She read to him the opening salutation, and on his expressing astonishment that he could join ‘much affliction’ with ‘joy,’ she explained to him that this was the divine paradox of all Christianity, in which sorrow never destroyed joy, but sometimes brought out a deeper joy, even as there are flowers which pour forth their sweetest perfumes in the midnight.
Then she read him the exhortations to purity and holiness,[22] and asked him ‘whether that sounded like the teaching of men who practised the evil deeds of which the Christians were accused by the popular voice.’
He sat silent, and she read him the passage about the coming day of the Lord, and the sons of light, and the armour of righteousness.[23] Lastly, she read him the concluding part of the Second Letter, with its exhortations to diligence and order.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that in one passage Paulus may perhaps refer in a mysterious way to your father, the late Emperor. He is speaking of the coming of some lawless tyrant and enemy of God before the day of the Lord; and he adds, “only he who letteth will let, until he be taken away.”’
‘The Greek words ὁ κατέχων,’ she said, ‘might be rendered in Latin qui claudit. The Christians are so surrounded by enemies that they are sometimes obliged to express themselves in cryptograms, and Linus tells me that some Christians see in the words qui claudit an allusion to your father, Claudius. If so, Paulus seems to think that the day of the Lord’s return is very near.’
The young prince, though he had but a dim sense of what some of the phrases meant, was struck with what he had heard. There was something in the morality more vivid and more searching than anything which Epictetus had reported, or than Sosibius had read to him out of Zeno and Chrysippus. And besides the high morality there were tones which caused a more thrilling chord to vibrate within him than anything of which he had yet dreamed. The morality seemed to be elevated to a purer region of life and hope, and, in spite of the strange style, to be transfused through and through with a divine emotion.
‘And these,’ he said, ‘are the men whom they charge with every kind of atrocity! Surely, Pomponia, the world is rife with lies! Would it be too dangerous for you to let me see and speak to some of the Christian teachers? You might disguise me; it is quite easy. Even Pudens need not know; he never feels dull,’ he added with a smile, ‘if he may talk to Claudia, who is staying with you now.’
‘There was an excellent Jewish workman here named Aquila of Pontus,’ she said. ‘You might have talked to him, but he left Rome when the Jews were banished in your father’s days.He used to mend the awning over the viridarium, and those which kept the sun from blazing too hotly into our Cyzicene room.[24] He sometimes brought with him his still more excellent wife, Prisca. They knew Paulus, and said that he had promised some day to come to Rome. I am obliged to be very careful; but perhaps you can speak to Linus, who is the Elder of the Christians in Rome.’
‘But, Pomponia, the Christians believe, you tell me, in a leader named Jesus; is he the same as Christus or Chrestos?’