“In Ex. 32:16, for charuth, ‘graven,’ read cheruth, ‘freedom,’ for thou wilt find no freeman but him who is engaged in the Thorah.”—R. MEIR (Perek. 2).
“He is a freeman whom THE TRUTH makes free,
And all are slaves beside.”
… παρακύψας εἰς νόμον τέλειον τὸν τῆς ἐλευθερίας … (JAMES 1:25).
WE have already seen that in his brief second visit to the Churches of Galatia, on his road to Ephesus, St. Paul seems to have missed the bright enthusiasm which welcomed his first preaching. His keen eye marked the germs of coming danger, and the warnings which he uttered weakened the warmth of his earlier relationship towards them. But he could hardly have expected the painful tidings that converts once so dear and so loving had relapsed from everything which was distinctive in his teaching into the shallowest ceremonialism of his Judaising opponents. Already, whoever sanctioned them, these men had spoilt his best work, and troubled his happy disciples at Antioch and at Corinth, and they had their eye also on Ephesus. Thus to intrude themselves into other men’s labours—thus to let him bear the brunt of all dangers and labours while they tried to monopolise the result—to watch indifferently and unsympathetically while the sower bore forth his good seed, weeping, and then securely to thrust their blunt and greedy sickles into the ripening grain—to dog the footsteps of the bold, self–sacrificing missionary with easy, well–to–do men–pleasers, who, with no personal risk, stole in his absence into the folds which he had constructed, in order to worry with privy paws his defenceless sheep—to trouble with their petty formalisms and artificial orthodoxies the crystal water of Christian simplicity and Christian happiness—to endanger thus the whole future of Christianity by trying to turn it from the freedom of a universal Gospel into the bondage of a Judaic law—to construct a hedge which, except at the cost of a cutting in the flesh, should exclude the noblest of the Gentiles while it admitted the vilest of the Jews—all this, to the clear vision of St. Paul, seemed bad enough. But thus to thrust themselves among the little communities of his Galatian converts—to take advantage of their warm affections and weak intellects—to play on the vacillating frivolity of purpose which made them such easy victims, especially to those who offered them an external cult far more easy than spiritual religion, and bearing a fascinating resemblance to their old ceremonial paganism—this to St. Paul seemed intolerably base.
Vexed at this Galatian fickleness, and stung with righteous indignation at those who had taken advantage of it, he seized his pen to express in the most unmistakable language his opinion of the falsity and worthlessness of the limits into which these Christian Pharisees wished to compress the principles of Christianity—the worn–out and burst condition of the old bottles in which they strove to store the rich, fresh, fermenting wine. It was no time to pause for nice inquiries into motives, or careful balancing of elements, or vague compromise, or polished deference to real or assumed authority. It was true that this class of men came from Jerusalem, and that they belonged to the very Church of Jerusalem for whose poorer members he was making such large exertions. It was true that, in one flagrant instance at any rate, they had, or professed to have, the authority of James. Could it be that James, in the bigotry of lifelong habit, had so wholly failed to add understanding and knowledge to his scrupulous holiness, that he was lending the sanction of his name to a work which St. Paul saw to be utterly ruinous to the wider hopes of Christianity? If so, it could not be helped. James was but a man—a holy man indeed, and a man inspired with the knowledge of great and ennobling truths—but no more faultless or infallible than Peter or than Paul himself. If Peter, more than once, had memorably wavered, James also might waver; and if so, James in this instance was indubitably in the wrong. But St. Paul, at least, never says so; nor does he use a word of disrespect to “the Lord’s brother.” The Church of Jerusalem had, on a previous occasion, expressly repudiated others who professed to speak in their name; nor is there any proof that they had ever sanctioned this sort of counter–mission of espionage, which was subversive of all progress, of all liberty, and even of all morals. For, whoever may have been these Judaic teachers, vanity, party spirit, sensuality, had followed in their wake. They must be tested by their fruits, and those fruits were bitter and poisonous. Some of them, at least, were bad men, anxious to stand well with everybody, and to substitute an outward observance for a true religion. Greed, self–importance, externalism, were everything to them; the Cross was nothing. If they had not been bad men they would not have been so grossly inconsistent as to manipulate and evade the Law to which they professed allegiance. If they had not been bad men they would not have made the free use they did of the vilest of controversial weapons—surreptitious sneers and personal slanders. Yet by such base means as these they had persistently tried to undermine the influence of their great opponent. They systematically disparaged his authority. He was, they said, no Apostle whatever; he was certainly not one of the Twelve; he had never seen Jesus except in a vision, and therefore lacked one essential of the Apostolate; all that he knew of Christianity he had learnt at Jerusalem, and that he had wilfully perverted; his Gospel was not the real Gospel; such authority as he had was simply derived from the heads of the Church at Jerusalem, to whom his doctrines must be referred. Many of his present developments of teaching were all but blasphemous. They were a daring apostasy from the oral and even from the written Law; a revolt against the traditions of the fathers, and even against Moses himself. Was not his preaching a denial of all inspiration? Could they not marshal against him an array of innumerable texts? Was not well–nigh every line of the five books of Moses against him? Who was this Paul, this renegade from the Rabbis, who, for motives best known to himself, had become a nominal Christian from a savage persecutor? Who was he that he should set himself against the Great Lawgiver?1 If he argued that the Law was abrogated, how could he prove it? Christ had never said so. On the contrary, He had said that not a fraction of a letter of the Law should pass till all was fulfilled. To that the Twelve could bear witness. They kept the Law. They were living at peace with their Jewish brethren who yet did not recognise Jesus as the Messiah. Must not Paul’s opinions be antagonistic to theirs, if he was the only Christian who could not show his face at Jerusalem without exciting the danger of a tumult? Besides, he was really not to be trusted. He was always shifting about, now saying one thing and now another, with the obvious intention of pleasing men. What could be more inconsistent than his teaching and conduct with regard to circumcision? He had told the Galatians that they need not be circumcised, and yet he himself had once preached circumcision—aye, and more than preached it, he had practised it! Would he answer these two significant questions—Who circumcised Timothy? Who circumcised Titus?
St. Paul saw that it was time to speak out, and he did speak out. The matter at issue was one of vital importance. The very essence of the Gospel—the very liberty which Christ had given—the very redemption for which He had died—was at stake. The fate of the battle hung apparently upon his single arm. He alone was the Apostle of the Gentiles. To him alone had it been granted to see the full bearings of this question. A new faith must not be choked at its birth by the past prejudices of its nominal adherents. Its grave–clothes must not thus be made out of its swaddling–bands. The hour had come when concession was impossible, and there must be no facing both ways in the character of his conciliatoriness. Accordingly he flung all reticence and all compromise to the winds. Hot with righteous anger, he wrote the Epistle to the Galatians. It was his gage of battle to the incompetence of traditional authority—his trumpet–note of defiance to all the Pharisees of Christianity, and it gave no uncertain sound.2
Happily, he could give distinctness to his argument by bringing it to bear on one definite point. In recovering the lost outwork of Galatia he would carry the war into the camp of Jerusalem. The new teachers asserted, as at Antioch, the necessity of circumcision for Gentile Christians. If Paul could storm that bastion of Judaising Christianity, he knew that the whole citadel must fall. Circumcision was the very badge of Jewish nationality—the very nucleus of Jewish ceremonialism; the earliest, the most peculiar, the most ineffaceable of Jewish rites. Adam, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Balaam, had all been born circumcised.3 So completely was it the seal of the Covenant, that it had been given not even to Moses, but to Abraham. Joseph had seen that it was duly performed in Egypt. Moses had insisted upon it at all risks in Midian. Joshua had renewed it in Canaan; and so sacred was it deemed to be that the stone knives with which it had been performed were buried in his grave at Timnath Serah. Was there a king or prophet who had not been circumcised? Had not Jesus Himself submitted to circumcision? Was not Elias supposed to be always present, though unseen, to witness its due performance? Was not the mechanical effacement of it regarded as the most despicable of Hellenising apostasies? It was true that in the temporary and local letter which the Apostles had sanctioned they had said that it was not indispensablefor Gentile converts; but a thing might not be indispensable, and yet might be pre–eminently desirable. Let them judge for themselves. Did they not hear the Law read? Was not the Law inspired? If so, how could they arbitrarily set it aside?4
It was ever thus that Judaism worked, beginning with the Psalms and pure Monotheism, and then proceeding to the knife of circumcision, and the yoke of the Levitic Law, in which they entangled and crushed their slaves.5 It was ever thus that they compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, and when they had got him, made him ten times more the child of Gehenna than themselves. There was nothing at which the Jew gloried so much as thus leaving his mark on the very body of the despised and hated heathen—hardly less despised and hated, almost even more so, if he had hoped to equal them and their privileges by consenting to become a Jew. It was thus that they had got into their net the royal family of Adiabene. Helena, the amiable queen who fed the paupers of Jerusalem with dried figs and grapes in the famine of Claudius, and who now lies interred with some of her children in the Tombs of the Kings, had taken upon her the vow of the Nazarite for seven years. Just before the completion of the vow at Jerusalem, she had—was it accidentally, or by some trickery?— touched a corpse, and therefore had to continue the vow for seven years more. Once more at the conclusion of this term she had again incurred some trivial pollution, and had again to renew it for yet seven years more. Ananias, a Jewish merchant, in pursuance of his avocations, had got access to the seraglio of King Abennerig, and there had made a proselyte of the queen, and, through her influence, of her two sons, Izates and Monobazus. But he had had the good sense and large–heartedness to tell them that the essence of the Law was love to God and love to man. He was probably a Hagadist, who valued chiefly the great broad truths of which the outward observances of Mosaism were but the temporary casket; and he had the insight to know that for the sake of an outward rite, which could not affect the heart, it was not worth while to disturb a people and imperil a dynasty. His advice must not be confused with the cynical and immoral indifference which made Henri IV. observe that “Paris was well worth a mass.” It was, on the contrary, an enlightenment which would not confound the shadow with the substance.6 It was the conviction that the inscription on the Chél should be obliterated, and the Chél itself broken down.7 But on the steps of the enlightened Ananias came a narrow bigot, the Rabbi Eliezer of Galilee, and he employed to the facile weakness of the young princes the very argument which the Judaising teacher, whoever he was, employed to the Galatians: “My king, you are sinning against the Law, and therefore against God. It is not enough to read the Law; you must do the Law. Read for yourself what it says about circumcision, and you will see how wrong you are.”8 Prince Izates was so much struck with this “uncompromising orthodoxy” that he secretly withdrew into another chamber, and there had the rite performed by his physician. Not long after he and his brother were reading the Pentateuch, and came to the passage about circumcision in Ex. 12:48. Monobazus looked up at his brother, and said, “I am sorry for you, my brother,” and Izates made the same remark to him. This led to a conversation, and the brothers confessed, first to each other and then to Queen Helena, that they had both been secretly circumcised. The queen was naturally alarmed and anxious, and dangerous consequences ensued. But these were nothing to the Jewish fanatic. They would only be a fresh source of publicity, and therefore of glorifying in the flesh of his proselyte. Again, we read in the Talmud that Rabbi9 was a great friend of “the Emperor Antoninus.” On one occasion the Emperor asked him, “Wilt thou give me a piece of Leviathan in the world to come?”— since the flesh of Leviathan and of the bird Barjuchneh are to be the banquet of the blessed hereafter. “Yes,” answered Rabbi. “But why dost thou not allow me to partake of the Paschal Lamb?” “How can I,” answered Rabbi, “when it is written that ‘no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof’?” Upon hearing this, Antoninus submitted to the rite of circumcision, and embraced Judaism. The imagination of Rabbis and Pharisees was flattered by the thought that even emperors were not too great to accept their Halachoth. What would be their feelings towards one who offered the utmost blessings of the Chosen People without a single Judaic observance to the meanest slave?
Self–interest was an additional and a powerful inducement with these retrogressive intruders. Although Christian, they, like the Twelve, like even Paul himself, were still Jews. At Jerusalem they continued regularly to attend the services of the Temple and the gatherings of their synagogue. To be excommunicated from the synagogue in little Jewish communities like those that were congregated in Ancyra and Pessinus was a very serious matter indeed. It was infinitely more pleasant for them to be on good terms with the Jews, by making proselytes of righteousness out of St. Paul’s converts. Thus circumcision was only the thin end of the wedge.10 It obviated the painful liability to persecution. It would naturally lead to the adoption of all the observances, which the converts would constantly hear read to them in the Jewish service. But, if not, it did not much matter. It was not really necessary for them to keep the whole Law. A sort of decent external conformity was enough. So long as they made “a fair show in the flesh,” they might in reality do pretty much as they liked. It was against all this hypocrisy, this retrogression, this cowardice, this mummery of the outward, this reliance on the mechanical, that Paul used words which were half battles. There should be no further doubt as to what he really meant and taught. He would leap ashore among his enemies, and burn his ships behind him. He would draw the sword against this false gospel, and fling away the scabbard. What Luther did when he nailed his Theses to the door of the Cathedral of Wittenberg, that St. Paul did when he wrote the Epistle to the Galatians. It was the manifesto of emancipation. It marked an epoch in history. It was for the early days of Christianity what would have been for Protestantism the Confession of Augsburg and the Protest of Spires combined; but it was these “expressed in dithyrambs, and written in jets of flame;” and it was these largely intermingled with an intense personality and impassioned polemics. It was a De Corona, a Westminster Confession, and an Apologia in one. If we wish to find its nearest parallel in vehemence, effectiveness, and depth of conviction, we must look forward for sixteen centuries, and read Luther’s famous treatise, DeCaptivitateBabylonica, in which he realised his saying “that there ought to be set aside for this Popish battle a tongue of which every word is a thunderbolt.”11 To the Churches of Galatia he never came again; but the words scrawled on those few sheets of papyrus, whether they failed or not of their immediate effect, were to wake echoes which should “roll from soul to soul, and live for ever and for ever.”