And for this historical purpose, the writings of the great Gentile Apostle are of paramount value, and justly occupy the inquirer's first researches. The most considerable of them are of unimpeachable authenticity. They are the very earliest Christian writings we possess. They are the productions of a man more clearly known to us than any of the first missionaries of the Gospel. They are letters: abounding in disclosures of personal feelings, of biographical incident, of changing moods of thought, of outward and inward conflict. They are addressed to young communities, scattered over a vast area, and composed of differing elements; and exhibit the whole fermentation of their new life, the scruples, the heart-burnings, the noble inspirations, the grievous factions, of the Apostolic age. The Gospels and the Book of Acts treat no doubt of a prior period, but proceed from a posterior, of whose state of mind, whose retrospective theories concerning the ministry of Christ, it is of primary importance to the criticism of the Evangelists that we should be informed; and on these points the Pauline Epistles are the indispensable groundwork of all our knowledge or conjecture. In them we catch the Christian doctrine and tradition at an earlier stage than any other canonical book represents throughout. Although the narratives of the New Testament doubtless abound in material drawn faithfully from a more primitive time, they are certainly not free from the touch and tincture of the post-Pauline age. How powerful an instrument the Apostle's letters may become for either confirming or checking the historical records, may be readily conceived by every reader of Paley's "Horæ Paulinæ." In fine, if it be a just principle, in historical criticism, to proceed from the more known to the less known,—to begin from a date that yields contemporary documents, and work thence into the subjacent and superjacent strata of events,—the elucidation of Christian antiquity must take its commencement from the Epistles of St. Paul.
Except in its general similarity of subject, the first of the three works mentioned at the head of this article admits of no comparison with the other two. It is rather an illustrated guide-book to the Apostle's world of place and time, than a personal introduction to himself. The authors are highly accomplished and scholarly men, and could not fail, in dealing with an historical theme, to bring together and group with conscientious skill a vast store of archæological and topographical detail; to weigh chronological difficulties with patient care; to translate with philological precision, and due aim at accuracy of text. They have accordingly produced a truly interesting and instructive book: so instructive, indeed, that by far the greater part of its information would, probably, have been quite new to St. Paul himself. His life seems to us to be injudiciously overlaid with what is wholly foreign to it, and for the sake of picturesque effect to be set upon a stage quite invisible to him. He was not "Principal of a Collegiate Institution," accustomed to examine boys in Attic or Latian geography; was not familiar with Thucydides or Grote; was indifferent to the Amphictyonic Council; and, in the vicinity of Salamis and Marathon, probably read the past no more than a Brahmin would in travelling over Edgehill or Marston Moor. The world of each man must be measured from his own spiritual centre, and will take in much less in one direction, much more in another, than is spread beneath his eye. He cannot be reached by geographical approaches. You may determine the elements of his orbit, and yet miss him after all. It is an illusory process to paint the ancient world as it would look to an Hellenic gentleman then, or a university scholar now; and then think how St. Paul would feel in passing through it to convert it. The indirect influence of this kind of conception seems to us apparent both in Mr. Conybeare's translation and Mr. Howson's narrative and descriptions. The outward scene and conditions of the Apostle's career are elaborately displayed; but more with the modern academic than with the old Hebrew tone of coloring; and the English version, scrupulous and delicate as it is, has, to our taste, a general flavor quite different from the original Greek. Unconsciously entangled in the classifications and symbols of the Protestant theology, the authors are detained outside the real genius and feeling of the Apostle.
Of a far higher order are the other two works,—produced, we infer from their numerous correspondences of both form and substance, not without concert between the authors. Indeed, the same explanation of the merits of Lachmann's text (printed without translation by Mr. Stanley, and with the adapted authorized version by Mr. Jowett) is made to serve for both. So clearly and compendiously is this explanation drawn, that, in the next edition of Lachmann, Mr. Jowett's introduction might usefully be annexed to the great critic's rather tangled and awkward preface. Of the superior fidelity of this recension, we think no habitual reader of the Greek Scriptures can reasonably doubt; and the recognition of its authority fulfils a prior condition of all scientific theology. The text being chosen on grounds purely critical, the notes are written in a spirit purely exegetical; they aim, simply and with rare self-abnegation, to bring out, by every happy change of light and turn of reflective sympathy, the great Apostle's real thought and feeling. How very far this faithful historic purpose in itself raises the interpreter above the crowd of erudite and commenting divines, can scarcely be understood till it has formed a new generation, and fixed itself as a distinct intellectual type. It is not, however, an affair of mere will and disposition; but, like most of the higher exercises of veracity, comes into operation only as the last result of mental tact and affluence. With the most honest intentions towards St. Paul, a critic without psychological insight and dialectic pliancy, without power of melting down his modern abstractions and redistributing them in the moulds of the old realistic thought,—a critic without entrance into the passionate depths of human nature,—a critic pre-occupied by Catholic or Protestant assumptions, and untrained to imagine the questions and interests of the first age,—cannot surrender himself to the natural impression of the Apostle's language. The disciple and the master are, in such case, at cross-purposes with one another; the questions put are not the questions answered; the interlocutors do not really meet, but wind in a maze about each other's loci, not to end till the unconscious interpreter has set his fantasies within the shadow of inspiration. No such blind chase is possible to our authors. They have achieved the conditions of fidelity; and bring to a task, in which the truthful and sagacious spirit of Locke had already fixed the standard high, the ampler resources of modern learning, and more practised habit of historic combination. In the distribution of their work, the difference of natural genius between the two authors has perhaps been consulted, and is, at all events, distinctly expressed. Mr. Stanley's aptitude for reproducing the image of the past, his apprehensive sympathy with the concrete and individual elements of the world, fitly engage themselves with the composite forms of Corinthian society, and the most personal, various, and objective of the Apostle's letters. For the more speculative Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, there was need of Mr. Jowett's philosophical depth and subtilty. The strictness with which he restrains these seductive gifts to the proper business of the interpreter, is not less admirable than their occasional happy application. Instead of being employed to force upon the Apostle a logical precision foreign to his habit, they are chiefly engaged in detecting and wiping out false niceties of distinction drawn by later theology, and throwing back each doctrinal statement into its original degree of indeterminateness. It is not in the notes,—which are wholly occupied in recovering St. Paul's own thought,—but in the interposed disquisitions, which avowedly deal with the theology of to-day, that a certain breadth and balance of statement, and delicate ease in manœuvring the forms and antitheses of abstract thought, and fine appreciation of human experience, make us feel the double presence of metaphysical power and historical tact. The author, accordingly, appears to us, not only to have seized the great Apostle's attitude of mind more happily than any preceding English critic, but also to have separated the essence from the accidents of the Pauline Christianity, and disengaged its divine elements for transfusion into the organism of our immediate life. Mr. Stanley appears to have more difficulty in unreservedly adhering to the purely historical view, and clerically flutters, without clear occasion, on the outskirts of "edification";—the critic in his notes, the preacher in his paraphrase; conceding in act more readily than in name, and apologizing for finding human ingredients in the Apostles and their doctrines, as if it were he, and not God, that would have them there. This tendency to blur the lines which he himself draws between the temporary and the permanent in the Scriptures with which he deals, is the only fault we can find with Mr. Stanley; whose associate, clinging less to the past, in effect preserves more for the present. To learn the external scene of the Apostle's career, we would refer our readers to Messrs. Conybeare and Howson; to appreciate his moral surroundings, and the problems it presented, especially on the ethnic side, they may take Mr. Stanley as their guide; but for insight into the Apostle himself, and outlook on the world as it seemed to him, they must resort to Mr. Jowett.
The Pauline Epistles are interesting, apart from all assumption of inspired authority, because the elements are seen fermenting there of the greatest known revolution both in the history of the world and in the spiritual consciousness of individual man. Judaism was the narrowest (that is, the most special) of religions; Christianity, the most human and comprehensive. Within a few years, the latter was evolved out of the former; taking all its intensity and durability, without resort to any of its limitations. This marvellous expansion of the national into the universal was not achieved without a process and a conflict. Divine though the work was, it had to be wrought upon men, and through men, whose character, interests, convictions, habits, and institutions furnished the data conditioning the problem, and whose remodelled affections and will supplied the instruments for its solution. The laws of human nature, therefore, and the action of human events, necessarily enter into the study of this great revolution; and it cannot be detained out of the hands of the historian by any exclusive rights of the divine. When we endeavor to trace the successive steps of faith from Mount Zion to the Vatican, many parts of the progress appear to have left but scanty vestige. We know the beginning, in the doctrine of the Hebrew Messiah; we know the end, in the recognition of a Saviour of the world. We know the intermediate fact,—that Judaism did not surrender its own without a struggle, or readily give away the keys of its enclosure just when it was passing from a prison of affliction into a palace of "the kingdom." But within this general fact lies a world of mysterious detail,—nay, almost the whole life of the early Church. Who began the open breach between Messiah and the Law? how, and to what extent, did the parties divide? what was their relative magnitude at different times and in different places? and by what process was the difference terminated, and the two extremes—Marcion on the one hand and the Ebionites on the other—removed outside as heretics? The Christianity of the third century is so little like the doctrine of Matthew's Gospel as to perplex our sense of identity. No one can bring the two into direct comparison, without feeling how much must have happened to shape the earlier into the form of the later. Could we trace the flow and estimate the sources of this change, the most wonderful of the world's experiences would be resolved. The continuity, however, of visible causation is often broken; there are everywhere many missing links in the chain, and a chasm extending through a large part of the second century. But a generation earlier we meet with materials of the richest value in the Epistles of St. Paul; and by their aid the general direction may be found by which thought and events must have advanced. Otherwise, the change would seem as violent and inconceivable as a convulsion that should mingle the Jordan and the Tiber.
No doubt, the germ of the Gospel's universality is to be found in the personal characteristics of its Author,—in the whole spirit of his life, and the direct tendency of his teachings. He who found in the love of God and love of man the very springs of eternal life; who measured good and evil, not by the act, but by the affection whence they come; who placed his ideal for man in likeness to the perfection of God,—had already proclaimed a religion transcending all local limits. Nay, if he opposed the "true worship" to the services at Gerizim and Jerusalem, and could wish the Temple away, that obstructed his direct dealing with the human soul and suppressed the inner shrine "not made with hands," he must even have placed himself in an attitude of open alienation towards the ritual of his people. At the same time, his words seem to have left not unfrequently an opposite impression. He comes, "not to destroy the Law and the prophets, but to fulfil" them; "not a jot or a tittle is to fail." His most spiritual truths and sentiments, instead of being announced as novelties grounding themselves on his personal authority, are drawn out of the old Hebrew Scriptures; and even the life beyond death he finds lurking in patriarchal idioms and phrases heard at the burning bush. His intensest polemic against the sacerdotal party goes on within the limits of the system which they represent and yet corrupt; and his bitterest reproach against them is that there is no reverence for it in their hearts, since they hugely violate and trivially obey it. Far from ever launching out against law as law, or setting up faith as a rival principle excluding it, he extends precept to the last heights of religion, enjoins the divinest affections, as if there also obedience was possible, and duty and volition had their place. It was not in a nature holy and harmonious as his,—type of heavenly peace rather than of earthly conflict,—that the schism would be exhibited between Will and Love; where both are at their height, there is no rent between them. Nor was there need, in that meek, reverential soul, to break with the past, in order to find a sanctity for the present, and leave an inspiration for the future. Some things, once given for the hardness of men's hearts, might be dropped, and fall behind; but God had ever lived, and left the trace of his perfectness upon the elder times as on the newest manifestations of the hour. There was enough in the Law, if only its fruitful seeds were warmed into life, to furnish forth the Gospel. And so Christ presents himself as the disciple of Moses, and in the Sermon on the Mount does but open out the tables of Sinai. It was not, therefore, without honest ground that his immediate disciples could defend him from the charge of being unfaithful to the religion of his native land. And yet the instinct of the priests and rabbis told them truly that he and they could not co-exist, that his doctrine reduced their work to naught, and that, whencesoever he might draw it, there was no doubt whither he must carry it. The "witnesses" were not altogether "false" which they brought to show his inner hostility to the altar ceremonial; and perhaps his enemies, with apprehension sharpened by fear, more correctly interpreted his tendency in this direction than his followers, entangled in the cloud of a Judaic love. It was quite natural that the real antithesis between the Law and the Gospel should thus be first felt by his antagonists, whilst as yet it slept undeveloped in the minds of his followers and in the habitual expression of his own thought; and that its earliest proclamation should be their act, their defiance, the cross on Calvary!
This terrible challenge, fiercely protesting that the Law would hold no parley with the Gospel, the Apostles, however, refused to accept. They still denied their Lord's apostasy or their own; they had always been, and with his encouragement, the best of Jews: nor did they contemplate, so far, any change. The crucifixion was a Jewish mistake, meant for the nation's enemy, but alighting on its representative; a mistake, however, which God had counteracted by a glorious rescue, in the resurrection of the crucified. The mischief being thus undone, the day of Hebrew opportunity was resumed; the ministry of Jesus was not closed; he yet lived and preached to them as before;—no longer, indeed, in person till their better mind should re-assert itself, but by "faithful witnesses";—no longer too in tentative disguise, but now identified as Messiah by his exaltation above this world. Whatever conflicts of mind the disciples suffered in the mysterious period following the crucifixion, the operation of the resurrection and the Spirit was at first simply to reinstate them in their prior faith,—that the kingdom would soon be restored to Israel, and be brought in by no other than their Master, already waiting for the crisis in a higher world till God's hour should come. There is no evidence to show that, on the transference of their Lord's life from earth to heaven, they were carried into any greater comprehensiveness or spirituality of faith: their convictions were more intense, but held on in the same direction, being all included in one great theme,—the speedy coming of Messiah's kingdom and the end of the world. Nay, of so little consequence, in comparison with this general picture of expectation, was even the appearance in it of the person of Jesus as its central figure, that Apollos, more than twenty years afterwards, was making and baptizing converts, without having ever heard of any later prophet than John the Baptist; and these people are already recognized as "disciples," and then informed, as needful complement to their faith, that, besides the crisis being near, the person is appointed.[58] Here had evidently been, for some quarter of a century, two independent streams of Messianic faith, one from a rather earlier source than the other, but pursuing their own separate way, till thus partially confluent at Ephesus. And what is the relation between them? One of them baptizes into an impersonal and anonymous hope, the other into the same hope with the name attached. And when these two states of mind are set side by side, they are regarded as the same in their essence, and differing only in completeness. Nor is there anything in their mutual feeling to hinder their instant coalescence. This fact defines in the clearest way the position of the early Church; the ordinary Jew believed that Messiah would some time come, and bring in "the last days"; Apollos, that he would come erelong; the Christians, that already the person was indicated, and would prove to be Jesus of Nazareth. All three co-existed within the Hebrew pale, and the two last fall under the common category of "disciples."
It was impossible, however, that the contemplation of a Messiah risen and reserved in heaven should affect all the believers in a precisely similar manner. His personal attendants it would take up just where the crucifixion had let them down; would give new force to their previous impressions, new sacredness to their recollections, new significance to his words and example, new reluctance to venture where he had not led. The whole effect would be conservative, and tend to fix them, with an inspired rigor, within the limits of the Master's lot and life. Quite otherwise was it with the new disciples, who had no such restraining memories of the human Teacher. They began with Christ above, and were tied down by no concrete biographical images, no scruples of tender retrospect. They were free to ask themselves, "What meant this surprising way of revealing Messiah 'in heavenly places,' and letting his disguise first fall off in his escape from local relations? The scene from which he looked down,—was it the mere upper chamber of Judæa, or did it overarch the human world? Who could claim him, now that he was there? Was it for him to examine pedigrees to test 'the children of the kingdom'; or would he, as Son of David, even come emblazoned with his own?" The mere conception of an ascended and immortal being, assessor to the Lord of all, seemed to dwarf and shame all provincial restrictions, and sanction the distaste for binding forms and ceremonial exclusiveness. The withdrawal of Christ to a holier sphere accorded well with all that was most spiritual in his teachings and in himself; and could not fail to reflect a strong light back on this aspect of his life, and give a more significant emphasis to the tradition of his deepest words. In the mind of many a disciple this tendency would be favored by a weariness towards the outer worship of the temple, and a secret aspiration after purer and more intimate communion with God. Especially was the foreign Jew obliged to confess such a feeling to himself. The very speaking of Greek spoiled him for thinking as a Hebrew; for language is the channel of the soul, and according as the organism is open, the sap will flow. Accustomed to the simple piety of the Proseucha, where God was sought without priest or sacrifice, and adequately found in poetry, and prophecy, and prayer, the Hellenist acquired a tone of sentiment on which the material pomps and puerilities of Mount Moriah painfully jarred. Nor could he enclose himself contentedly, like the Palestine Jew, within the sacred boundary that admitted the most worthless son of Abraham, and shut the noblest Gentile out. Living in heathen cities, dealing with heathen men, touched at times with the sorrow or the goodness of heathen neighbors, his moral feeling fell into contradiction with his inherited exclusiveness, and inwardly demanded some other providential classification of mankind. Accordingly, it was the Hellenist Stephen who first saw, in the heavenly Christ, a principle of universal religion and a proclamation of spiritual worship. When accused of defaming Moses and the Law and the holy place, and setting up Jesus to supersede them, he boldly reflects on the stone Temple, rooted to one spot, as at variance with His nature who said, "Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool," and points to the earlier tabernacle, movable from place to place, following the steps of wandering humanity, as truer emblem of a faith that takes every winding of history, and a God who goes where we go, and stays where we stay.[59] This noble doctrine doubtless expressed a feeling common among the foreign Jews of liberal culture and fervid piety; and when consecrated by Stephen's martyrdom, it would assume a distinctness unknown before, and become the admitted type of belief among the Christian Hellenists. That it was confined to them is evident from the partial effect of the persecution in which Stephen fell. His friends,—perhaps we may say his party,—hunted from house to house, fled from Jerusalem; but the Jewish Apostles remained where they were,[60] apparently unmenaced and undisturbed. The hostility of the city drew therefore a distinction between such Hebrew Christians as the twelve, and the freer "Grecians" who proclaimed a Spirit above the Temple and the Law. The former, constituting an inner sect of Judaism, might hold their ground unmolested; the latter were treated as apostates, and "scattered abroad." The essential, but hitherto dormant, antithesis between the Gospel and the Law, had thus burst into expression, and embodied itself in two sections of the Church that grew ever more distinct; the Hebrew party concentrated in Jerusalem, and remaining intensely national; the Hellenistic, spreading itself on the outskirts of Palestine, and erelong fixing its head-quarters at Antioch. Within this freer circle, first as persecutor, soon as disciple, appears Saul of Tarsus. So congenial are its tendencies and aspirations with his nature and his antecedent position, that his hostile attitude towards it might well strike him, on looking back, as a monstrous self-contradiction. A foreigner to Palestine, a "citizen of no mean city," familiar with a trade that bought from the shepherds of Mount Taurus, and sold to the Greek skippers of the Levant, he knew the human side of the Gentile world too well to rest in a narrow Judaism. We cannot imagine his fervid, free-moving mind, content to live within the enclosure of Rabbinical niceties, or able to find, in the materialism of the Temple rites, his ideal of true worship. With sympathies essentially cosmopolitan, he could scarcely fail to be disappointed, not to say repelled, by Jerusalem,—so different from the dream of his young romance. Some higher, fresher communion between earth and heaven, some wider monarchy for God than over a mere clan, would be to him natural objects of aspiration. Hence his first persecuting attitude towards the Christian Hellenists was permanently untenable; and as he went amongst them, words were sure to fall upon his ear, and holy looks to meet his eye, that would smite him with a kindred affection. Whether the death of Stephen left on his mind images which he could not banish, and commenced a reaction which no plunge into fresh violences could arrest, it is vain to conjecture. That it should be so, would be only human; for in the life of passion, triumph and humiliation are near neighbors, and often the last note in the song of exultation dies down into the plaint of compunction. Certain it is, that shortly afterwards it "pleased God to reveal his Son in him"; that, with the suddenness characteristic of impassioned natures, he came to himself, and found his proper work, "to which he had been set apart from his mother's womb"; and that his new convictions were of the very same type and tendency with Stephen's, and strongly discriminated from the Messianic doctrine of the twelve at Jerusalem. The incipient breach between Law and Gospel, latent in the Master, denied by the twelve, bursting forth among the Hellenists, finally realized and defined itself in Paul; whose intense impulses were too great for the custody of his will; whose soul had wings to fly, but not feet to plod; who felt himself the theatre of living powers not his own, and could find no peace till, by communion with the heavenly Son of God, he discovered a providential love universal as human life, and a way of reconciliation quick and open as human trust and reverence. It is easier to speak of the effects than of the nature of his conversion. His writings exhibit its results, but only vaguely allude to its occurrence, and never in terms at all resembling the recitals in the Book of Acts, or abating their discrepancies. Of these narratives (Acts ix. 1-9, xxii. 6-12, xxvi. 12-18) Mr. Jowett remarks, "There is no use in attempting any forced reconcilement." (I. 229.) On the one hand, "There is no fact in history more certain or undisputed than that, in some way or other, by an inward vision or revelation of the Lord, or by an outward miraculous appearance as he was going to Damascus, the Apostle was suddenly converted from being a persecutor to become a preacher of the Gospel." (I. 227.) On the other, "If we submit the narrative of the Acts to the ordinary rules of evidence, we shall scarcely find ourselves able to determine whether any outward fact was intended by it or not." This, however, is of the less moment, because it is evident from the language of the Epistle to the Galatians (Gal. i. 15, 16) that,—
"Whether the conversion of St. Paul was an outward or an inward fact, it was not principally the outward appearance in the heavens, but the inward effect, that the Apostle would have regarded. Compare Eph. iii. 3: 'How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery (as I wrote afore in few words).'
"It has been often remarked, that miracles are not appealed to singly in Scripture as evidences of religion, in the same way that they have been used by modern writers. Especially does this remark apply to the conversion of St. Paul. Not a hint is found in his writings, that he regarded 'the heavenly vision' as an objective evidence of Christianity. The evidence to him was the sudden change of heart; what he terms, in the case of his converts, the reception of the Spirit; what he had known, and what he felt; the fact that one instant he was a persecutor, and the second a preacher of the Gospel. The last inquiry that he would have thought of making, would be that of modern theologians: 'How, without some outward sign, he could be assured of the reality of what he had seen and heard.' No outward sign could, as such, have convinced the mind of a man who fell to the ground amazed, unless it were certain that his companions had seen the light and heard the voice. Nor unless they had distinctly been partakers of the supernatural vision could he ever have been satisfied that what they saw was anything but a meteor, or lightning, or that the voice they heard was more than the sound of thunder. No evidence of theirs would have been an answer to the language of some of the rationalist divines: 'St. Paul was overtaken by a storm of thunder and lightning in the neighborhood of Damascus.' Such difficulties are insuperable; at best we can only raise probabilities in answer to them, based on the general tone of the narrative in Acts ix. But we may remember that the belief in some outward fact was not the essential point in St. Paul's faith, and therefore we need not make it the essential point in our own.