The Character and Conversion of St. Paul
SETTING aside for the present the story of St. Paul’s conversion as given
in the Acts of the Apostles—for I am bound to admit that there are
circumstances in connection with that account which throw doubt upon its
historical accuracy—and looking at the broad facts only, we are struck at
once with the following obvious reflection, namely, that Paul was an able
man, a cultivated man, and a bitter opponent of Christianity; but that in
spite of the strength of his original prejudices, he came to see what he
thought convincing reasons for going over to the camp of his enemies. He
went over, and with the result we are all familiar.
Now even supposing that the miraculous account of Paul’s conversion is
entirely devoid of foundation, or again, as I believe myself, that the
story given in the Acts is not correctly placed, but refers to the vision
alluded to by Paul himself (I. Cor. xv.), and to events which happened,
not coincidently with his conversion, but some years after it—does not
the importance of the conversion itself rather gain than lose in
consequence? A charge of unimportant inaccuracy may be thus sustained
against one who wrote in a most inaccurate age; but what is this in
comparison with the testimony borne to the strength of the Christian
evidences by the supposition that _of their own weight alone_, _and
without miraculous assistance_, _they succeeded in convincing the most
bitter_, _and at the same time the ablest_, _of their opponents_? This
is very pregnant. No man likes to abandon the side which he has once
taken. The spectacle of a man committing himself deeply to his original
party, changing without rhyme or reason, and then remaining for the rest
of his life the most devoted and courageous adherent of all that he had
opposed, without a single human inducement to make him do so, is one
which has never been witnessed since man was man. When men who have been
committed deeply and spontaneously to one cause, leave it for another,
they do so either because facts have come to their knowledge which are
new to them and which they cannot resist, or because their temporal
interests urge them, or from caprice: but if they change from caprice in
important matters and after many pledges given, they will change from
caprice again: they will not remain for twenty-five or thirty years
without changing a jot of their capriciously formed opinions. We are
therefore warranted in assuming that St. Paul’s conversion to
Christianity was not dictated by caprice: it was not dictated by
self-interest: it must therefore have sprung from the weight of certain
new facts which overbore all the resistance which he could make to them.
What then could these facts have been?
Paul’s conduct as a Jew was logical and consistent: he did what any
seriously-minded man who had been strictly brought up would have done in
his situation. Instead of half believing what he had been taught, he
believed it wholly. Christianity was cutting at the root of what was in
his day accepted as fundamental: it was therefore perfectly natural that
he should set himself to attack it. There is nothing against him in this
beyond the fact of his having done it, as far as we can see, with much
cruelty. Yet though cruel, he was cruel from the best of motives—the
stamping out of an error which was harmful to the service of God; and
cruelty was not then what it is now: the age was not sensitive and the
lot of all was harder. From the first he proved himself to be a man of
great strength of character, and like many such, deeply convinced of the
soundness of his opinions, and deeply impressed with the belief that
nothing could be good which did not also commend itself as good to him.
He tested the truth of his earlier convictions not by external standards,
but by the internal standard of their own strength and purity—a fearful
error which but for God’s mercy towards him would have made him no less
wicked than well-intentioned.
Even after having been convinced by a weight of evidence which no
prejudice could resist, and after thus attaining to a higher conception
of right and truth and goodness than was possible to him as a Jew, there
remained not a few traces of the old character. Opposition beyond
certain limits was a thing which to the end of his life he could not
brook. It is not too much to say that he regarded the other Apostles—and
was regarded by them—with suspicion and dislike; even if an angel from
Heaven had preached any other doctrine than what Paul preached, the angel
was to be accursed (Gal. i., 8), and it is not probable that he regarded
his fellow Apostles as teaching the same doctrine as himself, or that he
would have allowed them greater licence than an angel. It is plain from
his undoubted Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians that the other
Apostles, no less than his converts, exceedingly well knew that he was
not a man to be trifled with. If the arm of the law had been as much on
his side after his conversion as before it, it would have gone hardly
with dissenters; they would have been treated with politic tenderness the
moment that they yielded, but woe betide them if they presumed on having
any very decided opinions of their own.
On the other hand, his sagacity is beyond dispute; it is certain that his
perception of what the Gentile converts could and could not bear was the
main proximate cause of the spread of Christianity. He prevented it from
becoming a mere Jewish sect, and it has been well said that but for him
the Jews would now be Christians, and the Gentiles unbelievers. Who can
doubt his tact and forbearance, where matters not essential were
concerned? His strength in not yielding a fraction upon vital points was
matched only by his suppleness and conciliatory bearing upon all others.
To use his own words, he did indeed become “all things to all men” if by
any means he could gain some, and the probability is that he pushed this
principle to its extreme (see Acts xxi., 20–26).
Now when we see a man so strong and yet so yielding—the writer moreover
of letters which shew an intellect at once very vigorous and very subtle
(not to say more of them), and when we know that there was no amount of
hardship, pain, and indignity, which he did not bear and count as gain in
the service of Jesus Christ; when we also remember that he continued thus
for all the known years of his life after his conversion, can we think
that that conversion could have been the result of anything even
approaching to caprice? Or again, is it likely that it could have been
due to contact with the hallucinations of his despised and hated enemies?
Paul the Christian appears to be the same sort of man in most respects as
Paul the Jew, yet can we imagine Paul the Christian as being converted
from Christianity to some other creed, by the infection of
hallucinations? On the contrary, no man would more quickly have come to
the bottom of them, and assigned them to diabolical agency. What then
can that thing have been, which wrenched the strong and able man from all
that had the greatest hold upon him, and fixed him for the rest of his
life as the most self-sacrificing champion of Christianity? In answer to
this question we might say, that it is of no great importance how the
change was made, inasmuch as the fact of its having been made at all is
sufficiently pregnant. Nevertheless it will be interesting to follow
Strauss in his remarks upon the account given in the Acts, and I am bound
to add that I think he has made out his case. Strange! that he should
have failed to see that the evidences in support of the Resurrection are
incalculably strengthened by his having done so. How short-sighted is
mere ingenuity! And how weak and cowardly are they who shut their eyes
to facts because they happen to come from an opponent!
Strauss, however, writes as follows:—“That we are not bound to the
individual features of the account in the Acts is shewn by comparing it
with the substance of the statement twice repeated in the language of
Paul himself: for there we find that the author’s own account is not
accurate, and that he attributed no importance to a few variations more
or less. Not only is it said on one occasion that the attendants stood
dumb-foundered: on another that they fell with Paul to the ground; on one
occasion that they heard the voice but saw no one; on another that they
saw the light but did not hear the voice of him who spoke with Paul: but
also the speech of Jesus himself, in the third repetition, gets the well
known addition about “kicking against the pricks,” to say nothing of the
fact that the appointment to the Apostleship of the Gentiles, which
according to the two earlier accounts was made partly by Ananias, partly
on the occasion of a subsequent vision in the Temple at Jerusalem, is in
this last account incorporated in the speech of Jesus. There is no
occasion to derive the three accounts of this occurrence in the Acts from
different sources, and even in this case one must suppose that the author
of the Acts must have remarked and reconciled the discrepancies; that he
did not do so, or rather that without following his own earlier narrative
he repeated it in an arbitrary form, proves to us how careless the New
Testament writers are about details of this kind, important as they are
to one who strives after strict historical accuracy.
“But even if the author of the Acts had gone more accurately to work,
still he was not an eye witness, scarcely even a writer who took the
history from the narrative of an eye witness. Even if we consider the
person who in different places comprehends himself and the Apostle Paul
under the word ‘we’ or ‘us’ to have been the composer of the whole work,
that person was not on the occasion of the occurrence before Damascus as
yet in the company of the Apostle. Into this he did not enter until much
later, in the Troad, on the Apostle’s second missionary journey (Acts
xvi., 10). But that hypothesis with regard to the author of the Acts of
the Apostles is, moreover, as we have seen above, erroneous. He only
worked up into different passages of his composition the memoranda of a
temporary companion of the Apostle about the journeys performed in his
company, and we are therefore not justified in considering the narrator
to have been an eye witness in those passages and sections in which the
‘we’ is wanting. Now among these is found the very section in which
appear the two accounts of his conversion which Paul gives, first, to the
Jewish people in Jerusalem, secondly, to Agrippa and Festus in Cæsarea.
The last occasion on which the ‘we’ was found was xxi., 18, that of the
visit of Paul to James, and it does not appear again until xxvii., 1,
when the subject is the Apostle’s embarkation for Italy. Nothing
therefore compels us to assume that we have in the reports of these
speeches the account of any one who had been a party to the hearing of
them, and, in them, Paul’s own narrative of the occurrences that took
place on his conversion.”
The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures having been long
given up by all who have considered the awful consequences which it
entails, the Bible records have been opened to modern criticism:—the
result has been that their general accuracy is amply proved, while at the
same time the writers must be admitted to have fallen in with the
feelings and customs of their own times, and must accordingly be allowed
to have been occasionally guilty of what would in our own age be called
inaccuracies. There is no dependence to be placed on the verbal, or
indeed the substantial, accuracy of any ancient speeches, except those
which we know to have been reported _verbatim_, they were (as with the
Herodotean and Thucydidean speeches) in most cases the invention of the
historian himself, as being what seemed most appropriate to be said by
one in the position of the speaker. Reporting was a rare art among the
ancients, and was confined to a few great centres of intellectual
activity; accuracy, moreover, was not held to be of the same importance
as at the present day. Yet without accurate reporting a speech perishes
as soon as it is uttered, except in so far as it lives in the actions of
those who hear it. Even a hundred years ago the invention of speeches
was considered a matter of course, as in the well-known case of Dr.
Johnson, than whom none could be more conscientious, and—according to his
lights—accurate. I may perhaps be pardoned for quoting the passage in
full from Boswell, who gives it on the authority of Mr. John Nichols; the
italics are mine. “He said that the Parliamentary debates were the only
part of his writings which then gave him any compunction: _but that at
the time he wrote them he had no conception that he was imposing upon the
world_, _though they were frequently written from very slender
materials_, _and often from none at all—the mere coinage of his own
imagination_. He never wrote any part of his works with equal velocity.”
(Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, chap. lxxxii.)
This is an extreme case, yet there can be no question about its truth.
It is only one among the very many examples which could be adduced in
order to shew that the appreciation of the value of accuracy is a thing
of modern date only—a thing which we owe mainly to the chemical and
mechanical sciences, wherein the inestimable difference between precision
and inaccuracy became most speedily apparent. If the reader will pardon
an apparent digression, I would remark that that sort of care is wanted
on behalf of Christianity with which a cashier in a bank counts out the
money that he tenders—counting it and recounting it as though he could
never be sure enough before he allowed it to leave his hands. This
caution would have saved the wasting of many lives, and the breaking of
many hearts.
We, on the other hand, however reckless we may be ourselves, are in the
habit of assuming that any historian whom we may have occasion to
consult, and on whose testimony we would fain rely, must have himself
weighed and re-weighed his words as the cashier his money; an error which
arises from want of that sympathy which should make us bear constantly in
mind what lights men had, under what influences they wrote, and what we
should ourselves have done had we been so placed as they. But if any
will maintain that though the general run of ancient speeches were, as
those supposed to have been reported by Johnson, pure invention, yet that
it is not likely that one reporting the words of Almighty God should have
failed to feel the awful responsibility of his position, we can only
answer that the writer of the Acts did most indisputably so fail, as is
shewn by the various reports of those words which he has himself given:
if he could in the innocency of his heart do this, and at one time report
the Almighty as saying this, and at another that, as though, more or
less, this or that were a matter of no moment, what certainty can we have
concerning such a man that inaccuracy shall not elsewhere be found in
him? None. He is a warped mirror which will distort every object that
it reflects.
It follows, then, that from the Acts of the Apostles we have no data for
arriving at any conclusion as to the manner of Paul’s change of faith,
nor the circumstances connected with it. To us the accounts there given
should be simply non-existent; but this is not easy, for we have heard
them too often and from too early an age to be able to escape their
influence; yet we must assuredly ignore them if we are anxious to arrive
at truth. We cannot let the story told in the Acts enter into any
judgement which we may form concerning Paul’s character. The desire to
represent him as having been converted by miracle was very natural. He
himself tells us that he saw visions, and received his apostleship by
revelation—not necessarily at the time of, or immediately after, his
conversion, but still at some period or other in his life; it would be
the most natural thing in the world for the writer of the Acts to connect
some version of one of these visions with the conversion itself: the
dramatic effect would be heightened by making the change, while the
change itself would be utterly unimportant in the eyes of such a writer;
be this however as it may, we are only now concerned with the fact that
we know nothing about Paul’s conversion from the Acts of the Apostles,
which should make us believe that that conversion was wrought in him by
any other means, than by such an irresistible pressure of evidence as no
sane person could withstand.
From the Apostle’s own writings we can glean nothing about his conversion
which would point in the direction of its having been sudden or
miraculous. It is true that in the Epistle to the Galatians he says,
“After it had pleased God to reveal his Son in me,” but this expression
does not preclude the supposition that his conversion may have been led
up to by a gradual process, the culmination of which (if that) he alone
regarded as miraculous. Thus we are forced to admit that we know nothing
from any source concerning the manner and circumstances of St. Paul’s
change from Judaism to Christianity, and we can only conclude therefore
that he changed because he found the weight of the evidence to be greater
than he could resist. And this, as we have seen, is an exceedingly
telling fact. The probability is, that coming much into contact with
Christians through his persecution of them, and submitting them to the
severest questioning, he found that they were in all respects sober
plainspoken men, that their conviction was intense, their story coherent,
and the doctrines which they had received simple and ennobling; that
these results of many inquisitions were so unvarying that he found
conviction stealing gradually upon him against his will; common honesty
compelled him to inquire further; the answers pointed invariably in one
direction only; until at length he found himself utterly unable to resist
the weight of evidence which he had collected, and resolved, perhaps at
the last suddenly, to yield himself a convert to Christianity.
Strauss says that, “in the presence of the believers in Jesus,” the
conviction that he was a false teacher—an impostor—“must have become
every day more doubtful to him. They considered it not only publicly
honourable to be as convinced of his Resurrection as they were of their
own life—but they shewed also a state of mind, a quiet peace, a tranquil
cheerfulness, even under suffering, which put to shame the restless and
joyless zeal of their persecutor. Could _he_ have been a false teacher
who had adherents such as these? Could that have been a false pretence
which gave such rest and security? on the one hand, he saw the new sect,
in spite of all persecutions, nay, in consequence of them, extending
their influence wider and wider round them; on the other, as their
persecutor, he felt that inward tranquillity growing less and less which
he could observe in so many ways in the persecuted. We cannot therefore
be surprised if in hours of inward despondency and unhappiness he put to
himself the question, ‘Who after all is right, thou, or the crucified
Galilean about whom these men are so enthusiastic?’ And when he had got
as far as this, the result, with his bodily and mental characteristics,
naturally followed in an ecstasy in which the very same Christ whom up to
this time he had so passionately persecuted, appeared to him in all the
glory of which his adherents spoke so much, shewed him the perversity and
folly of his conduct, and called him to come over to his service.”
The above comes simply to this, that Paul in his constant contact with
Christians found that they had more to say for themselves than he could
answer, and should, one would have thought, have suggested to Strauss
what he supposes to have occurred to Paul, namely, that it was not likely
that these men had made a mistake in thinking that they had seen Christ
alive after his Crucifixion. There can be no doubt about Strauss’s being
right as to the Christian intensity of conviction, strenuousness of
assertion, and readiness to suffer for the sake of their faith in Christ;
and these are the main points with which we are concerned. We arrive
therefore at the conclusion that the first Christians were sufficiently
unanimous, coherent and undaunted to convince the foremost of their
enemies. They were not so _before_ the Crucifixion; they could not
certainly have been made so by the Crucifixion alone; something beyond
the Crucifixion must have occurred to give them such a moral ascendancy
as should suffice to generate a revulsion of feeling in the mind of the
persecuting Saul. Strauss asks us to believe that this missing something
is to be found in the hallucinations of two or three men whose names have
not been recorded and who have left no mark of their own. Is there any
occasion for answer?
It is inconceivable that he who could write the Epistle to the Romans
should not also have been as able as any man who ever lived to question
the early believers as to their converse with Christ, and to report
faithfully the substance of what they told him. That he knew the other
Apostles, that he went up to Jerusalem to hold conferences with them,
that he abode fifteen days with St. Peter—as he tells us, in order “to
question him”—these things are certain. The Greek word ιστορησαι is a
very suggestive one. It is so easy to make too much out of anything that
I hardly dare to say how strongly the use of the verb ιστορειν suggests
to me “getting at the facts of the case,” “questioning as to how things
happened,” yet such would be the most obvious meaning of the word from
which our own “history” and “story” are derived. Fifteen days was time
enough to give Paul the means of coming to an understanding with Peter as
to what the value of Peter’s story was, nor can we believe that Paul
should not both receive and transmit perfectly all that he was then told.
In fact, without supposing these men to be so utterly visionary that
nothing durable could come out of them, there is no escape from holding
that Peter was justified in firmly believing that he had seen Christ
alive within a very few days of the Crucifixion, that he succeeded also
in satisfying Paul that this belief was well-founded, and that in the
account of Christ’s reappearances, as given I. Cor. xv., we have a
virtually _verbatim_ report of what Paul heard from Peter and the other
Apostles. Of course the possibility remains that Paul may have been too
easily satisfied, and not have cross-examined Peter as closely as he
might have done. But then Paul was converted _before_ this interview;
and this implies that he had already found a general consent among the
Christians whom he had met with, that the story which he afterwards heard
from Peter (or one to the same effect) was true. Whence then the
unanimity of this belief? Strauss answers as before—from the
hallucinations of an originally small minority. We can only again reply
that for the reasons already given we find it quite impossible to agree
with him.
* * * * *
[The quotation from Strauss given in this chapter will be found pp. 414,
415, 420, of the first volume of the English translation, published by
Williams and Norgate, 1865. I believe that my brother intended to make a
fresh translation from the original passages, but he never carried out
his intention, and in his MS. the page of the English translation with
the first and last words of each passage are alone given. I could hardly
venture to undertake the responsibility of making a fresh translation
myself, and have therefore adhered almost word for word to the published
English translation—here and there, however, a trifling alteration was
really irresistible on the scores alike of euphony and clearness.—W. B.
O.]