apotheosis so abjectly obtruded on a Caligula or a Claudius? He accepted the blasphemous adulation, which, as a King of the Jews, he ought to have rejected with indignant horror. At that very moment his doom was sealed. It was a fresh instance of that irony of heaven which often seems to place men in positions of superlative gorgeousness at the very moment when the fiat is uttered which consigns them to the most pitiable and irrecoverable fall.32
There was no visible intervention. No awful voice sounded in the ears of the trembling listeners. No awful hand wrote fiery letters upon the wall. St. Luke says merely that the angel of God smote him. Josephus introduces the grotesque incident of an owl seated above him on one of the cords which ran across the theatre, which Agrippa saw, and recognised in it the predicted omen of impending death.33 Whether he saw an owl or not, he was carried from the theatre to his palace a stricken man—stricken by the hand of God. In five days from that time— five days of internal anguish and vain despair,34 in the fifty–fourth year of his age, and the fourth of his reign over the entire dominion of his grandfather—Agrippa died. And whatever may be the extent to which he had won the goodwill of the Jews by his lavish benefactions, the Gentiles hated him all the more because he was not only a Jew but an apostate. A consistent Jew they could in some measure tolerate, even while they hated him; but for these hybrid renegades they always express an unmitigated contempt. The news of Agrippa’s death was received by the population, and especially by the soldiers, both at Cæsarea and Sebaste with feastings, carousals, and every indication of indecent joy. Not content with crowning themselves with garlands, and pouring libations to the ferryman of the Styx, they tore down from the palace the statues of Agrippa’s daughters, and subjected them to the most infamous indignities. The foolish inertness of Claudius left the insult unpunished, and these violent and dissolute soldiers contributed in no small degree to the evils which not many years afterwards burst over Judæa with a storm of fire and sword.35
Of these scenes Saul and Barnabas may have been eye–witnesses on their return journey from Jerusalem to Antioch. The order of events in St. Luke may indeed be guided by the convenience of narrating consecutively all that he had to say about Herod Agrippa, and above all of showing how the sudden onslaught on the Church, which seemed to threaten it with nothing short of extermination, was checked by the deliverance of Peter, and arrested by the retribution of God. This would be the more natural if, as there seems to be good reason to believe, the ghastly death of Herod took place in the very same month in which, by shedding the blood of the innocent in mere pursuit of popularity, he had consummated his crimes.36 If Saul and Barnabas were at Jerusalem during Peter’s imprisonment, they may have been present at the prayer meeting at the house of Mary, the mother of Mark, and the kinswoman of Barnabas. If so we can at once account for the vivid minuteness of the details furnished to St. Luke respecting the events of that memorable time.37
In any case, they must have heard the death of Agrippa discussed a thousand times, and must have recognised in it a fresh proof of the immediate governance of God. But this was to them a truth of the most elementary character. Their alleged indifference to public questions simply arose from their absorption in other interests. Their minds were full of deeper concerns than the pride and fall of kings; and their visit to Jerusalem was so purely an episode in the work of St. Paul that in the Epistle to the Galatians he passes it over without a single allusion.38 There is nothing surprising in the omission. It is the object of the Apostle to show his absolute independence of the Twelve. This second visit to Jerusalem had, therefore, no bearing on the subject with which he was dealing. More than eleven years had already elapsed since the Crucifixion, and a very ancient tradition says that twelve years (which to the Jews would mean anything above eleven years) was the period fixed by our Lord for the stay of the Apostles in the Holy City.39 Even if we attach no importance to the tradition, it is certain that it approximates to known facts, and we may therefore assume that, about this time, the Apostles began to be scattered in various directions. St. Paul passes over this eleemosynary visit, either because in this connexion it did not occur to his memory, or because the mention of it was wholly unimportant for his purpose.
Yet there was one circumstance of this visit which was fraught with future consequences full of sadness to both the Apostles. Barnabas, as we have seen, was nearly related to John Mark, son40 of that Mary in whose house was the upper room. It would be most natural that he, and therefore that Saul, should, during their short visit, be guests in Mary’s house, and the enthusiasm of her son may well have been kindled by the glowing spirit of his cousin and the yet more fiery ardour of his great companion. The danger of further persecution seemed to be over, but Peter, Mark’s close friend and teacher, was no longer in Jerusalem, and, in spite of any natural anxieties which the prevalent famine may have caused, the Christian mother consented to part with her son, and he left Jerusalem in the company of the Apostle of the Gentiles.