more

THE title of the Founder of Christianity has of late been somewhat familiarly applied to the Person of the object of Christian worship, in lieu of the appropriate expression of the apostolic writers, of the Foundation of our Faith. Without pausing to attempt to measure the profound distance which separates the germ contained in the Sermon on the Mount, from the last fruits of Historic Christianity in the conclusions of the General Vatican Council of 1866, it may be observed that the word Christian originated out of the Holy Land, some time after the crucifixion, in a spot never trodden by the feet of Jesus Christ. Nor can there be any doubt that the complete series of dogmas which have gradually been piled up by ecclesiastical involution upon the faith of the original twelve, has been supported far more by the language of the most voluminous of the earliest Christian writers than on the words ascribed to Jesus himself by the synoptic Evangelists. Jewish Christianity, or the recognition, by those who maintained the national worship and obedience, of the claim of Jesus of Nazareth to the title of the Anointed King of Israel, became extinct with the desolation of Palestine, after the overthrow of the last selfnamed Messias-the Son of the Star. Of Aryan Christianity, a new faith, a new life, and a new philosophy, the first and most

famous preacher was Saul of

Tarsus.

The life and character of this

great revolutionist of the faith of the Roman world has never yet been adequately grasped in literature.

Either, on the one hand, a halo of divine authority and counsel which were never attributed to Paul by any contemporary, so far as the New Testament informs us, has been cast around his name by the canonisation of the Church, or on the other hand the fierce

hatred of his countrymen, in the nineteenth as well as in the first century, has disfigured the heroic proportions of a thoroughly Semitic character. The account of his entrance on the course which has had so mighty an influence on the changing conditions of human civilisation and credence, which is given by the most eloquent of the New Testament writers, has been subject of late to a fierce attack by a writer who is learned in all those matters which pertain to patristic study, but utterly unacquainted with all those which throw light on the conduct and inner life of a rabbi who sat at the feet of the great Rabban Gamaliel, and was the contemporary, and may have been the rival, of the no less famous Rabbi Johanan Ben Zaccai. If the author of "Supernatural Religion" would devote to that purpose the few years requisite for gaining a rudimentary acquaintance with the Talmud, he would regard with more respect

and confidence the history of the Judæo-Grecian biographer of St. Paul. As to the incidents of his life, as well as with regard to those of a yet more important biography, that we are without any of the patient and careful details which such a writer as Herodotus would have given, becomes only the more apparent the more minutely we compare the statements of the Acts of the Apostles with those of the Epistles bearing the name of Paul. But that we possess what a Semitic doctor would consider to be a fairly adequate history of some fifteen years of the life of his apostles cannot be fairly denied.

Saul of Tarsus, who, for some unexplained reason, from the year A.D. 43 is spoken of and signs himself as Paul, was the son of a Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, born at Tarsus, and thus claiming the proud title of a Roman citizen. He tells us that he profited unusually as a student in Rabbinical learning, so that he sat at the feet of Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, grandson of the famous Hillel, during whose tenure of the presidentship of the Great Sanhedrim the Crucifixion took place. Although a Pharisee and the disciple of so great a doctor, Saul possessed the unusual and (from the Jewish point of view) suspicious accomplishment of some knowledge of the Greek language. Not only are his letters found in Greek (which might have been the case if they were translations), but the argument, in at least one instance, is founded on the phraseology of the Septuagint, and could not have been deduced from the Hebrew text. He is also described on one occasion as quoting a Greek poet, and on another as addressing the Roman commandant at Jerusalem in Greek, although he made his address to the people in Ara

maic. The study of Greek literature was held, by the strictest doctors of the law, to be unbecoming in a devout Jew.

"In the law of the Lord doth he meditate day and night" is the character of "the man that walketh not in the counsel of the

ungodly." "Find me," was the comment of a great doctor, “an hour which is neither day nor night, and in that you may study the Greek writers." Notwithstanding this questionable learning, Saul, according to his biographer, appears to have acted as president of the Bethdin, or secondary court, before which Stephen was accused, and by which he was condemned; and, further, to have been entrusted with a commission to act against those accused of heresy at Damascus. "I verily thought with myself," are the words which his biographer puts in his lips, "that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Which thing I also did in Jerusalem, and many of the saints I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests."

Of the event which effected a complete change in the opinions, though scarcely in the character, of Saul, three accounts are given by his biographer; and slighter references to it are to be found in the epistles bearing his name. It has been urged that these accounts are inconsistent. It may, however, rather prove to be the case that the modern critic has been too hasty. At noon, on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus, as Saul was on his way to execute the commission of the High Priest, he was struck to the earth by lightning; the Greek verb with that signification being employed by the historian, though the proper word is not used in the English ver sion. As he fell he heard a

voice. In the first account it is stated that the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. In his defence on the Temple stairs Saul is represented, by the same historian, as saying "They that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid, but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me." In the third account no mention is made of the companions of Saul, except the statement that they were all fallen to the earth. The reference to the occurrence in the epistle to the Galatians gives the explanation of the apparent inconsistency between these accounts. "It pleased God," Paul there says, "to reveal his Son in me." The subjective nature of the phenomenon is thus plainly indicated. The sound accompanying the flash was heard, as was natural, by the whole company. The words conveyed to the mind of Paul were audible to him alone. Persons who have studied phenomena of this nature—such, for example, as are to be found in the biography of Fox, the founder of the Quakers -are aware how natural sounds at times convey the impression of articulate words to a certain class of recipients. It is not necessary to call such impressions imaginary -in many cases it would be very wrong to do so-but it is purely subjective; powerful, indeed, to the individual concerned, but inappreciable to the nearest companion. On this view, and on this alone, the author of the Acts of the Apostles is consistent both with himself and with the Epistle.

Blinded by the shock, Saul was led into Damascus, where he remained for three days without sight as well as without food. He was there visited by a disciple named Ananias, recovered his vi. sion, and was baptised. "Straight

way " he preached in the synagogues the faith which he had come to the city to uproot. Such, at least, is the first account in the Acts, with which the third agrees in saying, "first unto them of Damascus.' But the account in the epistle, in which the writer is urging the subjective nature of the faith, makes no mention of Ananias, or of the baptism which he enjoined, but says "immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood, neither went I up to Jerusalem, to them which were apostles before me, but I went into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus !" After three years, this statement proceeds: Paul went to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days, but saw no other apostleonly James, the Lord's brother. Fourteen years later he went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus; and a contention is alluded to as to the Gentile character of this later companion. At Antioch, whether before or after this visit is not stated in the Epistle, a fierce contention occurred with Peter, whom, as well as Barnabas, the author does not scruple to charge with dissimulation when he says, "I withstood him to the face, because he was to be condemned."

The chronology of the Acts of the Apostles can only be exactly supplied by taking the statement of Jerome, that Festus replaced Felix in the second year of Nero, as a note of time. According to the dates thus determined, the ready reference in the Epistles to a distance of time of fourteen years is illustrated by the remark that each of the visits to Jerusalem in question occurred in a Sabbatic year, as was also the case on that Feast of Pentecost at which Paul "hasted, if it were possible for him to be at Jerusalem." The Temple service had a special solemnity on

the day of Pentecost of the Sabbatic year. On that occasion alone the king took a part in the ritual. He read an appointed portion of the Law, the sacred roll being handed to him by the High Priest with the same marks of respect which the Pontiff himself was accustomed to receive from the Sagan, or vice high priest, on other occasions. If the peculiar character of this festival was not the chief reason which induced Paul to be present, at least it supplied him with a note of time which he could not forget.

The visit of Peter to Antioch is only indicated in the narrative of the Acts by the expression, "Certain men which came down from Judea.' With them Paul and Barnabas had no small discussion and disputation, which led to the journey of the two teachers in question to Jerusalem. This is consistent with the view that, in the epistle, the reference to Peter's visit to Antioch is not chronologically placed, but occurs as a reference explanatory of the visit to Jerusalem. The contradiction urged by the author of "Supernatural Religion" thus disappears. There is a substantial, though not a detailed, accord between the two accounts. But it is also undeniable that neither of them can be regarded as chronicles. Each writer refers to such points only as bear upon the object he has in view; that object being, not a biography, not a chronicle, but an elucidation of the manner in which certain doctrinal points came to be debated and accepted. Thus the sojourn of Paul in Arabia, a circumstance of the utmost interest to those who seek to form an opinion of the real mental history of the man, is not alluded to in the Acts. In the same way the plot against Paul's

*Acts ix. 1.

§ Acts xv. 4.

life, and the escape by night from Damascus, which are mentioned in the Acts as the immediate cause of the first visit to Jerusalem, but which in no way tend to confirm Paul's claim to any apostolic mission, are omitted in the epistle to the Galatians; although when Paul is telling the Corinthians of his frequent sufferings, the event is referred to without any chronological indication of the time of its

Occurrence.

Whatever explanation, however, may be offered, there is something like a contradiction between the texts of the two books cited, as they now stand. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul was in Jerusalem in each of the years A.D. 31*. 34, 41, 48§, and 55||. On the third of these occasions Barnabas and Paul took up the contributions of the disciples at Antioch to Jerusalem. Of this visit, which fell on a Sabbatic year, no notice is taken in the Epistle to the Galatians. The omission of reference to it might be unimportant, were it not for the gist of the argument of the Epistle. Paul does not, indeed, state in so many words that he did not go to Jerusalem between the time when he spent fifteen days with Peter and his visit fourteen years afterwards. But such an inference is the natural outcome from the words he actually uses. And it is

hard to understand how he could have been personally unknown to the Christian Churches in Judea, if he had been one of the messengers who brought to Jerusalem the Antioch subscriptions. It cannot, perhaps, be said with propriety, that there is any positive contradiction. But, on the other hand, it is evident that we do not possess a chronicle of clearly stated events,

Acts xi. 30; xii. 25. Acts xxi. 17.