the new school of mystics. In this state of trance he discovered that
central figure of the Cabalistic speculation, the _Metathron_, the
co-regent of the Almighty; or, as he otherwise was called, the
_Synadelphos_, the _confrère_ of the Deity, or Suriel, the "Prince of
the Countenance," whom the Cabalists imagined to be the chief marshal
or chief scribe in heaven; who was once on earth, as Enoch or as Elijah,
and was advanced to that high position in heaven.
It is the Demiurge, the highest magistrate in heaven, whom the gnostic
Valentine calls a godlike angel, and of whom the rabbis said, "His name
is like unto the name of his Master."
This central figure, blended with the messianic speculations of that
age, with the doctrines of Peter and the nascent Church, combined in
Paul's mind to one mystic conception of the "Son of God," intelligible
to pagan ears. So he went forth and proclaimed Jesus of Nazareth the Son
of God. In substance, the expression is about the same as Metathron and
Synadelphos, and the office which Paul ascribed to Jesus is precisely of
the same nature with that which the Cabalists ascribed to the angel who
was the _Saar Haolom_, the prince or ruler of this world, who stands
before God, or also sits before him, as Paul's Jesus stands before God
or sits at his right hand. It is precisely the same in both systems, the
names only are changed; so that it is difficult to decide whether Paul
was or the rabbis were the authors of the metathronic speculations,
especially as these two angels only have Greek names, while all others
are Hebrew or Chaldæan, and later Cabalists frequently put down Joshua
or Jesus in the place of Metathron.
Those who believe that Acher's dualism of the Deity was the Persian
_Ormuzd_ and _Ahriman_, hence a good and an evil principle, and that
Metathron never was an evil demon, are as decidedly mistaken as those
who believe that Paul had more than one God. Paul's Son of God and
Acher's Metathron are the same central figure before the throne of God,
and the two authors are identical.
In that world of secret thoughts Paul discovered the harmonization of
discordant speculations and the remedy for all existing evils. "The
world must be regenerated by a new religion," was his great ideal. The
ancient religions and the philosophies have produced the corruption
which rages universally. They must be swept away. Society must be
reconstructed on a new basis, and this basis is in the theology and
ethics of Israel, separated and liberated from their climatical and
national limitations, their peculiar Jewish garb. There was no hope
left of saving the Jewish nationality and political organization from
the hands of omnipotent Rome, which swallowed and neutralized kingdoms
and nations with wonderful ease; nor was there any particular necessity
for it if society at large was reconstructed on the new basis. The
object of Jesus was to reconstruct the kingdom of heaven _in Israel_,
and he was crucified. All Israel had the same object in view, and stood
at the brink of dissolution. If the basis and principles of the kingdom
of heaven became the postulate of society at large, Jesus is resurrected
in the world, and Israel is saved, was Paul's main idea.
The Pharisean rabbis hoped that this would come to pass at some future
day, when, they maintained, all sacrifices and all laws would be
abolished, and all the nations of the earth would be one family, with
one God and one moral law. Paul seized upon the idea, and added to it
the simple dogma of Peter, "The Messiah has come." That hoped-for future
is now. God's promise to Abraham, "And there shall be blessed by thee,
and by thy seed, all the families of the earth," is to be fulfilled at
once. So he came forth from his mystical paradise an apostle of Jesus
and a new redeemer of Israel. He argued exactly as the Pharisean doctors
did who maintained that the Messiah would come when all mankind should
be guilty or all righteous. In the estimation of Paul, at that
particular time all mankind was corrupt and demoralized, and so that was
the time for the Messiah to make his appearance.
He went to work at once. He began to preach his new Christianity at
Damascus about the year 51, and found out that the world was not
prepared for his ideas. He had a narrow escape at Damascus, where the
governor and soldiers pursued him. Like the spies at Jericho, he was let
down in a basket over the city walls and made his escape. So _he_
narrates the story. The author of the Acts, true to his hostility to the
Jews, of course brings them in as the persecutors. But Paul, in general,
never speaks otherwise than with the highest regard and love of his
kinsmen and his brothers according to the flesh.
The failure at Damascus did not discourage Paul. It only convinced him
that he was too young--he could not at that time have been much over
twenty-one years; that he was not sufficiently prepared for the great
enterprise; that it was not such an easy task to throw down the
superannuated heathenism and to reorganize society on a new basis. He
retired into Arabia and remained there nearly three years, to perfect a
plan of operation. Nearly three years he spent in silent contemplation,
to discover the proper means, to take the right hold upon the heathen
world, and to unfurl a new banner of heaven upon this wicked earth. In
53 or 54 we meet him again at Antioch, with his new and original
gospel--the gospel for the Gentiles--prepared for his mission and ready
to embark in the great enterprise, to wage active war upon all existing
systems of religion and philosophy, and to replace all of them by Paul's
gospel. He had been in Jerusalem fifteen days, had conversed with Peter
and nobody else, but he repeatedly tells us that he had taken advice of
none, consulted none, was appointed by nobody, and learned nothing of
anybody. The gospel was his gospel, and he was an apostle by the
appointment of God Almighty himself, who had revealed his Son to him. In
Antioch he established the first congregation of Jews and Gentiles, and
called them Christians. So Paul was the actual author of Christianity
among the Gentiles.
What was Paul's gospel? Paul, setting out on his journeys with the great
idea of converting heathens, was obliged to paganize the Gospel. The
heathens knew nothing of the Jewish Messiah, and he gave him the name
popularly known among them--he called him the Son of God, which was a
common name in mythology. The Son of God and Mary was a term as popular
among heathens as it was foreign to the Jews, among whom Jesus was to
remain the Messiah, only that he became also the Metathron. This
explained to Jewish mystics the possibility of the second advent, and
gave a metaphysical foundation to the resurrection doctrine. The kingdom
of heaven, or the theocracy, was another unintelligible idea to the
heathen. Israel's laws and form of government were as odious and decried
among the pagans as the hostility to that people was fierce and
implacable. Paul made thereof a theological kingdom of heaven, when all
the dead shall resurrect in spiritual bodies, and the living shall be
changed accordingly, together with this earth and all that is thereon;
and declared all the laws of Israel abrogated, so that only the spirit
thereof, the precepts and not the laws, should be obligatory in the new
state of society.
The sins and wickedness of the world are forgiven to all who believe in
the Son, and whose flesh is crucified with him, to resurrect with him in
purity; for he died a vicarious atonement for all. He was the last
sacrifice, to blot out the sins of all who have faith in him.
The Crucified One did not resurrect merely in the spirit, of which the
heathens could not form a satisfactory conception, because the
immortality of the soul was by no means a general belief among them, and
their gods were no spirits; he resurrected in his very body, and was
caught up to heaven, to sit or stand there at God's right hand, to come
down again in proper time. "Here, then, is your tangible proof of
immortality," he said to the heathens. "Like the Crucified One, all of
you will resurrect from the dead, or be changed on the day of judgment."
This was plain language to heathens, who knew that but lately Cæsar had
been caught up to heaven as Romulus was before him, and asked no
questions as to how a human body can rise in the atmosphere and become
incorruptible; none as to what means above or below, up or down, as to
where God is and where he is not, where his right hand, where before and
where behind him; or as to whether the world is full of his glory. No
such questions were asked, and there was the ocular demonstration of
immortality, tangible and intelligible to the grossest intellect.
The Jewish nationality and the Jewish law are at their end, and the
world is the heir to that covenant and to the blessing of God by Abraham
and his seed. With the new covenant the old one ceases. It has fulfilled
its destiny. It was a state of preparation for this period of universal
salvation to all who have love, hope, and faith. With Adam and the flesh
came the sin, law, and death; with Jesus the flesh ceases, hence no more
sin, law, or death.
These are the main features of Paul's gospel: The Son of God, the
theological kingdom of heaven, the vicarious atonement, the bodily
resurrection of the Crucified One, the abrogation of the law, and the
beginning of the new covenant. He was the first man to utter these
doctrines; with him Christianity begins, and he named it.
But Paul knew well that doctrines alone would be insufficient to rouse
the heathen world from its demoralized state, its dreary and stupid
dreams; and he resorted to the most terrible and most shocking of all
messages. He came to the heathens with the terror-striking proclamation,
"The end is nigh!" The whole earth, with all the creatures thereon; the
whole human family, with all its wickedness, all its atrocious crimes,
will be destroyed in one moment. All of you, men, women, and children,
with all your vices and crimes, will be suddenly summoned before the
Eternal and All-just; you have to go, all of you, and appear before the
omniscient God. The end is nigh, the destruction of the human family is
certain and right before you. It will come soon. It may come any day, at
any moment.
Now Paul's gospel came in. Here is your choice. There are death and
damnation; here are life and happiness everlasting. God has sent his Son
in advance of the approaching catastrophe to warn you, and he is
appointed now to conduct the end of all flesh. Cling to him and be
saved, or believe not and be condemned forever. So he came to the
heathens. This was his gospel. How did he succeed? We will explain after
a brief pause.
All passages in the Gospels and the Acts which have reference to the
above Christology, to the end of things or against it--in which the
synoptics most fatally contradict one another--are the products of
writers long after Paul, when the attempts to reconcile Jewish and
Gentile Christianity were made. For with Paul begins the new form of
Christianity and the struggle with the representatives of the old form.
Within ten years he traversed the land from Antioch to Athens, in three
different journeys, and established his bishopric, the first Christian
congregations among the Gentiles. He organized them fully, with deacons
and deaconesses, preachers and prophets; and he was their bishop, their
oracle, their revelation, and their demi-god. He let his converts
believe that they could do wonderful things, in healing the sick,
driving out demons, prophesying and speaking with strange tongues,
because it served his purposes, although he did none of these things. He
gave them the Holy Ghost, _i.e._, he regenerated their feelings and
pacified their stormy passions, suppressed their brutal lusts, and
elevated their aspirations to higher ideals. He did not feel that
sovereign contempt for money which the Master did whom he glorified; for
he, like the other apostles, took his pay, and argued with the
Corinthians, like a good Pharisean lawyer, that bishops and preachers
must be paid--an argument well understood by the dignitaries of the
Church to this day.
Wonderful, indeed, is the progress which Paul made among the Gentiles in
ten years. Like a pillar of fire, he traversed the deserts of
heathenism; like a second Elijah, he battled against the priests and
prophets of Baal, and conjured down the fire from heaven to his
assistance. Within ten years he laid the foundation of a new
civilization, of the reorganization of society on the new basis. He did
not live to see it realized, but he saw the new system take root and
promise golden fruit. Wonderful, we maintain, was his success; for he
was not only opposed by the entire heathen world, and by the orthodox
Jews, although he proclaimed their God and their doctrines, their
religion and their hopes, but was also most strenuously opposed by the
apostles and the nascent congregation in Jerusalem, whose Master he
glorified, and whose cause he made the cause of the world. The
dissensions between Paul and the apostles were of a very serious
character, and there was ample cause for them.
In the first place, he took it upon himself to be an apostle, and they
had their college of Twelve, to which none could be added, especially
not Paul, who had never seen Jesus of Nazareth. He maintained that God
had appointed him, God had revealed his Son and his Gospel to him; but
the apostles did not believe it, and never acknowledged him as an
apostle. At the end of his journeys, Peter, James, and John, three out
of Twelve, acknowledged him as an apostle to the Gentiles, but not to
the Jews. The rest never did, which, of course, was a great trouble and
drawback to Paul among his own converts.
In the second place, they could never forgive him for the idea of going
to the Gentiles. Peter, who had become a pious Essene and considered it
unlawful to go to the house or into the company of a Gentile; James, who
dreaded the idea of eating of the bread of the Gentile, and made a
hypocrite in this point of Peter at Antioch--and they were the heads of
the Church--could not forgive Paul's innovation in going to the
Gentiles. Paul was sensible enough to silence them by begging money for
them, and to appoint the Sunday for collections to be made for the
saints of Jerusalem. But it was too much for them that Paul went to the
Gentiles.
In the third place, he changed their whole religion into a new sort of
mythology. He made of Jesus a Son of God, of which they had no
knowledge. He preached vicarious atonement, bodily resurrection, the end
of the old covenant and the beginning of a new, the end of all flesh,
the last judgment--all of which was foreign to them; not one word of all
that had their Master told them, and they knew only what he did tell
them. They naturally looked upon him as an unscrupulous innovator. They
had not experience and forethought enough to understand that Paul's
success among the heathens depended on that means. They were pious men
who prayed much, believed seriously, and had no knowledge of the world
as it was.
In the fourth place, they could not possibly give their consent to
Paul's abrogation of the whole law, knowing, as they did, how their
Master respected every tittle, every iota of the law; that he had come
to fulfil the law, and to reëstablish the theocracy; how could they
possibly think of the idea of abolishing Sabbath and holidays,
circumcision and ablutions, all and everything, to be guided by the
phantom of hope, love, and faith, against which James argues in his
epistle with all the energy of his soul? Those inexperienced saints did
not know that the Pharisean doctors held similar theories, and that Paul
could not possibly hope to meet with any success among the Gentiles if
he had come to them with the laws of the Jews. They were Roman citizens,
who contemned the laws of the barbarians. Had Paul come with the word
Judaism on his lips, he would have surely failed. Had he come to enforce
a foreign law, he would have been laughed at as a madman. They did not
know that Paul cared not for an hundred and one laws, as long as the
essence and substance could be saved and preserved; that he held that
laws are local, the spirit is universal; that laws are limitations, the
spirit is free and the property of all men of all ages and climes; that
he was determined to drop everything which could retard his progress.
In the fifth place, and this was the worst, they could not forgive him
for preaching the theological kingdom of heaven. A kingdom of Israel--a
throne of David, a Davidian prince, a Zion and a Jerusalem in heaven,
and slavery, misery, and oppression on earth--was so new and foreign to
them, so contrary to what they had heard from their Master, that they
could not accept it. What should become of Peter's Messiah, of the hopes
and promises connected with the second advent, if all at once the whole
scheme is transported from earth to heaven? It was too much
disappointment, they could not endure it. Those men did not understand
that Paul had carefully to avoid every conflict with the Roman
authorities. He was too prudent to be crucified. They could not
comprehend that his great object was not to remove the evil at once; he
intended to sow the seed, to bring forth the plant; to give to the
heathens correct notions of God, duty, responsibility, purity, holiness,
morality, justice, humanity, and freedom, which in proper time should
necessarily break the chains, revolutionize the sentiments, and elevate
the views, hopes, aspirations, and designs of the nations.
They could not comprehend that their Messiah and kingdom of heaven,
together with his terrible message of the end of all flesh and the last
judgment day, were means, and nothing but means, to captivate and reform
the heathen. His Son of God was crucified and resurrected from the dead
to forewarn all of the approaching end of all flesh; to show that in a
little while all the dead should resurrect and the living should be
changed to spiritual beings. He had been given all power by the Almighty
to conduct the catastrophe of the world, and would be present at the
last judgment day. But after all that is over, the earth and man changed
to a new state of spiritual life, then the Son of God returns the
kingdom to the Father, and God will be again all in all. So the Son of
God was a general superintendent, the demiurge for the time being, a
doctrine of which the apostles had no knowledge, and to which they
could not give their consent. He could not get them to understand that
these were the means for the conversion of the Gentiles, and that he had
quite another gospel for the enlightened portion of the community. They
could not see that among heathens used to apotheosis, man-worship, and
plastic gods, ideas, to become effective, must put on concrete and
tangible bodies.
They could not imagine that the sensuality and corruption of the age
required heroic and terror-striking means to rouse and to move the
masses; and so the dissensions and troubles between Paul and the nascent
Church increased with the success of Paul among the Gentiles. His
epistles, one and all, are polemics, not against heathenism or against
Judaism, but against his colleagues in Jerusalem, whom, together with
their doctrines, he treats in a most reckless manner. They could not
write to counterbalance Paul--in fact, there were no writers of any note
among them. Therefore, only one side of the polemics, that of Paul, is
fully represented in the New Testament; and the side of the Jewish
Christians remained mostly matter of tradition.
Messengers were sent to follow Paul to undo his gospel and preach that
of the apostles; to introduce the law and circumcision among the Gentile
Christians. Those messengers in many cases succeeded, notwithstanding
the thundering epistles of Paul. So his influence was weakened and his
progress retarded among the Gentiles till finally, after ten years of
hard work, he concluded upon going to Jerusalem and, if possible,
effecting a compromise with the apostolic congregation. It was a
dangerous time for him to go to Jerusalem, for just then the fanatic
high-priest, Ananias, had convened a court of his willing tools, tried
James, the brother of Jesus, and, finding him guilty, of what God only
knows, had him and some of his associates executed--a bloody deed, which
cost him his office, on account of the loud and emphatic protestations
of the Jews before Agrippa II and the Roman governor. Therefore, Paul
was cautioned by prophets and friends not to go to Jerusalem.
But he was not the man to be frightened by dangers; he was the very type
of boldness and courage. He went to Jerusalem to effect a conciliation
with the Church. A synod met in the house of James the apostle, who had
succeeded the former James as head of the Church, and Paul was told to
do that against which his conscience, his honor, his manhood must have
revolted: he was required to play the hypocrite in Jerusalem, in order
to pacify the brethren who were angry at him. The thousands of Jews,
they said, who were zealous for the law, and were informed how Paul
taught the people to forsake Moses, to give up circumcision and the
ancient customs, hearing of his presence in Jerusalem, "the multitude
must needs come together," which points to the Jewish Christians
faithful to the law. Therefore they advised him to go through the
mockery of a purification at the Temple, "to be at charges," as they
called it, with some who had vowed a vow, and make the prescribed
sacrifices after the purification.
Poor man! After so much labor, such ardent toils, such numerous perils,
dangers, anxieties, trials, reverses, and triumphs, after ten long years
of such work and such dangers, he is not safe in Jerusalem among his own
kinsmen and among those whose Master he glorified, whose doctrines he
taught, and whose interests he protected. How small must he have
appeared to himself when walking up the Temple Mount in the company of
the four men, whose expenses he paid, to be purified with them: "And all
may know that those things, whereof they were informed concerning thee,
are nothing; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly and keepest the
law." The man who had defied a world, to submit to the humbling
dictation of his colleagues, who were children in comparison with
him--this is mortifying to the utmost. This is the time of which it is
said in the _Talmud_ that Paul or Acher narrated, that on passing behind
the _sanctum sanctorum_ he heard the _Bath-kol_ or Holy Ghost exclaim:
"Return, all ye forward children; all return, except Paul, who has known
me and rebelled against me." Paul never forgot, never forgave, this
humiliation. It estranged his feelings altogether from his colleagues in
Jerusalem, and he embraced the first best opportunity to rid himself
entirely of his Jewish associations.
The opportunity soon offered. While near the Temple some Jews from Asia
Minor recognized him. A disturbance ensued. He was arrested and locked
up in the castle by the Roman commander. Here the author of the Acts
brings in a terrible tumult--speeches, trials, a Jewish mob, with a
noble Roman stepping in in time to wind up dramatically--not one word of
which is historical. Paul, standing accused as the ringleader of the new
sect who expected the second advent of the Messiah, could only appear
dangerous to the zealous and vigilant Roman authorities. Nothing else
was necessary to put his life in jeopardy. In the night he made up his
mind to appeal to Cæsar, because he was a Roman citizen. Therefore he
was sent to Cæsarea, to the governor, under the protection of soldiers.
Not a sound was heard in his favor among the Jewish Christians. Not an
angel appeared. Not a solitary miracle was wrought; none dreamed a
dream; nobody had a vision; the Holy Ghost was as silent as the grave;
none of all the Christians in Palestine showed his face, when Paul,
loaded with chains, was transported from Jerusalem to Cæsarea. This
silence speaks volumes. They did not care much about the innovator.
Therefore Paul's epistles from his prison in Cæsarea are thunder-bolts
against the law, circumcision, and his colleagues in Jerusalem. It is
the offended man, the wounded lion, who retaliates in his anger.