Now first he must not forget the pious woman who is—so we surely may assume—to take charge of this inestimable packet, and to deliver it at Rome. We know nothing of Phœbe but from this brief mention. We cannot perhaps be formally certain that she is here described as a female Church-official, a "deaconess" in a sense of that word familiar in later developments of Church-order—a woman set apart by the laying-on of hands, appointed to enquire into and relieve temporal distress, and to be the teacher of female enquirers in the mission. But there is at least a great likelihood that something like this was her position; for she was not merely an active Christian, she was "a ministrant of the Church." And she was certainly, as a person, worthy of reliance and of loving commendatory praise, now that some cause—absolutely unknown to us; perhaps nothing more unusual than a change of residence, obliged by private circumstances—took her from Achaia to Italy. She had been a devoted and it would seem particularly a brave[259] friend of converts in trouble, and of St Paul himself. Perhaps in the course of her visits to the desolate she had fought difficult battles of protest, where she found harshness and oppression. Perhaps she had pleaded the forgotten cause of the poor, with a woman's courage, before some neglectful richer "brother."
Then Rome itself, as he sees Phœbe reaching it, rises—as yet only in fancy; it was still unknown to him—upon his mind. And there, moving up and down in that strange and almost awful world, he sees one by one the members of a large group of his personal Christian friends, and his beloved Aquila and Prisca are most visible of all. These must be individually saluted.
What the nature of these friendships was we know in some instances, for we are told here. But why the persons were at Rome, in the place which Paul himself had never reached, we do not know, nor ever shall. Many students of the Epistle, it is well known, find a serious difficulty in this list of friends so placed—the persons so familiar, the place so strange; and they would have us look on this sixteenth chapter as a fragment from some other Letter, pieced in here by mistake; or what not. But no ancient copy of the Epistle gives us, by its condition, any real ground for such conjectures. And all that we have to do to realize possibilities in the actual features of the case, is to assume that many at least of this large Roman group, as surely Aquila and Prisca,[260] had recently migrated from the Levant to Rome; a migration as common and almost as easy then as is the modern influx of foreign denizens to London.
Bishop Lightfoot, in an Excursus in his edition of the Philippian Epistle,[261] has given us reason to think that not a few of the "Romans" named here by St Paul were members of that "Household of Cæsar" of which in later days he speaks to the Philippians (iv. 22) as containing its "saints," saints who send special greetings to the Macedonian brethren. The Domus Cæsaris included "the whole of the Imperial household, the meanest slaves, as well as the most powerful courtiers"; "all persons in the Emperor's service, whether slaves or freemen, in Italy and even in the provinces." The literature of sepulchral inscriptions at Rome is peculiarly rich in allusions to members of "the Household." And it is from this quarter, particularly from discoveries in it made early in the last century, that Lightfoot gets good reasons for thinking that in Phil. iv. 22 we may, quite possibly, be reading a greeting from Rome sent by the very persons (speaking roundly) who are here greeted in the Epistle to Rome. A place of burial on the Appian Way, devoted to the ashes of Imperial freedmen and slaves, and other similar receptacles, all to be dated with practical certainty about the middle period of the first century, yield the following names: Amplias, Urbanus, Stachys, Apelles, Tryphæna, Tryphosa, Rufus, Hermes, Hermas, Philologus, Julius, Nereis; a name which might have denoted the sister (see ver. 15) of a man Nereus.
Of course such facts must be used with due reserve in inference. But they make it abundantly clear that, in Lightfoot's words, "the names and allusions at the close of the Roman Epistle are in keeping with the circumstances of the metropolis in St Paul's day." They help us to a perfectly truthlike theory. We have only to suppose that among St Paul's converts and friends in Asia and Eastern Europe many either belonged already to the ubiquitous "Household," or entered it after conversion, as purchased slaves or otherwise; and that some time before our Epistle was written there was a large draft from the provincial to the metropolitan department; and that thus, when St Paul thought of personal Christian friends at Rome, he would happen to think, mainly, of "saints of Cæsar's Household." Such a theory would also, by the way, help to explain the emphasis with which just these "saints" sent their greeting, later, to Philippi. Many of them might have lived in Macedonia, and particularly in the colonia of Philippi, before the time of their supposed transference to Rome.
We may add, from Lightfoot's discussion, a word about "the households," or "people"—of Aristobulus and Narcissus—mentioned in the greetings before us. It seems at least likely that the Aristobulus of the Epistle was a grandson of Herod the Great, and brother of Agrippa of Judea; a prince who lived and died at Rome. At his death it would be no improbable thing that his "household" should pass by legacy to the Emperor, while they would still, as a sort of clan, keep their old master's name. Aristobulus' servants, probably many of them Jews (Herodion, St Paul's kinsman, may have been a retainer of this Herod), would thus now be a part of "the Household of Cæsar," and the Christians among them would be a group of "the Household saints." As to the Narcissus of the Epistle, he may well have been the all-powerful freedman of Claudius, put to death early in Nero's time. On his death, his great familia would become, by confiscation, part of "the Household"; and its Christian members would be thought of by St Paul as among "the Household saints."
Thus it is at least possible that the holy lives which here pass in such rapid file before us were lived not only in Rome, but in a connexion more or less close with the service and business of the Court of Nero. So freely does grace make light of circumstance.
Now it is time to come from our preliminaries to the text.
Ver. 1.
Ver. 2.
But—the word may mark the movement of thought from his own delay in reaching them to Phœbe's immediate coming—I commend to you Phœbe, our sister, (this Christian woman bore, without change, and without reproach, the name of the Moon-Goddess of the Greeks,) being a ministrant (διάκονον) of the Church which is in Cenchreæ, the Ægæan port of Corinth; that you may welcome her, in the Lord, as a fellow-member of His Body, in a way worthy of the saints, with all the respect and the affection of the Gospel, and that you may stand by her (παραστῆτε αὐτῇ) in any matter in which she may need you, stranger as she will be at Rome. For she on her part (αὕτη) has proved[262] a stand-by (almost a champion, one who stands up for others, προστάτις) of many, aye, and of me among them.