The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles Volume Ii Part 12

[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 Archaeological 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 amba.s.sador 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 G.o.d 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 wors.h.i.+p was thoroughly Pantheistic. Every desire, pa.s.sion, 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 punis.h.i.+ng 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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 bra.s.s statue of the high priest Hyrca.n.u.s, 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 t.i.tulis Atticae 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 Pcile, 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 cla.s.ses 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 superst.i.tious,"

would not have been the most conciliatory form of address to a keen-witted a.s.sembly 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 wors.h.i.+p of the deity than other men. For as I pa.s.sed along and observed the objects of your wors.h.i.+p, I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown G.o.d." 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 n.o.bler purpose. The circ.u.mstance upon which St. Paul seized, the existence of an altar dedicated to the unknown G.o.d, is amply confirmed by historic evidence. St. Paul may have noticed such altars as he pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ds who sent a plague upon Athens.[170] St. Paul's argument then was this. The Athenians were already wors.h.i.+ppers of the Unknown G.o.d. This was the very deity he came proclaiming, and therefore he could not be a setter forth of strange G.o.ds nor liable to punishment in consequence. He then proceeds to declare more fully the nature of the Deity hitherto unknown. He was the G.o.d 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 G.o.ds of the Epicureans who sat far aloof from all care and thought about this lower world. St. Paul taught G.o.d's personal existence as against the Stoics, and G.o.d'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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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. G.o.d 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 const.i.tution 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 cla.s.sical 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 G.o.ds in ancient Greek writers: as in Pausanias, _Description of Greece_, vol. i., p. 2 (s.h.i.+lleto'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 G.o.d to man, "In Him we live and move and have our being,"

and the Divine desire that man should seek after and know G.o.d, he quoted a pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d. How is it then that men can conceive the G.o.dhead, that which is Divine, to be like unto those gold and silver, bra.s.s or marble statues, even though wrought with the greatest possible skill. The philosophers indeed pretended to distinguish between the Eternal G.o.dhead 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 G.o.d.[173]

[172] These words are directly and literally taken out of the _Phaenomena_ 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 a.s.sos, a town of aeolis in Greece. See for more about Cleanthes and Aratus, Fabricius, _Bibliotheca Graeca_, or Smith's _Dict. Greek and Rom. Biog._

[173] As it was with the ancient image wors.h.i.+ppers, 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 wors.h.i.+ppers 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 G.o.d had postponed to that late date this novel teaching: "The times of ignorance G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed. When the Apostle got thus far the a.s.sembly 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 pa.s.sed 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, n.o.bler 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 circ.u.mcised 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d, but in the methods of their service, their service is to angels and not to G.o.d, in that they observe Sabbaths and new moons, and the pa.s.sover, and the great fast, and the fast and circ.u.mcision, 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 G.o.d, or rather to be known of G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sage 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 quant.i.ty of s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sumption 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 G.o.d 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 Durr, 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 t.i.tle of his book, to which I have already referred, is _De t.i.tulis Atticae 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 Beran 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 s.p.a.ce 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 archaeological 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+on in the Jewish synagogues; and upon ordinary days improving the hours during which his hands laboured upon the coa.r.s.e 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d's presence and of your own communion with Him, which will turn life and its busiest work into a season of refres.h.i.+ng prayer and untiring intercession.

[178] This expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Claudius, which in the providence of G.o.d 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 Beran 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 Bera. Paul preached that Jesus was the Christ. The Jews blasphemed Him, and called Him accursed. Their att.i.tude 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. G.o.d too directly encouraged him. The very proximity of the Christian Church to the Jewish Synagogue const.i.tuted 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 G.o.d's strength and grace were perfected, and a.s.surance 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 G.o.d'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 circ.u.mstances lent their a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sistants, 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage.

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 circ.u.mstances. The Corinthians were breaking up into sects, calling themselves by the names of various Christian leaders. St. Paul thanks G.o.d 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 G.o.d's providence, had been a.s.signed 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 Annaeus 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 statesmans.h.i.+p. 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 mult.i.tude; so it was with Festus, who left an innocent man in bonds at Caesarea 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 wors.h.i.+p G.o.d 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 n.o.bler. 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sing 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.

CHAPTER XIV.

_THE EPHESIAN CHURCH AND ITS FOUNDATION._

"Paul, and with him Priscilla and Aquila, came to Ephesus, and he left them here: but he himself entered into the synagogue, and reasoned with the Jews. And when they asked him to abide a longer time, he consented not; but taking his leave of them, and saying, I will return again unto you, if G.o.d will, he set sail from Ephesus.... Now a certain man named Apollos, an Alexandrian by race, a learned man, came to Ephesus; and he was mighty in the Scriptures. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spake and taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John: and he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of G.o.d more carefully."--ACTS xviii. 19-21, 24-26.

"And it came to pa.s.s, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having pa.s.sed through the upper country, came to Ephesus."--ACTS xix. 1.

Ephesus has been from very ancient times a distinguished city. It was famous in the religious history of Asia Minor in times long prior to the Christian Era. It was celebrated at the time of the Roman Empire as the chief seat of the wors.h.i.+p of Diana and of the magical practices a.s.sociated with that wors.h.i.+p; and Ephesus became more celebrated still in Christian times as the city where one of the great c.u.menical Councils was held which served to determine the expression of the Church's faith in her Divine Lord and Master. It must then be of great interest to the Christian student to note the first beginnings of such a vast transformation as that whereby a chief seat of pagan idolatry was turned into a special stronghold of Christian orthodoxy.

Let us then devote this chapter to tracing the upgrowth of the Ephesian Church, and to noting the lessons the modern Church may derive therefrom.

St. Paul terminated his work in Corinth some time about the middle or towards the close of the year 53 A.D. In the early summer of that year Gallio came as proconsul to Achaia, and the Jewish riot was raised.

After a due interval, to show that he was not driven out by Jewish machinations, St. Paul determined to return once more to Jerusalem and Antioch, which he had left some four years at least before. He went down therefore to Cenchreae, the port of departure for pa.s.sengers going from Corinth to Ephesus, Asia Minor, and Syria. A Christian Church had been established there by the exertions of St. Paul or some of his Corinthian disciples. As soon as an early Christian was turned from sin to righteousness, from the adoration of idols to the wors.h.i.+p of the true G.o.d, he began to try and do something for Him whose love and grace he had experienced. It was no wonder that the Church then spread rapidly when all its individual members were instinct with life, and every one considered himself personally responsible to labour diligently for G.o.d. The Church of Cenchreae was elaborately organised.

It had not only its deacons, it had also its deaconesses, one of whom, Phbe, was specially kind and useful to St. Paul upon his visits to that busy seaport, and is by him commended to the help and care of the Roman Church (Rom. xvi. 1, 2).

From Cenchreae St. Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla sailed for Ephesus, where, as we have already hinted, it is most likely the latter pair had some special business avocations which led them to stay at that city. They may have been large manufacturers of tents, and have had a branch establishment at Ephesus, which was then a great mercantile emporium for that part of Asia Minor.

An incidental remark of the sacred writer "having shorn his head in Cenchreae, for he had a vow," has raised a controverted question. Some refer this expression to Aquila, and I think with much the greater probability. It was customary with the Jews at that time when in any special danger to take a temporary Nazarite vow, binding themselves to abstain from wine and from cutting their hair till a certain definite period had elapsed. Then when the fixed date had arrived, the hair was cut off and preserved till it could be burned in the fire of a sacrifice offered up at Jerusalem upon the individual's next visit to the Holy City. The grammatical order of the words naturally refer to Aquila as the maker of this vow; but I cannot agree in one reason urged for this latter theory. Some have argued that it was impossible for Paul to have made this vow; that it would, in fact, have been a return to the bondage of Judaism, which would have been utterly inconsistent on his part. People who argue thus do not understand St.

Paul's position with respect to Jewish rites as being things utterly unimportant, and, as such, things which a wise born Jew would do well to observe in order to please his countrymen. If St. Paul made a vow at Corinth it would have been simply an ill.u.s.tration of his own principle, "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order that I might gain the Jews." But further, I must say that the taking of a vow, though derived from Judaism, need not have necessarily appeared to St. Paul and the men of his time a purely Jewish ceremony. Vows, in fact, naturally pa.s.sed over from Judaism to Christianity.[182] Vows, indeed, of this peculiar character, and with this peculiar external sign of long hair, are no longer customary amongst Christians; but surely special vows cannot be said to have gone out of fas.h.i.+on, when we consider the wide spread of the teetotal movement, with its vows identical in one important element with that of the Nazarites! But viewing the matter from a still wider standpoint, people, when contending thus, forget what a large part the tradition of ancient customs must have played in the life, manners, and customs of St.

Paul. All his early life he was a strict Pharisaic Jew, and down to the end of life his early training must have largely modified his habits. To take but one instance, pork was the common and favourite food of the Romans at this period. Now I am sure that St. Paul would have vigorously resisted all attempts to prevent the Gentile Christians eating bacon or ham; but I should not be in the least surprised if St. Paul, trained in Pharisaic habits, never once touched a food he had been taught to abhor from his earliest youth. Life is a continuous thing, and the memories of the past are very powerful. We can to this day trace among ourselves many customs and traditions dating back to the times antecedent to the Reformation, and much farther. The fires still lighted on St. John's Eve throughout Ireland, and once customary in Scotland, are survivals of the times of Druidical paganism in these islands. The ceremonies and social customs of Shrove Tuesday and Hallow E'en are survivals of the rude mirth of our pre-Reformation forefathers, on the nights before a celebrated fast, Ash Wednesday, in one case, before a celebrated feast, All Saints' Day, in the other. Or perhaps I may take another instance more closely a.n.a.logous still which every reader can verify for himself. The use of the Church of England has to this day a curious instance of the power of tradition as opposed to written law. There is a general rubric placed in the Book of Common Prayer before the first Lord's Prayer. It runs as follows: "Then the minister shall kneel and say the Lord's Prayer with an audible voice; the people also kneeling and repeating it with him, both here, and wheresoever else it is used in Divine Service." This rubric plainly prescribes that clergy and people shall always say the Lord's Prayer conjointly. And yet, let my readers go into any church of the Anglican Communion on Sunday next, I care not what the tone of its theological thought, and observe the first Lord's Prayer used at the beginning of the Communion Service. They will find that this general rubric is universally neglected, and the celebrating priest says the opening Lord's Prayer by himself with no voice of the people raised to accompany him. Now whence comes this universal fact? It is simply an ill.u.s.tration of the strength of tradition. It is a survival of the practice before the Reformation handed down by tradition to the present time, and over-riding a positive and written law. In the days before the Reformation, as in the Roman Catholic Church of the present day, the opening Dominical or Lord's Prayer in the Ma.s.s was said by the priest alone. When the service was translated into English the old custom still prevailed, and has lasted to the present day.[183] This was only human nature, which abhors unnecessary changes, and is intensely conservative of every practice which is linked with the fond memories of the past.

This human nature was found strong in St. Paul, as in other men, and it would have argued no moral or spiritual weakness, no desire to play fast and loose with gospel liberties, had he, instead of Aquila, resorted to the old Jewish practice and bound himself by a vow in connexion with some special blessing which he had received, or some special danger he had incurred. When we are studying the Acts we must never forget that Judaism gave the tone and form, the whole outer framework to Christianity, even as England gave the outward shape and form to the const.i.tutions of the United States and her own numberless colonies throughout the world. St. Paul did not invent a brand new religion, as some people think; he changed as little as possible, so that his own practice and wors.h.i.+p must have been to mere pagan eyes exactly the same as that of the Jews, as indeed we might conclude beforehand from the fact that the Roman authorities seem to have viewed the Christians as a mere Jewish sect down to the close of the second century.[184]

[182] Jeremy Taylor, in his _Holy Living_, in his chapter on Prayer, has some wise remarks on vows. He includes them under the head of Prayer: "A vow to G.o.d is an act of prayer and a great degree and instance of opportunity, and an increase of duty by some new uncommanded instance, or some more eminent degree of duty or frequency of action, or earnestness of spirit in the same. And because it hath pleased G.o.d in all ages of the world to admit of intercourse with His servants in the matter of vows, it is not ill advice that we make vows to G.o.d in those cases in which we have great need or great danger." He then proceeds to lay down rules and cautions for making vows.