Ἄπιστοι γὰρ Λυκάονες ὡς καὶ Ἀριστοτέλης μαρτυρεῖ.— SCHOL. inH.iv. 88.
“WHEN they persecute you in this city, flee ye to another,” our Lord had said to His twelve Apostles when He sent them forth as lambs among wolves.1 Expelled from Antioch,2 the Apostles obeyed this injunction. They might have crossed the Paroreian range to Philomelium, and so have made their way westwards to Synnada and the Phrygian cities, or eastwards to Laodicea. What circumstances determined their course we cannot tell, but they kept to the south of the Paroreia, and, following a well–traversed road, made their way to the pleasant city of Iconium. For a distance of about sixty miles the road ran south–westwards over bleak plains, scoured by wild asses and grazed by countless herds of sheep, until it reaches the green oasis on which stands the city of Iconium.3 It is the city so famous through the Middle Ages, under the name of Konieh, as the capital of the Sultans of Roum, and the scene of the romantic siege by Godfrey of Bouillon. Here, on the edge of an interminable steppe, and nearly encircled by snow–clad hills, they had entered the district of Lycaonia, and found themselves in the capital city of an independent tetrarchy. The diversity of political governments which at this time prevailed in Asia Minor was so far an advantage to the Apostles, that it rendered them more able to escape from one jurisdiction to another. Their ejection from Antioch must have received the sanction of the colonial authorities, who were under the Propraetor of Galatia; but at Iconium they were beyond the Propraetor’s province, in a district which, in the reign of Augustus, belonged to the robber–chief Amyntas, and was still an independent tetrarchy of fourteen towns.4
Doubtless, as at Antioch, their first care would be to secure a lodging among their fellow–countrymen, and the means of earning their daily subsistence. On the Sabbath they entered as usual the one synagogue which sufficed the Jewish population. Invitations to speak were at first never wanting, and they preached with a fervour which won many converts both among Jews and proselytes. The Batlanîm, indeed, and the Ruler of the Synagogue appear to have been against them, but at first their opposition was in some way obviated.5 Some of the Jews, however, stirred up the minds of the Gentiles against them.6 Over the Proselytes of the Gate the Apostles would be likely to gain a strong influence. It would not be easy to shake their interest in such teaching, or their gratitude to those who were sacrificing all that made life dear to their desire to proclaim it. But when Jewish indignation was kindled, when the synagogue became the weekly scene of furious contentions,7 it would be easy enough to persuade the Gentile inhabitants of the city that these emissaries, who had already been ejected from Antioch, were dangerous incendiaries, who everywhere disturbed the peace of cities. In spite, however, of these gathering storms the Apostles held their ground, and their courage was supported by the evident blessing which was attending their labour. So long as they were able not only to sway the souls of their auditors, but to testify the power of their mission by signs and wonders, they felt that it was not the time to yield to opposition. Their stay, therefore, was prolonged, and the whole population of the city was split into two factions—the one consisting of their enemies, the other of their supporters. At length the spirit of faction grew so hot that the leaders of the hostile party of Jews and Gentiles made a plot to murder the Apostles.8 Of this they got timely notice, and once more took flight. Leaving the tetrarchy of Iconium, they still pursued the great main road, and made their way some forty miles into the district of Antiochus IV., King of Commagene, and to the little town of Lystra in Lycaonia.
The site of Lystra has never been made out with perfect certainty, but there is good reason to believe that it was at a place now known as Bin Bir Kilisseh, or the Thousand and One Churches,—once the see of a bishop, and crowded with the ruins of sacred buildings. It lies in the northern hollows of the huge isolated mass of an extinct volcano, “rising like a giant from a plain level as the sea.”9 It is called the Kara Dagh, or Black Mountain, and is still the haunt of dangerous robbers.
Both at Lystra and in the neighbouring hamlets the Apostles seem to have preached with success, and to have stayed for some little time. On one occasion Paul noticed among his auditors a man who had been a cripple from his birth. His evident eagerness10 marked him out to the quick insight of the Apostle as one on whom a work of power could be wrought. It is evident on the face of the narrative that it was not every cripple or every sufferer that Paul would have attempted to heal; it was only such as, so to speak, met half–way the exertion of spiritual power by their own ardent faith. Fixing his eyes on him, Paul raised his voice to its full compass, and cried—“Rise on thy feet upright.” Thrilled with a divine power, the man sprang up; he began to walk. The crowd who were present at the preachings, which seem on this occasion to have been in the open air, were witnesses of the miracle, and reverting in their excitement, perhaps from a sense of awe, to their rude native Lycaonian dialect11—just as a Welsh crowd, after being excited to an over–powering degree by the English discourse of some great Methodist, might express its emotions in Welsh—they cried: ‘The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men. The tall and venerable one is Zeus; the other, the younger and shorter one, who speaks so powerfully, is Hermes.’12 Ignorant of the native dialect, the Apostles did not know what the crowd were saying,13 and withdrew to their lodging. But meanwhile the startling rumour had spread. Lycaonia was a remote region where still lingered the simple faith in the old mythologies.14 Not only were there points of resemblance in Central Asia between their own legends and the beliefs of the Jews,15 but this region was rendered famous as the scene of more than one legendary epiphany, of which the most celebrated —recorded in the beautiful tale of Philemon and Baucis16—was said to have occurred in this very neighbourhood. Unsophisticated by the prevalent disbelief, giving ready credence to all tales of marvel, and showing intense respect for any who seemed invested with special sacredness,17 the Lycaonians eagerly accepted the suggestion that they were once more favoured by a visit from the old gods, to whom in a faithless age they had still been faithful. And this being so, theyat least would not be guilty either of the impious scepticism which had ended in the transformation into a wolf of their eponymous prince Lycaon, or of the inhospitable carelessness which for all except one aged couple had forfeited what might have been a source of boundless blessings. Before the gate of the town was a Temple of Zeus, their guardian deity. The Priest of Zeus rose to the occasion. While the Apostles remained in entire ignorance of his proceedings he had procured bulls and garlands, and now, accompanied by festive crowds, came to the gates to do them sacrifice.18 Paul and Barnabas were the last to hear that they were about to be the centres of an idolatrous worship, but when they did hear it they, with their sensitive conceptions of the awful majesty of the one true God, were horror–stricken to an extent which a Gentile could hardly have understood.19 Rending their garments, they sprang out with loud cries among the multitude, expostulating with them, imploring them to believe that they were but ordinary mortals like themselves, and that it was the very object of their mission to turn them from these empty idolatries to the one living and true God, who made the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and all that in them is. And so, as they gradually gained more of the ear of the multitude, they explained that during past generations God had, as it were, suffered all the heathen to walk in their own ways,20 and had not given them special revelations; and yet even in those days He had not left Himself without witness by the mercies which He then sent, as He sends them now, “by giving us from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, by filling our hearts with food and gladness.”
Such was the strong yet kindly and sympathetic protest uttered by the Apostles against the frank superstition of these simple Lycaonians. It was no time now, in the urgency of the moment, to preach Christ to them, the sole object being to divert them from an idolatrous sacrifice, and to show the futile character of the polytheism of which such sacrifices formed a part. Paul, who was evidently the chief speaker, does this with that inspired tact which can always vary its utterances with the needs of the moment. No one can read the speech without once more perceiving its subtle and inimitable coincidence with his thoughts and expressions.21 The rhythmic conclusion is not unaccordant with the style of his most elevated moods; and besides the appropriate appeal to God’s natural gifts in a town not in itself unhappily situated, but surrounded by a waterless and treeless plain, we may naturally suppose that the “filling our hearts with food and gladness” was suggested by the garlands and festive pomp which accompanied the bulls on which the people would afterwards have made their common banquet. Nor do I think it impossible that the words may be an echo of lyric songs22 sung as the procession made its way to the gates. To use them in a truer and loftier connexion would be in exact accord with the happy power of seizing an argument which St. Paul showed when he turned into the text of his sermon at Athens the vague inscription to the Unknown God.
But the Lystrenians did not like to be baulked of their holiday and of their banquet; and those who had been most prominent in proclaiming the new epiphany of Zeus and Hermes were probably not a little ashamed. M. Renan is right in the remark that the ancient heathen had no conception of a miracle as the evidence of a doctrine. If, then, the Apostles could work a miracle, and yet indisputably disclaim all notion of being gods in disguise, what were they, and what became of their miracle? The Lycaonians, in the sulky revulsion of their feelings, and with a somewhat uneasy sense that they had put themselves into a ridiculous position, were inclined to avenge their error on those who had innocently caused it. They were a faithless and fickle race, liable, beyond the common wont of mobs, to sudden gusts of feeling and impulse.23 In their disappointment they would be inclined to assume that if these two mysterious strangers were not gods they were despicable Jews; and if their miracle was not a sign of their divinity, it belonged to the malefic arts of which they may well have heard from Roman visitors. And on the arrival of the Jews of Antioch and Iconium at Lystra, with the express purpose of buzzing their envenomed slanders into the ears of these country people, the mob were only too ripe for a tumult. They stoned Paul and, when they thought he was dead, dragged him outside their city gates, leaving him, perhaps, in front of the very Temple of Jupiter to which they had been about to conduct him as an incarnation of their patron deity. But Paul was not dead. This had not been a Jewish stoning, conducted with fatal deliberateness, but a sudden riot, in which the mode of attack may have been due to accident. Paul, liable at all times to the swoons which accompany nervous organisations, had been stunned, but not killed; and while the disciples stood in an agonised group around what they thought to be his corpse, he recovered his consciousness, and raised himself from the ground. The mob meanwhile had dispersed; and perhaps in disguise, or under cover of evening—for all these details were as nothing to Paul, and are not preserved by his biographer—he re–entered the little city.
Was it in the house of Eunice and Lois that he found the sweet repose and tender ministrations which he would need more than ever after an experience so frightful? If Lystra was thus the scene of one of his intensest sufferings, and one which, lightly as it is dwelt upon, probably left on his already enfeebled constitution its lifelong traces, it also brought him, by the merciful providence of God, its own immense compensation. For it was at Lystra that he converted the son of Eunice, then perhaps a boy of fifteen,24 for whom he conceived that deep affection which breathes through every line of the Epistles addressed to him. This was the Timotheus whom he chose as the companion of his future journeys, whom he sent on his most confidential messages, to whom he entrusted the oversight of his most important churches, whom he summoned as the consolation of his last imprisonment, whom he always regarded as the son in the faith who was nearest and dearest to his heart. If Luke had been with St. Paul in this his first journey, he would probably have mentioned a circumstance which the Apostle doubtless regarded as one of God’s best blessings, and as one which would help to obliterate in a feeling of thankfulness even the bitter memories of Lystra.25 But we who, from scattered allusions, can see that it was here and now that St. Paul first met with the gentlest and dearest of all his converts, may dwell with pleasure on the thought that Timotheus stood weeping in that group of disciples who surrounded the bleeding missionary, whose hearts glowed with amazement and thankfulness when they saw him recover, who perhaps helped to convey him secretly to his mother’s house, and there, it may be, not only bound his wounds, but also read to him in the dark and suffering hours some of the precious words of those Scriptures in which from a child he had been trained.
But after so severe a warning it was scarcely safe to linger even for a single day in a town where they had suffered such brutal violence. Even if the passion of the mob had exhausted itself, the malignity of the Jews was not so likely to be appeased. Once more the only safety seemed to be in flight; once more they took refuge in another province. From Lystra in Lycaonia they started, under the grey shades of morning, while the city was yet asleep, for the town of Derbe,26 which was twenty miles distant, in the district of Isaurica. It is grievous to think of one who had been so cruelly treated forced to make his way for twenty miles with his life in his hand, and still all battered and bleeding from the horrible attack of the day before. But if the dark and rocky summit of Kara Dagh, the white distant snows of Mount Ægaeus,27 and the silver expanse of the White Lake had little power to delight his wearied eyes, or calm his agitated spirit, we may be sure that He was with him whom once he had persecuted, but for whose sake he was now ready to suffer all; and that from hour to hour, as he toiled feebly and wearily along from the cruel and fickle city, “God’s consolations increased upon his soul with the gentleness of a sea that caresses the shore it covers”.
At Derbe they were suffered to rest unmolested. It may be that the Jews were ignorant that Paul was yet alive. That secret, pregnant with danger to the safety of the Apostle, would be profoundly kept by the little band of Lystrenian disciples. At any rate, to Derbe the Jews did not follow him with their interminable hate. The name of Derbe is omitted from the mention of places where he reminds Timothy that he had suffered afflictions and persecutions. His work seems to have been happy and successful, crowned with the conversion of those disciples whom he ever regarded as “his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing.” Here, too, he gained one more friend in Gaius of Derbe, who afterwards accompanied him on his last visit to Jerusalem.28
And now that they were so near to Cybistra (the modern Eregli), through which a few stages would have brought them to the Cilician gates, and so through Tarsus to Antioch, it might have been assumed that this would have been the route of their return. Why did they not take it? There may be truth in the ingenious suggestion of Mr. Lewin,29 “that the road—as is sometimes still the case—had been rendered impassable by the waters of Ak Ghieul, swollen by the melting of the winter snows, and that the way through the mountains was too uncertain and insecure.”30 But they may have had no other reason than their sense of what was needed by the infant Churches which they had founded. Accordingly they went back, over the wild and dusty plain, the twenty miles from Derbe to Lystra, the forty miles from Lystra to Iconium, the sixty miles from Iconium to Antioch. It may well be supposed that it needed no slight heroism to face once more the dangers that might befall them. But they had learnt the meaning of their Lord’s saying, “He who is near Me is near the fire.” Precautions of secrecy they doubtless took, and cheerfully faced the degrading necessity of guarded movements, and of entering cities, perhaps in disguise, perhaps only at late nightfall and early dawn. The Christians had early to learn those secret trysts and midnight gatherings and private watchwords by which alone they could elude the fury of their enemies. But the Apostles accomplished their purpose. They made their way back in safety, everywhere confirming the disciples, exhorting them to constancy, preparing them for the certainty and convincing them of the blessing of the tribulations through which we must enter the kingdom of God.31 And as some organisation was necessary to secure the guidance and unity of these little bodies of converts, they held solemn meetings, at which, with prayer and fasting, they appointed elders,32 before they bestowed on them a last blessing and farewell. In this manner they passed through Lycaonia, Iconium, and Pisidia, and so into Pamphylia; and since on their first journey they had been unable to preach in Perga, they did so now. Possibly they found no ship ready to sail down the Cestrus to their destination. They therefore made their way sixteen miles overland to the flourishing seaport of Attaleia, at the mouth of the Katarrhaktes, which at that time found its way to the sea over a range of cliffs in floods of foaming waterfall; and from thence—for they never seem to have lingered among the fleeting and mongrel populations of these seaport towns—they took ship to Seleucia, saw once more the steep cone of Mount Casius, climbed the slopes of Coryphæus, and made their way under the pleasant shade of ilex, and myrtle, and arbutus, on the banks of the Orontes, until once more they crossed the well–known bridge, and saw the grim head of Charon staring over the street Singôn, in which neighbourhood the little Christian community were prepared to welcome them with keen interest and unbounded love.
So ended the first mission journey of the Apostle Paul— the first flight as it were of the eagle, which was soon to soar with yet bolder wing, in yet wider circles, among yet more raging storms. We have followed him by the brief notices of St. Luke, but we have no means of deciding either the exact date of the journey, or its exact duration. It is only when the crises in the history of the early Church synchronise with events of secular history, that we can ever with certainty ascertain the date to which they should be assigned.33 We have seen that Paul and Barnabas visited Jerusalem about the time of Herod Agrippa’s death, and this took place in April A.D. 44. After this they returned to Antioch, and the next thing we are told about them is their obedience to the spiritual intimation which marked them out as Evangelists to the heathen. It is reasonable to believe, therefore, that they spent about a year at Antioch, since they could not easily find vessels to convey them from place to place except in the months during which the sea was regarded as open. Now navigation with the ancients began with the rising of the Pleiades, that is, in the month of March; and we may assume with fair probability that March, A.D. 45, is the date at which they began their evangelising labours. Beyond this all must be conjecture. They do not seem to have spent more than a month or two in Cyprus;34 at Antioch in Pisidia their stay was certainly brief. At Iconium they remained “a considerable time;” but at Lystra again, and at Derbe, and on their return tour, and at Perga and Attaleia, the narrative implies no long residence. Taking into account the time consumed in travelling, we are hardly at liberty to suppose that the first circuit occupied much more than a year, and they may have returned to the Syrian Antioch in the late spring of A.D. 46.35
But brief as was the period occupied, the consequences were immense. For though Paul returned from this journey a shattered man—though twenty years afterwards, through a vista of severe afflictions, he still looks back, as though they had happened but yesterday, to the “persecutions, afflictions, which came upon him at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra; what persecutions he endured, and yet from all the Lord delivered him”36—though the journeyings and violence, and incessant menace to life, which has tried even men of such iron nerves as Oliver Cromwell, had rendered him more liable than ever to fits of acute suffering and intense depression,37 yet, in spite of all, he returned with the mission–hunger in his heart; with the determination more strongly formed than ever to preach the word, and be instant in season and out of season; with the fixed conviction that the work and destiny in life to which God had specially called him was to be the Apostle of the heathen.38
That conviction had been brought unalterably home to his soul by the experience of every town at which they had preached. Up to a certain point, and that point not very far within the threshold of his subject, the Jews were willing to give him a hearing; but when they began to perceive that the Gospel was universal—that it preached a God to whom a son of Abraham was no whit dearer than any one in any nation who feared Him and loved righteousness—that it gave, in fact, to the title of “son of Abraham” a significance so purely metaphorical as to ignore all special privilege of blood—their anger burnt like flame. It was the scorn and indignation of the elder brother against the returning prodigal, and his refusal to enjoy privileges which henceforth he must share with others.39 The deepseated pride of the Jews rose in arms. Who were these obscure innovators who dared to run counter to the cherished hopes and traditional glories of well–nigh twenty centuries? Who were these daring heretics, who, in the name of a faith which all the Rabbis had rejected, were thus proclaiming to the Gentiles the abandonment of all exclusive claim to every promise and every privilege which generations of their fathers had held most dear?
But this was not all. To abandon privileges was unpatriotic enough; but what true Jew, what observer of the Halachah, could estimate the atrocity of apostatising from principles? Had not Jews done enough, by freely admitting into their synagogues the Proselytes of the Gate? Did they not even offer to regard as a son of Israel every Gentile who would accept the covenant rite of circumcision, and promise full allegiance to the Written and Oral Law? But the new teachers, especially Paul, seemed to use language which, pressed to its logical conclusion, could only be interpreted as an utterly slighting estimate of the old traditions, nay, even of the sacred rite of circumcision. It is true, perhaps, that they had never openly recommended the suppression of this rite; but it was clear that it occupied a subordinate place in their minds, and that they were disinclined to make between their Jewish and Gentile converts the immensity of difference which separated a Proselyte of Righteousness from a Proselyte of the Gate.
It is very possible that it was only the events of this journey which finally matured the views of St. Paul on this important subject. The ordinary laws of nature had not been reversed in his case, and as he grew in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, so his own Epistles,40 though each has its own divine purpose, undoubtedly display the kind of difference in his way of developing the truth which we should ordinarily attribute to growth of mind. And it is observable that St. Paul, when taunted by his opponents with having once been a preacher of circumcision, does not meet the taunt by a denial, but merely by saying that at any rate his persecutions are a sign that nowthat time is over. In fact, he simply thrusts aside the allusion to the past by language which should render impossible any doubts as to his sentiments in the present. In the same way, in an earlier part of his Epistle,41 he anticipates the charge of being a time–server—a charge which he knew to be false in spirit, while yet the malignity of slander might find some justification of it in his broad indifference to trifles—not by any attempt to explain his former line of action, but by an outburst of strong denunciation which none could mistake for men–pleasing or over–persuasiveness. Indeed, in the second chapter of the Galatians, St. Paul seems distinctly to imply two things. The one is that it was the treacherous espionage of false brethren that first made him regard the question as one of capital importance; the other that his views on the subject were at that time so far from being final, that it was with a certain amount of misgiving as to the practical decision that he went up to the consultation at Jerusalem. It was the result of this interview—the discovery that James and Kephas had nothing to contribute to any further solution of the subject— which first made him determined to resist to the utmost the imposition of the yoke on Gentiles, and to follow the line which he had generally taken. But he had learnt from this journey that nothing but the wisdom of God annihilating human foolishness, nothing but the gracious Spirit of God breaking the iron sinew in the neck of carnal obstinacy, could lead the Jews to accept the truths he preached. Paul saw that the husbandmen in charge of the vineyard would never be brought to confess that they had slain the Heir as they had slain well–nigh all who went before Him. Though He had come first to His own possessions, His own people refused to receive Him.42 Israel after the flesh would not condescend from their haughty self–satisfaction to accept the free gift of eternal life.
And, therefore, he was now more than ever convinced that his work would lie mainly among the Gentiles. It may be that the fury and contempt of the Jews kindled in him too dangerously for the natural man—kindled in him in spite of all tender yearnings and relentings—too strong an indignation, too fiery a resentment. It may be that he felt how much more adapted others were than himself to deal with these; others whose affinities with them were stronger, whose insight into the inevitable future was less clear. The Gentiles were evidently prepared to receive the Gospel. For these other sheep of God evidently the fulness of time had come. To those among them who were disposed for eternal life the doctrine of a free salvation through the Son of God was infinitely acceptable. Not a few of them had found in the Jewish teaching at least an approach to ease.43 But the acceptance of Judaism could only be accomplished at the cost of a heavy sacrifice. Even to become a “Proselyte of the Gate” subjected a man to much that was distasteful; but to become a Proselyte of the Gate was nothing. It was represented by all the sterner bigots of Judaism as a step so insignificant as to be nearly worthless. And yet how could any man stoop to that which could alone make him a Proselyte of Righteousness, and by elevating him to this rank, place on him a load of observances which were dead both in the spirit and in the letter, and which yet would most effectually make his life a burden, and separate him—not morally, but externally—from all which he had loved and valued most?44 The sacrifices which an African convert has to make by abandoning polygamy—which a Brahmin has to make by sacrificing caste—are but a small measure of what a Gentile had to suffer if he made himself a Jew. How eagerly then would such an inquirer embrace a faith which, while it offered him a purer morality, and a richer hope for the future, and a greater strength for the present, and a more absolute remission for the past, offered him these priceless boons unaccompanied by the degradation of circumcision and the hourly worry of distinctions between meats! Stoicism might confront him with the barren inefficiency of “the categorical imperative;” the Gospel offered him, as a force which needed no supplement, the Spirit of the living Christ. Yes, St. Paul felt that the Gentiles could not refuse the proffered salvation. He himself might only live to see the green blade, or at best to gather a few weak ears, but hereafter he was confident that the full harvest would be reaped. Henceforth he knew himself to be essentially the Apostle of the Gentiles, and to that high calling he was glad to sacrifice his life.