_ST. PETER'S FIRST SERMON._
"But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and
spake forth unto them, saying, Ye men of Judæa, and all ye that
dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and give ear unto my
words."--ACTS ii. 14.
This verse contains the opening words of St. Peter's address to the
multitude who were roused to wonder and inquiry by the miraculous
manifestations of Pentecost. That address is full of interest when
viewed aright, freed from all the haze which the long familiarity of
ages has brought with it. In this second chapter we have the report of
a sermon preached within a few days of Christ's ascension, addressed
to men many of whom knew Jesus Christ, all of whom had heard of His
work, His life, and His death, and setting forth the apostolic
estimate of Christ, His miracles, His teaching, His ascended condition
and glory. We cannot realize, unless by an intellectual effort, the
special worth of these apostolic reports contained in the Acts. Men
are sometimes sceptical about them, asking, how did we get them at
all? how were they handed down? This is, however, an easier question
to answer than some think. If we take, for instance, this Pentecostal
address alone, we know that St. Luke had many opportunities of
personal communication with St. Peter. He may have learned from St.
Peter's own mouth what he said on this occasion, and he could compare
this verbal report with the impressions and remembrances of hundreds
who then were present. But there is another solution of the difficulty
less known to the ordinary student of Holy Scripture. The ancients
made a great use of shorthand, and were quite well accustomed to take
down spoken discourses, transmitting them thus to future ages.
Shorthand was, in fact, much more commonly used among the ancients
than among ourselves. The younger Pliny, for instance, who was a
contemporary of the Apostles, never travelled without a shorthand
writer, whose business it was to transcribe passages which struck his
master in the books he was perpetually studying. The sermons of
Chrysostom were all extemporaneous effusions. In fact, the
golden-mouthed patriarch of Constantinople was such an indefatigable
pulpit-orator, preaching almost daily, that it would have been
impossible to have made any copious preparation. The extensive reports
of his sermons which have come down to us, the volumes of his
expositions on the books of Scripture which we possess, prove that
shorthand must have been constantly used by his hearers.[56] Now what
would we give for a few shorthand reports of sermons by Clement of
Rome, by St. Luke, by Timothy, by Apollos, preached in Rome,
Alexandria, or Antioch? Suppose they were discovered, like the
numerous Egyptian manuscripts which have of late years come to light,
deposited in the desert sands, and were found to set forth the
miracles, the ministry, and the person of Christ exactly as now we
preach them, what a marvellous confirmation of the faith we should
esteem them! And yet what should we then possess more than we already
have in the sermons and discourses of St. Peter and St. Paul, reported
by an eye and ear-witness who wrote the Acts of the Apostles?
[56] I read the other day the report of an eminent Unitarian
divine who was lecturing upon the Gospels. He was upholding the
view that it was impossible that reports of the discourses of
Christ and of His Apostles could have been handed down in anything
like their shape as given in the New Testament, because it was an
age without shorthand. The lecturer is an eminent metaphysical and
philosophical critic, but he is evidently not versed in the social
life of the ancients. Had the lecturer but referred to Prof. J. E.
B. Mayor's edition of Pliny's _Letters_, Book iii., p. 96, he
would have found abundant references proving that shorthand was a
usual accomplishment among educated men long prior to the
Christian era.
I. The congregation assembled to listen to this first Gospel discourse
preached by a human agent was a notable and representative one. There
were Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in
Mesopotamia and in Judæa,--or, as an ancient expositor (Tertullian)
puts it, in Armenia[57] and Cappadocia,--in Pontus and Asia, in
Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and in the parts of Libya about
Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and
Arabians. The enumeration of the various nationalities listening to
St. Peter begins from the extremest east; it proceeds then to the
north, from thence to the south, terminating with Rome, which
represents the west. They were all Jews or Jewish proselytes, showing
how extremely wide, at the epoch of the Incarnation, was the
dispersion of God's ancient people. St. Paul, in one profound passage
of the Epistle to the Galatians, notes that "God sent forth His Son in
the fulness of time," that is, at the exact moment when the world was
prepared for the advent of the truth. This "fulness of time" may be
noted in many directions. Roman roads, Roman law, commerce, and
civilization opened channels of communication which bore the tidings
of the gospel into every land. A sweet singer of our own time, the
late Sir Samuel Ferguson, has depicted in his _Lays of the Western
Gael_ this diffusion of the gospel through the military organization
of Rome. He represents a Celt from Ireland as present at the
crucifixion. This may seem at first somewhat improbable, as Ireland
was never included within the bounds of the Roman Empire; and yet the
poet's song can be justified from history. Though never included
formally within the Empire, Irishmen and Scotch Highlanders must often
have served in the ranks of the Roman army, just as at the present
day, and especially in India, men of foreign nationalities are often
found serving in the ranks of the British army. In later times
Irishmen most certainly formed a Roman legion all to themselves. St.
Jerome tells us[58] that he had seen them acting in that capacity at
Treves, in Germany. They were noted for their bravery, which, as
Jerome believes, they sustained by consuming human flesh. Three
hundred years earlier Irishmen may often have enlisted in the service
of those British legions which the Romans withdrew from Britain and
located in the East; and thus Sir Samuel Ferguson does not pass the
bounds of historic credibility when he represents a certain centurion,
who had been present at the crucifixion, as returning to his native
land, and there proclaiming the tidings of our Lord's atoning
sacrifice:--
[57] Tertullian, _Against the Jews_, chap. vii.
[58] _Adv. Jovin._, lib. ii., cap. 7, in Migne's _Pat. Lat._, t.
xxiii., col. 296.
"And they say, Centurion Altus, when he to Emania came,
And to Rome's subjection called us, urging Cæsar's tribute claim,
Told that half the world barbarian thrills already with the faith,
Taught them by the God-like Syrian, Cæsar lately put to death."[59]
[59] I have worked out this point at some length in _Ireland and
the Celtic Church_, chap. i., pp. 14-20.
The dispersion of the Jews throughout not only the Roman Empire, but
far beyond its limits, served the same end, and hastened the fulness
of time needed for the Messiah's appearance. We must remember,
however, that the long list of varied nationalities present at this
Pentecostal feast were not Gentiles, they were Jews of the dispersion
scattered broadcast among the nations as far as Central Asia towards
the east, as far as southern Arabia and Aden on the south, and Spain
and Britain on the west. The course of modern investigation and
discovery amply confirms the statement of this passage, as well as the
similar statement of the eighth chapter, which represents a Jewish
statesman of Abyssinia or Ethiopia as coming up to Jerusalem for the
purposes of devotion. Jewish inscriptions have been found in Aden
dating back long before the Christian era. A Jewish colony existed
ages before Christ in the region of Southern Arabia, and continued to
flourish there down to the Middle Ages.[60] At Rome, Alexandria, and
Greece the Jews at this period constituted an important factor in the
total population.[61] The dispersion of the Jews had now done its
work, and brought with it the fulness of time required by the Divine
purposes. The way of the Messiah had been effectually prepared by it.
The Divine seed fell upon no unploughed and unbroken soil. Pure and
noble ideas of worship and morality had been scattered broadcast
throughout the world. Some years ago the Judgment of Solomon was found
depicted on the ceiling of a Pompeian house, witnessing to the spread
of scriptural knowledge through Jewish artists in the time of Tiberius
and of Nero. A race of missionaries, too, equipped for their work, was
developed through the discipline of exile. The thousands who hung upon
Peter's lips needed nothing but instruction in the faith of Jesus
Christ, together with the baptism of the Spirit, and the finest, the
most enthusiastic, and the most cosmopolitan of agencies lay ready to
the Church's hand. While, again, the organization of synagogues, which
the exigencies of the dispersion had called into existence, was just
the one suited to the various purposes of charity, worship, and
teaching, which the Christian Church required. Whether, indeed, we
consider the persons whom St. Peter addressed, or the machinery they
had elaborated, or the diffusion of pure religious ideas they had
occasioned, we see in this passage a splendid illustration of the care
and working of Divine Providence bringing good out of evil and real
victory out of apparent defeat. Prophet and psalmist had lamented over
Zion's ruin and Israel's exile into foreign lands, but they saw not
how that God was thereby working out His own purposes of wider
blessing to mankind at large, fitting Jews and Gentiles alike for that
fulness of time when the Eternal Son should be manifested.
[60] The history of the Jewish settlement in the south of Arabia
is very little known by the average student of the Acts, and yet
it is a wonderful confirmation of its accuracy both here and in
the account of the Ethiopian eunuch. This colony existed in Arabia
long before the Christian era. They claimed, indeed, to have been
a portion of the Jews of the Captivity. They established an
independent kingdom in Southern Arabia, which bitterly persecuted
the Christians about the year 500. A full account of this
little-known persecution, and of the Homerite martyrs who suffered
in it, will be found by those curious in such matters in that
great monumental work the _Acta Sanctorum_ of the Bollandists,
vols. x. and xii. for October, under the names of St. Arethas and
St. Elesbaan. Large quantities of manuscripts about this Jewish
colony were discovered some years ago in the mosques of Southern
Arabia. A considerable number of Jews still find a place there.
See, for an account of the Jewish kingdom in Arabia, an article on
Elesbaan, in vol. ii. of the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_.
Gibbon in his forty-second and fiftieth chapters has much about
it.
[61] The Jewish cemeteries discovered at Rome date back to the
time of our Lord, or even before it. They were the models on which
the Christians made the catacombs. The symbols of Judaism appear
in the Christian tombs. See Northcote's _Epitaphs of the
Catacombs_, and Brownlow and Northcote's _Roma Sotteranea_.
II. The brave, outspoken tone of this sermon evidences the power and
influence of the Holy Spirit upon St. Peter's mind. St. Chrysostom, in
his famous lectures on the Acts of the Apostles, notes the courageous
tone of this address as a clear evidence of the truth of the
resurrection. This argument has been ever since a commonplace with
apologists and expositors, and yet it is only by an effort that we can
realize how very strong it is. Here was St. Peter and his fellow
Apostles standing up proclaiming a glorified and ascended Messiah.
Just seven weeks before, they had fled from the messengers of the High
Priest sent to arrest their Master, leaving Him to His fate. They had
seen Him crucified, knew of His burial, and then, feeling utterly
defeated, had as much as possible withdrawn themselves from public
notice. Seven weeks after, the same band, led by St. Peter, himself a
short time before afraid to confess Christ to a maidservant, boldly
stand up, charge upon the multitude, who knew all the circumstances of
Christ's execution, the crime of having thus killed the Prince of
Life, and appeal to the supernatural evidence of the gift of tongues,
to which they had just listened, as the best proof of the truth of
their message. St. Peter's courage on this occasion is one of the
clearest proofs of the truth of his testimony. St. Peter was not
naturally a courageous man. He was very impulsive and very
sympathetic. He was the creature of his surroundings. If he found
himself in the midst of Christ's friends, he was the most forward to
uphold Christ's cause, but he had not much moral stamina. He was sadly
deficient in staying power. His mind was very Celtic in its tone, to
draw an illustration from national characteristics. The Celtic mind is
very sympathetic, ardent, enthusiastic. It is swept along in moments
of excitement, either of victory or of defeat, by the dominating power
of numbers. How often has this quality been manifested by the French
people, for instance? They are resistless when victorious; they
collapse utterly and at once when defeated. St. Peter was just the
same. He was sympathetic, ardent, enthusiastic, and fell, in later as
well as in earlier age, into the perils which attend such
temperaments. He denied his Master when surrounded by the menials of
the high priest. He was ready to die for that Master a few hours
before, when sitting surrounded by Christ's disciples in the secrecy
of the upper room. Divine grace and the baptism of the Spirit did not
at all change his natural character in this respect. Divine grace,
whether granted in ancient or in modern times, does not destroy
natural character, which is God's gift to man. It merely refines,
purifies, elevates it. We find, indeed, a striking illustration of
this law of the Divine life in St. Peter's case.
One of the most convincing proofs of the truth of the New Testament is
the identity of character we behold in the representations given of
St. Peter by writers who produced their books quite independently of
each other. St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Galatians long prior to
any of the Gospel narratives. Yet St. Paul's picture of St. Peter in
the Epistle to the Galatians is exactly the same as that drawn by the
four Evangelists alike. St. Paul depicts him as the same intensely
sympathetic, and therefore the same unstable person whom the
Evangelists describe. The brave scene in the upper chamber, and the
scene of cowardice and disgrace in the high priest's palace, were in
principle re-enacted twenty years after, about the year A.D. 53, at
Antioch. St. Peter was very bold in maintaining the right of Gentile
freedom, and hesitated not to live like the Gentile Christians of
Antioch, so long as none of the strict Jewish Christians of Jerusalem
knew about it. St. Peter wished, in fact, to stand well with both
parties, and therefore strove to conciliate both. He was, for the
time, a type of that famous character Mr. Facing-two-ways. He lived,
therefore, as a Gentile, until some of the Jerusalem brethren arrived
at Antioch, when he at once quailed before them and retreated,
betraying the cause of Christian freedom, and sacrificing, just as men
do still, Christian principle and honesty upon the altar of
self-seeking popularity. St. Peter, we therefore maintain, always
remained at heart the same character. He was bold and forward for
Christ so long as all went well, because he was intensely sympathetic;
but he had very little of that power of standing alone which marked
St. Paul, and nerved him, even though a solitary witness, when the
cause of truth was involved. This somewhat lengthened argument is
absolutely necessary to show the strength of our conclusion: that it
must have been an overpowering sense of the awful reality of Christ's
resurrection and ascension which alone could have overcome this
natural weakness of St. Peter, and make him on the day of Pentecost as
brave in proclaiming Jesus Christ to his red-handed murderers as he
was bold to propose a new Apostle in place of the hapless traitor to
the assembled disciples in the upper chamber. St. Peter evidently
believed, and believed with an intense, overwhelming, resistless
conviction, in the truth of Christ's resurrection and ascension, which
thus became to him the source of personal courage and of individual
power.
III. Again, the tone of St. Peter's sermon was remarkable because of
its enlarged and enlightened spirituality. It proved the Spirit's
power in illuminating the human consciousness. St. Peter was rapidly
gaining a true conception of the nature of the kingdom of God. He
enunciates that conception in this sermon. He proclaims Christianity,
in its catholic and universal aspect, when he quotes the prophet Joel
as predicting the time when the Lord would pour out His Spirit upon
all flesh. St. Peter does not indeed seem to have realized all at once
the full significance of his own teaching. He did not see that his
words applied to the Gentiles equally with the Jews, sounding the
death-knell of all national exclusiveness in religion. Had he seen the
full meaning of his own words, he would not have hesitated so much
about the baptism of Cornelius and the admission of the Gentiles. It
has been found true, not only of St. Peter, but of teachers,
reformers, politicians, statesmen, that they have not at once
recognised all the vast issues and undeveloped principles which lay
wrapped up in their original message. The stress and trial of life
alone draw them out, at times compelling their authors to regret their
earlier actions, at other times leading them to follow out with
intensified vigour the principles and movements which they had
themselves set in operation. Luther, when he protested against
indulgences; Erasmus, when he ridiculed the ignorance of the monks
and advocated the study of the Greek New Testament; John Hampden, when
he refused to pay ship money; or Bishop Ken, when he declined
obedience to the orders of King James II.;--none of them saw whereunto
their principles would necessarily grow till time had thoroughly
threshed their teaching and their actions, separating the husk of
external circumstances, which are so variable, from the kernel of
principle, which is eternally the same, stern, severe, inexorable, in
its operations. So it was with St. Peter, and still earlier with the
prophets. They sang of and preached a universal religion, as in this
passage, but yet none of them realized the full scope and meaning of
the words they had used, till a special revelation upon the housetop
at Joppa compelled St. Peter to grasp and understand and apply the
principles he had been already proclaiming.
In this respect, indeed, we recognise the greatness, the divinity of
the Master Himself towering above the noblest of His followers; above
even Peter himself, upon whom He pronounced such an eulogium, and
bestowed such privileges. Our Lord Jesus Christ taught this
universality of Christianity, and expressly recognised it. St. Peter
indeed taught it in this sermon, but he did not recognise the force of
his own words. Jesus Christ not only taught it, but realized the
meaning of His teaching. It was indeed no part of Christ's earthly
ministry to preach to the Gentiles. He came to the house of Israel
alone. Yet how clearly He witnesses, how distinctly He prophesies of
the future universality of His kingdom. He heals a centurion's
servant, proclaiming at the same time that many shall come from the
east and west, and sit down in the kingdom, while the children of the
kingdom shall be cast out. He risks His life among the inhabitants of
the city where He had been brought up, in order that He may deliver
this truth. He repeats it to the woman of Samaria, in order that He
may chase away her national superstition. He embodies it in His great
eucharistic prayer for His Apostles and for His Church at large. The
more carefully and the more devoutly we study Christ's words, the more
lofty will be our conception of His personality and character, who
from the very beginning recognised the full force of His message, the
true extent of that Divine society He was about to establish. The
avowed catholicity of Christ's teaching is one of the surest proofs of
Christ's divinity. He had not to wait as Peter waited, till events
explained the meaning of His words; from the beginning He knew all
things which should happen.
Still the tone of St. Peter's sermon proved that the Spirit had
supernaturally enlightened him. He had already risen to spiritual
heights undreamt-of hitherto, even by himself. A comparison of a few
passages proves this. In the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew we have
narrated for us the scene where our Lord extracts from St. Peter his
celebrated confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living
God," and then soon after bestows upon him the equally celebrated
rebuke, "Get thee behind Me, Satan! thou art a stumblingblock unto Me:
for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men." St.
Peter, with his horror-struck opposition to the very idea of Christ's
death and suffering, evidently cherished the same notions of the
kingdom of God, which Christ had come to establish, as James and John
did when they petitioned for the highest place in the Master's
kingdom. This carnal conception of a temporal kingdom and earthly
forces and human weapons St. Peter retained when he armed himself
with a sword and prepared to defend his Master in the Garden of
Gethsemane; and even later still when, after the resurrection, the
Apostles, acting doubtless through Peter as their spokesman, demanded,
"Dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" But the Spirit
was vouchsafed, and new power, of which the Master had spoken, was
granted, and that power raised Peter above all such low Jewish ideas,
and the kingdom announced to the Jews is no longer a kingdom of earth,
with its carnal weapons and its dignities. He now understood what the
Master had taught when He witnessed before Pontius Pilate His good
confession, "My kingdom is not of this world: if My kingdom were of
this world, then would My servants fight, that I should not be
delivered to the Jews: but now is My kingdom not from hence." The
carnal conception passes away under the influence of the heavenly
solvent, and St. Peter proclaimed a kingdom which was a purely
spiritual dominion, dealing with remission of sins and a purified
interior life, through the operation and indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
The power of the Holy Ghost was shown in St. Peter's case by the vast
and complete change which passed at once over his spiritual ideas and
outlook. The thoughts and expectations of the pious Jews of
Galilee--the very class from whom St. Peter sprang--were just then
shaped and formed by the popular apocalyptic literature of the period,
as we have already pointed out in the second lecture. The Second
Epistle of St. Peter and the Epistle of Jude prove that the Galileans
of that time were careful students of works like the Assumption of
Moses, the Book of Enoch, and the Ascension of Isaiah, which agree in
representing the kingdom of God and the reign of the Messiah as
equivalent to the triumph of the Jewish nation over all foreign
dominion and bondage. St. Peter and the other eleven Apostles shared
these natural ideas and expectations till the Spirit was poured out,
when they learned in a profounder spiritual comprehension to estimate
aright the scope and meaning of our blessed Lord's teaching. St. Peter
dwells, therefore, in his sermon on Christ's person, His sufferings,
His resurrection, His ascension, no longer indeed for the purpose of
exalting the Jewish nation, or predicting its triumph, but to point a
purely spiritual lesson. "Repent ye, and be baptized every one of you
in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins; and ye
shall receive"--not honour, riches, temporal freedom, but "ye shall
receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." The subject-matter of St. Peter's
sermon, the change in his tone of teaching, is another great proof of
a supernatural force and power imparted on the Day of Pentecost.
IV. Let us look somewhat farther into the matter of this earliest
Christian sermon, that we may learn the apostolic view of the
Christian scheme. Some persons have asserted that the earliest
Christians were Ebionites,[62] and taught a system of doctrine akin to
modern Unitarianism. This theory can best be tested by an appeal to
the Acts of the Apostles. What, for instance, was the conception of
Christ's life, work, and ascended state, which St. Peter presented to
the astonished multitude? We must not expect, indeed, to find in this
sermon a formulated and scientific system of Christian doctrine. St.
Peter was as yet far too near the great events he declared, far too
close to the superhuman personality of Christ, to co-ordinate his
ideas and arrange his views. It is a matter of every-day experience
that when a new discovery is suddenly made, when a new revelation
takes place in the region of nature, men do not grasp at once all the
new relations thereby involved, all the novel applications whereof it
is capable. The human mind is so limited in its power that it is not
till we get some distance away from a great object that we are enabled
to survey it in the fulness of its outline. Inspiration assisted St.
Peter, elevated his mind, raised his tone of thought to a higher
level, but it did not reverse this fundamental law under which the
human mind works. Yet St. Peter's discourse contains all the great
principles of Catholic Christianity as opposed to that low view which
would represent the earliest Christians as preaching the purely
humanitarian scheme of modern Unitarianism. St. Peter taught boldly
the miraculous element of Christ's life, describing Him as "a man
approved of God by mighty works and wonders and signs which God did
by Him." Yet he did not dwell as much as we might have expected upon
the miraculous side of Christ's ministry. In fact, the earliest
heralds of the Cross did not make as much use of the argument from
miracles as we might have expected them to have done. And that for a
very simple reason. The inhabitants of the East were so accustomed to
the practices of magic that they simply classed the Christian
missionaries with magicians. The Jewish explanation of the miracles of
our Lord is of this description. The Talmudists do not deny that He
worked miracles, but assert that He achieved them by a special use of
the Tetragammaton, or the sacred name of Jehovah, which was known only
to Himself. The sacred writers and preachers refer, therefore, again
and again to the miracles of our Saviour, as St. Peter does in the
second chapter, as well-known and admitted facts, whatever explanation
may be offered of them, and then turn to other aspects of the
question. The Apostles had, however, a more powerful argument in
reserve. They preached a spiritual religion, a present peace with God,
a present forgiveness of sins; they point forward to a future life of
which even here below believers possess the earnest and the pledge.
We, with our minds steeped in ages of Christian thought and teaching,
can have no idea of the convincing self-evidencing force of teaching
like that, to a Jew reared up in a system of barren formalism, and
still more to a Gentile, with spiritual instincts longing for
satisfaction, and which he was expected to satisfy with the
bloodstained shows of the amphitheatre or with the immoralities and
impure banquetings of the pagan temples. To persons in that condition,
an argument derived from a mere wonderful work brought little
conviction, for they were well accustomed to behold very marvellous
and apparently miraculous actions, such as to this day the wandering
jugglers of India exhibit.[63] But when they beheld lives transfused
by the love of God, and heard pure spiritual teaching such as
responded to the profoundest depths of their own hearts, then deep
answered unto deep. The preaching of the Cross became indeed the power
of God unto salvation, because the human soul instinctively felt that
the Cross was the medicine fittest for its spiritual maladies.
[62] The term Ebionite is thus well explained by the Rev. J. M.
Fuller in the _Dict. Christ. Biog._, vol. ii., p. 25: "The term
Ebionism expresses conveniently the opinions and practices of the
descendants of the Judaizers of the apostolic age, and is very
little removed from Judaism. Judaism was for them not so much a
preparation for Christianity as an institution eternally good in
itself, and but slightly modified in Christianity. Whatever merit
Christianity possessed, was possessed as the continuation and
supplement of Judaism. The divinity of the old covenant was the
only valid guarantee for the truth of the new. Hence the tendency
of this class of Ebionites to exalt the old at the expense of the
new, to magnify Moses and the prophets, and to allow Jesus Christ
to be 'nothing more than a Solomon or a Jonas' (Tertull., _De
Carne Christi_, c. 18); 'Legal righteousness was to them the
highest type of perfection; the earthly Jerusalem, in spite of its
destruction, was an object of adoration, as if it were the House
of God' (Irenæus, _Adv. Hær._, i., 26); its restoration would take
place in the millennial kingdom of Messiah, and the Jews would
return there as the manifested chosen people of God."
[63] See Moll's _Hypnotism_, p. 216, in the "Contemporary Science
Series."
V. Again, this sermon shows the method of interpreting the Psalms and
Prophets popular among the pious Jews of St. Peter's time. St. Peter's
method of interpretation is identical with that of our Lord, of St.
Paul, and of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. He beholds in
the Psalms hints and types of the profoundest doctrines of the Creed.
We can see this in both the quotations which he makes. St. Peter finds
in the sixteenth Psalm a prophecy of the intermediate state of souls
and of the resurrection of our Lord. "Thou wilt not leave my soul in
Hades" is a text which has furnished the basis of the article in the
Apostles' Creed which teaches that Christ descended into hell. It is a
pity indeed that the translation which the last revisers have adopted,
"Hades" instead of "Hell," was not used in the English translation of
the Apostles' Creed; for the ordinary reading has misled many a
thoughtful and serious soul, as if the Creed taught that the pure and
sinless spirit of the Saviour had been made partaker of the horrors of
eternal misery. Whereas, in truth, the doctrine of Scripture and of
the Creed alike merely asserts that our Lord's spirit, when separated
from the body, entered and thereby sanctified and prepared the place
or state where Christian souls, while separated from their bodies,
await the general resurrection of the just and the completion of their
happiness. The doctrine of the intermediate state, as taught by Bishop
Pearson and other great divines, is primarily based on two texts, the
passage before us and the words of our Saviour to the penitent thief,
"To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise" (Luke xxiii. 43). This
doctrine accurately corresponds with the catholic doctrine of our
Lord's Person. The Arian heresy denied the true deity of our Lord. The
second great heresy was the Apollinarian, which denied His true and
perfect humanity. The orthodox doctrine taught the tripartite nature
of man, that is, that there was in man, first, a body, secondly, the
animal soul which man possesses in common with the beasts, and which
perishes at death, and, lastly, the human spirit which is immortal and
by which he maintains communion with God. Now the Apollinarian heresy
asserted that Jesus Christ possessed a body and a soul, but denied His
possession of a spirit. Its theory was that the Divine nature took the
place of a true human spirit in Christ, so that Christ was unlike His
brethren in this respect, that when the body died, and the animal soul
perished, He had no human spirit by which He might enter into Hades,
or dwell in Paradise. The Divine nature was the only portion of the
Incarnate Lord which then survived. Against this view the words of St.
Peter testified beforehand, teaching, by his adaptation of David's
prophecy, that our Lord possessed the fulness of humanity in its
threefold division, whereby He was enabled to share the experience and
lot of His brethren, not only in this life, but also in the
intermediate state of Hades, wherein the spirits of the blessed dead
await re-union with their bodies, and expect in hope the second advent
of their Lord.[64]
[64] See the article on "Apollinaris the Younger" in the _Dict.
Christ. Biog._, vol. i., for a concise account of the Apollinarian
heresy.
St. Peter's interpretation again of the Psalms recognised in David's
words a prophecy of the resurrection: "Neither wilt Thou give Thy Holy
One to see corruption,"--a rendering of the New Testament revisers
which, however literal, is not nearly as vigorous or suggestive as the
old translation, "Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see
corruption." St. Peter then proceeds to point out how impossible it
was that this prediction could have been fulfilled in David. David's
flesh undoubtedly did see corruption, because every one knew where his
tomb was. St. Peter's speech here touches upon a point where we can
confirm his accuracy out of ancient historians. David was buried,
according to ancient writers, in the city of David (2 Kings ii. 10).
The Rabbis went even further, they determined the time of his death.
According to a writer quoted by that great seventeenth-century
teacher, Dr. John Lightfoot,[65] "David died at Pentecost, and all
Israel bewailed him, and offered their sacrifices the day following."
After the return from Babylon the site of the sepulchre was known, as
Neh. iii. 16 reports, telling us that Nehemiah the son of Azbuk
repaired the wall over against the sepulchre of David; while still
later Josephus[66] tells us that Hyrcanus, the high priest, and Herod
the Great opened David's tomb, and removed vast treasures from it. St.
Peter's words on this occasion possess an important evidential
aspect, and suggest one of the gravest difficulties which the
assailants of the resurrection have to face. St. Peter appealed to the
evidence of David's tomb as demonstrating the fact that he was dead,
and that death still held him in its power. Why did not his opponents
appeal to the testimony of Christ's tomb? It is evident from St.
Peter's argument that Christ's tomb was empty, and was known to be
empty. The first witnesses to the resurrection insisted, within a few
weeks of our Lord's crucifixion, upon this fact, proclaimed it
everywhere, and the Jews made no attempt to dispute their assertions.
Our opponents may indeed say, we acknowledge the fact of the emptiness
of the tomb, but the body of Christ was removed by St. Peter and his
associates. How then, we reply, do you account for St. Peter's action?
Did conscious guilt and hypocrisy make him brave and enthusiastic? If
they say, indeed, Peter did not remove the body, but that his
associates did, then how are we to account for the conversations St.
Peter thought he had held with his risen Master, the appearances
vouchsafed to him, the close converse, "eating and drinking with him
after He was risen from the dead"? St. Peter, by his appeal to David's
tomb, and its bearing on the sixteenth Psalm, proves that he believed
in no ideal resurrection, no phantasm,--no ghost story, to put it
plainly; but that he taught the doctrine of the resurrection as the
Church now accepts it.
[65] _Horæ Hebraicæ_ on Acts ii. 29.
[66] See Josephus, _Antiqq._, XIII., viii., 4; XVI., vii., 1;
_Wars_, I., ii., 5.