that young Saul, whom we have above found abetting, as far as in him
lay, the murder of Stephen. This hot-headed youth, furnished with a
permission from the priests, entered houses suspected of harboring
Christians, laid violent hold on men and women, and dragged them to
prison or before the tribunals. Saul boasted that there was no one of
his generation so zealous as himself for the traditions. True it is that
often the gentleness and the resignation of his victims astonished him;
he experienced a kind of remorse; he fancied he heard these pious women,
whom, hoping for the Kingdom of God, he had cast into prison, saying
during the night, in a sweet voice, "Why persecutest thou us?" The blood
of Stephen, which had almost smothered him, sometimes troubled his
vision. Many things that he had heard said of Jesus went to his heart.
This superhuman being, in his ethereal life, whence he sometimes
emerged, revealing himself in brief apparitions, haunted him like a
spectre. But Saul shrunk with horror from such thoughts; he confirmed
himself with a sort of frenzy in the faith of his traditions, and
meditated new cruelties against those who attacked him. His name had
become a terror to the faithful; they dreaded at his hands the most
atrocious outrages and the most sanguinary treacheries.
The persecution of the year 37 had for its result, as is always the
case, the spread of the doctrine which it was wished to arrest. Till now
the Christian preaching had not extended far beyond Jerusalem; no
mission had been undertaken; enclosed within its exalted but narrow
communion, the mother Church had spread no halos around herself nor
formed any branches. The dispersion of the little circle scattered the
good seed to the four winds of heaven. The members of the Church of
Jerusalem, driven violently from their quarters, spread themselves over
every part of Judea and Samaria, and preached everywhere the Kingdom of
God. The deacons, in particular, freed from their administrative
functions by the destruction of the community, became excellent
evangelists.
The scene of the first missions, which was soon to embrace the whole
basin of the Mediterranean, was the region about Jerusalem, within a
radius of two or three days' journey. Philip the Deacon was the hero of
this first holy expedition. He evangelized Samaria most successfully.
Peter and John, after confirming the Church of Sebaste, departed again
for Jerusalem, evangelizing on their way the villages of the country of
Samaria. Philip the Deacon continued his evangelizing journeys,
directing his steps toward the south, into the ancient country of the
Philistines.
Azote and the Gaza route were the limits of the first evangelical
preachings toward the south. Beyond were the desert and the nomadic life
upon which Christianity has never taken much hold. From Azote Philip the
Deacon turned toward the north and evangelized all the coast as far as
Cæsarea, where he settled and founded an important church. Cæsarea was a
new city and the most considerable of Judea. It was in a kind of way the
port of Christianity, the point by which the Church of Jerusalem
communicated with all the Mediterranean.
Many other missions, the history of which is unknown to us, were
conducted simultaneously with that of Philip. The very rapidity with
which this first preaching was done was the reason of its success. In
the year 38, five years after the death of Jesus, and probably one year
after the death of Stephen, all this side of Jordan had heard the glad
tidings from the mouths of missionaries hailing from Jerusalem. Galilee,
on its part, guarded the holy seed and probably scattered it around her,
although we know of no missions issuing from that quarter. Perhaps the
city of Damascus, from the period at which we now are, had also some
Christians, who received the faith from Galilean preachers.
The year 38 is marked in the history of the nascent Church by a much
more important conquest. During that year we may safely place the
conversion of that Saul whom we witnessed participating in the stoning
of Stephen, and as a principal agent in the persecution of 37, but who
now, by a mysterious act of grace, becomes the most ardent of the
disciples of Jesus.
From the year 38 to the year 44 no persecution seems to have been
directed against the Church. The faithful were, no doubt, far more
prudent than before the death of Stephen, and avoided speaking in
public. Perhaps, too, the troubles of the Jews who, during all the
second part of the reign of Caligula, were at variance with that prince,
contributed to favor the nascent sect.
This period of peace was fruitful in interior developments. The nascent
Church was divided into three provinces, Judea, Samaria, Galilee, to
which Damascus was no doubt attached. The primacy of Jerusalem was
uncontested. The Church of this city, which had been dispersed after the
death of Stephen, was quickly reconstituted. The apostles had never
quitted the city. The brothers of the Lord continued to reside there and
to wield a great authority.
Peter undertook frequent apostolical journeys in the environs of
Jerusalem. He had always a great reputation as a thaumaturgist. At Lydda
in particular he was reputed to have cured a paralytic named Æneas, a
miracle which is said to have led to numerous conversions in the plain
of Saron. From Lydda he repaired to Joppa, a city which appears to have
been a centre for Christianity. Peter made a long sojourn at Joppa, at
the house of a tanner named Simon, who dwelt near the sea. The
organization of works of charity was soon actively entered upon.
The germ of those associations of women, which are one of the glories of
Christianity, existed in the first churches of Judea. At Jaffa commenced
those societies of veiled women, clothed in linen, who were destined to
continue through centuries the tradition of charitable secrets. Tabitha
was the mother of a family which will have no end as long as there are
miseries to be relieved and feminine instincts to be gratified.
The Church of Jerusalem was still exclusively composed of Jews and of
proselytes. The Holy Ghost being shed upon the uncircumcised before
baptism, appeared an extraordinary fact. It is probable that there
existed thenceforward a party opposed in principle to the admission of
Gentiles, and that all did not accept the explanations of Peter. The
author of the Acts would have us believe that the approbation was
unanimous. But in a few years we shall see the question revived with
much greater intensity. This matter of the good centurion was, perhaps,
like that of the Ethiopian eunuch, accepted as an exceptional case,
justified by a revelation and an express order from God. Still the
matter was far from being settled. This was the first controversy which
had taken place in the bosom of the Church; the paradise of interior
peace had lasted for six or seven years.
About the year 40 the great question upon which depended all the future
of Christianity appears thus to have been propounded. Peter and Philip
took a very just view of what was the true solution, and baptized
pagans.
The new faith was spread from place to place with marvellous rapidity.
The members of the Church of Jerusalem, who had been dispersed
immediately after the death of Stephen, pushing their conquests along
the coast of Phoenicia, reached Cyprus and Antioch. They were at first
guided by the sole principle of preaching the Gospel to the Jews only.
Antioch, "the metropolis of the East," the third city of the world, was
the centre of this Christian movement in Northern Syria. It was a city
with a population of more than five hundred thousand souls, and the
residence of the imperial legate of Syria. Suddenly advanced to a high
degree of splendor by the Seleucidæ, it reaped great benefit from the
Roman occupation. Antioch, from its foundation, had been wholly a
Grecian city. The Macedonians of Antigone and Seleucus had brought with
them into that country of the Lower Orontes their most lively
recollections, their worship, and the names of their country. The
Grecian mythology was there adopted as it were in a second home; they
pretended to show in the country a crowd of "holy places" forming part
of this mythology. The city was full of the worship of Apollo and of the
nymphs. The degradation of the people was awful. The peculiarity of
these centres of moral putrefaction is to reduce all the race of mankind
to the same level. The depravity of certain Levantine cities, which are
dominated by the spirit of intrigue and delivered up entirely to low
cunning, can scarcely give us an idea of the degree of corruption
reached by the human race at Antioch. It was an inconceivable medley of
mountebanks, quacks, buffoons, magicians, miracle-mongers, sorcerers,
false priests; a city of races, games, dances, processions, _fêtes_,
revels, of unbridled luxury, of all the follies of the East, of the most
unhealthy superstitions, and of the fanaticism of the orgy. The city
was very literary, but literary only in the literature of rhetoricians.
The beauty of works of art and the infinite charm of nature prevented
this moral degradation from sinking entirely into hideousness and
vulgarity.
The Church of Antioch owed its foundation to some believers originally
from Cyprus and Cyrene, who had already been much engaged in preaching.
Up to this time they had only addressed themselves to the Jews. But in a
city where pure Jews--Jews who were proselytes, "people fearing God"--or
half-Jewish pagans and pure pagans, lived together, exclusive preaching
restricted to a group of houses became impossible. That feeling of
religious aristocracy on which the Jews of Jerusalem so much prided
themselves did not exist in those large cities, where civilization was
altogether of the profane sort, where the scope was greater, and where
prejudices were less firmly rooted. The Cypriot and Cyrenian
missionaries were then constrained to depart from their rule. They
preached to the Jews and to the Greeks indifferently.
The success of the Christian preaching was great. A young, innovating,
and ardent Church, full of the future, because it was composed of the
most diverse elements, was quickly founded. All the gifts of the Holy
Spirit were there poured out, and it was easy to perceive that this new
Church, emancipated from the strict Mosaism which erected an insuperable
barrier around Jerusalem, would become the second cradle of
Christianity. Assuredly, Jerusalem must remain forever the capital of
the Christian world; nevertheless, the point of departure of the Church
of the Gentiles, the primordial focus of Christian missions, was, in
truth, Antioch. It was there that for the first time a Christian church
was established, freed from the bonds of Judaism; it was there that the
great propaganda of the apostolic age was established; it was there that
St. Paul assumed a definite character. Antioch marks the second
halting-place of the progress of Christianity, and, in respect of
Christian nobility, neither Rome nor Alexandria nor Constantinople can
be at all compared with it.
The foundation of Christianity, from this point of view, is the greatest
work that the men of the people have ever achieved. Very quickly,
without doubt, men and women of the high Roman nobility joined
themselves to the Church. At the end of the first century, Flavius
Clemens and Flavia Domitilla show us Christianity penetrating almost
into the palace of the Cæsars.
ISAAC M. WISE
In the rabbinical literature several successes of the apostles are
noticed, especially at Capernaum and Capersamia. One of them is most
remarkable, viz., the conversion of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcan by the
apostle James. This rabbi, the _Talmud_ narrates, was actually arrested
by Roman officers, and, in obedience to the edict against Christianity,
was accused of the crime of being a Christian, which he did not deny,
although he repented it.
The most important success, however, which the apostles could boast was
the conversion of Paul. The man whose colossal genius and gigantic
energies grasped the pillars upon which the superstructure of
Græco-Roman paganism rested, bent and broke them like rotten staves,
till with a thundering noise down came the ancient fabric, with its
gods, altars, temples, priests, and priestesses, depositing _débris_
that took centuries to remove and remodel; the man whose hands were
against all, and against whom were all hands; who defied the philosophy
of the philosophers, the power of the priests, and the religions of the
world; who was all alone all in all--this man was Paul of Tarsus, the
great apostle to the Gentiles, with an original gospel of his own. He
kindled a fire in the very heart of the Roman Empire, under the eyes of
the authorities of Rome and of Jerusalem, which in a few centuries
consumed ancient heathenism from the Tigris to the Tiber, and from the
Tiber to the Thames. With a skilful hand he threw the sparks upon the
accumulated combustibles of error, corruption, and slavery, and ancient
society exploded, to make room and furnish the material for a new
civilization. The conversion of this man was the apostles' great
success. If it had not been for him the nascent Church, like other
Jewish sects, would have perished in the catastrophe of Jerusalem,
because the apostles did not possess that vigor and energy to resist the
violent shock. In Paul, however, the spirit of John and of Jesus
resurrected with double vigor, and he became the actual founder of the
Christianity of history.
Few and far apart are the brilliant stars in the horizon of history.
Strike out a hundred names and their influence upon the fate of man, and
you have no history.
Those brilliant stars, however, did not always make history from their
own wealth, from the original resources of their minds. Ideas which tens
of thousands have held, without an attempt to carry them into effect,
and others have unsuccessfully attempted to realize, in the right time
and under favorable circumstances are seized upon by an executive
genius, and a new epoch in history is opened. The numerous minor spirits
which contributed to the sum total of the creative idea disappear in the
brilliancy of the one star which remains visible in history. The world
is a machine shop. Each artificer makes the part of a machine. One
master mind combines the parts, and he is known as the master machinist.
Paul was one of those master machinists, one of those brilliant stars in
the horizon of history. In him the spirit of Jesus resurrected as
eminently and vigorously as John had resurrected in Jesus. He was the
author of Gentile Christianity. He conceived the idea of carrying into
effect what all the prophets, all pious Israelites of all ages, hoped
and expected--the denationalization of the Hebrew ideas, and their
promulgation in the form of universal religion among the Gentiles; to
conciliate and unite the human family under the great banner inscribed
with the motto of "One God and one code of morals to all." All Jews of
all ages hoped and expected that the kingdom of heaven should be
extended to all nations and tongues; but Paul went forth TO DO it; this
is his particular greatness.
The circumstances, of course, favored his enterprise. Græco-Roman
paganism was undermined. The gods stood in disrepute, and the augurs
smiled. The state religion was an organized hypocrisy. The learned
believed nothing; the vulgar almost everything, if it was but
preposterously absurd enough. The progress of Grecian philosophy and the
inroads of Judaism in the Roman world were so considerable that royal
families had embraced Judaism, and the emperor Tiberius had found it
necessary to drive the Jews, together with the Egyptian priests, from
Rome, because their religion had its admirers in the very palace of the
Cæsars, as well as among priests, nobles, and plebeians. All the devout
Gentiles whom Paul met on his journeys were Judaized Greeks or Syrians;
for the Pharisees traversed land and sea to make one proselyte.
Therefore, when Paul preached in Asia Minor, Cicero and Cato _had_
spoken in Rome; Seneca and Epictetus gave utterance to sentiments as
nearly like those of Paul and other Jews as are the two eyes of the same
head.
Again, on the other hand, Epicurism in its worst sequences, sensualism
in its most outrageous form, the despotism and brutality of the Cæsars
and their favorites, had so undermined the moral sentiments and
religious feelings of the masses that scepticism, fraught with shocking
vices and unnatural crimes, coupled with contemptible hypocrisy and
ridiculous superstition, demoralized the masses and brought truth itself
into ill-repute. To add to all this there came the steady decline of the
Jewish state, the growing demonstration of fast-approaching ruin, and,
in consequence thereof, the growth of superstition among the Hebrews,
among whom a class of mystics sprang up, who professed to know what God
and his angels do, speak, and think in the secret cabinet of heaven,
where the throne of the Almighty stands, splendidly and minutely
described by those mystics who supposed that they received superior
knowledge by special impressions from on high, without study or research
on their part; and expected to see the status of social and political
affairs suddenly changed by miraculous interpositions of the Deity,
without human exertion and coöperation. This state of affairs was highly
favorable to Paul's stupendous enterprise.
But who was Paul himself? Notwithstanding all the attempts of the author
of the Acts to mystify him into as mythical a character as the Gospels
made of Jesus, Paul is an open book in history. We have his genuine
epistles, in which he gives considerable account of himself and his
exploits. We have one portion of the Acts in which, contrary to the rest
of that book, the author narrates in the first person plural, "we,"
which appears to be taken from the notes of one of Paul's
companions--Luke, Timothy, Silas, or any other. Then we have the
_Talmud_, with its numerous anecdotes about _Acher_, as the rabbis
called Paul, which are of inestimable value to the historian. These
sources enable us to form a conception of the man. A few remarks on his
life will be found interesting.
Paul is not a proper name. It signifies "the little one." The author of
the Acts states that his name was Saul. But, it appears, he knew no more
about it than we do, and changed the P of Paul into an S, to make of it
the Hebrew name Saul. In his epistles he invariably calls himself Paul,
and not Saul. So the author of the "we" portion of the Acts always calls
him Paul. Passing under an assumed name, the rabbis called him _Acher_,
"another," _i.e._, one who passes under another or assumed name. They
maintain that his name was Elisha ben Abujah. But this name must be
fictitious, because it is a direct and express reference to Paul's
theology. It signifies "the saving deity, son of the father god," and
Paul was the author of the "Son of God" doctrine. The fact is, he was
known to the world under his assumed name only.
Nothing is known of his youth, except a few spurious anecdotes recorded
in the _Talmud_. When quite young he studied the law and some Grecian
literature at the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, among the thousand
students who listened to the wisdom of that master. He states that he
was a very zealous Pharisee, who persecuted the Christians. But all of a
sudden he embraced the cause of the persecuted, and became one of its
most zealous apostles. We can easily imagine the nature of that
persecution, although the Stephen story, like the Damascus story and the
vision on the way, as narrated in the Acts, is spurious, because Paul
never alludes to it, and the Jews of Jerusalem had no jurisdiction in
Damascus over anybody. But what caused his remarkable transition from
one extreme to the other? First a Pharisee, with law and nothing but
law, and then the author of the epistles, which reject and abrogate the
entire law. Transitions of this nature require time, and are wrought by
violent agencies only.
A number of stories narrated in the _Talmud_, together with those of the
Acts, point to the fact that the youthful Paul, with his vivid
imagination, witnessed many an act of barbarous violence and outrageous
injustice. Occurrences of this nature were not rare under the military
despotism of Rome in Judea. The soil was saturated with innocent blood.
The world was governed by the sword, and Rome groaned under the
unnatural crimes of her Cæsars. There was universal depravity among the
governing class, and endless misery among the governed. The rabbis give
us to understand that this state of affairs misled Paul into the belief
that there was no justice in heaven or earth, no hope for Israel, no
reward and no punishment, that the balance of justice was destroyed. It
is quite natural that under such circumstances such a scepticism should
overpower young and sensitive reasoners.
King Saul, in a state of despair, receiving no reply from the prophets,
none from the Urim and Thumim, deeply fallen as he was, went in disguise
to the Witch of Endor. Goethe's Faust, in imitation thereof, receiving
no answer to his questions addressed to heaven and eternity, no answer
through his knowledge of nature's laws and nature's forces, no answer
from the philosophy of his century and the theology of his priests,
throws himself into the embrace of Mephistopheles. That is human nature.
Exactly the same thing was done in the days of Paul, and exactly the
same thing he himself did. There was the indescribable misery of the
age, and there were the knowledge and theories of that overburdened
century, and no answer, no reply to the questions addressed to heaven
and eternity; and they went to the fountains of mysticism and secret
knowledge to quench the thirst of the soul. There sprung up the
visionary Gnostics among the Gentiles, and the Cabalistic Mystics among
the Jews. History notices the same rotation continually--idealism,
sensualism, scepticism, and finally mysticism.
The mystic art among the Hebrews then was of two different kinds, either
to attract an evil spirit or to be transported alive into paradise or
heaven. An evil spirit was attracted by fasting and remaining for days
and nights alone in burial-grounds, till the brain was maddened and
infatuated, when the artificial demoniac prophesied and performed sundry
miracles. The transportation to heaven or paradise was more difficult.
The candidate for a tour into heaven would retire to some isolated
spot, fast until the brain was maddened with delirium and the nerves
excited to second sight by the loss of sleep. Then, in that state of
trance, he would sit down on the ground, draw up his knees, bend down
his head between them, and murmur magic spells, until, through the
reversed circulation of the blood, the maddened brain, and the unstrung
nerves, he would imagine that he saw the heaven opening to his
inspection, palace after palace thrown widely open to his gaze, hosts of
angels passing within view, until finally he imagined himself entirely
removed from the earth, transported aloft into those diamond palaces on
high, or, as Paul calls it, "caught up into paradise," where he heard
"unspeakable words, which it is not possible for a man to utter," and
the throne of God, with all the seraphim and cherubim, archangels and
angels, became visible and their conversation intelligible to the
enraptured and transported mystic, in a fit of hallucination, when the
bewildered imagination sees objectively its own subjective phantasma,
and hears from without, in supposed articulate sounds, its own silent
thoughts. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to form a
correct idea of the mystic eccentricities to which this awful practice
must have led those who frequently indulged in it. Rabbinical mystics,
like modern trance-speakers, gave vivid descriptions of the interior
splendor and grand sceneries of heaven and of the conversations of
angels. One of those descriptions is preserved in _Pirke Rabbi Eliezer_,
and others in various fragments of the _Talmud_.
Among those particularly noticed in the _Talmud_ as having been in
heaven or paradise there is also Acher, or Paul, who states so himself
in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians (xii.). That passage gave rise
to the story of Jesus appearing in person to Paul, just as the
rabbinical mystics claimed to have had frequent intercourse with the
prophet Elijah, who had been transported alive to heaven.