“Whoso breaketh a hedge [applied by the Rabbis to their SeyyaglaThorah, or ‘hedgo for the Law’], a serpent shall bite him.”—ECCLES. 10:8.
“‘Gods of Hellas! Gods of Hellas!’
Said the old Hellenic tongue;
Said the hero–oaths, as well as
Poets’ songs the sweetest sung!
‘Have ye grown deaf in a day?
Can ye speak not yea or nay—
Since Pan is dead?’”—E. BARRETT BROWNING.
“Die Götter sanken vom Himmelsthron
Es stürtzten die Herrlichen Saülen,
Und geboren würde der Jungfrau Sohn
Die Gebrechen der Erde zu heilen;
Verbannt war der Sinne flüchtige Lust
Und der Mensch griff denkend in seine Brust.”—SCHILLER.
WHEN Barnabas and Saul returned to Antioch they found the Church still animated by the spirit of happy activity It was evidently destined to eclipse the importance of the Holy City as a centre and stronghold of the Faith. In the Church of Jerusalem there were many sources of weakness which were wanting at Antioch. It was hampered by depressing poverty. It had to bear the brunt of the earliest persecutions. Its lot was cast in the very furnace of Jewish hatred; and yet the views of its most influential elders were so much identified with their old Judaic training that they would naturally feel less interest in any attempt to proselytise the Gentiles.
At Antioch all was different. There the prejudices of the Jews wore an aspect more extravagant, and the claims of the Gentiles assumed a more overwhelming importance. At Jerusalem the Christians had been at the mercy of a petty Jewish despot. At Antioch the Jews were forced to meet the Christians on terms of perfect equality, under the impartial rule of Roman law.1
Of the constitution of the early Church at Antioch nothing is said, but we are told of a little group of prophets and teachers2 who occupied a prominent position in their religious services. These were Barnabas, Simeon (surnamed, for distinction’s sake, Niger, and possibly, therefore, like Lucius, a native of Cyrene), Manaen, and Saul. Of Simeon and Lucius nothing whatever is known, since the suggestion that Lucius may be the same person as Luke the Evangelist is too foundationless to deserve a refutation. Of Manaen, or, to give him his proper Jewish name, Menahem, we are told the interesting circumstance that he was the foster–brother of Herod Antipas. It has, therefore, been conjectured that he may have been a son of the Essene who lent to Herod the Great the influence of his high authority,3 and who, when Herod was a boy at school, had patted him on the back and told him he should one day be king.4 If so, Menahem must have been one of the few early converts who came from wealthy positions; but there is nothing to prove that he was thus connected with the celebrated Essene, and in any case he can hardly have been his son.5
It was during a period of special service, accompanied by fasting, that the Holy Spirit brought home to their souls the strong conviction of the new work which lay before the Church, and of the special commission of Barnabas and Saul.6 The language in which this Divine intimation is expressed seems to imply a sudden conviction following upon anxious deliberation; and that special prayer and fasting7 had been undertaken by these prophets and teachers in order that they might receive guidance to decide about a course which had been already indicated to the two Apostles.
St. Paul, indeed, must long have yearned for the day in which the Lord should see fit to carry out His own promise “to send him far hence to the Gentiles.”8 The more deeply he thought over his predicted mission, the more would he realise that it had been predestined in the councils of God. Gentiles worshipped idols, but so had their own fathers done when they dwelt beyond Euphrates. Jewish Rabbis had admitted that, after all, Abraham himself was but the earliest of the proselytes.9 If, as legend told, Terah had been a maker of idols, and if Abraham had received his first call, as Stephen had said, while yet living in Ur of the Chaldees, why should not thousands of the heathen be yet numbered among the elect of God? Had not God made of one blood all the nations upon earth? Had not the aged Simeon prophesied that the infant Jesus should be a light to lighten the Gentiles, no less than the glory of His people Israel? And were there not to be reckoned among His human ancestors Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, and Ruth, the loving woman of the accursed race of Moab? Had not Hadassah been a sultana in the seraglio of Xerxes? Had not Moses himself married a woman of Ethiopia?10 And among the great doctors of recent days was it not asserted that Shammai was descended from Haman, the Amalekite?11 And, however necessary had been the active hostility to mixed marriages, and all other close intercourse with the heathen in the reforming period of Ezra and Nehemiah, had not Zephaniah declared in the voice of prophecy that “men should worship Jehovah every one from his place, even all the isles of the heathen?”12 Nay, did no deeper significance than was suggested in the vulgar exegesis lie in the ancient promise to Abraham, that “in him all families of the earth should be blessed?”13 Did the prophecy that all the ends of the earth should see the salvation of our God14 merely mean that they should see it as excluded aliens, or as wanderers doomed to perish? If the Gentiles were to come to the light of Zion, and kings to the brightness of her dawn—if the isles were to wait for God, and the ships of Tarshish15—did this merely mean that the nations were but to be distant admirers and tolerated servants, admitted only to the exoteric doctrines and the less peculiar blessings, and tolerated only as dubious worshippers in the Temple’s outmost courts? Would not this be to them a blessing like the blessing of Esau, which was almost like a curse, that their dwelling should be away from the fatness of the earth, and away from the dew of blessing from above?16 Or, after all, if such reasonings were inconclusive—if, however conclusive, they were still inadequate to break down that barrier of prejudice which was an obstacle more difficult to surmount than the middle wall of partition—was any argument needful, when they had heard so recently the command of their Lord that they were to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature,17 and the prophecythat they should be witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth?18
Such convictions may have been in the heart of Paul long before he could persuade others to join in giving effect to them. It is matter of daily experience that the amount of reasoning which ought to be sufficient to produce immediate action is often insufficient to procure even a languid assent. But the purpose of the Apostle was happily aided by the open–hearted candour of Barnabas, the intellectual freshness of the Church of Antioch, and the immense effect produced by the example of Peter, who had won even from the Church of Jerusalem a reluctant acquiescence in the baptism of Cornelius.
And apart from the all but ineradicable dislike towards the heathen which must have existed in the minds of Jews and Jewish Christians, as a legacy of six centuries of intolerance—even supposing this dislike to be removed from within—yet the attempt to win over to the new faith the vast opposing forces of Judaism and heathenism without the fold might well have seemed fantastic and impossible. Could any but those whose hearts were lit with a zeal which consumed every difficulty, and dilated with a faith to which it seemed easy to remove mountains, listen without a smile to the proposal of evangelising the world which was then being advanced by two poor Jews—Jews who, as Jews by birth, were objects of scorn to the Gentiles, and as Jews who sat loose to what had come to be regarded as the essence of Judaism, were objects of detestation to Jews themselves? Is it possible to imagine two emissaries less likely to preach with acceptance “to the Jew first, and afterwards to the Greek?” And if the acceptance of such a mission required nothing short of the religious genius and ardent faith of Paul, surely nothing short of the immediate aid of the Holy Spirit of God could have given to that mission so grand and eternal a success.
For even had the mission been to the Jews exclusively, the difficulties which it presented might well have seemed insuperable. It must utterly fail unless the Jew could be persuaded of two things, of which one would be most abhorrent to his pride, the other most opposed to his convictions, and both most alien to his deepest prejudices. To become a Christian he would be forced to admit that all his cherished conceptions of the Messiah had been carnal and erroneous, and that when, after awaiting His advent for twenty centuries, that Lord had come suddenly to His Temple, the Jews had not only rejected but actually crucified Him, and thereby filled up the guilt which their fathers had incurred by shedding the blood of the Prophets. Further, he would have to acknowledge that not only his “hereditary customs,” but even the Law—the awful fiery Law which he believed to have been delivered by God Himself from the shrouded summit of Sinai—was destined, in all the facts which he regarded as most distinctive, to be superseded by the loftier and more spiritual revelation of this crucified Messiah. Lastly, he would have to resign without a murmur those exclusive privileges, that religious haughtiness by which he avenged himself on the insults of his adversaries, while he regarded God as being “a respecter of persons,” and himself as the special favourite of Heaven.
And fear would be mingled with hatred. Under certain conditions, in the secrecy of Oriental seraglios, in the back–stairs intercourse of courts and gynœcea, in safe places like the harem of Abennerig and the audience–room of Helen of Adiabene, with Mary of Palmyra, or Fulvia, the wife of Saturninus, or Poppæa in the Golden House,19 a Jew was glad enough to gain the ear of an influential proselyte, and the more moderate Jews were fully content in such cases with general conformity. They found it easy to devour widows’ houses and make long prayers. But they were well aware that every widely successful attempt to induce Gentile proselytes to practise the outward ceremonies of their religion would be fraught with the extremest peril to their communities,20 and would lead in every city of the Empire to a renewal of such scenes as those of which Alexandria had lately been the witness. It is probable that they would have checked any impolitic zeal on the part of even an orthodox Rabbi; but it filled them with fury to see it displayed by one who, as a schismatic, incurred a deadlier odium than the most corrupted of the heathen. To them a Paul was even more hateful than a Flaccus, and Paul was all the more hateful because he had once been Saul. And that this audacious pervert should not only preach, but preach to the heathen; and preach to the heathen a doctrine which proposed to place him on a level with the Jew; and, worse still, to place him on this level without any acceptance on his part of the customs without which a Jew could hardly be regarded as a Jew at all—this thought filled them with a rage which year after year was all but fatal to the life of Paul, as for long years together it was entirely fatal to his happiness and peace.21
Yet even supposing these obstacles to be surmounted, supposing that the missionaries were successful in converting their own countrymen, and so were enabled, by means of the “Proselytes of the Gate,” to obtain their first point of contact through the synagogue with the heathen world, might it not seem after all as if their difficulties had then first begun? What hopes could they possibly entertain of making even the slightest, impression on that vast weltering mass of idolatry and corruption? Now and then, perhaps, they might win the heart of some gentle woman, sick to death of the cruelty and depravity of which she was forced to be a daily witness; here and there, perhaps, of some slave, oppressed and ignorant, and eager to find a refuge from the intolerable indignities of ancient servitude;—but even if they could hope for this, how far had they then advanced in the conversion of Heathendom, with all its splendid worldliness and glittering fascination?
For to the mass of the heathen, as I have said, their very persons were hateful from the mere fact that they were Jews.22 And so far from escaping this hatred, the missionaries were certain to be doubly hated as Christian Jews. For during the first century of Christianity, the ancients never condescended to inquire what was the distinction between a Jew and a Christian.23 To them a Christian was only a more dangerous, a more superstitious, a more outrageously intolerable Jew, who added to the follies of the Jew the yet more inexplicable folly of adoring a crucified malefactor. It is to the supposed turbulence of One whom he ignorantly calls Chrestus, and imagines to have been still living, that Suetonius attributes the riots which cost the Jews their expulsion from Rome. The stolid endurance of agony by the Christians under persecution woke a sort of astonished admiration;24 but even Pliny, though his candid account of the Christians in Bithynia refutes his own epithets, could only call Christianity “a distorted and outrageous superstition;” and Tacitus and Suetonius, using the substantive, only qualify it by the severer epithets of “deadly,” “pernicious,” and “new.”25
The heathen world into which, “as lambs among wolves,” the Apostles were going forth, was at that moment in its worst condition. The western regions, towards which the course of missions took its way, were prevalently Greek and Roman; but it was a conquered Greece and a corrupted Rome. It was a Greece which had lost its genius and retained its falsity, a Rome which had lost its simplicity and retained its coarseness. It was Greece in her lowest stage of seducer and parasite; it was Rome at the epoch of her most gorgeous gluttonies and her most gilded rottenness. The heart of the Roman Empire under the Cæsars was “a fen of stagnant waters.” Cæsarism has found its modern defenders, and even a Tiberius has had his eulogists among the admirers of despotic power; but no defence can silence the damning evidence of patent facts. No advocacy can silence the awful indictment which St. Paul writes to the inhabitants of the imperial city.26 If such things were done in the green tree, what was done in the dry? What was the condition of the thistles, if this was the code of the forest–trees? If St. John in the Apocalypse describes Rome as the harlot city which had made the nations drunk with the cup of the wine of her fornications, he uses language no whit severer than that of Seneca, who speaks of Rome as a cesspool of iniquity;27 or than that of Juvenal, who pictures her as a filthy sewer, into which have flowed the abominable dregs of every Achæan and Syrian stream.28 Crushed under the ignominies inflicted on her by the despotism of madmen and monsters;29 corrupted by the pollutions of the stage, and hardened by the cruelties of the amphitheatre; swarming with parasites, impostors, poisoners, and the vilest slaves; without any serious religion; without any public education; terrorised by insolent soldiers and pauperised mobs, the world’s capital presents at this period a picture unparalleled for shame and misery in the annals of the world. But, reduced as it was to torpor under the night–mare of an absolutism which it neither could nor would shake off, the Roman world had sought its solace in superstition, in sensuality, or in Stoicism. The superstition mainly consisted in the adoption of cunning systems of priestcraft, impassioned rituals, horrible expiations borrowed from the degrading mythologies of Egypt or from the sensual religions of Galatia and Phrygia.30 So rife were these, and so dangerous to morality and order, that long before this age the Senate had vainly attempted the suppression of the rites offered to Sabazius, to Isis, and to Serapis.31 The jingling of sistra, and the cracked voices of beardless Galli, were familiar in every Roman town.32 The sensuality was probably more shameful, and more shameless, than has ever been heard of in history. And amid this seething corruption, it was the few alone who retained the virtue and simplicity of the old family life and worship. The Stoicism in which the greater and more suffering spirits of the epoch—a Cremutius Cordus, a Thrasea Paetus, an Helvidius Priscus, an Annaeus Cornutus, a Musonius Rufus, a Barea Soranus—found refuge, was noble and heroic, but hard and unnatural. He who would estimate the reaction of man’s nobler instincts against the profligacy of Pagan life—he who would judge to what heights the Spirit of God can aid those who unconsciously seek Him, and to what depths the powers of evil can degrade their willing votaries—must bridge over the gulf which separates a Petronius and an Appuleius from the sweetness and dignity of “minds naturally Christian,” like those of an Epictetus and an Aurelius. He who would further estimate the priceless services which Christianity can still render even to souls the most naturally exalted, must once more compare the chill, the sadness, the painful tension, the haughty exclusiveness, the despairing pride of Stoicism with the warmth, the glow, the radiant hope, the unbounded tenderness, the free natural emotion, the active charities, the peaceful, infinite contentment of Christianity as it shines forth with all its living and breathing sympathies in the Epistles of St. Paul.
And this difference between Stoicism and Christianity is reflected in the lives of their disciples. While the last genuine representatives of Roman statesmanship and Roman virtue were thinking it a grand thing to hold aloof from the flatteries into which the other senators plunged with such headlong baseness—while they were being regarded as models of heroism for such acts as rising and walking out of the senate when some more than usually contemptible flattery was being proposed—while they were thus eating away their own hearts in the consciousness of an ineffectual protest, and finding it difficult to keep even their own souls from “the contagion of the world’s slow stain”—two Jews of obscure name, of no position, without rank, without wealth, without influence, without either literary, political, or military genius, without any culture but such as a Roman noble would have despised as useless and grotesque—but mighty in the strength of a sacred cause, and irresistible in the zeal of a conscious inspiration—set forth unnoticed on the first of those journeys which were destined to convert the world. For He who made and loved the world, and knew the needs of the world which He died to save, had sent them forth; and if He had sent them forth without any apparent means for the fulfilment of His great design, it was because He willed to choose “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things to confound the mighty, and things which are not to bring to nought things which are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.”33
Vast, then, as was the task before them, and hedged around by apparently insuperable difficulties, the elders of the Church of Antioch were convinced that Barnabas and Saul had indeed been summoned on a Divine mission, and that they dared no longer delay the distinct manifestation of the will of the Spirit. They held one more special prayer and fast,34 laid on the heads of their two great brethren the hands of consecration, and sent them on their way. Already, in his vision, Paul had been predestined to be an Apostle of the Gentiles;35 henceforth, after this solemn ordination, he receives the title of an Apostle in its more special significance.36 For a time, as in his Epistles to the Thessalonians, he modestly abstains from himself adopting it; but when his name was vilified, when his teaching was thwarted, when his authority was impugned, he not only adopted it,37 but maintained his independent position as a teacher, and his right to be regarded as in nowise inferior to the very chiefest of the Twelve.