About three years after writing his famous letter to the Romans,—just referred to,—Paul came as a prisoner to the capital city. But although a prisoner awaiting a public trial, the imperial government gave him free liberty to receive in his own hired house members of the Christian Church, and indeed any who chose to come and listen to his teaching; and this liberty of free access to him was continued all through the two years of his waiting for the public trial. The words of the “Acts of the Apostles,” a writing universally received as authentic, are singularly definite here: “And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house (in Rome), and received all that came unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him” (Acts xxviii. 30–31).
It was during these two years of the imprisonment that the great teacher justified his subsequent title, accorded him by so many of the early Christian writers, of joint founder with S. Peter of the Roman Church. The foundations of the Church of the metropolis we believe certainly to have been laid by another leading member of the apostolic band, S. Peter.[8] But S. Paul’s share in strengthening and in building up this Church, the most important congregation in the first days of Christianity, was without doubt very great.
At a very early period, certainly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, Rome became the acknowledged centre and the metropolis of Christendom. The great world-capital was the meeting-place of the followers of the Name from all lands. Thither, too, naturally flocked the teachers of the principal heresies in doctrinal truth which very soon sprang up among Christian converts. Under these conditions something more, in such a centre as Rome, was imperatively needed than the simple direct Gospel teaching, however fervid: something additional to the recital of the wondrous Gospel story as told by S. Peter and repeated possibly verbatim by his disciple S. Mark. A deeper and fuller instruction was surely required in such a centre as Rome quickly became. Men would ask, Who and what was the Divine Founder of the religion,—what was His relation to the Father, what to the angel-world? What was known of His preexistence? These and such-like questions would speedily press for a reply in such a cosmopolitan centre as imperial Rome. Inspired teaching bearing on such points as these required to be welded into the original foundation stories of the leading Church which Rome speedily became, and this was supplied by the great master S. Paul, to whom the Holy Ghost had vouchsafed what may be justly termed a double portion of the Spirit. The Christology of Paul, to use a later theological term, was, in view of all that was about to come to pass in the immediate future, a most necessary part of the equipment of the Church of God in Rome.
The keynote of the famous master’s teaching during those two years of his Roman imprisonment may be doubtless found in the letters written by him at that time. Three of these, the “Ephesian,” “Colossian,” and “Philippian” Epistles, were emphatically massive expositions of doctrine—especially that addressed to the Colossians. From these we can gather what was the principal subject-matter of the Pauline teaching at Rome. His thoughts were largely taken up with the great doctrinal questions bearing on the person of the Founder of Christianity.
We will quote one or two passages from the great doctrinal Epistle to the Colossians as examples of the Pauline teaching at this juncture of his life when he was engaged in building up the Roman Church, and furnishing it with an arsenal of weapons which would soon be needed in their life and death contest with the dangerous heresies[9] which so soon made their appearance in the city which was at once the metropolis of the Church and the Empire.
“The Father, ... who hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, ... who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: for by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him: and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of His Cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him (I say), whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Col. i. 12–20).
And once more: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, ... and not after Christ. For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power.”
Preaching on such texts, which contain those tremendous truths which just at this time he embodied in his Colossian letter, did S. Paul lay the foundation of the “Christology” of the Church of Rome. With justice, then, was he ranked by the early Christian writers as one of the founders of the Roman Church, for he was without doubt the principal teacher of the famous congregation in the all-important doctrinal truths bearing on the person and office of Jesus Christ.
S. Peter, whose yet earlier work at Rome, we believe, stretching over some eight or nine years, we have already dwelt on, was evidently absent from the capital when S. Paul in A.D. 58 wrote his famous Letter to the Romans; nor had he returned in A.D. 61, when Paul was brought to the metropolis as a prisoner; but that he returned to Rome somewhere about A.D. 63–4 is fairly certain.