It seemed to me now only right and natural that I should tell Clemens of Scaurus’s illness and of my intention to leave Nicopolis on the morrow. He took my departure as a matter of course. Could he be of service, he asked, in making arrangements for my sailing? I assured him that everything had been done that was needful for that day. Then I told him how Scaurus had urged me to join Epictetus’s classes, and that he wished me afterwards to join the army. Finding him interested and sympathetic, I gave him an account of my old friend’s life, his affection for me, his love of research, his literary pursuits, and his study of Jewish as well as Greek literature, not omitting his early reading of the gospels, nor forgetting to tell him about old Hermas the Christian, his librarian. He listened with more and more attention. “I am not surprised,” he said, “that you love so good a friend and so honest a man.”
Presently I said, “I wonder whether it would be still possible and right for me to join the army, if⸺” and there I stopped. “Dear friend,” said he, “if that unmentioned thing were to come to pass, trust me that nothing would be possible or right for you against which your conscience cried out, and nothing wrong that your conscience permitted. Some might condemn your decision—whether to join the army or not to join. But you would not be bound by their condemnation. Your conscience would receive guidance. Those who follow on that unmentioned path do not follow with an ‘if.’ Should that path be taken, it would be, not on conditions, but because of a friendly constraint. Let us not speak of that now. Tell me more about your friend.” “I have his letter here,” said I, “and would read it if you cared to hear it. But it deals freely, very freely, with the gospels. Once, at least, I think my old friend is unfair to them. It would perhaps pain you.” “It would not pain but please me,” said he. “I always like to hear honest, able, and educated men speak their minds freely about our Christian writings. The pity of it is, that we have hitherto had few such critics. If we had had them when the gospels were first written, perhaps they would have contained fewer things that may in after times cause some of the faithful to stumble.”
So I began to read Scaurus’s letter to him. At first I omitted portions here and there, either because they were personal, or because they might hurt the feelings of a Christian. Presently, halting in the middle of a bitter saying, I finished the sentence in my own way—somewhat awkwardly. Clemens smiled. “Pardon me,” said he, “for interrupting you. I am not a master of styles. Yet, if I mistake not, those last words did not come from Æmilius Scaurus. If I am wrong, forgive me. But if I am right in thinking that you altered something to spare my feelings, then let me assure you again that it would trouble me that you should do this, even though the criticism came from the bitterest enemy of the Christians. As it is, I have learned already to esteem your friend as a genuine lover of truth, and one from whom I have even now learned some things and hope to learn more. The more you will allow me to learn (without giving pain to yourself) the better shall I be pleased.” “Well then,” said I, “we will talk about the letter afterwards. For the present, I will read on steadily without omitting a single word, unless you stop me.” And so I did. Clemens listened intently, without stopping me, only he now and then, especially towards the end, expressed assent or interest, or sympathy, by a slight movement or inarticulate murmur; till we came to the last words, the uncompleted sentence, suggesting what might have happened on one memorable afternoon, if he had not dismissed a “disciple whom Jesus loved.” This I did not read, but I placed the letter before him. “These,” said I, “were his last words, the very last.”
He read them, and turned away his face. I thought, and rightly, that he was feeling with me. But I am sure now that he was also praying for me, and for Scaurus too. For a time we sat in silence. I was the first to break it, expressing my sorrow that the story of the Syrophœnician woman should have led Scaurus to form what seemed to me a wrong conception of Christ. “But you see,” replied Clemens, “he revolted from that wrong conception, or was ready to revolt from it, at the last moment of all. And I agree with you that, if he had approached that story with the preparation that Paul gave you, he would have regarded it as you did. I am sure Christ was never cruel to anyone. If He really uttered those seemingly cruel words to that sorrowful woman, He was cruel in word, only that He might be the more kind and the more helpful in deed. He intended this gospel to be preached to all the world, though He waited for the Father to teach Him the time and the manner of the preaching to the Gentiles.”
“Is there anything in John’s gospel,” said I, “that resembles this story?” “There is a dialogue,” he replied, “between Christ and a Samaritan woman, who is described as living in sin, just as you have suggested concerning the Syrophœnician. And Christ chides her, but with great gentleness, and finally reveals Himself to her as Messiah. It has occurred to me that this is one of the many instances where John steps in to remove a misunderstanding liable to be caused by some passage in Mark, which Luke omits.”
Then he added, “I will talk with you, if you please, about the letter or the gospel or anything else, if you really desire it. But if you would wish to be alone with your own thoughts (as you well might wish), do not, I beseech you, stay longer. You have laid me under a debt by introducing me to a genuine lover of truth on whom the Light of the World has dawned, even though it may not be given to him to see the full day. May he find peace!”
I was quite willing to stay now. “Do you agree with Scaurus,” said I, “that John alludes in parts of his gospel to the teaching of Epictetus?” “I feel sure,” replied Clemens, “that John alludes to the doctrine of the Stoics and Cynics. Now Epictetus has been, for some years past, most widely known among all classes, rich, poor—yes, and slaves, too—as the representative of the Cynic doctrine. So that your friend seems to me likely to be right.” “Scaurus,” said I, “mentions self-knowledge and God-knowledge as if the former were inculcated by Epictetus, the latter by John, in opposition. Is that so, in your opinion?” “Not quite,” said he, “but nearly so. All the Stoics lay stress, as you know, on self-knowledge. Epictetus, perhaps more than most, teaches men to look for God within themselves. Luke also—alone of the evangelists—has one tradition of this kind, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ John, feeling that many were prevented thereby from looking for God out of themselves, laid stress on the latter. That is to say, John paraphrased Christ’s teaching about ‘the Father in heaven’ in such a form that it should be more familiar to the Greeks, urging them to ‘know God.’ So Paul is said by Luke to have taken as his text on the Areopagus an inscription TO THE UNKNOWN GOD; and he tried to teach the philosophers that God could be ‘known.’ But neither Paul nor John would deny that self-knowledge, and the consciousness of our own sins, and the sense of our own burdens, are necessary if we are to have our burdens lightened, our sins forgiven, and our souls brought into the light of the glory of the knowledge of God.”
“And as to the ‘troubling’ of Christ,” said I, “mentioned thrice in the fourth gospel, do you agree with Scaurus that there, too, the author is alluding to Epictetus?” “I do indeed,” said he. “I did so from the first moment when I read the new gospel. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. We are born to be lifted up to heaven by troubles. But trouble of soul does not mean confusion or turbidness of soul. Trouble is on the surface, peace is beneath, peace that is deeper than the deepest of depths. In the world, says the Saviour, we shall have tribulation, and tribulation brings trouble with it. But He bids us be of good cheer amidst and beneath all our trouble, because He has overcome the world. Perhaps, however, John emphasizes this doctrine of ‘trouble,’ not out of hostility to the Cynic philosophy, but rather out of a friendly feeling to it, as much as to say, ‘This notion of yours, that you must avoid “trouble,” is the weak point in your teaching. It tends to lower you to the level of the Epicureans. And it gives you a false and unworthy notion of God, who is our Father, and who bears the troubles of His children’.”
From that we passed to other matters, most of which I shall omit—details about the fourth gospel, about its authorship and about Scaurus’s view, that it blended history with allegory. On some of these he thought that Scaurus might be correct. But he was doubtful as to the possibility of explaining, as Scaurus had suggested, the different order in which the evangelists place the purification of the Temple. “For,” said he, “it seems to me scarcely possible that, within the time from Tiberius to Trajan, an evangelist should be led to change the order of such an event simply because of its order in some one book—because it was placed at what Gentiles might take to be the beginning (being really the end) of a Hebrew gospel.” At the same time Clemens admitted that there was an astonishing difference of opinion among Christians as to the period of Christ’s preaching, “and,” said he, “instead of quoting statements or referring to historical facts, they often quote prophecies, or argue from the fitness of things. It is all very unsatisfactory.”
Of this I afterwards had experience. For, after I had become a Christian, I found that some, even though they received the gospel of John, argued that Christ could only have preached for one year—because Isaiah contains the words, “to preach the acceptable year of the Lord”! On the other hand, the young Irenæus, bitterly attacking this view, maintained that Christ must have preached till His fortieth or fiftieth year! As I have said above, I have actually heard him supporting this extraordinary supposition by appealing to the authority of the elders that had seen John!