THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM

“Show me some one person formed according to the principles he professes. Show me one who is sick and happy; in danger and happy; dying and happy; exiled and happy; disgraced and happy.”—EPICTETUS.

IT was now about the month of February, A.D. 58, and the work which St. Paul had set before him at Corinth was satisfactorily concluded. Having been nine months in Europe,1 he was anxious to get to Jerusalem by the Passover, and intended to sail straight from Corinth to one of the ports of Palestine. Every preparation was made; it almost seems that he had got on board ship; when he was informed of a sudden2 plot on the part of the Jews to murder him. As to all the details we are left in the dark. We know that the previous plot of the Jews, nearly five years earlier,3 had been foiled by the contemptuous good sense of Gallio; but even if their revenge were otherwise likely to be laid aside, we cannot doubt that ample fuel had since been heaped upon the smouldering fire of their hatred. From every seaport of the Ægean, from the highlands of Asia Minor, from its populous shores, from Troas under the shadows of Mount Ida, to Athens under the shadow of Mount Pentelicus, they would hear rumours of that daring creed which seemed to trample on all their convictions, and fling to the Gentiles their most cherished hopes. The Jewish teachers who tried to hound the Judaising Christians against St. Paul would stand on perfectly good terms with them, and these Judaisers would take a pleasure in disseminating the deadliest misrepresentations of Paul’s doctrine and career. But apart from all misrepresentation, his undeniable arguments were quite enough to madden them to frenzy. We may be sure that St. Paul taught as he wrote, and since we have noticed it as a characteristic of his intellect that he is haunted by words and expressions,4 we might infer, à priori, even if it were not abundantly evident in his writings, that he is still more powerfully possessed and absorbed by any thoughtswhich might have been forced into immediate prominence. We may regard it as psychologically certain that his discourses at Corinth were the echo of the arguments which fill the two Epistles which he wrote at Corinth; and to the Jews the conclusions which they were meant to establish would be regarded as maddening blasphemies. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile”—where, then, is the covenant to Abraham and to his seed? “There is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision”—where, then, is Moses and all the splendour of Sinai? “Weak and beggarly elements”—are these the terms to apply to the inspired, sacred, eternal Thorah, in which God himself meditates, which is the glory of the world? We are not surprised that the Jews should get up a plot. Paul, under the ægis of Roman authority, might be safe in the city, but they would avenge themselves on him as soon as his ship had left the shore. The wealthy Jewish merchants of Corinth would find no difficulty in hearing of sailors and captains of country vessels who were sufficiently dependent on them to do any deed of violence for a small consideration.

How was the plot discovered? We do not know. Scenes of tumult, and hairbreadth escapes, and dangerous adventures, were so common in St. Paul’s life, that neither he, nor any one else, has cared to record their details. We only know that, after sudden discussion, it was decided, that Paul, with an escort of the delegates, quite sufficiently numerous to protect him from ordinary dangers, should go round by Macedonia. The hope of reaching Jerusalem by the Passover had, of course, to be abandoned; the only chance left was to get there by Pentecost. It was doubtless overruled for good that it should be so, for if St. Paul had been in the Holy City at the Passover he would have been mixed up by his enemies with the riot and massacre which about that time marked the insane rising of the Egyptian impostor who called himself the Messiah.5

Of the seven converts6 who accompanied St. Paul— Sosipater son of Pyrrhus,7 a Berœan, Aristarchus and Secundus of Thessalonica, Gaius of Derbe, Timotheus of Lystra, Tychicus and Trophimus of Ephesus, and Luke—all except the latter left him apparently at Philippi, and went on to Troas to await him there.8 St. Luke was closely connected with Philippi, where St. Paul had left him on his first visit,9 and the two stayed at the Roman colony to keep the Passover. Very happy, we may be sure, was that quiet time spent by St. Paul in the bosom of the Church which he loved best of all—amid the most blameless and the most warm–hearted of all his converts. Years must have elapsed before he again spent a Passover in circumstances so peaceful and happy.10

The eight days of the feast ended in that year on Monday, April 3, and on the next day they set sail. Detained by calms, or contrary winds, they took five days11 to sail to Troas, and there they again stayed seven days.12 The delay was singular, considering the haste with which the Apostle was pressing forward to make sure of being at Jerusalem by Pentecost. It was now about the 10th of April, and as the Pentecost of that year fell on May 17, St. Paul, dependent as he was on the extreme uncertainties of ancient navigation, had not a single day to spare. We may be quite sure that it was neither the splendour of the town, with its granite temples and massive gymnasium, that detained him, nor all the archaic and poetic associations of its neighbourhood, nor yet the loveliness of the groves and mountains and gleams of blue sea. Although his former visits had been twice cut short—once by the Macedonian vision, and once by his anxiety to meet Titus—it is even doubtful whether he would have been kept there by the interest which he must have necessarily felt in the young and flourishing Church of a town which was one of the very few in which he had not been subjected to persecution. The delay was therefore probably due to the difficulty of finding or chartering a vessel such as they required.13

Be that as it may, his week’s sojourn was marked by a scene which is peculiarly interesting, as one of the few glimpses of ancient Christian worship which the New Testament affords. The wild disorders of vanity, fanaticism, and greed, which produced so strange a spectacle in the Church of Corinth, would give us, if we did not regard them as wholly exceptional, a most unfavourable conception of these Sunday assemblies. Very different, happily, is the scene to which we are presented on this April Sunday at Alexandria Troas, A.D. 58.14

It was an evening meeting. Whether at this period the Christians had already begun the custom of meeting twice,—early in the morning, before dawn, to sing and pray, and late in the evening to partake of the Love Feast and the Lord’s Supper, as they did some fifty years after this time in the neighbouring province of Bithynia,15—we are not told. Great obscurity hangs over the observance of the Lord’s day in the first century. The Jewish Christians doubtless continued to keep the Sabbath, but St. Paul reprobates the adoption of any such custom among the Gentiles; and, indeed, his language seems to show that he did not regard with favour any observance of times or seasons which savoured at all of Sabbatical scrupulosity.16 All that we know is, that from the Resurrection onwards, the first day of the week was signalised by special Christian gatherings for religious purposes, and that on this particular Sunday evening the members of the Church of Troas were assembled, in accordance with their usual custom, to partake of the Love Feast, and to commemorate the death of Christ in the Holy Communion.17

The congregation may have been all the more numerous because it was known that on the next day the Apostle and his little company would leave the place. They were gathered in one of those upper rooms on the third storey, which are the coolest and pleasantest part of an Eastern house. The labours of the day were over, and the sun had set, and as three weeks had now elapsed since the full moon of the Passover, there was but a pale crescent to dispel the darkness. But the upper room was full of lamps,18 and in the earnestness of his overflowing heart, Paul, knowing by many a mysterious intimation the dangers which were awaiting him, continued discoursing to them till midnight. On the broad sill of one of the open windows, of which the lattice or enclosing shutter had been flung wide open to catch the cool sea breeze, sat a boy named Eutychus.19 The hour was very late, the discourse unusually long, the topics with which it dealt probably beyond his comprehension. Though he was sitting in the pleasantest place in the room, where he would enjoy all the air there was, yet the heat of a crowded meeting, and the glare of the many lamps, and the unbroken stream of the speaker’s utterance,20 sent the lad fast asleep. The graphic description of St. Luke might almost make us believe that he had been watching him, not liking, and perhaps not near enough to awaken him, and yet not wholly insensible of his danger, as first of all he began to nod, then his head gradually sank down on his breast, and, at last, he fell with a rush and cry from the third storey into the courtyard beneath.21 We can imagine the alarm and excitement by which the voice of the speaker was suddenly interrupted, as some of the congregation ran down the outside staircase22 to see what had happened. It was dark,23 and the poor lad lay senseless, and “was taken up dead.”24 A cry of horror and wailing rose from the bystanders; but Paul, going down–stairs, fell on him, and clasping his arms round him,25 said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” After he had calmed the excitement by this remark, he left the lad to the effects of rest and quiet, and the kindly care, perhaps, of the deaconesses and other women who were present; for the narrative simply adds that the Apostle went up–stairs again, and after “breaking the bread,”26—words descriptive probably of the eucharistic consecration—and making a meal, which describes the subsequent Agapê, he continued in friendly intercourse with the congregation till the dawn of day, and then went out. By that time Eutychus had fully recovered. “They led the boy alive”—apparently into the upper chamber— “and were not a little comforted.”

Next day the delegates—these “first Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land”—went down to their vessel to sail round Cape Lectum, while Paul went by land27 across the base of the promontory to rejoin them at Assos. Whether he had friends to visit on the way, or whether he wished to walk those twenty miles through the pleasant oak–groves along the good Roman roads in silent commune with his own spirit, we do not know. Natures like his, however strong may be their yearning for sympathy, yet often feel an imperious necessity for solitude. If he had heard the witty application by Stratonicus, of Homer’s line,

Ἆσσον ἴθʼ ὥς κεν θᾶσσον ὀλέθρου τέρμαθʼ ἵκηαι,

he might, while smiling at the gay jest directed against the precipitous descent from the town to the harbour, have thought that for him too—on his way to bonds and imprisonment, and perhaps to death itself—there was a melancholy meaning in the line.28 Passing between the vast sarcophagi in the street of tombs, and through the ancient gate which still stands in ruin, he made his way down the steep descent to the port, and there found the vessel awaiting him. St. Luke, who was one of those on board, here gives a page of his diary, as the ship winged her way among the isles of Greece. The voyage seems to have been entirely prosperous. The north–west wind which prevails at that season would daily swell the great main–sail, and waft the vessel merrily through blue seas under the shadow of old poetic mountains, by famous cities, along the vernal shores. That same evening they arrived at Mitylene, the bright capital of Lesbos, the home of Sappho and Alcæus, and the cradle of lyric song. Here they anchored because the moonless night rendered it unsafe to thread their course among the many intricacies of that sinuous coast. Next day they anchored off rocky Chios, whose green fields were the fabled birthplace of Homer.29 Next day they touched for a short time at Samos, and then sailed across the narrow channel to anchor for the night in the island–harbour of Trogyllium, under the ridge of Mycale, so famous for Conon’s victory. Next day, sailing past the entrance of the harbour of Ephesus, they came to anchor at Miletus. St. Paul would gladly have visited Ephesus if time had permitted, but he was so anxious to do all in his power to reach Jerusalem by Pentecost, and therefore to avoid all delays, whether voluntary or accidental, that he resisted the temptation. At Miletus, however, the vessel had to stop, and Paul determined to utilise the brief delay. He had probably arrived about noon, and at once sent a messenger to the elders of the Church of Ephesus to come and see him.30 It was but a distance of from thirty to forty miles along a well–kept road, and the elders31 might easily be with him by the next day, which, reckoning from his departure at Troas, was probably a Sunday. He spent the day in their company, and before parting delivered them an address which abounds in his peculiar forms of expression, and gives a deeply interesting sketch of his work at Ephesus.

“Ye know,” he said, “how from the first day on which I set foot in Asia I bore myself with you, serving the Lord with all lowly–mindedness, and tears, and trials that happened to me in the plots of the Jews;32 how I reserved nothing that was profitable,33 but preached to you, and taught you publicly, and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and Greeks repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. And now behold I, bound in the spirit,34 am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what may happen to me there, save that in every city the Holy Spirit testifies to me, saying that bonds and tribulations await me. But I regard it as of no moment, nor do I hold my soul so precious to myself35 as to finish my course,36 and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus to testify37 the Gospel of the grace of God. And now behold I know that ye shall never see my face again, all you among whom I passed proclaiming the kingdom.38 Therefore, I call you to witness this very day that I am pure from the blood of all. For I reserved nothing, but preached to you the whole counsel of God. Take heed, then, to yourselves, and to all the flock over which the Holy Ghost appointed you bishops to feed the Church of the Lord39 which He made His own by His own blood. I know that there shall come after my departure grievous wolves among you, not sparing the flock; and from your ownselves40 shall arise men speaking perverse things, so as to drag away disciples after them. Therefore be watchful, remembering that for three years, night and day,41 I ceased not with tears42 to admonish each one. And now I commend you to God, and to the word of His grace, who is able to build you up, and give you an inheritance among all the sanctified. No man’s silver or gold or raiment did I covet. Yourselves know that to my needs, and to those with me, these hands”—and there he held up those thin, toilworn hands before them all—“these hands ministered. In all things I set you the example, that, thus labouring, you ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, ‘It is blessed rather to give than to receive.’”43

After these words, which so well describe the unwearied thoroughness, the deep humility, the perfect tenderness, of his Apostolic ministry, he knelt down with them all, and prayed. They were overpowered with the touching solemnity of the scene. He ended his prayer amidst a burst of weeping, and as they bade him farewell—anxious for his future, anxious for their own—they each laid their heads on his neck,44 and passionately kissed him,45 pained above all at his remark that never again should they gaze, as they had gazed so often,46 on the dear face of the teacher who had borne so much for their sakes, and whom they loved so well. If Paul inspired intense hatreds, yet, with all disadvantages of person, he also inspired intense affection. He had—to use the strong expression47 of St. Luke—to tear himself from them. Sadly, and with many fore–bodings, they went down with him to the vessel, which was by this time awaiting him; and we may be very sure that Paul was weeping bitterly as he stepped on board, and that sounds of weeping were long heard upon the shore, until the sails became a white speck on the horizon, and with heavy hearts the Elders of Ephesus turned away to face once more, with no hope of help from their spiritual father, the trials that awaited them in the city of Artemis.

The wind blew full in favour of the voyagers, and before the evening they had run with a straight course to Cos. Neither the wines, nor the purple, nor the perfumes of Cos, would have much interest for the little band;48 but, if opportunity offered, we may be sure that “the beloved physician” would not miss the opportunity of seeing all that he could of the scientific memorials of the Asclepiadæ—the great medical school of the ancient world. Next day the little vessel rounded the promontory of Cnidus, and sped on for Rhodes, where, as they entered the harbour, they would admire the proverbial fertility of the sunny island of roses, and gaze with curiosity on the prostrate mass of its vast Colossus, of which two legs still stood on their pedestal,49 though the huge mass of bronze had been hurled down by an earthquake, there to stay till, thirteen centuries later, they were broken up, and carried away on 900 camels, to be the ignoble spoil of a Jew.50 The monstrous image—one of the wonders of the world—was a figure of the sun; and, with whatever lingering artistic sympathy it might have been regarded by the Gentile converts, St. Paul would perhaps think with a smile of Dagon, “when he fell flat, and shamed his worshippers,” or point to it as a symbol of the coming day when all idols should be abolished at the returning dawn of the Sun of Righteousness. The empire of the sea, which this huge statue had been reared to commemorate, had not passed away more completely than the worship of Apollo should pass away; and to St. Paul the work of Chares of Lindos, spite of all its grace and beauty, was but a larger idol, to be regarded with pity, whereas the temple reared to that idol by the apostate Idumean usurper who had called himself king of the Jews could only be looked upon with righteous scorn.51

Next day, passing the seven capes which terminate the mountain ridge of “verdant Cragus,” and the mouth of the yellow river which gave its name of Xanthus to the capital of Lycia, and so catching a far–off glimpse of temples rich with the marbles which now adorn our British Museum, the vessel which bore so much of the fortune of the future, turned her course eastward to Patara. Beneath the hill which towered over its amphitheatre rose also amid its palm–trees, the temple and oracle of Apollo Patareus. A single column, and a pit,—used possibly for some of the trickeries of superstition,—alone remain as a monument of its past splendour;52 and it was due in no small measure to the life’s work of the poor Jewish Apostle who now looked up at the vast world–famed shrine, that Christian poets would tell in later days how

“The oracles are dumb,

No voice nor hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;

Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shrick the steep of Delphos leaving;

No nightly trance or breathed spell

Inspires the pale–eyed priest from the prophetic cell.”

They could now no longer avail themselves of the vessel in which so far they had accomplished a prosperous, and, in spite of all misgivings, a happy voyage. Either its course ended there, or it would continue to coast along the shores of Pamphylia and Cilicia. But here they were fortunate enough to find another vessel bound straight for Phœnicia, and they at once went on board, and weighed anchor. Once more they were favoured by wind and wave. Sailing with unimpeded course—through sunlight and moonlight—at the rate of a hundred miles a day, they caught sight53 at dawn of the snowy peaks of Cyprus, and passing by Paphos—where Paul would be reminded of Sergius Paulus and Elymas—in some four days, they put in at Tyre, where their ship was to unload its cargo. The Apostle must have ceased to feel anxiety about being at Jerusalem by Pentecost, since, owing to providential circumstances, he had now a full fortnight to spare. There were some disciples at Tyre, and St. Paul may have seen them on previous occasions;54 but in so populous and busy a town it required a little effort to find them.55 With them Paul stayed his usual period of seven days, and they by the Spirit told him not to go to Jerusalem. He knew, however, all that they could tell him of impending danger, and he too was under the guidance of the same Spirit which urged him along—a fettered but willing captive. When the week was over56 St. Paul left them; and so deeply in that brief period had he won their affections, that all the members of the little community, with their wives and children, started with him to conduct him on his way. Before they reached the vessel they knelt down side by side, men and women and little ones, somewhere on the surf–beat rocks57 near which the vessel was moored, to pray together—he for them, and they for him—before they returned to their homes; and he went once more on board for the last stage of his voyage from Tyre to Ptolemais, the modern Acre. There they finally left their vessel, and went to greet the disciples, with whom they stayed for a single day, and then journeyed by land across the plain of Sharon—bright at that time with a thousand flowers of spring—the forty–four miles which separate Acre from Cæsarea. Here St. Paul lingered till the very eve of the feast. Ready to face danger when duty called, he had no desire to extend the period of it, or increase its certainty. At Cæsarea, therefore, he stayed with his companions for several days, and they were the last happy days of freedom which for a long time he was destined to spend. God graciously refreshed his spirit by this brief interval of delightful intercourse and rest. For at Cæsarea they were the guests of one who must have been bound to Paul by many ties of the deepest sympathy— Philip the Evangelist. A Hellenist like himself, and a liberal Hellenist, Philip, as Paul would have been most glad to recognise, had been the first to show the large sympathy and clear insight, without which Paul’s own work would have been impossible. It was Philip who had evangelised the hated Samaritans; it was Philip who had had the courage to baptise the Ethiopian eunuch. The lots of these two noble workers had been closely intertwined. It was the furious persecution of Saul the Pharisee which had scattered the Church of Jerusalem, and thus rendered useless the organisation of the seven deacons. It was in flight from that persecution that the career of Philip had been changed. On the other hand, that new career had initiated the very line of conduct which was to occupy the life of Paul the Apostle. As Paul and Philip talked together in those few precious hours, there must have flourished up in their minds many a touching reminiscence of the days when the light of heaven, which had once shone on the face of Stephen upturned to heaven in the agony of martyrdom, had also flashed in burning apocalypse on the face of a young man whose name was Saul. And besides a community of thoughts and memories, the house of Philip was hallowed by the gentle ministries of four daughters who, looking for the coming of Christ, had devoted to the service of the Gospel their virgin lives.58

To this happy little band of believers came down from Judæa the Prophet Agabus, who, in the early days of St. Paul’s work at Antioch, had warned the Church of the impending famine. Adopting the symbolic manner of the ancient prophets,59 he came up to Paul, unbound the girdle which fastened his cetôneth, and tying with it his own feet and hands said, “Thus saith the Holy Spirit, Thus shall the Jews in Jerusalem bind the man whose girdle this is, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.” They had long been aware of the peril of the intended visit, but no intimation had been given them so definite as this, nor had they yet foreseen that a Jewish assault would necessarily end in a Roman imprisonment. On hearing it, St. Paul’s companions earnestly entreated him to stay where he was, while they went to Jerusalem to convey the Gentile contribution; and the members of the Cæsarean Church joined their own tears and entreaties to those of his beloved companions. Why should he face a certain peril? Why should he endanger an invaluable life? Since the Spirit had given him so many warnings, might there not be even something of presumption in thus exposing himself in the very stronghold of his most embittered enemies? St. Paul was not insensible to their loving entreaties and arguments; there might have been an excuse, and something more than an excuse, for him had he decided that it was most unwise to persist in his intentions; but it was not so to be. His purpose was inflexible. No voices of even prophets should turn him aside from obedience to a call which he felt to be from God. A captive bound to Christ’s triumphant chariot–wheel, what could he do? What could he do but thank God even if the Gospel, which was to some an aroma of life, became to him an aroma of earthly death? When the finger of God has pointed out the path to a noble soul, it will not swerve either to the right hand or the left. “What are ye doing, weeping and breaking my heart?” he said. “I am willing not only to go to Jerusalem to be bound, but even to die, for the name of the Lord Jesus.” They saw that further importunity would be painful and useless—

“He saw a hand they could not see

Which beekoned him away,

He heard a voice they could not hear

Which would not let him stay.”

They desisted and wiped away their tears, saying, “The Lord’s will be done.”

Too soon the happy days of rest and loving intercourse came to an end. It was seventy–five miles, an ordinary three days’ journey, from Cæsarea to Jerusalem. That year the feast began at sunset on Wednesday, May 17.60 The last day at Cæsarea was a Sunday. Next day they packed up their baggage61—and it was precious, for it contained the chaluka—and, accompanied by some of the Cæsarean converts, who, with multitudes of other Jews, were streaming up to Jerusalem on that last day before the feast began,62 they started for the Holy City, with hearts on which rested an ever–deepening shadow. The crowd at these gatherings was so immense that the ordinary stranger might well fail to find accommodation, and be driven to some temporary booth outside the walls. But the brethren had taken care to secure for Paul and his delegates a shelter in the house of Mnason, a Cyprian, and one of the original disciples. St. Paul seems to have had a sister living at Jerusalem, but we do not know that she was a Christian, and in any case her house—which might be well known to many Tarsian Jews—would be an uncertain resting–place for an endangered man. And so for the fifth time since his conversion Paul re–entered Jerusalem. He had rarely entered it without some cause for anxiety, and there could have been scarcely one reminiscence which it awoke that was not infinitely painful. The school of Gamaliel, the Synagogue of the Libertines, the house where the High Priest had given him his commission to Damascus, the spot where the reddened grass had drunk the blood of Stephen must all have stirred painful memories. But never had he trod the streets of the Holy City with so deep a sadness as now that he entered it, avoiding notice as much as possible, in the little caravan of Cæsarean pilgrims and Gentile converts. He was going into a city where friends were few, and where well–night every one of the myriads among whom he moved was an actual or potential enemy, to whom the mere mention of his name might be enough to make the dagger flash from its scabbard, or to startle a cry of hatred which would be the signal for a furious outbreak. But he was the bearer of help, which was a tangible proof of his allegiance to the mother church, and the brethren whom he saw that evening at the house of Mnason gave him a joyous welcome. It may have cheered his heart for a moment, but it did not remove the deep sense that he was in that city which was the murderess of the Prophets. He knew too well the burning animosity which he kindled, because he remembered to well what had been his own, and that of his party, against the Christian Hellenists of old. The wrath which he had then felt was now a furnace heated sevenfold against himself.

The next day till sunset was marked by the ceremonies of the feast, and the greater part of it was spent by St. Paul and his little company in an assembly of the elders, who met to receive him under the presidency of James.63 The elders were already assembled when the visitors came in, and we may imagine that it was with something more than a thrill of curiosity—that it must have been with an almost painful shyness—that “timid provincial neophytes” like Timothy and Trophimus (the latter especially, an uncircumcised Gentile, whom his teacher had encouraged to regard himself as entirely emancipated from the Jewish law)—found themselves in the awful presence of James, the Lord’s brother—James, the stern, white–robed, mysterious prophet, and the conclave of his but half–conciliated Judaic presbyters. No misgiving could assail them in their own free Asiatic or Hellenic homes; but here in Jerusalem, in “the Holy, the Noble city,” under the very shadow of the Temple, face to face with zealots and Pharisees, it required nothing less than the genius of a Paul to claim without shadow of misgiving that divine freedom which was arraigned in the name of a history rich in miracles, and a whole literature of inspired books. That free spirit was a lesson which the Jews themselves as a body could not learn. It required, indeed, the earthquake shock which laid their temple in ruins, and scattered their nationality to the four winds of heaven, effectively to teach them the futility of the convictions to which they so passionately clung. They would have resisted without end the logic of argument had not God Himself in due time refuted their whole theology by the irresistible logic of facts. The destruction of Jerusalem did more to drive them from an immemorial “orthodoxy” than the Epistles of St. Paul himself.

As we read the narrative of the Acts in the light of the Epistles, it is difficult to resist the impression that the meeting between the Apostle and the Elders of Jerusalem was cold. It is, of course, certain that the first object of the meeting was the presentation of the contribution from which Paul had hoped so much. One by one he would call forward the beloved delegates, that they might with their own hands lay at the feet of James the sums of money which his Gentile Churches had contributed out of their deep poverty, and which in many and many a coin bore witness to weeks of generous self–denial. There lay all this money, a striking proof of the faithfulness with which Paul, at any rate, had carried out his share of the old compact at Jerusalem, when—almost by way of return for concessions which the Judaisers had done their best to render nugatory—the Three had begged him to be mindful of the poor. It must have been a far larger bounty than they had any reason to expect, and on this occasion, if ever, we might surely have looked for a little effusive sympathy, a little expansive warmth, on the part of the community which had received so tangible a proof of the Apostle’s kindness. Yet we are not told about a word of thanks, and we see but too plainly that Paul’s hardly disguised misgiving as to the manner in which his gift would be accepted64 was confirmed. Never in any age have the recipients of alms at Jerusalem been remarkable for gratitude.65 Was the gratitude of the Zealots and Pharisees of the community extinguished in this instance by the fact that one of the bags of money was carried by the hands of an uncircumcised Gentile? Had it been otherwise, nothing would have lain more entirely in the scope of St. Luke’s purpose to record. Though some at least of the brethren received Paul gladly, the Elders of the Church had not hurried on the previous evening to greet and welcome him, and subsequent events prove too clearly that his chief reward lay in the sense of having done and taught to his converts what was kind and right, and not in any softening of the heart of the Judaic Christians. Gratitude is not always won by considerateness. The collection for the saints occupies many a paragraph in St. Paul’s Epistles, as it had occupied many a year of his thoughts. But there is little or no recorded recognition of his labour of love by the recipients of the bounty which but for him could never have been collected.

When the presentation was over, Paul narrated in full detail66 the work he had done, and the Churches which he had confirmed or founded in that third journey, of which we have seen the outline. What love and exultation should such a narrative have excited! All that we are told is, that “they, on hearing it, glorified God, and said”—what? The repetition, the echo, of bitter and even deadly reproaches against St. Paul, coupled with a suggestion which, however necessary they may have deemed it, was none the less humiliating. “You observe, brother, how many myriads of the Jews there are that have embraced the faith, and they are all zealots of the Law.” The expression is a startling one. Were there, indeed, at that early date “manymyriads” of Jewish Christians, when we know how insignificant numerically were the Churches even at such places as Rome and Corinth, and when we learn how small was the body of Christians which, a decade later, took refuge at Pella from the impending ruin of Jerusalem? If we are to take the expression literally—if there were even as many as two myriads of Christians who were all zealous for the Law, it only shows how fatal was the risk that the Church would be absorbed into a mere slightly–differentiated synagogue. At any rate, the remark emphasised the extreme danger of the Apostle’s position in that hotbed of raging fanaticism, especially when they added, “And they”—all these myriads who have embraced the faith and are zealots of the Law!— “have been studiously indoctrinated67 with the belief about you, that you teach APOSTASY FROM MOSES, telling all THE JEWS of the dispersion not to circumcise their children, and not to walk in obedience to the customs. What then is the state of affairs? That a crowd will assemble is quite certain; for they will hear that you have come. At once then do what we tell you. We have four men who have a vow upon them. Take them, be purified with them, and pay their expenses that they may get their heads shaved. All will then recognise that there is nothing in all which has been so carefully inculcated into them about you, but that you yourself also walk in observance of the Law. But as regards the Gentilesthat have embraced the faith, we enjoined their exemption from everything of this kind, deciding only that they should keep themselves from meat offered to idols, and blood, and strangled, and fornication.”

What did this proposal mean? It meant that the emancipation from the vow of the Nazarite could only take place at Jerusalem, and in the Temple, and that it was accompanied by offerings so costly that they were for a poor man impossible. A custom had therefore sprung up by which rich men undertook to defray the necessary expenses, and this was regarded as an act of charity and piety. The Jews, indeed, looked so favourably on a species of liberality which rendered it possible for the poor no less than the rich to make vows at moments of trial and danger, that when Agrippa I. paid his first visit to Jerusalem, he had paid the expenses which enabled a large number of Nazarites to shave their heads,68 not only because he wished to give an ostentatious proof of his respect for the Levitical law, but also because he knew that this would be a sure method of acquiring popularity with the Pharisaic party. The person who thus defrayed the expenses was supposed so far to share the vow, that he was required to stay with the Nazarites during the entire week, which, as we gather from St. Luke, was the period which must elapse between the announcement to the priest of the termination of the vow and his formal declaration that it had been legally completed.69 For a week then, St. Paul, if he accepted the advice of James and the presbyters, would have to live with four paupers in the chamber of the Temple which was set apart for this purpose; and then to pay for sixteen sacrificial animals and the accompanying meat offerings; and to stand among these Nazarites while the priest offered four he–lambs of the first year without blemish for burnt offerings, and four ewe–lambs of the first year without blemish for sin offerings, and four rams without blemish for peace offerings; and then, to look on while the men’s heads were being shaved and while they took their hair to burn it under the boiling caldron of the peace offerings, and while the priest took four sodden shoulders of rams and four unleavened cakes out of the four baskets, and four unleavened wafers anointed with oil, and put them on the hands of the Nazarites, and waved them for a wave–offering before the Lord—which, with the wave–breads and the heave–shoulders, the priest afterwards took as his own perquisites. And he was to do all this, not only to disprove what was undoubtedly a calumny if taken strictly—namely, that he had taught the Jews apostasy from Moses (as though his whole Gospel was this mere negation!)—but also to prove that there was no truth in the reports about him, but that he also was a regular observer of the Law.

That it was an expensive business was nothing. Paul, poor as he had now become, could not, of course, pay unless he had the money wherewith to pay it; and if there were any difficulty on this score, its removal rested with those who made the proposal. But wasthe charge against him false in spirit as well as in letter? Was it true that he valued, and—at any rate with anything approaching to scrupulosity—still observed the Law? Would there not be in such conduct on his part something which might be dangerously misrepresented as an abandonment of principle? If those Judaisers on whom he did not spare to heap such titles as “false apostles,” “false brethren,” “deceitful workers,” “dogs,” “emissaries of Satan,” “the concision,”70 had shaken the allegiance of his converts by charging him with inconsistency before, would they not have far more ground to do so now? It is true that at the close of his second journey he had spontaneously taken on himself the vow of the Nazarite. But since that time circumstances had widely altered. At that time the animosity of those false brethren was in abeyance; they had not dogged his footsteps with slander; they had not beguiled his converts into legalism; they had not sent their adherents to undo his teaching and persuade his own churches to defy his authority. And if all these circumstances were changed, he too was changed since then. His faith had never been the stereotype of a shibboleth, or the benumbing repetition of a phrase. His life, like the life of every good and wise man, was a continual education. His views during the years in which he lived exclusively among Gentile churches and in great cities had been rendered clearer and more decided. Not to speak of the lucid principles which he had sketched in the Epistles to the Corinthians, he had written the Epistle to the Galatians, and had developed the arguments there enunciated in the Epistle to the Romans. It had been the very object of those Epistles to establish the nullity of the Law for all purposes of justification. The man who had written that the teaching of the Judaisers was a quite different gospel to his, and that any one who preached it was accursed71—who had openly charged Peter with tergiversation for living Judaically after having lived in Gentile fashion72—who had laid it down as his very thesis that “from works of Law no flesh shall be justified”73—who had said that to build again what he destroyed was to prove himself a positive transgressor74—who had talked of the Law as “a curse” from which Christ redeemed us, and declared that the Law could never bring righteousness75 —who had even characterised that Law as a slavery to “weak and beggarly elements” comparable to the rituals of Cybele worship and Moon worship, and spoken of circumcision as being in itself no better than a contemptible mutilation76— who had talked again and again of being dead to the Law, and openly claimed fellowship rather with the Gentiles, who were the spiritual, than with the rejected and penally blinded Jews, who were but the physical descendants of Abraham—was this the man who could without creating false impressions avoid danger of death, which he had braved so often, by doing something to show how perfectly orthodox he was in the impugned respects? A modern writer has said that he could not do this without untruth; and that to suppose the author of the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians standing seven days, oilcakes in hand, in the Temple vestibule, and submitting himself to all the manipulations with which Rabbinic pettiness had multiplied the Mosaic ceremonials which accompanied the completion of the Nazaritic vow—to suppose that, in the midst of unbelieving Priests and Levites, he should have patiently tolerated all the ritual nullities of the Temple service of that period, and so have brought the business to its tedious conclusion in the elaborate manner above described, “is just as credible as that Luther in his old age should have performed a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln with peas in his shoes, or that Calvin on his deathbed should have vowed a gold–embroidered gown to the Holy Mother of God.”77

But the comparison is illusory. It may be true that the natural temperament of St. Paul—something also, it may be, in his Oriental character—inclined him to go much farther in the way of concession than either Luther or Calvin would have done; but apart from this his circumstances were widely different from theirs in almost every respect. We may well imagine that this unexpected proposal was distasteful to him in many ways; it is hardly possible that he should regard without a touch of impatience the tedious ceremonialisms of a system which he now knew to be in its last decadence, and doomed to speedy extinction. Still there were two great principles which he had thoroughly grasped, and on which he had consistently acted. One was acquiescence in things indifferent for the sake of charity, so that he gladly became as a Jew to Jews that he might save Jews; the other that, during the short time which remained, and under the stress of the present necessity, it was each man’s duty to abide in the condition wherein he had been called. He was a Jew, and therefore to him the Jewish ceremonial was a part of national custom and established ordinance. For him it had, at the very lowest, a civilif not a religious validity. If the Jews misinterpreted his conduct into more than was meant, it would only be a misrepresentation like those which they gratuitously invented, and to which he was incessantly liable. Undoubtedly during his missionary journey he must again and again have broken the strict provisions of that Law to the honour and furtherance of which he had devoted his youth. But though he did not hold himself bound to do all that the Law and the Rabbis required, yet neither did he feel himself precluded from any observance which was not wrong. His objection to Levitism was not an objection to external conformity, but only to that substitution of externalism for faith to which conformity might lead. He did not so much object to ceremonies as to placing any reliance on them. He might have wished that things were otherwise, and that the course suggested to him involved a less painful sacrifice. He might have been gladder if the Elders had said to him, “Brother, you are detested here; at any moment the shout of a mob may rise against you, or the dagger of a Sicarius be plunged into your heart. We cannot under such circumstances be responsible for your life. You have given us this splendid proof of your own loyalty and of the Christian love of your converts. The feast is over.78 Retire at once with safety, and with our prayers and our blessings continue your glorious work.” Alas! such advice was only a “might have been.” He accepted the suggestion they offered, and the very next day entered the Temple with these four Nazarites, went through whatever preliminary purification was deemed necessary by the Oral Law, and gave notice to the priests that from this time they must begin to count the seven days which must pass before the final offerings were brought and the vow concluded.79

If the Elders overrated the conciliatory effect of this act of conformity, they had certainly underrated the peril to which it would expose the great missionary who, more than they all, had done his utmost to fulfil that last command of Christ that they should go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. The city was full of strangers from every region of the world, and the place where of all others they would delight to congregate would be the courts of the Temple. Even, therefore, if St. Paul, now that the storms of years had scarred his countenance and bent his frame, was so fortunate as to remain unrecognised by any hostile priest who had known him in former days, it was hardly possible that every one of the thousands whom he had met in scores of foreign cities should fail to identify that well–known face and figure. It would have been far safer, if anything compelled him to linger in the Holy City, to live unnoticed in the lowly house of Mnason. He might keep as quiet as he possibly could in that chamber of the Nazarites; but even if, during those seven days of enforced idleness, he confined himself there to the utmost extent, and even if the other Nazarites abstained from divulging the secret of a name so famous, it was impossible that he should escape the eyes of the myriads who daily wandered through the Temple courts and took part in its multitudinous ceremonies.

For the Jews at that period were in a most inflammable state of mind, and the tremors of the earthquake were already felt which was soon to rend the earth under their feet, and shake their Temple and city into irretrievable ruin. On the death of Herod Agrippa I.,80 Claudius, thinking that his son was too young to succeed to the government of so turbulent a people, kept him under his own eye at Rome, and appointed Cuspius Fadus to the Procuratorship of Judæa. To secure an additional hold upon the Jews, he ordered that the crown of Agrippa, and, what was of infinitely greater importance, the “golden robes” of the High Priest, should be locked up under the care of the Romans in the Tower of Antonia. So deep was the fury of the Jews at the thought that these holy vestments should be under the impure care of Gentiles, that the order could only be enforced by securing the presence at Jerusalem of C. Cassius Longinus, the Præfect of Syria, with an immense force. Claudius almost immediately afterwards cancelled the order, at the entreaty of a deputation from Jerusalem, supported by the influence of the young Agrippa. Claudius had owed to Agrippa’s father his very empire, and since the youth inherited all the beauty, talent, and versatility of his family, he was a great favourite at the Imperial Court. Fadus had been succeeded by Tiberius Alexander, a nephew of Philo,81 who was peculiarly hateful to the Jews because he was a renegade from their religion. He was superseded by Cumanus, and about the same time Agrippa II. was invested with the little kingdom of Chalcis, vacant by the death of his uncle Herod, and also with the functions of guarding the Temple and the Corban, and nominating to the High Priesthood.82 The Procuratorship of Cumanus marked the commencement of terrible disturbances. At the very first Passover at which he was present an event occurred which was a terrible omen of the future. Just as at this day the Turkish soldiers are always prepared to pour down from the house of the Turkish Governor on the first occurrence of any discord between the Greek and Latin Churches, so it was the custom of the Roman commandant of the Tower of Antonia to post detachments of soldiers along the roof of the cloister which connected the fortress with the Temple area—ready at any moment to rush down the stairs and plunge into the very midst of the crowded worshippers. What occurred on this occasion is singularly characteristic. While standing there at guard, one of the Roman soldiers, weary of having nothing to do, and disgusted with watching what he despised as the mummeries of these hateful Jews, expressed his contempt for them by a gesture of the most insulting indecency.83 Instantly the Jews were plunged into a paroxysm of fury. They cursed the new Procurator, and began to pelt the soldiers with stones, which seem to have been always ready to hand among this excitable race. Fearing that the Antonia detachment would be too weak to cope with so savage an onslaught, Cumanus marched his entire forces round from the Prætorium. At the clash of their footsteps, and the gleam of their swords, the wretched unarmed mass of pilgrims was struck with panic, and made a rush to escape. The gates of the Temple were choked up, and a multitude, variously stated at ten and at twenty thousand, was trampled and crushed to death.

This frightful disaster was followed by another tragedy. An imperial messenger was robbed by bandits at Bethhoron, not far from Jerusalem. Furious at such an insult, Cumanus made the neighbouring villages responsible, and in sacking one of them a Roman soldier got hold of a copy of the Scriptures, and burnt it before the villagers with open blasphemies. The horror of the insult consisted in the fact that the sacred roll contained in many places the awful and incommunicable Name. As they had done when Pilate put up the gilt votive shields in Jerusalem, and when Caligula had issued the order that his image should be placed in the Temple, the Jews poured in myriads to Cæsarea, and prostrated themselves before the tribunal of the Procurator. In this instance Cumanus thought it best to avert dangerous consequences by the cheap sacrifice of a common soldier, and the Jews were for the time appeased by the execution of the offender.

Then had followed a still more serious outbreak. The Samaritans, actuated by the old hatred to the Jews, had assassinated some Galilæan pilgrims to the Passover at En Gannim, the frontier village of Samaria which had repulsed our Lord.84 Unable to obtain from Cumanus—whom the Samaritans had bribed—the punishment of the guilty village, the Jews, secretly countenanced by the High Priest Ananias, and his son Ananus, flew to arms, and, under the leadership of the bandit Eleazar, inflicted on the Samaritans a terrible vengeance. Cumanus, on hearing this, marched against them and routed them. A renewal of the contest was prevented by the entreaties of the chief men at Jerusalem, who, aware of the tremendous results at issue, hurried to the battle–field in sackcloth and ashes. Meanwhile the Præfect of Syria, Titus Ummidius Quadratus, appeared on the scene, and, after hearing both sides, found Cumanus and his tribune Celer guilty of having accepted a bribe, and sent them to Rome with Ananias and Ananus to be tried by the Emperor.85 Jonathan, one of the very able ex–High Priests of the astute house of Annas, was sent to plead the cause of the Jews. At that time Agrippina was all–powerful with the Emperor, and the freedman Pallas all–powerful both with him and with Agrippina, who owed her elevation to his friendly offices. The supple Agrippa introduced Jonathan to Pallas, and it seems as if a little compact was struck between them, that Pallas should induce the Emperor to decide in favour of the Jews, and that Jonathan should petition him on behalf of the Jews to appoint to the lucrative Procuratorship his brother Felix. The plot succeeded. The Samaritans were condemned; their leaders executed; Cumanus banished; Celer sent to Jerusalem to be beheaded; Ananias and Ananus triumphantly acquitted; and A.D. 52, six years before St. Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem, Felix—like his brother, an Arcadian slave—who had taken the name of Antonius in honour of his first mistress, and the name of Claudius in honour of his patron—became Procurator of Judæa.86

At first the new Procurator behaved with a little decent reserve, but it was not long before he began to show himself in his true colours, and with every sort of cruelty and licentiousness “to wield the power of a king with the temperament of a slave.” After his emancipation he had been entrusted with a command in a troop of auxiliaries, and acting with the skill and promptitude of a soldier, he had performed a really useful task in extirpating the bandits. Yet even the Jews murmured at the shameless indifference with which this Borgia of the first century entrapped the chief bandit Eleazar into a friendly visit, on pretence of admiring his skill and valour, and instantly threw him into chains, and sent him as a prisoner to Rome. They were still more deeply scandalised by his intimacy with Simon Magus, who lived with him at Cæsarea as a guest, and by whose base devices this “husband or adulterer of three queens” succeeded in seducing Drusilla, the beautiful sister of Agrippa II.—who had now come as a king to Judæa— from her husband Aziz, King of Emesa. A crime of yet deeper and darker dye had taken place the very year before Paul’s arrival. Jonathan, who was often bitterly reminded of his share in bringing upon his nation the affliction of a Procurator, who daily grew more infamous from his exactions and his savagery, thought that his high position and eminent services to Felix himself entitled him to expostulate. So far from taking warning, Felix so fiercely resented the interference that he bribed Doras, a friend of Jonathan’s, to get rid of him. Doras hired the services of some bandits, who, armed with sicae, or short daggers, stabbed the priestly statesman at one of the yearly feasts. The success and the absolute impunity of the crime put a premium upon murder; assassinations became as frequent in Jerusalem as they were at Rome during the Papacy of Alexander VI. The very Temple was stained with blood. Any one who wanted to get rid of a public or private enemy found it a cheap and easy process to hire a murderer. It is now that the ominous term sicariusoccurs for the first time in Jewish history.

This had happened in A.D. 57, and it was probably at the Passover of A.D. 58—only seven weeks before the time at which we have now arrived—that the Egyptian Pseudo– Messiah had succeeded in raising 30,000 followers, with no better pretensions than the promise that he would lead them to the Mount of Olives, and that the walls of Jerusalem should fall flat before him. Four thousand of these poor deluded wretches seem actually to have accompanied him to the Mount of Olives. There Felix fell upon them, routed them at the first onslaught, killed four hundred, took a multitude of prisoners, and brought the whole movement to an impotent conclusion. The Egyptian, however, had by some means or other made good his escape—was at this moment uncaptured—and, in fact, was never heard of any more. But the way in which followers had flocked in thousands to so poor an impostor showed the tension of men’s minds.

Such was the condition of events—in so excited a state were the leaders and the multitude—at the very time that St. Paul was keeping himself as quiet as possible in the chambers of the Nazarites. Four days had already passed, and there seemed to be a hope that, as the number of pilgrims began to thin, he might be safe for three more days, after which there would be nothing to prevent him from carrying out his long–cherished wish to visit Rome, and from thence to preach the Gospel even as far as Spain. Alas! he was to visit Rome, but not as a free man.

For on the fifth day there were some Jews from Ephesus and other cities of Asia—perhaps Alexander the coppersmith was one of them—in the Court of the Women, and the glare of hatred suddenly shot into the eyes of one of these observers as he recognised the marked features of the hated Shaûl. He instantly attracted towards him the attention of some of the compatriots to whom Paul’s teaching was so well known. The news ran in a moment through the passionate, restless, fanatical crowd. In one minute there arose one of those deadly cries which are the first beginnings of a sedition. These Asiatics sprang on Paul, and stirred up the vast throng of worshippers with the cry, “Israelites! help! This is the wretch who teaches all men everywhere against the people, and the Thorah, and the Temple. Ay, and besides that, he brought Greeks into the Temple, and hath polluted this holy place.” Whether they really thought so or not we cannot tell, but they had no grounds for this mad charge beyond the fact that they had seen the Ephesian Trophimus walking about with Paul in the streets of Jerusalem, and supposed that Paul had taken him even into the holy precincts. To defile the Temple was what every enemy of the Jews tried to do. Antiochus, Heliodorus, Pompey, had profaned it; and very recently the Samaritans had been charged with deliberately polluting it by scattering dead men’s bones over its precincts. Instantly the rumour flew from lip to lip that this was Shaûl, of whom they had heard—Paul, the mesith—Paul, one of the Galilæan Minim—one of the believers in “the Hung”—Paul, the renegade Rabbi, who taught and wrote that Gentiles were as good as Jews—the man who blasphemed the Thorah—the man whom the synagogues had scourged in vain—the man who went from place to place getting them into trouble with the Romans; and that he had been caught taking with him into the Temple a Gentile dog, an uncircumcised ger.87 The punishment for that crime was death—death by the full permission of the Romans themselves; death even against a Roman who should dare to set foot beyond the Chêl.They were now in the Court of the Women, but they only had to go through the Corinthian gate, and down the fifteen steps outside of it, to come to the Chêl—the “middle–wall of partition,” that low stone balustrade with obelisks, on each of which was engraved on stone tablets the inscription in Greek and Latin that “No alien must set foot within that enclosure on pain of certain death.”88 Here, then, was a splendid opportunity for most just vengeance on the apostate who taught apostasy. A rush was made upon him, and the cry “To the rescue!” echoed on all sides through the streets.89 To defend himself was impossible. What voice could be heard amid the wild roar of that momentarily increasing hubbub? Was this to be the end? Was he to be torn to pieces then and there in the very Temple precincts? If he had been in the court below, that would have been his inevitable fate, but the sacredness of the spot saved him. They began dragging him, vainly trying to resist, vainly trying to speak a word, through the great “Beautiful” gate of Corinthian brass, and down the fifteen steps, while the Levites and the Captain of the Temple, anxious to save the sacred enclosure from one more stain of blood, exerted all their strength to shut the ponderous gate behind the throng which surged after their victim.90 But meanwhile the Roman centurion stationed under arms with his soldiers on the roof of the western cloisters, was aware that a wild commotion had suddenly sprung up. The outburst of fury in these Oriental mobs is like the scream of mingled sounds in a forest which sometimes suddenly startles the deep stillness of a tropic night. The rumour had spread in a moment from the Temple to the city, and streams of men were thronging from every direction into the vast area of the Court of the Gentiles. In another moment it was certain that those white pillars and that tessellated floor would be stained with blood. Without a moment’s delay the centurion sent a message to Lysias, the commandant of Antonia, that the Jews had seized somebody in the Temple, and were trying to kill him. The Romans were accustomed to rapid movements, taught them by thousands of exigencies of their career in hostile countries, but nowhere more essential than in a city which Præfect after Præfect and Procurator after Procurator had learnt to detest as the head–quarters of burning, senseless, and incomprehensible fanaticism. A single word was enough to surround Lysias with a well–disciplined contingent of centurions and soldiers, and he instantly dashed along the cloister roof and down the stairs into the Court of the Gentiles. The well–known clang of Roman arms arrested the attention of the mob. They had had some terrible warnings very lately. The memory of that awful day, when they trampled each other to death by thousands to escape the cohort of Cumanus, was still fresh in their memory. They did not dare to resist the mailed soldiery of their conquerors.

Lysias and his soldiers forced their way straight through the throng to the place where Paul was standing, and rescued him from his enraged opponents. When he had seized him, and had his arms bound to two soldiers by two chains, he asked the question, “Who the man might be, and what he had done?”91 Nothing was to be learnt from the confused cries that rose in answer, and, in despair of arriving at anything definite in such a scene, Lysias ordered him to be marched into the barracks.92 But no sooner had he got on the stairs which led up to the top of the cloister, and so into the fortress,93 than the mob, afraid that they were going to be baulked of their vengeance, made another rush at him, with yells of “Kill him! kill him!”94 and Paul, unable in his fettered condition to steady himself, was carried off his legs, and hurried along in the arms of the surrounding soldiers. He was saved from being torn to pieces chiefly by the fact that Lysias kept close by him; and, as the rescue–party was about to disappear into the barracks, Paul said to him in Greek, “May I speak a word to you?” “Can you speak Greek?” asked the commandant in surprise. “Are you not then really that Egyptian95 who a little while ago made a disturbance,96 and led out into the wilderness those 4,000 sicarri?”97 “No,” said Paul; “I am a Jew, a native of Tarsus, in Cilicia, a citizen of no undistinguished city,98 and, I entreat you, allow me to speak to the people.”

It was an undaunted request to come from one whose life had just been rescured, and barely rescued, from that raging mob, and who was at that moment suffering from their rough treatment. Most men would have been in a state of such wild alarm as to desire nothing so much as to be hurried out of sight of the crowd. Not so with St. Paul. Snatched from his persecutors after imminent risk—barely delivered from that most terrifying of all forms of danger, the murderous fury of masses of his fellow–men—he asks leave not only to face, but even to turn round and address, the densely–thronging thousands, who were only kept from him by a little belt of Roman swords.99

Lysias gave him leave to speak, and apparently ordered one of his hands to be unfettered; and taking his stand on the stairs, Paul, with uplifted arm, made signals to the people that he wished to address them.100 The mob became quiet, for in the East crowds are much more instantly swayed by their emotions than they are among us; and Paul, speaking in Syriac, the vernacular of Palestine, and noticing priests and Sanhedrists among the crowd, began—

“Brethren and Fathers,101 listen to the defence I have now to make to you!”

The sound of their own language, showing that the speaker was at any rate no mere Hellenist, charmed their rage for the moment, and produced a still deeper silence. In that breathless hush Paul continued his speech. It was adapted to its object with that consummate skill which, even at the most exciting moments, seems never to have failed him. While he told them the truth, he yet omitted all facts which would be likely to irritate them, and which did not bear on his immediate object. That object was to show that he could entirely sympathise with them in this outburst of zeal, because he had once shared their state of mind, and that nothing short of divine revelations had altered the course of his religion and his life. He was, he told them, a Jew,102 born indeed in Tarsus, yet trained from his earliest youth in Jerusalem, at the feet of no less a teacher than their great living Rabban Gamaliel; that he was not merely a Jew, but a Pharisee who had studied the inmost intricacy of the Halacha;103 and was so like themselves in being a zealot for God, that he had persecuted “this way” to the very death, haling to prison not only men, but even women; in proof of which he appealed to the testimony of the ex–High Priest Theophilus,104 and many still surviving members of the Sanhedrin who had given him letters to Damascus. What, then, had changed the whole spirit of his life? Nothing less than a divine vision of Jesus of Nazareth, which had stricken him blind to earth, and bidden him confer with Ananias.105 He does not tell them that Ananias was a Christian, but —which was no less true—that he was an orthodox observer of the Law, for whom all the Jews of Damascus felt respect. Ananias had healed his blindness, and told him that it was “the God of our fathers,” who foreordained him to know His will and see “the Just One,”106 and hear the message from His lips, that he might be for Him “a witness to all men” of what he had heard and seen. He then mentions his baptism and return to Jerusalem, and, hurrying over all needless details, comes to the point that, while he was worshipping— now twenty years ago—in that very Temple, he had fallen into a trance, and again seen the risen Jesus, who bade him hurry with all speed out of Jerusalem, because there they would not receive his testimony. But so far from wishing to go, he had even pleaded with the heavenly vision that surely the utter change from Saul the raging persecutor—Saul who had imprisoned and beaten the believers throughout the synagogues— Saul at whose feet had been laid the clothes of them that slew His witness107 Stephen— the change from such a man to Saul the Christian and the preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—could not fail to win credence to his testimony. But He who spake to him would not suffer him to plead for a longer opportunity of appealing to his fellow–countrymen. Briefly but decisively came the answer which had been the turning–point for all his subsequent career— “Go, for I will send thee far away TO THE GENTILES!”

That fatal word, which hitherto he had carefully avoided, but which it was impossible for him to avoid any longer, was enough. Up to this point they had continued listening to him with the deepest attention. Many of them were not wholly unacquainted with the facts to which he appealed. His intense earnestness and mastery over the language which they loved charmed them all the more, because the soldiers who stood by could not understand a word of what he was saying, so that his speech bore the air of a confidential communication to Jews alone, to which the alien tyrants could only listen with vain curiosity and impatient suspicion. Who could tell but what some Messianic announcement might be hovering on his lips? Might not he who was thrilling them with the narrative of these visions and revelations have some new ecstasy to tell of, which should be the signal that now the supreme hour had come, and which should pour into their hearts a stream of fire so intense, so kindling, that in the heat of it the iron chains of the Romans should be as tow? But was thisto be the climax? Was a trance to be pleaded in defence of the apostasy of the renegade? Was this evil soul to be allowed to produce holy witness for his most flagrant offences? Were they to be told, forsooth, that a vision from heaven had bidden him preach to “sinners of the Gentiles,” and fling open, as he had been doing, the hallowed privileges of the Jews to those dogs of the uncircumcision? All that strange multitude was as one; the same hatred shot at the same instant through all their hearts. That word “GENTILES,” confirming all their worst suspicions, fell like a spark on the inflammable mass of their fanaticism. No sooner was it uttered108 than they raised a simultaneous yell of “Away with such a wretch from the earth; he ought never to have lived!”109

Then began one of the most odious and despicable spectacles which the world can witness, the spectacle of an Oriental mob, hideous with impotent rage, hnowling, yelling, cursing, gnashing their teeth, flinging about their arms, waving and tossing their blue and red robes, casting dust into the air by handfuls, with all the furious gesticulations of an uncontrolled fanaticism.110

Happily Paul was out of the reach of their personal fury.111 It might goad them to a courage sufficient to make them rend the air with their cries of frenzy, and make the court of the Temple look like the refuge for a throng of demoniacs; but it hardly prompted them to meet the points of those Roman broadswords. In great excitement, the commandant ordered the prisoner to be led into the barracks, and examined by scourging; for, being entirely ignorant of what Paul had been saying, he wanted to know what further he could have done to excite those furious yells. The soldiers at once tied his hands together, stripped his back bare, and bent him forward into the position for that horrid and often fatal examination by torture which, not far from that very spot, his Lord had undergone.112 Thrice before, on that scarred back, had Paul felt the fasces of Roman lictors; five times the nine–and–thirty strokes of Jewish thongs; here was a new form of agony, the whip— the horribile flagellum—which the Romans employed to force by torture the confession of the truth.113 But at this stage of the proceedings, Paul, self–possessed even in extremes, interposed with a quiet question. It had been useless before, it might be useless now, but it was worth trying, since both the soldiers and their officers seem already to have been prepossessed by his noble calm and self–control in the midst of dangers so awful and so sudden. He therefore asked in a quiet voice, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a Roman who has not been tried?” The question was addressed to the centurion who was standing by to see that the torture was duly administered, and he was startled by the appeal. This was evidently no idle boaster; no man who would invent a privilege to escape pain or peril. Few under any circumstances would ever venture to invent the proud right of saying CIVIS ROMANUS SUM,114 for the penalty of imposture was death;115 and the centurion had seen enough to be quite sure that this prisoner, at any rate, was not the man to do so. He made the soldiers stop, went off to the commandant and said to him, with something of Roman bluntness, “What are you about?116 This man is a Roman.” This was important. If he was a Roman, the Chiliarch had already twice broken the law which entitled him to protection; for he had both bound him and, in contravention of an express decree of Augustus, had given orders to begin his examination by putting him to the torture. Moreover, as being one who himself placed the highest possible value on the juscivitatis, he respected the claim. Hurrying to him, he said—

“Tell me, are youa Roman?”

“Yes.”

But Lysias, as he looked at him, could not help having his doubts. He was himself a Greek or Syrian, who had bought the franchise, and thereupon assumed the prænomen Claudius, at a time when the privilege was very expensive.117 Whether Paul was a Roman or not, he was clearly a Jew, and no less clearly a very poor one: how could hehave got the franchise?

“Iknow how much it cost me118 to get this citizenship,” he remarked, in a dubious tone of voice.

“But I have been a citizen from my birth,” was the calm answer to his unexpressed suspicion.

The claim could not be resisted. Paul was untied, and the soldiers dropped their scourges. But Lysias was not by any means free from anxiety as to the consequences of his illegal conduct.119 Anxious to rid his hands of this awkward business in a city where the merest trifles were constantly leading to most terrible consequences, he told the chief priests to summon next day a meeting of the Sanhedrin in order to try the prisoner.

The Sanhedrin met in full numbers. They no longer sat in the Lishcath Haggazzîth, the famous hall, with its tessellated pavement, which stood at the south side of the Court of the Priests.120 Had they still been accustomed to meet there, Lysias and his soldiers would never have been suffered to obtrude their profane feet into a chamber which lay within the middle wall of partition—beyond which even a Procurator dare not even have set a step on pain of death. But at this period the Sanhedrin had probably begun their meetings in the Chanujôth, or “booths,” the very existence of which was a proof of the power and prosperity of “the Serpent House of Hanan.”121 To this place Lysias led his prisoner, and placed him before them. The Nasi, or President, was, as usual, the High Priest.122 The preliminary questions were asked, and then Paul, fixing on the assembly his earnest gaze,123 began his defence with the words, “Brethren, my public life has been spent in all good conscience towards God till this day.”124 Something in these words jarred particularly on the mind of the High Priest. He may have disliked the use of the term “brethren,” an address which implied a certain amount of equality, instead of one of those numerous expressions of servility which it was only fitting that a man like this should use to the great assembly of the wise. But Paul was no Am–ha–arets, on the contrary, he was as much a Rabbi, as much a Chakam, as the best “remover of mountains” among them all, and it may have been that he designedly used the term “brethren” instead of “fathers” because he too had been once a Sanhedrist. The bold assertion of perfect innocence further irritated the presiding Nasi, and he may have felt, somewhat painfully, that his own public life had not by any means been in all good conscience either towards God or towards man. This High Priest, Ananias, the son of Nebedoeus,125 who had been appointed by Herod of Chalcis, was one of the worst, if not the very worst specimen of the worldly Sadducees of an age in which the leading hierarchs resembled the loosest of the Avignon cardinals, or of the preferment–hunting bishops in the dullest and deadest period of Charles the Second or George the First.126 History records the revengeful unwisdom of his conduct towards the Samaritans, and the far from noble means which he took to escape the consequences of his complicity in their massacre. The Talmud adds to our picture of him that he was a rapacious tyrant who, in his gluttony and greed, reduced the inferior priests almost to starvation by defrauding them of their tithes;127 and that he was one of those who sent his creatures with bludgeons to the threshing–floors to seize the tithes by force.128 He held the high–priesthood for a period which, in these bad days, was unusually long,129 a term of office which had, however, been interrupted by his absence as a prisoner to answer for his misconduct at Rome. On this occasion, thanks to an actor and a concubine, he seems to have gained his cause,130 but he was subsequently deposed to make room for Ishmael Ben Phabi, and few pitied him when he was dragged out of his hiding–place in a sewer to perish miserably by the daggers of the Sicarii, whom, in the days of his prosperity, he had not scrupled to sanction and employ.131

His conduct towards St. Paul gives us a specimen of his character. Scarcely had the Apostle uttered the first sentence of his defence when, with disgraceful illegality, Ananias ordered the officers of the court to smite him on the mouth.132 Stung by an insult so flagrant, an outrage so undeserved, the naturally choleric temperament of Paul flamed into that sudden sense of anger which ought to be controlled, but which can hardly be wanting in a truly noble character. No character can be perfect which does not cherish in itself a deeply–seated, though perfectly generous and forbearing, indignation against intolerable wrong. Smarting from the blow, “God shall smite thee,” he exclaimed, “thou white–washed wall!133 What! Dost thou sit there judging me according to the Law, and in violation of law biddest me to be smitten?”134 The language has been censured as unbecoming in its violence, and has been unfavourably compared with the meekness of Christ before the tribunal of his enemies. “Where,” asks St. Jerome, “is that patience of the Saviour, who—as a lamb led to the slaughter opens not his mouth—so gently asks the smiter, ‘If I have spoken evil, bear witness to the evil; but if well, why smitest thou me?’ We are not detracting from the Apostle, but declaring the glory of God, who, suffering in the flesh, reigns above the wrong and frailty of the flesh.”135 Yet we need not remind the reader that not once or twice only did Christ give the rein to righteous anger, and blight hypocrisy and insolence with a flash of holy wrath. The bystanders seem to have been startled by the boldness of St. Paul’s rebuke, for they said to him, “Dost thou revile the High Priest of God?” The Apostle’s anger had expended itself in that one outburst, and he instantly apologised with exquisite urbanity and self–control. “I did not know,” he said, “brethren, that he is the High Priest;” adding that, had he known this, he would not have addressed to him the opprobrious name of “whited wall,” because he reverenced and acted upon the rule of Scripture, “Thou shalt not speak ill of a ruler of thy people.”136

It has been thought very astonishing that St. Paul should not know that Ananias was the High Priest, and all sorts of explanations have consequently been foisted into his very simple words. These words cannot, however, mean that he was unable to recognise the validity of Ananias’s title;137 or that he had spoken for the moment without considering his office;138 or that he could not be supposed to acknowledge a high priest in one who behaved with such illegal insolence.139 Considering the disrepute and insignificance into which the high–priesthood had fallen during the dominance of men who would only, as a rule, take it for a short time in order to “pass the chair;”140 considering that one of these worldly intruders took to wearing silk gloves that he might not soil his hands with the sacrifices; considering, too, that the Romans and the Herods were constantly setting up one and putting down another at their own caprice, and that the people often regarded some one as the realhigh priest, who was no longer invested with the actual office; considering, too, that in such ways the pontificate of these truckling Sadducees had sunk into a mere simulacrum of what once it was, and that the real allegiance of the people had been completely transferred to the more illustrious Rabbis—it is perfectly conceivable that St. Paul, after his long absence from Jerusalem,141 had not, during the few and much occupied days which had elapsed since his return, given himself the trouble to inquire whether a Kamhit, or a Boethusian, or a Canthera was at that particular moment adorned with the empty title which he probably disgraced. He must, of course, have been aware that the high priest was the Nasiof the Sanhedrin, but in a crowded assembly he had not noticed who the speaker was. Owing to his weakened sight, all that he saw before him was a blurred white figure issuing a brutal order, and to this person, who in his external whiteness and inward worthlessness thus reminded him of the plastered wall of a sepulchre, he had addressed his indignant denunciation. That he should retract it on learning the hallowed position of the delinquent, was in accordance with that high breeding of the perfect gentleman which in all his demeanour he habitually displayed.

But while we can easily excuse any passing touch of human infirmity, if such there were, in his sudden vehemence, we cannot defend his subsequent conduct at that meeting. Surely it was more than pardonable if on that day he was a little unhinged, both morally and spiritually, by the wild and awful trials of the day before. In the discussion which was going on about his case, his knowledge of the Sanhedrin, of which he had been a member, enabled him easily to recognise that his judges were still mainly divided into two parties—the Saddueean priests and the Pharisaic elders and scribes. The latter were the more popular and numerous, the former were the more wealthy and powerful. Now St. Paul well knew that these two parties were separated from each other by an internecine enmity, which was only reconciled in the presence of common hatreds. He knew, too, that one main point of contention between them arose from questions about the Unseen World, and the life beyond the grave.142 Seeing, therefore, that he would meet with neither justice nor mercy from that tribunal, he decided to throw among them the apple of discord, and cried out amid the Babel of tongues, “Brethren, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. I am being judged about the hope and resurrection of the dead.” The plan showed great knowledge of character, and the diversion thus caused was for the time eminently successful; but was it worthy of St. Paul? Undoubtedly there were points in common between him and the Pharisees. “They taught a resurrection of the dead: so did he. They taught the coming of the Kingdom of God: so did he. They taught the Advent of the Messiah: so did he. They taught an intercourse of God with men by the medium of angels, dreams, and visions: so did he. He shared with the Pharisees exactly those doctrines, on account of which he was regarded by the Sadducees as a seducer of the people.” This is true; but, on the other hand, his belief in the risen Messiah was not the point on which he was mainly being called in question.143 That belief, had it stood alone, would have been passed over by the Sanhedrin as, at the worst, a harmless delusion. Nay, some of the Pharisaic Sanhedrists may even have been nominally Christians.144 But the fury against St. Paul was kindled by the far more burning questions which arose out of his doctrine of the nullity of the Law, and the admission of the Gentiles to equal privileges with the seed of Abraham. Did not, then, the words of the Apostle suggest a false issue? And had he any right to inflame an existing animosity?145 And could he worthily say, “I am a Pharisee?” Was he not in reality at variance with the Pharisees in every fundamental particular of their system? Is not the Pharisaic spirit in its very essence the antithesis of the Christian?146 Did not the two greatest Epistles which he had written prove their whole theology, as such, to be false in every line? Was it not the very work of his life to pull down the legal prescriptions around which it was their one object to rear a hedge? Had not they been occupied—as none knew better than himself—in riveting the iron fetters of that yoke of bondage, which he was striving to shatter link by link? Was there not the least little touch of a suggestiofalsiin what he said? Let us make every possible deduction and allowance for a venial infirmity; for a sudden and momentary “œconomy,” far less serious than that into which his great brother–Apostle had swerved at Antioch; and let us further admit that there is a certain nationality in the chivalry of rigidly minute and scrupulously inflexible straightforwardness, which is, among Northern nations, and among the English in particular, the hereditary result of centuries of training. Let us also acknowledge, not without a blush of shame, that certain slight managements and accommodations of truth have in later ages been reckoned among Christian virtues. Yet, after all these qualifications, we cannot in this matter wholly see how St. Paul could say without qualification, in such an assembly, “I am a Pharisee.” If we think him very little to blame for his stern rebuke of the High Priest; if, referring his conduct to that final court of appeal, which consists in comparing it with the precepts and example of his Lord, we can quite conceive that He who called Herod “a fox” would also have called Ananias “a whited wall;” on the other hand, we cannot but think that this creating of a division among common enemies on the grounds of a very partial and limited agreement with certain other tenets held by some of them, was hardly worthy of St. Paul; and knowing, as we do know, what the Pharisees were, we cannot imagine his Divine Master ever saying, under any circumstances, “I am a Pharisee.” Moreover, the device, besides being questionable, was not even politic. It added violence to a yet more infuriated reaction in men who felt that they had been the victims of a successful stratagem, and in the remark of St. Paul before the tribunal of Felix147 I seem to see—though none have noticed it—a certain sense of compunction for the method in which he had extricated himself from a pressing danger.

But, as we have said, the stratagem was for the time almost magically successful. Paul’s enemies were instantly at each other’s throats. The High Priest, Ananias, was so singularly detested by the Pharisaic party that centuries afterwards the tradition still lingered of his violence and greed.148 There rose a sudden uproar of angry voices, and the scribes, who sided with the Pharisees, started up in a body to declare that Paul was innocent. “We find the defendant not guilty; but if a spirit or angel spoke to him—?”149 Again the Jews, even these distinguished Hierarchs and Rabbis, showed their utter incapacity for self–control. Even in the august precincts of the Sanhedrin the clamour was succeeded by a tumult so violent that Paul was once more in danger of being actually torn to pieces, this time by learned and venerable hands. Claudius Lysias, more and more amazed at the impracticability of these Jews, who first unanimously set upon Paul in the Temple, and half of whom in the Sanhedrin appeared to be now fighting in his defence, determined that his fellow–citizen should not at any rate suffer so ignoble a fate, and once more ordered the detachment of soldiers to go down to snatch him from the midst of them, and lead him to the one spot in Jerusalem where the greatest living Jew could alone find security—the barracks of foreign conquerors.

St. Paul might well be exhausted and depressed by the recurrence, on two consecutive days, of such exciting scenes, and even a courage so dauntless as his could not face unshaken this continual risk of sudden death. The next day was again to bring a fresh peril; but before it came, God in His mercy, who had ever encouraged His faithful servant at the worst and darkest crises, sent him a vision which saved him from all alarm as to his actual life for many a long and trying day. As at Jerusalem on his first visit, and as at Corinth, and as afterwards on the stormy sea, the Lord stood by him and said, “Cheer thee, Paul; for as thou didst bear witness respecting me at Jerusalem, so must thou also bear witness at Rome.”

The dawn of the next day sufficed to prove that his manœuvre in the Sanhedrin had only won a temporary success at the cost of a deeper exasperation. So unquenchable was the fury against him, and so inflamed was the feeling of disappointment that Lysias should have snatched him away from their revenge, that in the morning no less than forty Jews bound themselves with a terrible cheremnot to eat or drink till they had killed him.150 The Jews, like some Christians in the worst days of Christendom, believed in the divine right of assassination as the means of getting rid of a tyrant or an apostate.151 Their penal blindness had deceived them into the sanctification of religious murder. How dark a picture does it present to us of the state of Jewish thought at this period that, just as Judas had bargained with the chief priests for the blood–money of his Lord, so these forty sicarii went, not only without a blush, but with an evident sense of merit, to the hostile section of the Sanhedrin, to suggest to them the concoction of a lie for the facilitation of a murder. “We are bound under a curse not to touch food till we slay Paul. Do you then, and the Sanhedrin, give notice to the commandant to bring him down to you, under pretext of a more accurate inquiry into his case. We, before he gets near you, are prepared to slay him.” So far from rejecting the suggestion with execration, as many a heathen would have done, these degenerate Jews and worldly priests agreed to it with avidity. But a secret known to forty conspirators, and requiring the complicity of an indefinite number more, is no secret at all. There were sure to be dark hints, ominous gestures, words of ill–concealed triumph, and, indeed, so unanimous among the orthodox Jews, and even, we fear, among some nominal Jewish Christians, was the detestation of the man who taught “apostasy from Moses,” that in most circles there was no need for any pretence of concealment. When St. Peter had been in prison, and in peril of execution, the Christian community of Jerusalem had been in a ferment of alarm and sorrow, and prayer had been made day and night without ceasing to God for him; but St. Peter, and especially the St. Peter of that early period, was regarded with feelings very different from those with which the Judaic believers looked on the bold genius whose dangerous independence treated Mosaism and its essential covenant as a thing of the past for converted Gentiles. We hear of no prayer from any one of the Elders or the “many myriads” on behalf of St. Paul. He owed to a relative, and not to the Church, the watchful sympathy which alone rescued him from murder. He had a married sister living in Jerusalem, who, whether she agreed or not with the views of her brother—and the fact that neither she nor her family are elsewhere mentioned, and that St. Paul never seems to have put up at her house, makes it at least very doubtful— had yet enough natural affection to try to defeat a plot for his assassination. Most gladly would we have known something further about the details. All that we are told is, that the son of this lady, apparently a mere boy, on hearing of the intended ambuscade, went at once to the barracks of Fort Antonia, and gaining ready access to his uncle, who, as an untried Roman citizen, was only kept in custodia militaris, revealed to him the plot. The Apostle acted with his usual good sense and promptitude. Sending for one of the ten centurions of the garrison, he said to him, “Lead this youth to the commandant, for he has something to tell him.”152 The centurion went immediately to Lysias, and said, “The prisoner Paul called me to him, and asked me to lead this youth to you, as he has something to say to you.” There is a touch of very natural kindness in the way in which the Roman officer received the Jewish boy. Seeing, perhaps, that he was nervous and flustered, both from the peril to which he was subjecting himself by revealing this secret— since suspicion would naturally fall on him—and also by finding himself in the presence of the most powerful person in Jerusalem, the military delegate of the dreaded Procurator—Lysias took him by the hand, and walking with him to a place where they were out of earshot, began to ask him what his message was. The youth told him that he would immediately receive a request from the Sanhedrin to summon a meeting next day, and bring Paul once more before them to arrive at some more definite result; and that more than forty sicarii had agreed on time and place to murder his prisoner, so that the only way to defeat the plot was to refuse the request of the Sanhedrin. Lysias saw the importance of the secret, and instantly formed his plans. He told the youth not to mention to any one that he had given him information of the conspiracy, and, summoning two centurions, ordered them to equip two hundred legionaries, seventy cavalry soldiers, two hundred lancers,153 with two spare horses, to be ready to escort Paul safely to Cæsarea that very evening at nine o’clock. He was extremely glad to get rid of a prisoner who created such excitement, and who was the object of an animosity so keen that it might at any moment lead to a riot. At that day, too, charges of bribery flew about in the most dangerous manner. Celer, a Roman knight of far higher rank than himself, had actually been dragged by Jews round the walls of Jerusalem, and finally be–headed, for receiving a bribe from the Samaritans.154 Agrippa I. had been dismissed from Antioch; and no less a person than the Procurator Cumanus had been imprisoned and disgraced. So corrupt was the Roman administration in the hands of even the highest officials, that if Paul were murdered Lysias might easily have been charged with having accepted a bribe to induce him to connive at this nefarious conspiracy.155 There was now sufficient pretext to send Paul away swiftly and secretly, and so get rid of an embarrassing responsibility. At nine that evening, when it was dark and when the streets would be deserted, the large escort of four hundred and seventy soldiers—an escort the necessity of which shows the dangerous condition of the country, and the extent of Lysias’s alarm—stood ready at the gate of the barracks; and before the tramp of horse and foot began to startle the silent city, the commandant handed to the centurion in command a letter which, in its obvious genuineness, exhibits a very dexterous mixture of truth and falsehood, and by no means bears out the representation that Lysias was a stupid person. It was one of those abstracts of criminal charges called elogia, which it was the custom to write in submitting a prisoner to the cognisance of a superior judge; and it was ingeniously framed with a view to obviate beforehand any possible charge of illegal conduct towards a Roman citizen. The conduct of Lysias, though a little hasty at first, had however been, on the whole, both kind and honourable; and he would probably be assured by St. Paul that, so far as he was concerned, he might lay aside all anxiety as to any proceedings intended to vindicate the inalienable rights conferred by the citizenship.

The letter ran as follows:—

“Claudius Lysias to his Excellency the Procurator Felix, greeting.

“The prisoner whom I send to you is one who was seized by the Jews, and was on the point of being killed by them when I came down upon them with my forces, and rescued him on being informed that he was a Roman. As I wanted to know further the reason why they accused him, I took him down into their Sanhedrin, and found that he was being accused of questions of their law, but had against him no charge which deserved death or chains. But on receiving secret intimation of a plot which was to be put in force against him, I immediately sent him to you, at the same time giving notice to his accusers also to say all they had to say about him in your presence. Farewell!”

Paul was mounted on one of the horses provided for him, and the escort rode rapidly through the disturbed country, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, with a sharp look–out against any ambuscade. After that, being too numerous and well–armed to have any dread of mere brigands, they went at their case along a Roman road, the thirty–five miles to Antipatris.156 Here they rested for the remainder of the night. Next day the four hundred legionaries and lancers marched back to Jerusalem, while the mounted soldiers rode forward on the remaining twenty–five miles to Cæsarea. St. Paul thus entered Cæsarea with a pomp of attendance very unlike the humble guise in which he had left it, amid the little caravan of his fellow–Christians. They entered the town in broad daylight, and so large a body passing through the streets must have attracted many curious eyes. How must Philip and the other Christians of Cæsarea have been startled to recognise the rapid fulfilment of their forebodings as they saw the great teacher, from whom they had parted with so many tears, ride through the streets, with his right hand chained to the arm of a horseman, amid a throng of soldiers from the garrison of Antonia! That ride, in the midst of his Roman body–guard, was destined to be his last experience of air and exercise, till—after two years of imprisonment—his voyage to Rome began.

The centurion and his prisoner were at once introduced into the presence of Felix. Felix read the letter of Lysias, and after briefly inquiring to what province Paul belonged, and being told that he was a Cilician, he said, “I will hear out your case when your accusers have arrived.”157 He then handed Paul over to a soldier to be kept in one of the guard–rooms attached to the old Herodian palace which now formed the splendid residence of the procurators of Judæa.