“Thirdly, James, Peter, and John, being all the apostles now present at the council, the mention of their consent to his doctrine and practice was all that was necessary to his purpose to be mentioned concerning that council, It is no objection to this opinion, that we find no mention, in Acts xv. of Titus’s being with him; for he is not mentioned in the whole of the Acts, during which interval the journey must have happened.” (Whitby.)
“The Council of Jerusalem was assembled in the fourteenth year after St. Paul’s conversion. For the apostle adverts to this same journey, and determinately specifies the time in Galatians ii. 1, 2. Grotius is of opinion that four years should be here written instead of fourteen; who, nevertheless, allows, that the one mentioned in Galatians, is this journey to the Council. But the reason is evident why the apostle should date these years from the epoch of his conversion, from the scope of the first and second chapters. He styles himself an apostle, not of men, neither by man, chap. i. 1: he declared that his gospel was not according to men, and that he neither received nor learned it from men, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ, verses 11, 12. And this he proves to the Galatians by his conversion, which was not unknown to them. He begins with his strict profession of the Jewish religion, according to the tenets of the Pharisees, which ended in a most violent persecution of the Christians. Then he goes on to show how God revealed his Son to him, and that immediately he conferred not with flesh and blood, he neither held communion with any man, neither did he go up to Jerusalem to them that were apostles before him, by whom he could have been taught more fully the mind of God, ‘but went into Arabia,’ where he received the gospel by revelation; and he returned to Damascus, and preached the word of God to the confounding of the Jews: ‘Then after three years he went up to Jerusalem to see Peter.’ From all this it appears evident, that the epoch of these three years should commence at the time of his conversion. The same is to be said of the other epoch of the fourteen years. ‘Then, after fourteen years, I went up again to Jerusalem,’ chap. ii. 1, because the scope of both is the same,——and they both date from the same period of time. The word επειτα does not connect this sentence with that of the three years, as if the beginning of these should be dated from the close of those, because there is another επειτα which comes between these two texts, viz. in verse 21, of chap. i. where he begins to relate his travels in Syria and Cilicia, but does not specify the period of time he remained in those regions; therefore no chronological connexion can have been intended by him. The apostle still following up his design, says επειτα and παλιν, but neither does επειτα refer to his stay in Syria and Cilicia,——nor παλιν to his second coming to Jerusalem: for he had been with a second collection to Jerusalem, then suffering from famine, accompanied by Barnabas, but not by Titus; and because he then saw none of the apostles, he omitted mentioning that journey, considering it quite foreign to his present purpose.” (Pearson, Annales, 49.)
PAUL’S QUARREL WITH PETER.
The whole company of envoys, both Barnabas and Paul, the original messengers of the Syrian church, and Jude and Silas, the deputies of the apostolic college, presented the complete results of the Jerusalem consultation before a fall meeting of the whole congregation of believers at Antioch, and read the epistle of the council to them. The sage and happy exhortations which it contained were not only respectfully but joyfully received; and in addition to the comfort of these, the first written words of Christian inspiration, the two envoys, Jude and Silas, also discoursed to the church, commenting at more length on the apostolic message of which they were the bearers, and confirmed their hearers in the faith. After remaining there for some time, Jude bade them farewell, and returned to his apostolic associates; but Silas was so much pleased with the opportunities thus afforded him of doing good among the Gentiles, of whom he himself also was one, as his name shows,——that he stayed in Antioch after the departure of Jude, and labored along with Paul and Barnabas, teaching and preaching the word of the Lord, with many others also. This is commonly understood to be the time of Paul’s dissension with Peter, as mentioned in the epistle to the Galatians. The circumstances of this disagreeable occurrence have already been narrated and commented on, in the Life of Peter,——nor need anything additional be presented here in relation to Paul, except the observation, that his dispute with the chief apostle, and his harsh censure of his conduct, are very much in accordance with the impressions of his character, given in other passages of his life. He was evidently a man of violent and hasty passions; and is uniformly represented, both by his historian and by himself, as exceedingly bitter and harsh in his denunciations of all who differed from him on practical or speculative points, both before and after his calling to the apostleship; and this trait is manifested on such a variety of occasions, as to be very justly considered an inseparable peculiarity of his natural disposition and temperament. Doubtless there are many to whom it seems very strange, that the Apostle Paul should ever be spoken of as having been actually and truly angry, or ever having made an error in his conduct after his conversion; but there are instances enough to show that it was not a mere modest injustice to himself for him to tell the Lystran idolaters that he was a man of like passions with them,——but a plain matter of fact, made evident not only by his own noble and frank confession, but by many unfortunate instances throughout his recorded life. Yet there are a great many Protestants, who have been in the habit of making such a kind of idol or demi-god out of Paul, that they are as little prepared as the Lystrans to appreciate the human imperfections of his character; and if Paul himself could at this moment be made fully sensible of the dumb idolatrous reverence with which many of his modern and enlightened adorers regard him, he would be very apt to burst out in the same earnest and grieved tone, in which he checked the similar folly of the Lystrans,——“Sirs! why do ye these things? I also am a man of like passions with yourselves.”——“The spirit of divine truth which actuated me, and guided me in the way of light, by which I led others to life eternal, still did not make me anything more than a man,——a man in moral as in bodily weakness, nor exempt from liabilities to the accidents of passion, any more than to the pains of mortal disease. The Spirit that guided my pen in the record of eternal truth, and my tongue in the preaching of the word of salvation, did not exalt me above the errors, the failings and distresses of mortality; and I was still all my lifetime subject to the bondage of sin, groaning under that body of death, and longing for the day when I should pass away from the frailties and distresses of earth, to that state of being which alone is wholly sinless and pure.”
“From the opposition to St. Peter, which they suppose to be before the Council at Jerusalem, some would have it, that this Epistle to the Galatians was written before that Council; as if what was done before the Council could not be mentioned in a letter written after the Council. They also contend, that this journey, mentioned here by St. Paul, was not that wherein he and Barnabas went up to that Council to Jerusalem, but that mentioned Acts xi. 30; but this with as little ground as the former. The strongest reason they bring, is, that if this journey had been to the Council, and this letter after that Council, St. Paul would not certainly have omitted to have mentioned to the Galatians that decree. To which it is answered, 1. The mention of it was superfluous; for they had it already, see Acts xvi. 4. 2. The mention of it was impertinent to the design of St. Paul’s narrative here. For it is plain, that his aim, in what he relates here of himself, and his past actions, is to shew, that having received the gospel from Christ by immediate revelation, he had all along preached that, and nothing but that, everywhere; so that he could not be supposed to have preached circumcision, or by his carriage, to have shewn any subjection to the law; all the whole narrative following being to make good what he says, [♦]chap. i. 11, ‘that the gospel which he preached was not accommodated to the humoring of men; nor did he seek to please the Jews (who were the men here meant) in what he taught.’ Taking this to be his aim, we shall find the whole account he gives of himself, from that verse 11 of chap. i., to the end of the second chapter, to be very [♠]clear and easy, and very proper to invalidate the report of his preaching circumcision.” (Locke’s Paraphrase.)
[♦] “ehap.” replaced with “chap.”
[♠] “ctear” replaced with “clear”
“I conceive that this happened at the time here stated, because Paul intimates in Galatians ii. 11, that he was in Antioch when Peter came there; and Peter had never been to Antioch before Paul was in that city after the Council of Jerusalem; and besides the dissension between Paul and Barnabas, who was the intimate friend of Peter, appears to have originated here.” Pearson’s Annales Paul. (A. D. 50.)
A fine exhibition of a quibbling, wire-drawn argument, may be found in Baronius, (Annales, 51,) who is here put to his wits’ end to reconcile the blunt, “round, unvarnished tale,” in Paul’s own account, (in Galatians ii. 11–14,) with the papistical absurdity of the moral infallibility of the apostles. He lays out an argument of five heavy folio pages to prove that, though Paul quarreled thus with Peter, yet neither of them was in the slightest degree to blame, &c. But the folly of explaining away the Scriptures in this manner, is not confined wholly to the bigoted, hireling historian of papal Rome; some of the boldest of protestants have, in the same manner, attempted to reconcile the statement of Paul with the vulgar notions of apostolic infallibility. Witsius (Vita Pauli, iv. 12,) expends a paragraph to show that neither of them was to blame; but following the usual course of anti-papist writers, he represents the great protestant idol, Paul, in altogether the most advantageous light, according to the perfectly proverbial peculiarity of the opponents of the church of Rome, who, in their apostolic distinctions, uniformly “rob Peter to pay Paul.”
PAUL’S QUARREL WITH BARNABAS.