The Christ of Paul; Or, The Enigmas of Christianity

by George Reber

Peter disappears at the end of the twelfth chapter; but enough has been done to make him chief among the Apostles, and claim for him a spiritual supremacy in all matters which relate to the church. John, afterwards the great light of Asia, only plays the part of an esquire to Peter, his lord and superior. They are often together, but John is not suffered to speak. It was designed that John, who was to take Asia in charge, should stand next to Peter; but the writer, by imposing silence on him on all occasions, took care that the supremacy of Peter was not put in jeopardy. The preaching of Philip in Samaria was a device to show that Peter and John were superior to the rest of the Apostles in their power to confer the Holy Ghost. Philip made many converts, both men and women, and he baptized them—but his baptism was not sufficient. "Now when the Apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John. They laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost."—Acts viii. 14, 17.

According to Paul, and this is made clear by the quarrels between him and Peter, as related in the epistles, the latter was tenacious to the last for the Jewish rite of circumcision, and we have no evidence, and no reason to believe, that he ever gave it up. A sectarian Jew would never answer to be the head and founder of a Catholic church. The sectarian character of Peter must be got rid of, and we see studied efforts in the Acts to do so. We have seen that Peter, in the first words he addressed to Cornelius, took the opportunity to declare that he believed in the doctrine that God was no respecter of persons. But this was not enough, in the opinion of the writer of the Acts, or at least the first half, and to make Peter's emancipation from his old Jewish opinions more conspicuous, and enable him to explain how it happened that the change was brought about, the vision of Peter on the house-top is produced. He went up upon the house-top to pray, about the sixth hour, and became very hungry; but while they were preparing something for him to eat, he had a trance, "And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter, kill and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven."

The command of the Lord to Peter to eat, was a command to give up his Jewish views and notions; for that all flesh was alike, and equally proper to be taken on an empty stomach. Peter was at a loss to understand the vision, and while he was revolving the subject in his mind, Cornelius and his party came to be instructed by him, in accordance with the directions of the Lord. When Cornelius, who was of the Gentiles, made at known the object of his visit, Peter at once understood the import of the vision, and exclaimed, "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons," and that the gospel of Christ is to supply the spiritual wants of all nations, as the beasts and fowls are to furnish food for the hungry.

The conversion of Peter receives further importance and prominence from the defence he is compelled to make before the brethren, for his disregard of the rite of circumcision in the baptism of Cornelius. Peter makes a speech, in which he declares that he was commanded by God, not less than three times, to give up his old Jewish notions; and no sooner was the command given than Cornelius, a Gentile, who was sent to him by God, made his appearance. The command from God to Peter, and the arrival of the centurion, who was instructed by the Lord to come to him, left him no choice in the matter, and that he baptized the Gentile, in obedience to the commands of the Lord. The reason was sufficient. "When they heard these things, they held their peace, and glorified God, saying, Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life." (Acts. xi. 18.) The wall between Jew and Gentile is now broken down, and Peter a fit subject for the head of a universal or catholic church.

It seems that the person who put the speech into the mouth of Peter, renouncing circumcision, was not satisfied with what he said at the time. Something had been omitted or overlooked. Peter had shed his Jewish skin, but the Lord had not given him a commission to preach the gospel to all nations, and this he must have to be the head of a universal church. At the council held at Jerusalem by the Apostles to settle the question of circumcision, Peter, according to the Acts, seizes the opportunity to supply the omission: "And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up and said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago, God made choice among us, that the Gentiles, by my mouth, should hear the word of the gospel, and believe." (Acts xv. 7.) Now there was no occasion for Peter to make this claim or assertion, for it had nothing to do with the subject before the council, and was not true. The account which Paul gives of what took place at the council is quite different, contradictory, and no doubt true. He says, when he stated before the council the trouble and vexations which were occasioned by this rite, and reasons why it should not be forced on the Gentiles, that Peter, James, and John agreed with him—gave him the right hand of fellowship, and then entered into a compact that he should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. (Gal. ii.)

This agreement was never departed from; but not so with regard to circumcision. That Peter, James, and all the disciples disregarded the order of the Council in regard to that subject, is rendered clear by their subsequent conduct. After that, as much as two years, for the Council was held in A.D. 49 or A.D. 50, and the epistle to the Galatians was written in A. D. 52, Peter went to Antioch, where he found Paul. He ate with the uncircumcised until some Jewish converts came from Jerusalem at the instance of James, who found fault with his course. Peter, it seems, then changed front and stood up for circumcision. "I withstood him to the face," says Paul, for he was wrong. A discussion springs up. Paul claimed that men were not to be saved through old rites and ceremonies, nor by-works, but by faith. At this time, neither James nor Peter had given up their contracted notions on the Jewish rite. Nor had Peter as late as A. D. 57, twenty-four years after the death of Christ. Of the four parties which disturbed the peace of the church at Corinth at the time of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, which was written in A. D. 57, the party of Cephas was one. Peter was at the head of a party which held out for circumcision, seven years after the council at Jerusalem; and if he had not given it up then, when he was fifty-seven years old, there is no reason to believe he did after that. Nothing gave the men in the second century who undertook to put Peter at the head of a universal church so much trouble as this thing of circumcision, which we can readily detect by the pains and labors they have taken to free him from it. But the stain will not wash out.

The story told in the Acts about the way in which Peter was disenthralled from his narrow Jewish notions, is wholly inconsistent with the subsequent history of the church at Jerusalem. After the Lord had taken so much pains to prove to the disciples that a new dispensation had commenced, and the wall between the Jews and Gentiles was broken down, there was no reason why they should not all dispense with the practice of circumcision. But they never did. The fifteen first Bishops of Jerusalem, commencing with James and including Judas, were all circumcised Jews. (Eus., Ex. 77., B., iv. ch. v. Sulpicius Severus, vol. 11-31.) With the twelve disciples, jealousy of Paul, who fought this Jewish practice to the last, seemed to be the most active feeling of their natures, and we seldom hear of them unless they were dogging his footsteps, and stirring up the Jews against him. It was through their intrigues that the doors of the synagogue were slammed in his face wherever he went.

The doctrine of ordination, through which that deposit of divine riches which Irenæus says Christ left with the Apostles is made to flow in an uninterrupted current through all time, is conspicuously presented in the Acts. When Paul and Barnabas were at Antioch, and about to start for the West, on a mission to preach to the Gentiles, the Lord said, "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away." (Acts xiii. 2, 3.) Nothing could impose so great a humiliation as this upon Paul. The Lord again interferes and assigns him to a special duty, and to make this humiliation complete, he is ordered to receive his commission at the hands of the Apostles. Who laid their hands on Barnabas and Paul, is not stated, nor is it of any importance, as the object of the statement is to make it apparent that the latter, the great light of the Gentiles, submitted to the rite of ordination by the imposition of hands, administered by some one of the Apostles. Will any one believe this story to be true? If he does, he does not understand the character of Paul. There is nothing he would resent with so much feeling, as he would such an admission on his part that he was less than an Apostle. When it was claimed he was not, his soul took fire, and in his address to the Galatians, in the first chapter, he delivers himself in this defiant strain: "Paul, an Apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.) But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me." (Gal. i. I, 15, 16, 17.) Is this the Paul who patiently submits to receive his commission from an Apostle to preach the doctrines of Christ to the nations of the earth at Antioch, when he is about to commence his labors?

It is not enough that Paul should submit to receive the Holy Ghost at the hands of the Apostle, and in this way be authorized to preach the gospel; but he gives the ordinance his full sanction by conferring ordination on others. "And it came to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having passed through the upper coasts, came to Ephesus; and finding certain disciples, he said unto them, Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed? And they said unto him, We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Ghost came on them; and they spake with tongues, and prophesied." (Acts xix. 1, 2, 6.) No stronger proof could be given that the followers of Paul were opposed to the Episcopacy and the doctrine of succession and ordination, and contended against a government by Bishops with zeal to the last, than the labored and frequent efforts that are made to show that he himself gave his sanction to the order.

For Paul's persistence in claiming a human origin for Christ, there was a studied effort in the second century to destroy his claims as an Apostle; but after his epistles had undergone alterations so as to make Christ the Son of God in the sense of the Catholics of the second century, he was restored to favor, and his powers wonderfully magnified. He is now able to work miracles, and his power to heal diseases is such, that whatever comes in contact with his person, is so filled or imbued with holy energy, that its curative properties are sufficient to put death at defiance.