_ST. PAUL IN GREECE._
"Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was
provoked within him, as he beheld the city full of idols. So he
reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons,
and in the market-place every day with them that met with him.
And certain also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers
encountered him. And some said, What would this babbler say?
other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods:
because he preached Jesus and the resurrection."--ACTS xvii.
16-18.
"After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to
Corinth."--ACTS xviii. 1.
There are parallelisms in history which are very striking, and yet
these parallelisms can be easily explained. The stress and strain of
difficulties acting upon large masses of men evolve and call forth
similar types of character, and demand the exercise of similar powers.
St. Paul and St. Athanasius are illustrations of this statement. They
were both little men, both enthusiastic in their views, both pursued
all their lives long with bitter hostility, and both had experience of
the most marvellous and hairbreadth escapes. If any reader will take
up Dean Stanley's _History of the Eastern Church_, and read the
account given of St. Athanasius in the seventh chapter of that work,
he will be strikingly reminded of St. Paul in these various aspects,
but specially in the matter of his wondrous escapes from his deadly
enemies, which were so numerous that at last they came to regard
Athanasius as a magician who eluded their designs by the help of his
familiar spirits. It was much the same with St. Paul. Hairbreadth
escapes were his daily experience, as he himself points out in the
eleventh chapter of his Second Epistle to Corinth. He there enumerates
a few of them, but quite omits his escapes from Jerusalem, from the
Pisidian Antioch, from Iconium, Lystra, Thessalonica, and last of all
from Berœa, whence he was driven by the renewed machinations of the
Thessalonian Jews, who found out after a time whither the object of
their hatred had fled. Paul's ministry at Berœa was not fruitless,
short as it may have been. He established a Church there which took
good care of the precious life entrusted to its keeping, and therefore
as soon as the deputies of the Thessalonian synagogue came to Berœa
and began to work upon the Jews of the local synagogue, as well as
upon the pagan mob of the town, the Berœan disciples took Paul, who
was the special object of Jewish hatred, and despatched him down to
the sea-coast, some twenty miles distant, in charge of certain trusty
messengers, while Silas remained behind, in temporary concealment
doubtless, in order that he might consolidate the Church.[162] Here we
get a hint, a passing glimpse of St. Paul's infirmity. He was
despatched in charge of trusty messengers, I have said, who were to
show him the way. "They that conducted Paul brought him as far as
Athens." His ophthalmia, perhaps, had become specially bad owing to
the rough usage he had experienced, and so he could not escape all
solitary and alone as he did in earlier years from Damascus, and
therefore guides were necessary who should conduct him "as far as the
sea," and then, when they had got that far, they did not leave him
alone. They embarked in the ship with him, and, sailing to Athens,
deposited him safely in a lodging. The journey was by sea, not by
land, because a sea journey was necessarily much easier for the sickly
and weary Apostle than the land route would have been, offering too a
much surer escape from the dangers of pursuit.
[162] It is well, perhaps, to bear in mind the distances which
separate the various stages of St. Paul's progress through
Macedonia. Thessalonica was about a hundred miles from Philippi,
Berœa fifty from Thessalonica, and the sea-coast of the
Thermaic Gulf, or the Gulf of Salonica, as it is now called, some
twenty miles from Berœa.
The voyage was an easy one, and not too prolonged. The boat or ship in
which the Apostle was embarked passed through splendid scenery. On his
right hand, as he steered for the south, was the magnificent mountain
of Olympus, the fabled abode of the gods, rising a clear ten thousand
feet into the region of perpetual snow, while on his left was Mount
Athos, upon which he had been looking ever since the day that he left
Troas. But the Apostle had no eye for the scenery, nor had St. Luke a
word to bestow upon its description, though he often passed through
it, absorbed as they were in the contemplation of the awful realities
of a world unseen. The sea voyage from the place where St. Paul
embarked till he came to Phalerum, the port of Athens, where he
landed, lasted perhaps three or four days, and covered about two
hundred miles, being somewhat similar in distance, scenery, and
surroundings to the voyage from Glasgow to Dublin or Bristol, land in
both cases being in sight all the time and splendid mountain ranges
bounding the views on either side.[163]
[163] The best description which I know of this neighbourhood is
that given by Mr. Tozer in his _Highlands of Turkey_, vol. ii., p.
8. St. Paul embarked at the head of the long, narrow gulf, called
anciently the Thermaic Gulf, leading up to the city of
Thessalonica. The Apostle must have sailed in a mere fishing smack
or good-sized boat, as the iron-bound western coast of this gulf
is devoid of harbours sufficient for large ships. Mr. Tozer
himself sailed from Thessalonica in such a vessel, see _l.c._,
vol. ii., p. 4: "We chartered a vessel to convey us down the bay,
a six-oared Smyrna caïque, quite elegant in her appointments as
compared with the ordinary lumbering market boats and coasters of
these seas, and a tight little craft withal, for though not more
than six feet in width, and without a deck, she had made a voyage
to the Crimea during the war." Cicero, even when going as
proconsul into Asia travelled in the "undecked vessel of the
Rhodians," of whose weakness and slowness he complains: see his
letters to Atticus, v. 12 and 13.
St. Paul landed about November 1st, 51, at Phalerum, one of the two
ports of ancient Athens, the Piræus being the other, and thence his
uncertain steps were guided to the city itself, where he was left
alone in some lodging. The Berœan Christians to whom he was
entrusted returned perhaps in the same vessel in which they had
previously travelled, as the winter season, when navigation largely
ceased, was now fast advancing, bearing with them a message to Timothy
and Silas to come as rapidly as possible to his assistance, the
Apostle being practically helpless when deprived of his trusted
friends. At Athens St. Paul for a time moved about examining the city
for himself, a process which soon roused him to action and brought
matters to a crisis. St. Paul was well used to pagan towns and the
sights with which they were filled. From his earliest youth in Tarsus
idolatry and its abominations must have been a pain and grief to him;
but Athens he found to exceed them all, so that "his spirit was
provoked within him as he beheld the city full of idols." We have in
ancient Greek literature the most interesting confirmation of the
statement here made by St. Luke. We still possess a descriptive
account of Greece written by a chatty Greek traveller named
Pausanias, in the days of the Antonines, that is, less than a hundred
years after St. Paul's visit, and when Athens was practically the same
as in the Apostle's day. Pausanias enters into the greatest details
about Athens, describing the statues of gods and heroes, the temples,
the worship, the customs of the people, bestowing the first thirty
chapters of his first book upon Athens alone. Pausanias's _Description
of Greece_[164] is most interesting to every one because he saw Athens
in the height of its literary glory and architectural splendour, and
it is specially interesting to the Bible student because it amply
confirms and illustrates the details of St. Paul's visit.
[164] This important work may be most easily consulted in
Shilleto's translation, published in Bohn's Classical Library,
Bell & Sons, London, 1886.
Thus we are told in words just quoted that St. Paul found "the city
full of idols," and this provoked his spirit over and above the usual
provocation he received wherever he found dead idols like these
usurping the place rightfully belonging to the Lord of the universe.
Now let us take up Pausanias, and what does he tell us? In his first
chapter he tells how the ports of Athens were crowded on every side
with temples, and adorned with statues of gold and silver. Phalerum,
the port where Paul landed, had temples of Demeter, of Athene, of
Zeus, and "altars of gods unknown," of which we shall presently speak.
Then we can peruse chapter after chapter crowded with descriptions of
statues and temples, till in the seventeenth chapter we read how in
their pantheistic enthusiasm they idolised the most impalpable of
things: "The Athenians have in the market-place, among other things
not universally notable, an altar of Mercy, to whom, though most
useful of all the gods to the life of man and its vicissitudes, the
Athenians alone of all the Greeks assign honours. And not only is
philanthropy more regarded among them, but they also exhibit more
piety to the gods than others; for they have also an altar to Shame
and Rumour and Energy. And it is clear that those people who have a
larger share of piety than others have also a larger share of good
fortune." While again, in chapter xxiv., dwelling upon the statues of
Hercules and Athene, Pausanias remarks, "I have said before that the
Athenians, more than any other Greeks, have a zeal for religion."
Athens was, at the time of St. Paul's visit, the leading university of
the world, and university life then was permeated with the spirit of
paganism, the lovers of philosophy and science delighting to adorn
Athens with temples and statues and endowments as expressions of the
gratitude they felt for the culture which they had there gained.[165]
These things had, however, no charm for the Apostle Paul. Some
moderns, viewing him from an unsympathetic point of view, would
describe him in their peculiar language as a mere Philistine in
spirit, unable to recognise the material beauty and glory which lay
around. And this is true. The beauty which the architect and the
sculptor would admire was for the Apostle to a large extent
non-existent, owing to his defective eyesight; but even when
recognised it was an object rather of dislike and of abhorrence than
of admiration and pleasure, because the Apostle saw deeper than the
man of mere superficial culture and æsthetic taste. The Apostle saw
these idols and the temples consecrated to their use from the moral
and spiritual standpoint, and viewed them therefore as the outward and
visible signs of an inward festering corruption and rottenness, the
more beautiful perhaps because of the more awful decay which lay
beneath.
[165] The Emperor Hadrian, for instance, adorned Athens with
expensive buildings and libraries, and enriched it with
endowments. See Duhr's work, p. 44, on the _Journeys of the
Emperor Hadrian_, published in the Proceedings of the
Archæological Society of Vienna; and cf. Pausanias, i. 18.
The glimpses which St. Paul got of Athens as he wandered about roused
his spirit and quickened him to action. He followed his usual course
therefore. He first sought his own countrymen the Jews. There was a
colony of Jews at Athens, as we know from independent sources. Philo
was a Jew the authenticity of whose writings, at least in great part,
has never been questioned. He lived at Alexandria at this very period,
and was sent, about twelve years earlier, as an ambassador to Rome to
protest against the cruel persecutions to which the Alexandrian Jews
had been subjected at the time when Caligula made the attempt to erect
his statue at Jerusalem, of which we have spoken in a previous
chapter. He wrote an account of his journey to Rome and his treatment
by the Emperor, which is called _Legatio ad Caium_, and in it he
mentions Athens as one of the cities where a considerable Jewish
colony existed.[166] We know practically nothing more about this
Jewish colony save what we are told here by St. Luke, that it was
large enough to have a synagogue, not a mere oratory like the
Philippian Jews.[167] It cannot, however, have been a very large one.
Athens was not a seat of any considerable trade, and therefore had no
such attractions for the Jews as either Thessalonica or Corinth; while
its abounding idolatry and its countless images would be repellant to
their feelings. Modern investigations have, indeed, brought to light a
few ancient inscriptions testifying to the presence of Jews at Athens
in these earlier ages; but otherwise we know nothing about them. The
synagogue seems to have imbibed a good deal of the same easy-going
contemptuously tolerant spirit with which the whole atmosphere of
Athens was infected. Jews and pagans alike listened to St. Paul, and
then turned away to their own pursuits. In a city where every religion
was represented, and every religion discussed and laughed at, how
could any one be very much in earnest? St. Paul then turned from
the Jews to the Gentiles. He frequented the market-place, a
well-known spot, near to the favourite meeting-place of the Stoic
philosophers.[168] There St. Paul entered into discussion with
individuals or with groups as they presented themselves. The
philosophers soon took notice of the new-comer. His manner, terribly
in earnest, would soon have secured attention in any society, and much
more in Athens, where whole-souled and intense enthusiasm was the one
intellectual quality which was completely wanting. For who but a man
that had heard the voice of God and had seen the vision of the
Almighty could be in earnest in a city where residents and strangers
sojourning there all alike spent their time in nothing else but either
to tell or to hear some new thing? The philosophers and Stoics and
Epicureans alike were attracted by St. Paul's manner. They listened to
him as he discoursed of Jesus and the Resurrection, the two topics
which absorbed him. They mistook his meaning in a manner very natural
to the place, strange as it may seem to us. In Athens the popular
worship was thoroughly Pantheistic. Every desire, passion, infirmity
even of human nature was deified and adored, and therefore, as we have
already pointed out, Pity and Shame and Energy and Rumour, the last
indeed the most fitting and significant of them all for a people who
simply lived to talk, found spirits willing to prostrate themselves in
their service and altars dedicated to their honour. The philosophers
heard this new Jewish teacher proclaiming the virtues and blessings of
Jesus and the Resurrection, and they concluded Jesus to be one
divinity and the Resurrection another divinity, lately imported from
the mysterious East. The philosophers were the aristocracy of the
Athenian city, reverenced as the University professors in a German or
Scotch town, and they at once brought the new-comer before the court
of Areopagus, the highest in Athens, charged, as in the time of
Socrates, with the duty of supervising the affairs of the national
religion, and punishing all attacks and innovations thereon. The
Apostle was led up the steps or stairs which still remain, the judges
took their places on the rock-hewn benches, St. Paul was placed upon
the defendant's stone, called, as Pausanias tells us, the Stone of
Impudence, and then the trial began.
[166] Any one wishing to consult the writings of this contemporary
of St. Paul can find Philo's works translated into English in 4
vols. in Bohn's Library of Ecclesiastical Antiquity. A comparison
of St. Paul's writings with those of Philo will show us the
wondrous superiority of those of the Christian Apostle, owing to
his inspiration by the Holy Ghost. St. Paul's writings are a
perpetual feast of fat things nourishing the soul unto everlasting
life. The writings of Philo are curious and interesting, but no
one would dream of taking them as a spiritual guide of life.
[167] The Athenians had for a long time previous to St. Paul's
visit some commercial relations with the Jewish nation. Josephus,
_Antiqq._, XIV. 8, tells us how they erected a brass statue of the
high priest Hyrcanus, as an expression of their good will to the
Jewish nation. This was a hundred years before St. Paul's visit.
Bayet discovered early Jewish inscriptions among the Athenian
cemeteries. See his _De Titulis Atticæ Christianis_, pp. 122-24,
of which we treat in a note _infra_.
[168] Pausanias, i. 15, gives a description of the Porch or
Painted Chamber, the Stoa Pœcile, whence the Stoics derived
their name, showing that it was close to the Agora, or
market-place, where Paul disputed.
The Athenian philosophers were cultured, and they were polite. They
demand, therefore, in bland tones, "May we know what this new teaching
is, which is spoken by thee? For thou bringest certain strange things
to our ears; we would know, therefore, what these things mean." And
now St. Paul has got his chance of a listening audience. He has come
across a new type of hearers, such as he has not enjoyed since those
early days of his first Christian love, when, after his escape from
Jerusalem, he resided at the university city of Tarsus for a long
time, till sought out by Barnabas to come and minister to the crowds
of Gentiles who were flocking into the Church at Antioch.[169] St.
Paul knew right well the tenets of the two classes of men, the Stoics
and the Epicureans, with whom he had to contend, and he deals with
them effectually in the speech which he delivered before the court. Of
that address we have only the barest outline. The report given in the
Acts contains about two hundred and fifty words, and must have lasted
little more than two minutes if that was all St. Paul said. It
embodies, however, merely the leading arguments used by the Apostle as
Timothy or some other disciple recollected them and told them to St.
Luke. Let us see what these arguments were. He begins with a
compliment to the Athenians. The Authorised, and even the Revised,
Version represent him indeed as beginning like an unskilled and unwise
speaker with giving his audience a slap in the face. "Ye men of
Athens, in all things I perceive that ye are somewhat superstitious,"
would not have been the most conciliatory form of address to a
keen-witted assembly like that before which he was now standing. It
would have tended to set their backs up at once. If we study St.
Paul's Epistles, specially his First Epistle to Corinth, we shall find
that even when he had to find the most grievous faults with his
disciples, he always began like a prudent man by conciliating their
feelings, praising them for whatever he could find good or blessed in
them. Surely if St. Paul acted thus with believers living unworthy of
their heavenly calling, he would be still more careful not to offend
men whom he wished to win over to Christ! St. Paul's exordium was
complimentary rather than otherwise, bearing out the description which
Pausanias gives of the Athenians of his own day, that "they have more
than other Greeks, a zeal for religion." Let us expand his thoughts
somewhat that we may grasp their force. "Men of Athens, in all things
I perceive that ye are more religious and more devoted to the worship
of the deity than other men. For as I passed along and observed the
objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription,
To the unknown God." St. Paul here displays his readiness as a
practised orator. He shows his power and readiness to become all
things to all men. He seizes upon the excessive devotion of the
Athenians. He does not abuse them on account of it, he uses it rather
as a good and useful foundation on which he may build a worthier
structure, as a good and sacred principle, hitherto misapplied, but
henceforth to be dedicated to a nobler purpose. The circumstance upon
which St. Paul seized, the existence of an altar dedicated to the
unknown God, is amply confirmed by historic evidence. St. Paul may
have noticed such altars as he passed up the road from Phalerum, where
he landed, to the city of Athens, where, as we learn from Pausanias,
the next-century traveller, such altars existed in his time; or he may
have seen them on the very hill of Areopagus on which he was standing,
where, from ancient times, as we learn from another writer, altars
existed dedicated to the unknown gods who sent a plague upon
Athens.[170] St. Paul's argument then was this. The Athenians were
already worshippers of the Unknown God. This was the very deity he
came proclaiming, and therefore he could not be a setter forth of
strange gods nor liable to punishment in consequence. He then proceeds
to declare more fully the nature of the Deity hitherto unknown. He was
the God that made the world and all things therein. He was not
identical therefore with the visible creation as the Pantheism of the
Stoics declared,[171] but gave to all out of His own immense fulness
life and wealth, and all things; neither was He like the gods of the
Epicureans who sat far aloof from all care and thought about this
lower world. St. Paul taught God's personal existence as against the
Stoics, and God's providence as against the Epicureans. Then he struck
straight at the root of that national pride, that supreme contempt for
the outside barbaric world, which existed as strongly among these
cultured agnostic Greek philosophers as among the most narrow,
fanatical, and bigoted Jews: "He made of one every nation of men for
to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their
appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation; that they
should seek God, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him." A
doctrine which must have sounded exceeding strange to these Greeks
accustomed to despise the barbarian world, looking down upon it from
the height of their learning and civilisation, and regarding
themselves as the only favourites of Heaven. St. Paul proclaims on the
Hill of Mars Christian liberalism, the catholic and cosmopolitan
character of the true religion in opposition to this Greek contempt
grounded on mere human position and privilege, as clearly and as
loudly as he proclaimed the same great truth at Jerusalem or in the
synagogues of the Dispersion in opposition to Jewish exclusiveness
grounded on the Divine covenant. St. Paul had grasped the great lesson
taught by the prophets of the Old Testament as they prophesied
concerning Babylon, Egypt, and Tyre. They proclaimed the lesson which
Jewish ears were slow to learn, they taught the Jews the truth which
Paul preached to the philosophers of Athens, they acted upon the
principle which it was the great work of Paul's life to exemplify,
that God's care and love and providence are over all His works, that
His mercies are not restrained to any one nation, but that, having
made of one all nations upon the face of the earth, His blessings are
bestowed upon them all alike. This truth here taught by St. Paul has
been slow to make its way. Men have been slow to acknowledge the
equality of all nations in God's sight, very slow to give up their own
claims to exceptional treatment and blessing on the part of the
Almighty. The great principle enunciated by the Apostle struck, for
instance, at the evil of slavery, yet how slowly it made its way. Till
thirty years ago really good and pious men saw nothing inconsistent
with Christianity in negro slavery. Christian communions even were
established grounded on this fundamental principle, the righteous
character of slavery. John Newton was a slave trader, and seems to
have seen nothing wrong in it. George Whitfield owned slaves, and
bequeathed them as part of his property to be held for his Orphan
House in America. But it is not only slavery that this great principle
overthrows. It strikes down every form of injustice and wrong. God has
made all men of one; they are all equally His care, and therefore
every act of injustice is a violation of the Divine law which is thus
expressed. Such ideas must have seemed exceedingly strange, and even
unnatural to men accustomed to reverence the teaching and study the
writings of guides like Aristotle, whose dogma was that slavery was
based on the very constitution of nature itself which formed some men
to rule and others to be slaves.
[169] That period of retirement at Tarsus may have been utilised
by St. Paul in studying classical literature and Greek philosophy
by way of preparation for that life's work among the Gentiles, to
which he was appointed at his conversion.
[170] There are frequent notices of the altars to the unknown gods
in ancient Greek writers: as in Pausanias, _Description of
Greece_, vol. i., p. 2 (Shilleto's translation); _Life of
Apollonius_, by Philostratus, vi., 3; Lucian's _Philopatris_, 29.
See, however, for exhaustive discussions of this point, and the
whole subject of the topography of ancient Athens, Lewin's _St.
Paul_, vol. i., p. 242; Farrar's _St. Paul_, ch. xxvii., and
Conybeare and Howson's _St. Paul_, vol. i., ch. x. Spon and
Wheeler were travellers of the seventeenth century, whose works on
this subject are important as showing Athens as it existed before
modern changes. Some of the reports of travels in Greece, made by
eminent scholars in the same century, and now very little known,
may be found in the early volumes of the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society.
[171] St. Paul shows that he could sympathise with the true
element in pantheistic stoicism by his famous words which have a
certain pantheistic ring, but still a very different one from that
of the Stoics: "In Him we live and move and have our being."
St. Paul does not finish with this. He has not yet exhausted all his
message. He had now dealt with the intellectual errors and mistakes of
his hearers. He had around him and above him, if he could but see the
magnificent figure of Athene, the pride and glory of the Acropolis,
with its surrounding temples, the most striking proofs how their
intellectual mistakes had led the wise of this world into fatal and
degrading practices. In the course of his argument, having shown the
nearness of God to man, "In Him we live and move and have our being,"
and the Divine desire that man should seek after and know God, he
quoted a passage common to several well-known poets, "For we are also
His offspring."[172] This was sufficient for St. Paul, who as we see,
in all his Epistles, often flies off at a tangent when a word slips as
it were by chance from his pen, leading him off to a new train of
ideas. We are the offspring of God. How is it then that men can
conceive the Godhead, that which is Divine, to be like unto those gold
and silver, brass or marble statues, even though wrought with the
greatest possible skill. The philosophers indeed pretended to
distinguish between the Eternal Godhead and these divinities and
images innumerable, which were but representations of his several
characteristics and attributes. But even if they distinguished
intellectually, they did not distinguish in practice, and the people
from the highest to the lowest identified the idol with the deity
itself, and rendered thereto the honour due to God.[173]
[172] These words are directly and literally taken out of the
_Phænomena_ of Aratus, a Greek poet of Cilicia and a
fellow-countryman of the orator. He was absolutely correct,
however, in saying "certain of your own poets," as the same
sentiment is found in a hymn to Jupiter, composed by the Stoic
philosopher and poet Cleanthes, a poem which will be found with a
Latin version in Cudworth's _Intellectual System_. Cleanthes was
the immediate successor of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. His
words therefore would have the more weight with his disciples
three centuries later. He died, like a Stoic, of hunger, aged
eighty, and a statue was erected to him by the Roman Senate in his
native place Assos, a town of Æolis in Greece. See for more about
Cleanthes and Aratus, Fabricius, _Bibliotheca Græca_, or Smith's
_Dict. Greek and Rom. Biog._
[173] As it was with the ancient image worshippers, so is it with
the modern. The excuses made for the pagans in ancient times are
exactly the same as those made for the image worshippers of the
eighth and later centuries: see the article on Iconoclasm in the
_Dict. Christ. Biog._
St. Paul then proceeds to enunciate his own doctrines. He lightly
touches upon, as he did previously at Lystra (ch. xiv. 16), a subject
which neither the time at his disposal nor the position of his hearers
would permit him to discuss. He glances at, but does not attempt to
explain, why God had postponed to that late date this novel teaching:
"The times of ignorance God overlooked; but now He commandeth men that
they should all everywhere repent." This doctrine of repentance,
involving a sense of sin and sorrow for it, must have sounded
exceeding strange to those philosophic ears, as did the announcement
with which the Apostle follows it up, the proclamation of a future
judgment by a Man whom God had ordained for the purpose, and
authenticated by raising him from the dead. Here the crowd interrupted
him. The Resurrection, or Anastasis, which Paul preached was not then
a new deity, but an impossible process through which no man save in
fable had ever passed. When the Apostle got thus far the assembly
broke up. The idea of a resurrection of a dead man was too much for
them. It was too ludicrous for belief. "Some mocked: but others said,
We will hear thee again of this matter," and thus ended St. Paul's
address, and thus ended too the Athenian opportunity, for St. Paul
soon passed away from such a society of learned triflers and
scoffers. They sat in the seat of the scorner, and the seat of the
scorner is never a good one for a learner to occupy who wishes to
profit. He felt that he had no great work to do in such a place. His
opportunity lay where hearts were broken with sin and sorrow, where
the burden of life weighed upon the soul, and men heavy laden and sore
pressed were longing for real deliverance and for a higher, nobler
life than the world could offer. His work, however, was not all in
vain, nor were his personal discussions and his public address devoid
of results. The Church of Athens was one of those which could look
back to St. Paul as its founder. "Not many wise after the flesh were
called" in that city of wisdom and beauty, but some were called, among
whom was one of those very judges who sat to investigate the Apostle's
teaching: "But certain clave unto him, and believed: among whom also
was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others
with them." And this Church thus founded became famous; Dionysius the
Areopagite became afterwards a celebrated man, because his name was
attached some five centuries later to a notorious forgery which has
played no small part in later Christian history.[174] Dionysius was
the first bishop of the Athenian Church according to the testimony of
another Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, who lived in the middle of the
second century, while persons were yet living who could remember the
Areopagite. He was succeeded by Publius, who presided over the Church
at an important period of its existence. The Emperor Hadrian came to
Athens, and was charmed with it about the year 125 a.d. At that time
the Athenian Church must have included among its members several
learned men; for the two earliest _Apologies_ in defence of
Christianity were produced by it. The Athenian Church had just then
been purified by the fiery trials of persecution. Quadratus and
Aristides stood forth to plead its cause before the Emperor.[175] Of
Quadratus and his work we know but little. Eusebius, the great Church
historian, had, however, seen it, and gives us (_H. E._, iv. 3) a
brief abstract of it, appealing to the miracles of our Saviour, and
stating that some of the dead whom Christ had raised had lived to his
own time. While as for Aristides, the other apologist, his work, after
lying hidden from the sight of Christendom, was printed and published
last year, as we have told in the former volume of this commentary.
That _Apology_ of Aristides has much important teaching for us, as we
have there tried to show. There is one point, however, to which we did
not allude. The _Apology_ of Aristides shows us that the Athenian
Church accepted in the fullest degree and preserved the great Pauline
doctrine of the freedom and catholic nature of Christianity. In the
year 125 Judaism and Christianity were still struggling together
within the Church in other places; but at Athens they had clean
separated the one from the other. Till that year no one but a
circumcised Jewish Christian had ever presided over the Mother Church
of Jerusalem, which sixty years after the martyrdom of St. Peter and
St. Paul preserved exactly the same attitude as in the days of James
the Just.[176] The Church of Athens, on the other hand, as a
thoroughly Gentile Church, had from the first enjoyed the ministry of
Dionysius the Areopagite, a Gentile of culture and education. He had
been attracted by the broad liberal teaching of the Apostle in his
address upon Mars' Hill, enunciating a religion free from all narrow
national limitations. He embraced this catholic teaching with his
whole heart, and transmitted it to his successors, so that when some
seventy years later a learned Athenian stood forth in the person of
Aristides, to explain the doctrines of the Church, contrasting them
with the errors and mistakes of all other nations, Aristides does not
spare even the Jews. He praises them indeed when compared with the
pagans, who had erred on the primary questions of morals; but he
blames them because they had not reached the final and absolute
position occupied by the Christians. Listen to the words of Aristides
which proclaim the true Pauline doctrine taught in St. Paul's sermons,
re-echoed by the Epistles, "Nevertheless the Jews too have gone astray
from accurate knowledge, and they suppose in their minds that they are
serving God, but in the methods of their service, their service is to
angels and not to God, in that they observe Sabbaths and new moons,
and the passover, and the great fast, and the fast and circumcision,
and cleanness of meats," words which sound exactly the same note and
embody the same conception as St. Paul in his indignant language to
the Galatians (iv. 9-11): "Now that ye have come to know God, or
rather to be known of God, how turn ye back again to the weak and
beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage over again? Ye
observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you,
lest by any means I have bestowed labour upon you in vain."[177]
[174] Few biblical characters have been so surrounded with a haze
of fable as Dionysius the Areopagite. All that we certainly know
about him is from this passage in the Acts, and from two notices
by Eusebius, _H. E._, iii. 4, and iv. 23. In the _Acta Sanctorum_
the Bollandists bestow an immense quantity of space on Dionysius
and the literature of the subject under the date Oct. 9th, in
their Fourth Volume for October, pp. 696-987. The name of
Dionysius became specially celebrated when about the year 500 it
was attached to an impudent forgery called the _Heavenly
Hierarchy_, from which has been largely derived the modern Roman
doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, and which has
also exercised a great influence on the development of modern
pantheism: see the article on Dionysius in vol. i. of Smith's
_Dict. Christ. Biog._ Johannes Scotus Erigena, an Irish scholar of
the ninth century, was the only man in France found capable of
translating these Greek works when brought to Western Europe from
the East: see _Vett. Epistt. Hibernic. Sylloge_, xxii., xxiii.,
xxiv., in Ussher's Works (Ed. Elrington), iv. 474-87. Dionysius is
commemorated on Oct. 3rd in the ancient Latin Martyrologies, on
Oct. 9th in the modern Roman Martyrology. The ancient
Martyrologies--the ancient Roman, Ado's, Usaurd's--have a curious
notice stating that Aristides the Athenian, in a work which he
wrote about the Christian religion, described the martyrdom of
Dionysius in the reign of Hadrian. There is no notice of this in
the _Apology_ of Aristides which has lately come to light. A
curious story is told in one of his alleged letters, addressed to
Polycarp. Apollophanes, a pagan sophist, was attacking Polycarp
about Christianity. Dionysius tells Polycarp to remind his
opponent of the miraculous darkness on the day of Crucifixion
which Dionysius and Apollophanes had seen at Hierapolis, where
they were then both students, when Dionysius said, "Either the God
of nature suffers, or the world is in process of dissolution."
[175] The visits of the Emperor Hadrian to Athens, and his delight
in that city, have been confirmed by the latest antiquarian
investigations in the region of coins and inscriptions. The
student who wishes to make acquaintance with the evidence on this
point, which has an important bearing upon the historic proof of
our holy religion, should consult the learned treatise of Julius
Dürr, styled, _Die Reisen der Kaisers Hadrian_, (Vienna, 1881). It
minutely investigates the records of Hadrian's life, and shows us
that Hadrian visited and lived at Athens in A.D. 125. This work
was published ten years before the _Apology_ of the Athenian
Christian Aristides was discovered, serving to illustrate its
history from an independent point of view. I have endeavoured to
set forth the bearing of this point at greater length than I can
now bestow upon it in a series of papers on the _Apology_ of
Aristides in the _Sunday at Home_ for 1891-2. Mrs. Rendal Harris,
the wife of the discoverer of it, has published an interesting
work on this _Apology_, to which I would refer the reader (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1892). The _Apology_ itself was published in
1891, in the series called _Cambridge Texts and Studies_.
[176] The testimony of Eusebius, _H. E._, iv. 5, is express on
this point: "Down to the siege of the Jews under Hadrian there
were fifteen bishops in the Church of Jerusalem, all of whom, as
they say, were Hebrews from the first, and received the genuine
knowledge of Christ, so that in the estimation of those able to
judge they were counted worthy of the episcopal office."
[177] The whole subject of the origin and history of the primitive
Church of Athens has been minutely investigated by a modern French
scholar, C. Bayet, a member of the French school of antiquaries at
Athens. The title of his book, to which I have already referred,
is _De Titulis Atticæ Christianis Antiquissimis Commentatio_
(Thorin: Paris, 1878). He gives a large number of primitive
Christian and Jewish inscriptions found at Athens. The above
quotation from Aristides will be found in Rendal Harris's edition,
p. 48, in the Cambridge _Texts and Studies_.
St. Paul did not stay long at Athens. Five or six weeks perhaps, two
months at most, was probably the length of his visit, time enough just
for his Berœan guides to go back to their own city two hundred
miles away, and forward their message to Thessalonica fifty miles
distant, desiring Timothy and Silas to come to him. Timothy,
doubtless, soon started upon his way, tarried with the Apostle for a
little, and then returned to Thessalonica, as we learn from 1 Thess.
iii. 1: "When we could no longer forbear, we thought it good to be
left at Athens alone, and sent Timothy to establish you and comfort
you." And now he was again all alone in that scoffing city where
neither the religious, moral, nor intellectual atmosphere could have
been pleasing to a man like St. Paul. He quitted Athens therefore and
came to Corinth. In that city he laboured for a period of a year and a
half at least; and yet the record of his brief visit to Athens,
unsuccessful as it was so far as immediate results are concerned, is
much longer than the record of his prolonged work in Corinth.
Now if we were writing a life of St. Paul instead of a commentary on
the history told us in the Acts, we should be able to supplement the
brief narrative of the historical book with the ample details
contained in the Epistles of St. Paul, especially the two Epistles
written to Corinth itself, which illustrate the life of the Apostle,
his work at Corinth, and the state of the Corinthians themselves prior
and subsequent to their conversion. A consideration of these points
would, however, lead me to intrude on the sphere of the commentator on
the Corinthian Epistles, and demand an amount of space which we cannot
afford. In addition, the three great biographies of St. Paul to which
we have so often referred--Lewin's, Farrar's, and that of Conybeare
and Howson--treat this subject at such great length and with such a
profusion of archæological learning as practically leave a fresh
writer nothing new to say in this direction. Let us, however, look
briefly at the record in the Acts of St. Paul's work in Corinth,
viewing it from the expositor's point of view. St. Paul went from
Athens to Corinth discouraged, it may have been, by the results of his
Athenian labours. Opposition never frightened St. Paul; but learned
carelessness, haughty contemptuous indifference to his Divine message,
the outcome of a spirit devoid of any true spiritual life, quenched
his ardour, chilled his enthusiasm. He must indeed have been sorely
repelled by Athens when he set out all alone for the great capital of
Achaia, the wicked, immoral, debased city of Corinth. When he came
thither he united himself with Aquila, a Jew of Pontus, and Priscilla
his wife, because they were members of the same craft. They had been
lately expelled from Rome, and, like the Apostle, were tentmakers:
for convenience' sake therefore, and to save expense, they all lodged
together.[178] Here again St. Paul experienced the wisdom of his
father's training and of the Rabbinical law, which thus made him in
Corinth, as before in Thessalonica, thoroughly independent of all
external circumstances, and able with his own hands to minister to his
body's wants. And it was a fortunate thing too for the gospel's sake
that he was able to do so. St. Paul never permits any one to think for
a moment that the claim of Christ's ministry for a fitting support is
a doubtful one. He expressly teaches again and again, as in 1 Cor.
ix., that it is the Scriptural as well as rational duty of the people
to contribute according to their means to the maintenance of Christ's
public ministry. But there were certain circumstances at Thessalonica,
and above all at Corinth, which made St. Paul waive his just claim and
even cramp, limit, and confine his exertions, by imposing on himself
the work of earning his daily food. Thessalonica and Corinth had
immense Jewish populations. The Jews were notorious in that age as
furnishing the greatest number of impostors, quack magicians and every
other kind of agency which traded upon human credulity for the
purposes of gain. St. Paul was determined that neither Jew nor Gentile
in either place should be able to hinder the work of the gospel by
accusing him of self-seeking or covetous purposes. For this purpose he
united with Aquila and Priscilla in working at their common trade as
tentmakers, employing the Sabbath days in debating after his usual
fashion in the Jewish synagogues; and upon ordinary days improving the
hours during which his hands laboured upon the coarse hair cloth of
which tents were made, either in expounding to his fellow-workmen the
glorious news which he proclaimed or else in meditating upon the
trials of his converts in Macedonia, or perhaps, most of all, in that
perpetual communion with God, that never-ceasing intercession for
which he ever found room and time in the secret chambers of the soul.
St. Paul's intercessions as we read of them in his Epistles were
immense. Intercessory prayers for his individual converts are
frequently mentioned by him. It would have been impossible for a man
so hard pressed with labours of every kind temporal and spiritual to
find place for them all in formal prayers if St. Paul did not
cultivate the habit of ceaseless communion with his Father in heaven,
perpetually bringing before God those cases and persons which lay
dearest to his heart. This habit of secret prayer must be the
explanation of St. Paul's widespread intercessions, and for this
reason. He commends the same practice again and again to his converts.
"Pray without ceasing" is his language to the Thessalonians (1 Thess.
v. 17). Now this could not mean, prolong your private devotions to an
inordinate length, because great numbers of his converts were slaves
who were not masters of their time. But it does mean cultivate a
perpetual sense of God's presence and of your own communion with Him,
which will turn life and its busiest work into a season of refreshing
prayer and untiring intercession.
[178] This expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Claudius, which in
the providence of God brought Aquila and Priscilla into contact
with St. Paul, is mentioned by the Roman historian Suetonius,
_Claudius_, 25, in the following suggestive words: "He expelled
the Jews who were continually creating tumults, Chestus impelling
them." The tumults roused by the teaching of Christian doctrine,
like those in the Thessalonian and Berœan synagogues, were
evidently the origin of the edict. Aquila and Priscilla were
constant travellers, and seem to have been influential Christians.
We find them afterwards at Ephesus, where they tarried some time:
see Acts xviii. 18, 19, 26; 1 Cor. xvi. 19; and subsequently 2
Tim. iv. 19. They also lived at Rome for a period between their
two residences at Ephesus, as we learn from the fact that St. Paul
sends a salutation to them in Romans xvi. 3, 4.
Meanwhile, according to Acts xviii. 5, Silas and Timothy arrived from
Macedonia, bringing contributions for the Apostle's support, which
enabled him to fling himself entirely into ministerial and
evangelistic work. This renewed activity soon told. St. Paul had no
longer to complain of contemptuous or listless conduct, as at Athens.
He experienced at Jewish hands in Corinth exactly the same treatment
as at Thessalonica and Berœa. Paul preached that Jesus was the
Christ. The Jews blasphemed Him, and called Him accursed. Their
attitude became so threatening that Paul was at length compelled to
retire from the synagogue, and, separating his disciples, Jews and
Gentiles alike, he withdrew to the house of one Justus, a man whose
Latin name bespeaks his Western origin, who lived next door to the
synagogue. Thenceforth he threw himself with all his energy into his
work. God too directly encouraged him. The very proximity of the
Christian Church to the Jewish Synagogue constituted a special danger
to himself personally when he had to deal with fanatical Jews. A
heavenly visitor appeared, therefore, to refresh the wearied saint. In
his hour of danger and of weakness God's strength and grace were
perfected, and assurance was granted that the Lord had much people in
the city of Corinth, and that no harm should happen to him while
striving to seek out and gather God's sheep that were scattered abroad
in the midst of the naughty world of Corinthian life. And the secret
vision did not stand alone. External circumstances lent their
assistance and support. Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and
his family became converts, and were baptized. Gaius and Stephanas
were important converts gathered from amongst the Gentiles; so
important indeed were these three individuals and their families that
St. Paul turned aside from his purely evangelistic and missionary
labours and devoted himself to the pastoral work of preparing them for
baptism administering personally that holy sacrament, a duty which he
usually left to his assistants, who were not so well qualified for the
rough pioneer efforts of controversy, which he had marked out for
himself.[179] And so the work went on for a year and a half, till the
Jews thought they saw their opportunity for crushing the audacious
apostate who was thus making havoc even among the officials of their
own organisation, inducing them to join his Nazarene synagogue.[180]
Achaia, of which Corinth was the capital, was a Roman province,
embracing, broadly speaking, the territory comprised in the modern
kingdom of Greece. Like a great many other provinces, and specially
like Cyprus, to which we have already called attention, Achaia was at
times an imperial, at times a senatorial province. Forty years earlier
it was an imperial province. The Acts describes it as just then, that
is, about A.D. 53, a senatorial or proconsular province; and
Suetonius, an independent Roman historian, confirms this, telling us
(_Claud._, 25) that the Emperor Claudius restored it to the senate.
[179] See 1 Cor. i. 14-17: "I thank God that I baptized none of
you, save Crispus and Gaius; lest any man should say that ye were
baptized into my name. And I baptized also the household of
Stephanas: besides, I know not whether I baptized any other. For
Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." I have
often heard a very wrong conclusion drawn from this passage.
People think that St. Paul was here casting a certain slight upon
baptism as contrasted with preaching. His meaning, however, is
evident to any one who will realise the circumstances. The
Corinthians were breaking up into sects, calling themselves by the
names of various Christian leaders. St. Paul thanks God that very
few can call themselves by his name, as they had not even the poor
excuse for doing so, which his officiating at their baptism might
give. To him, in God's providence, had been assigned the rough,
dangerous pioneer work of preaching to the adversaries, Jews and
pagans, outside the Church; to others the work of introducing the
converts made by him into the Mystical Body of Christ.
[180] In vol. i., p. 270, I have pointed out that in Corinth the
Christians probably adopted, not only the name, but the
organisation of the synagogues.
Gallio, a brother of the celebrated philosophic writer Seneca, had
been sent to it as proconsul, and the Jews thought they now saw their
opportunity. Gallio, whose original and proper name was Annæus
Novatus, was a man distinguished by what in Rome was considered his
sweet, gentle, and loving disposition. His reputation may have
preceded him, and the Jews of Corinth may have thought that they would
play upon his easy-going temper. The Jews, being a very numerous
community at Corinth, had it of course in their power to prove very
unpleasant to any ruler, and specially to one of Gallio's reputed
temper.[181] The Roman governors were invested with tremendous powers;
they were absolute despots, in fact, for the time being, and yet they
were often very anxious to gain popularity, especially with any
troublesome body of their temporary subjects. The Roman proconsuls, in
fact, adopted a principle we sometimes see still acted out in
political life, as if it were the highest type of statesmanship. They
were anxious to gain popularity by gratifying those who made
themselves specially obnoxious and raised the loudest cries. They
petted the naughty, and they neglected the good. So it was with
Pontius Pilate, who perpetrated a judicial murder because it
contented the multitude; so it was with Festus, who left an innocent
man in bonds at Cæsarea because he desired to gain favour with the
Jews; and so too, thought the Jews of Corinth, it would be with
Gallio. They arrested the Apostle, therefore, using the messengers of
the synagogue for the purpose, and brought him to the proconsular
court, where they set him before the bema, or elevated platform,
whence the Roman magistrates dispensed justice. Then they laid their
formal accusation against him: "This man persuadeth men to worship God
contrary to the law"; expecting perhaps that he would be remitted by
the proconsul to the judgment and discipline of their own domestic
tribunal, even as Pilate said to the Jews about our Lord and their
accusation against Him: "Take ye Him, and judge Him according to your
law." But the philosophic brother of the Stoic Seneca had a profound
contempt for these agitating Jews. His Stoic education too had trained
him to allow external things as little influence upon the mind as
possible. The philosophic apathy which the Stoics cultivated must have
more or less affected his whole nature, as he soon showed the Jews;
for before the Apostle had time to reply to the charge Gallio burst in
contemptuously. If it were a matter of law and order, he declares, it
would be right to attend to it; but if your complaint is touching your
own national law and customs I will have nothing to say to it. And
then he commanded his lictors to clear the court. Thus ended the
attempt on St. Paul's freedom or life, an attempt which was indeed
more disastrous to the Jews themselves than to any one else; for the
Gentile mob of Corinth, hating the Jews, and glad to see them baulked
of their expected prey, seized the chief accuser Sosthenes, the ruler
of the synagogue, and beat him before the judgment-seat; while Gallio
all the while cared for none of these things, despising the mob, Jew
and Gentile alike, and contemptuously pitying them from the height of
his philosophic self-contentment. Gallio has been at all times
regarded as the type of the mere worldling, who, wrapped in material
interests, cares for nothing higher or nobler. But this is scarcely
fair to Gallio. The Stoic philosopher was not dead to better things.
But he is the type rather of men who, blinded by lower truths and mere
intellectual wisdom, are thereby rendered careless of those spiritual
matters in which the soul's true life alone consists. He had so
thoroughly cultivated a philosophic contempt for the outside world and
its business, the sayings and doings, the joys and the sorrows of the
puny mortals who fume and strut and fret their lives away upon this
earthly stage, that he lost the opportunity of hearing from the
Apostle's lips of a grander philosophy, a deeper contentment, of a
truer, more satisfying peace than was ever dreamt of in stoical
speculation. And this type of man is not extinct. Philosophy, science,
art, literature, politics, they are all great facts, all offer vast
fields for human activity, and all may serve for a time so thoroughly
to content and satisfy man's inner being as to render him careless of
that life in Christ which alone abideth for evermore.
[181] Cicero, in his oration Pro Flacco, ch. xxviii., shows how
troublesome and dangerous, even to the very highest persons, the
Jews at Rome could be one hundred years earlier than Gallio's day.
The attempt of the Jews marked the termination of St. Paul's work in
Corinth. It was at least the beginning of the end. He had now laboured
longer in Corinth than anywhere else since he started out from
Antioch. He had organised and consolidated the Church, as we can see
from his Corinthian Epistles and now he longed once more to visit his
old friends, and report what God had wrought by his means during his
long absence. He tarried, therefore, yet a while, visiting doubtless
the various Churches which he had established throughout all the
province of Achaia, and then, accompanied by a few companions, set
sail for Syria, to declare the results of his eventful mission, taking
Ephesus on his way. This was his first visit to that great city, and
he was probably led to pay it owing to the commercial necessities of
Aquila. Life's actions and deeds, even in the case of an apostle, are
moulded by very little things. A glance, a chance word, a passing
courtesy, forgotten as soon as done, and life is very different from
what it otherwise would have been. And so, too, the tent-making and
tent-selling of Aquila brought Paul to Ephesus, shaped the remainder
of his career, and endowed the Church with the rich spiritual heritage
of the teaching imparted to the Ephesian disciples by word and
epistle.