Corinth, about the year 53 A.D., a memorable event took place in his
career, which has had an immeasurable influence on the Christian world.
Being unable personally to visit, as he desired, the churches he had
founded, Paul began to write to them letters to instruct and confirm
them in the faith.
The apostle's first epistle was to his beloved brethren, in
Thessalonica,--the first of that remarkable series of theological essays
which in all subsequent ages have held their position as fundamentally
important in the establishment of Christian doctrine. They are luminous,
profound, original, remarkable alike for vigor of style and depth of
spiritual significance. They are not moral essays like those of
Confucius, nor mystic and obscure speculations like those of Buddha, but
grand treatises on revealed truth, written, as it were, with his heart's
blood, and vivid as fire in a dark night. In these epistles we see also
Paul's intense personality, his frank egotism, his devotion to his work,
his sincerity and earnestness, his affectionate nature, his tolerant and
catholic spirit, and also his power of sarcasm, his warm passions, and
his unbending will. He enjoins the necessity of faith, which is a gift,
with the practice of virtues that appeal to consciousness and emanate
from love and purity of heart. These letters are exhortations to a lofty
life and childlike acceptance of revealed truths. The apostle warns his
little flock against the evils that surrounded them, and which so easily
beset them,--especially unchastity and drunkenness, and strifes,
bickerings, slanders, and retaliations. He exhorts them to unceasing
prayer, the feeling of constant dependence, and hence the supreme need
of divine grace to keep them from falling, and to enable them to grow in
spiritual strength. He promises as the fruit of spiritual victories
immeasurable joys, not only amid present evils, but in the glorious
future when the mortal shall put on immortality. Especially and
repeatedly does he urge them to "have also that mind which was in Christ
Jesus," showing itself in humility, willingness to serve others,
unselfish consideration of others, even the preference of others'
interests before their own,--a combination of the homely practical with
the divinely ideal, such as the world had never learned from any earlier
philosophy of life.
Paul at last felt that he must revisit the earlier churches, especially
those of Syria. It was three years since he had left Antioch. But more
than all, he wished to consult with his brethren in Jerusalem, and to be
present at the feast of the Passover. Bidding an affectionate adieu to
his Christian friends, he set out for the little seaport of Cenchrea,
accompanied by Aquila and his wife Priscilla, and then set sail for
Ephesus, on his way to Jerusalem. In his haste to reach the end of his
journey he did not tarry at Ephesus, but took another vessel, and
arrived at Caesarea without any recorded accident. Nor did he make a
long visit at Jerusalem, probably to avoid a rupture with James, the
head of the church in that city, whose views about Jewish ceremonials,
as already noted, differed from his.
Paul returned again to Ephesus, where he made a sojourn of three years,
following his trade for a living, while he founded a church in that city
of necromancers, sorcerers, magicians, courtesans, mimics,
flute-players,--a city abandoned to Asiatic sensualities and
superstitious rites; an exceedingly wicked and luxurious city, yet
famous for arts, especially for the grandest temple ever erected by the
Greeks, one of the seven wonders of the world. It was in the most
abandoned capitals, with mixed populations, that the greatest triumphs
of Christianity were achieved. Antioch, Corinth, and Ephesus were more
favorable to the establishment of Christian churches than Jerusalem
and Athens.
But the trials of Paul in Ephesus, the capital of Asia Minor, the most
celebrated of all the Ionian cities,--"more Hellenic than Antioch, more
Oriental than Corinth, more wealthy than Thessalonica, more populous
than Athens,"--were incessant and discouraging, since it was the
headquarters of pagan superstitions, and of all forms of magical
imposture. As usual, he was reviled and slandered by the Jews; but he
was also at this time an object of intense hatred to the priests and
image-makers of the Temple of Diana, troubled in mind by evil reports
concerning the converts he had made in other cities, physically weak and
depressed by repeated attacks of sickness, oppressed by cares and
labors, exposed to constant dangers, his life an incessant mortification
and suffering, "killed all the day long," carrying about him wherever he
went "the deadness of the crucified Christ."
Paul's labors in Ephesus were nevertheless successful. He made many
converts and exercised an extraordinary influence,--among other things
causing magicians voluntarily to burn their own costly books, as
Savonarola afterward made a bonfire of vanities at Florence. His sojourn
was cut short at length by the riot which was made by the various
persons who were directly or indirectly supported by the revenues of the
Temple,--a mongrel mob, brought to terms by the tact of the town clerk,
who reminded the howling dervishes and angry silversmiths of the
punishment which might be inflicted on them by the Roman proconsul for
raising a disturbance and breaking the law.
Yet Paul with difficulty escaped from Ephesus and departed again for
Greece, not however until he had written his extraordinary Epistles to
the Corinthians, who had sadly departed from his teachings both in
morals and doctrine, either through ignorance, or in consequence of the
depravity which they had but imperfectly conquered. The infant churches
were deplorably split into factions, "the result of the visits from
various teachers who succeeded Paul, and who built on his foundations
very dubious materials by way of superstructure,"--even Apollos himself,
an Alexandrian Jew baptized by the Apostle John, the most eloquent and
attractive preacher of the day, who turned everybody's head. In the
churches women rose to give their opinions without being veiled, as if
they were Greek courtesans; the Agapae, or love-feasts, had degenerated
into luxurious banquets; and unchastity, the peculiar vice of the
Corinthians, went unrebuked. These evils Paul rebukes, and lays down
rules for the faithful in reference to marriage, to the position of
women, to the observance of the Lord's Supper, and sundry other things,
enjoining forbearance and love. His chapter in reference to charity is
justly regarded by all writers and commentators as the nearest approach
in Christian literature to the Sermon on the Mount. Scarcely less
remarkable is the chapter on death and the resurrection, shedding more
light on that great subject than all other writers combined in heathen
and Christian annals,--one of the profoundest treatises ever written by
mortal man, and which can be explained only as the result of a
supernatural revelation.
Paul's second sojourn in Macedonia lasted only six months; this time he
spent in going from city to city confirming the infant churches,
remaining longest in Thessalonica and Philippi, where his most faithful
converts were found. Here Titus joined him, bringing good news from
Corinth. Still, there were dissensions and evils in that troublesome
church which called for a second letter. In this letter he sets forth,
not in the spirit of egotism, the various sufferings and perils he had
endured, few of which are alluded to by Luke: "Of the Jews five times
received I forty stripes save one; thrice was I beaten with rods; once
was I stoned; thrice I suffered shipwreck; a night and a day have I
spent in the deep; in journeyings often; in perils of rivers, in perils
of robbers, in perils from my own race, in perils from the Gentiles, in
perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea,
in perils among false brethren; in toil and weariness, in sleeplessness
often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often; besides anxiety for all
the churches."
It was probably at the close of the year 57 A.D. that Paul set out for
Corinth, with Titus, Timothy, Sosthenes, and other companions. During
the three months he remained in that city he probably wrote his Epistle
to the Galatians and his Epistle to the Romans,--the latter the most
profound of all his writings, setting forth the sum and substance of his
theology, in which the great doctrine of justification by faith is
severely elaborated. The whole epistle is a war on pagan philosophy, the
insufficiency of good works without faith,--the lever by which in later
times Wyclif, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Saint Cyran overthrew a
pharisaic system of outward righteousness. In the Epistle to the
Galatians Paul speaks with unusual boldness and earnestness, severely
rebuking them for their departure from the truth, and reiterating with
dogmatic ardor the inutility of circumcision as of the Law abrogated by
Christ, with whom, in the liberty which he proclaimed, there is neither
Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female, but all
are one in Him. And Paul reminds them,--a bitter pill to the Jews,--that
this is taught in the promise made to Abraham four hundred and fifty
years before the Law was declared by Moses, by which promise all races
and tribes and people are to be blessed to remotest generations. This
epistle not only breathes the largest Christian liberty,--the equality
of all men before God,--but it asserts, as in the Epistle to the Romans,
with terrible distinctness, that salvation is by faith in Christ and not
by deeds of the Law, which is only a schoolmaster to prepare the way for
the ascendency of Jesus.
I need not dwell on these two great epistles, which embody the substance
of the Pauline theology received by the Church for eighteen hundred
years, and which can never be abrogated so long as Paul is regarded as
an authority in Christian doctrine.
I return to a brief notice of Paul's last visit to Jerusalem, which was
made against the expostulations of his friends and disciples in Ephesus,
who gathered around him weeping, knowing well that they never would see
his face again. But he was inflexible in his resolution, declaring that
he had no fear of chains, and was ready to die at Jerusalem for the
name of Jesus. Why he should have persisted in his resolution, so full
of danger; why he should again have thrown himself into the hands of his
bitterest enemies, thirsty for his blood,--we do not know, for he had no
new truth to declare. But the brethren were forced to yield to his
strong will, and all they could do was to provide him with a sufficient
escort to shield him from ordinary dangers on the way.
The long voyage from Ephesus was prosperous but tedious, and on the last
day before the Pentecostal feast, in May, in the year 58 A.D., Paul for
the fifth time entered Jerusalem. His meeting with the elders, under the
presidency of James,--"the stern, white-robed, ascetic, mysterious
prophet,"--was cold. His personal friends in Jerusalem were few, and his
enemies were numerous, powerful, and bitter; for he had not only
emancipated himself from the Jewish Law, with all its rites and
ceremonies, but had made it of no account in all the churches he had
founded. What had he naturally to expect from the zealots for that Law
but a renewed persecution? Even the Jewish Christians gave no thanks for
the splendid contribution which Paul had gathered in Asia for the relief
of their poor. Nor was there any exultation among them when Paul
narrated his successful labors among the Gentiles. They pretended to
rejoice, but added, "You observe, brother, how many myriads of the Jews
there are that have embraced the faith, and they are all zealots for the
Law. And we are informed that thou teachest all the Jews that are among
the Gentiles to forsake Moses." There was no cordiality among the Jewish
elders of the Christian community, and deadly hostility among the
unconverted Jews, for they had doubtless heard of Paul's
marvellous career.
Jerusalem was then full of strangers, and the Jews of Asia recognizing
Paul in the Temple, raised a disturbance, pretending that he was a
profaner of the sacred edifice. The crowd of fanatics seized him,
dragged him out of the Temple, and set about to kill him. But the Roman
authorities interfered, and rescuing him from the hands of the
infuriated mob, bore him to the castle, the tower of Antonia. When they
arrived at the stairs of the tower, Paul begged the tribune to be
allowed to speak to the angry and demented crowd. The request was
granted, and he made a speech in Hebrew, narrating his early history and
conversion; but when he came to his mission to the Gentiles, the uproar
was renewed, the people shouting, "Away with such a fellow from the
earth, for it is not fit that he should live!" And Paul would have been
bound and scourged, had he not proclaimed that he was a Roman citizen.
On the next day the Roman magistrate summoned the chief priests and the
Sanhedrim, to give Paul an opportunity to make his defence in the matter
of which he was accused. Ananias the high-priest presided, and the Roman
tribune was present at the proceedings, which were tumultuous and angry.
Paul seeing that the assembly was made up of Pharisees, Sadducees, and
hostile parties, made no elaborate defence, and the tribune dissolved
the assembly; but forty of the most hostile and fanatical formed a
conspiracy, and took a solemn oath not to eat or drink until they had
assassinated him. The plot reached the ears of a nephew of Paul, who
revealed it to the tribune. The officer listened attentively to all the
details, and at once took his resolution to send Paul to Caesarea, both
to get him out of the hands of the Jews, and to have him judged by the
procurator Felix. Accordingly, accompanied by an escort of two hundred
soldiers, seventy horsemen, and two hundred spearmen of the guard, Paul
was sent by night, secretly, to the Roman capital of the Province. He
entered the city in the course of the next day, and was at once led to
the presence of the governor.
Felix, as procurator, ruled over Judaea with the power of a king. He had
been a freedman of the Emperor Claudius, and was allied by marriage to
Claudius himself,--an ambitious, extortionate, and infamous governor.
Felix was obliged to give Paul a fair trial, and after five days the
indomitable missionary was confronted with accusers, among whom appeared
the high-priest Ananias. They associated with them a lawyer called
Tertullus, of oratorical gifts, who conducted the case. The principal
charges made against Paul were that he was a public pest and leader of
seditions; that he was a ringleader of the Nazarenes (the contemptuous
name which the Jews gave to the Christians); and that he had attempted
to profane the Temple, which was a capital offence according to the
Jewish law. Paul easily refuted these charges, and had Felix been an
upright judge he would have dismissed the case; but supposing the
apostle to be rich because of the handsome contributions he had brought
from Asia Minor for the poor converts at Jerusalem, Felix retained Paul
in the hope of a bribe. A few days after, Drusilla, a young woman of
great beauty and accomplishments, who had eloped from her husband to be
married to Felix, was desirous to hear so famous a man as Paul explain
his faith; and Felix, to gratify her curiosity, summoned his
distinguished prisoner to discourse before them. Paul eagerly embraced
the opportunity; but instead of explaining the Christian mysteries, he
reasoned about righteousness, self-control, and retribution,--moral
truths which even intelligent heathen accepted, and as to which the
consciences of both, his hearers must have tingled; indeed, he
discoursed with such matchless boldness and power that Felix trembled
with fear as he remembered the arts by which he had risen from the
condition of a slave, and the extortions and cruelties by which he had
become enriched, to say nothing of the lusts and abominations which had
disgraced his career. However, he did not set Paul free, but kept him a
prisoner for two years, in order to gain favor with the Jews, or to
receive a bribe.
Porcius Festus, the successor of Felix, was a just and inflexible man,
who arrived at Caesarea in the year 60 A.D., when Paul was fifty-eight
years of age. Immediately the enemies of Paul, especially the Sadducees,
renewed their demands to have him again tried; and Festus, wishing to be
just, ordered the second trial. Again Paul defended himself with
masterly ability, proving that he had done nothing against the Jewish
law or Temple, or against the Roman Emperor. Festus, probably not seeing
the aim of the conspirators, was disposed to send Paul back to Jerusalem
to be tried by a Jewish court. To prevent this, as at Jerusalem
condemnation and death would be certain, Paul, remembering that he was a
Roman citizen, fell back on his privilege, and at once appealed to
Caesar himself. The governor, at first surprised by such an unexpected
demand, consulted with his assistants for a moment, and then replied:
"Thou hast appealed unto Caesar, and unto Caesar shalt thou go." Thus
ended the trial of Paul; and thus providentially was the way open to
him, without expense to himself, to go to Rome, which of all cities he
wished to visit, and where he hoped to continue, even under bonds and
restrictions, his missionary labors.
In the meantime, before a ship could be got in readiness to transport
him and other prisoners to Rome, Herod Agrippa II., with his sister
Bernice, came to Caesarea to pay a visit to the new governor.
Conversation naturally turned upon the late extraordinary trial, and
Agrippa expressed a desire to hear the prisoner speak, for he had heard
much about him. Festus willingly acceded to this wish, and the next day
Paul was again summoned before the king and the procurator. Agrippa and
Bernice appeared in great pomp with their attendants; all the officers
of the army and the principal men of the city were also present. It was
the most splendid audience that Paul had ever addressed. He was equal to
the occasion, and delivered a discourse on his familiar topics,--his own
miraculous conversion and his mission to the Gentiles to preach the
crucified and risen Christ,--things new to Festus, who thought that Paul
was visionary, and had lost his balance from excess of learning.
Agrippa, however, familiar with Jewish law and the prophecies concerning
the Messiah, was much impressed with Paul's eloquence, and exclaimed:
"Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian!" When the assembly broke
up, Agrippa said, "This man might have been set at liberty, if he had
not appealed unto Caesar." Paul, however, did not wish to be set at
liberty among bitter and howling enemies; he preferred to go to Rome,
and would not withdraw his appeal. So in due time he embarked for Italy
under the charge of a centurion, accompanied with other prisoners and
his friends Timothy, Luke, and Aristarchus of Thessalonica.
The voyage from Caesarea to Italy was a long one, and in the autumn was
a dangerous one, as in Paul's case it unfortunately proved.
The following spring, however, after shipwreck and divers perils and
manifold fatigues, Paul arrived at Rome, in the year 61 A.D., in the
seventh year of the Emperor Nero. Here the centurion handed Paul over to
the prefect of the praetorian guards, by whom he was subjected to a
merely nominal custody, although, according to Roman custom, he was
chained to a soldier. But he was treated with great lenity, was allowed
to have lodgings, to receive his friends freely, and to hold Christian
meetings in his own house; and no one molested him. For two years Paul
remained at Rome, a fettered prisoner it is true, but cheered by
friendly visits, and attended by Luke, his "beloved physician" and
biographer, by Timothy and other devoted disciples. During this second
imprisonment Paul could see very little outside the praetorian barracks,
but his friends brought him the news, and he had ample time to write
letters. He had no intercourse with gifted and fortunate Romans; his
acquaintance was probably confined to the praetorian soldiers, and some
of the humbler classes who sought Christian instruction. But from this
period we date many of his epistles, on which his fame and influence
largely rest as a theologian and man of genius. Among those which he
wrote from Rome were the Epistles to the Colossians, the Ephesians, and
many pastoral letters like those written to Philemon, Titus, and
Timothy. We know but little of the life of Paul after his arrival at
Rome, for at this point Saint Luke closes his narrative, and all after
this is conjecture and tradition.[4] But the main part of Paul's work
was accomplished when he was first sent to Rome as a prisoner to be
tried in the imperial courts; and there is but little doubt that he
finally met the death he so heroically contemplated, at the hands of the
monster Nero, who martyred such a vast multitude of Paul's
fellow-Christians.
[Footnote 4: There has been much doubt as to whether Paul was martyred
during the three years of this imprisonment, or whether he was
acquitted, left Rome, visited his beloved churches in Macedonia and Asia
Minor, went to preach the gospel in Spain, and was again arrested, taken
to Rome, and there beheaded. The earliest authorities seem to have been
agreed upon the second hypothesis; and this is based chiefly upon a
statement made by Paul's disciple Clement to the effect that the apostle
had preached in "the extremity of the West" (an expression of Roman
writers to denote Spain), and also on the impossibility of placing
certain facts mentioned in the second letter to Timothy and the one to
Titus in the period of the first imprisonment. He was certainly tried,
defended himself, and he may have been at first acquitted.]
At Jerusalem and at Antioch he had vindicated the freedom of the Gentile
from the yoke of the Levitical Law; in his letters to the Romans and
Galatians he had proclaimed both to Jew and Gentile that they were not
under the law, but under grace. During the space of twenty years Paul
had preached the gospel of Jesus as the Christ in the chief cities of
the world, and had formulated the truths of Christianity. What
marvellous labors! But it does not appear that this apostle's
extraordinary work was fully appreciated in his day, certainly not by
the Jewish Christians at Jerusalem; nor does it appear even that his
pre-eminence among the apostles was conceded until the third and fourth
centuries. He himself was often sad and discouraged in not seeing a
larger success, yet recognized himself as a layer of foundations. Like
our modern missionaries, Paul simply sowed the seed; the fruit was not
to be gathered in until centuries after his death. Before he died, as is
seen in his second letter to Timothy, many of his friends and disciples
deserted him, and he was left almost alone. He had to defend himself
single-handed against the capricious tyrant who ruled the world, and who
wished to cast on the Christians the stain of his greatest crime, the
conflagration of his capital. As we have said, all details pertaining to
the life of Paul after his arrival at Rome are simply conjectural, and
although interesting, they cannot give us the satisfaction of certainty.
But in closing, after enumerating the labors and writings of this great
apostle, it is not inopportune to say a few words about his remarkable
character, although I have now and again alluded to his personal traits
in the course of this narrative.