Chapter 20

With St. Paul it is quite different. He is a saint without a luminous halo. His personal characteristics are too distinct and too human to make idealisation easy. For this reason he has never been the object of popular devotion. Shadowy figures like St. Joseph and St. Anne have been divinised and surrounded with picturesque legends; but St. Paul has been spared the honour or the ignominy of being coaxed and wheedled by the piety of paganised Christianity. No tender fairy-tales are attached to his cult; he remains for us what he was in the flesh. It is even possible to feel an active dislike for him. Lagarde ('Deutsche Schriften,' p. 71) abuses him as a politician might vilify an opponent. 'It is monstrous' (says he) 'that men of any historical training should attach any importance to this Paul. This outsider was a Pharisee from top to toe even after he became a Christian'--and much more to the same effect. Nietzsche describes him as 'one of the most ambitious of men, whose superstition was only equalled by his cunning. A much tortured, much to be pitied man, an exceedingly unpleasant person both to himself and to others.... He had a great deal on his conscience. He alludes to enmity, murder, sorcery, idolatry, impurity, drunkenness, and the love of carousing.' Renan, who could never have made himself ridiculous by such ebullitions as these, does not disguise his repugnance for the 'ugly little Jew' whose character he can neither understand nor admire. These outbursts of personal animosity, so strange in modern critics dealing with a personage of ancient history, show how vividly his figure stands out from the canvas. There are very few historical characters who are alive enough to be hated.

It is, however, only in our own day that the personal characteristics of St. Paul have been intelligently studied; and the most valuable books about him are later than the unbalanced tirades of Lagarde and Nietzsche, and the carping estimate of Renan. In the nineteenth century, Paul was obscured behind Paulinism. His letters were studied as treatises on systematic theology. Elaborate theories of atonement, justification, and grace were expounded on his authority, as if he had been a religious philosopher or theological professor like Origen and Thomas Aquinas. The name of the apostle came to be associated with angular and frigid disquisitions which were rapidly losing their connexion with vital religion. It has been left for the scholars of the present century to give us a picture of St. Paul as he really was--a man much nearer to George Fox or John Wesley than to Origen or Calvin; the greatest of missionaries and pioneers, and only incidentally a great theologian. The critical study of the New Testament has opened our eyes to see this and many other things. Much new light has also been thrown by studies in the historical geography of Asia Minor, a work in which British scholars have characteristically taken a prominent part. The delightful books of Sir W.M. Ramsay have now been supplemented by the equally attractive volume of another travelling scholar, Professor Deissmann. A third source of new information is the mass of inscriptions and papyri which have been discovered in the last twenty years. The social life of the middle and lower classes in the Levant, their religious beliefs and practices, and the language which they spoke, are now partially known to us, as they never were before. The human interest of the Pauline Epistles, and of the Acts, is largely increased by these accessions to knowledge.

The Epistles are real letters, not treatises by a theological professor, nor literary productions like the Epistles of Seneca. Each was written with reference to a definite situation; they are messages which would have been delivered orally had the Apostle been present. Several letters have certainly been lost; and St. Paul would probably not have cared much to preserve them. There is no evidence that he ever thought of adding to the Canon of Scripture by his correspondence. The Author of Acts seems not to have read any of the letters. This view of the Epistles has rehabilitated some of them, which were regarded as spurious by the Tübingen school and their successors. The question which we now ask when the authenticity of an Epistle is doubted is, Do we find the same man? not, Do we find the same system? There is, properly speaking, no system in St. Paul's theology, and there is a singularly rapid development of thought. The 'Pastoral Epistles' are probably not genuine, though the defence of them is not quite a desperate undertaking. Of the rest, the weight of evidence is slightly against the Pauline authorship of Ephesians, the vocabulary of which differs considerably from that of the undoubted Epistles; and the short letter called 2 Thessalonians is open to some suspicion. The genuineness of Ephesians is not of great importance to the student of Pauline theology, unless the closely allied Epistle to the Colossians is also rejected; and there has been a remarkable return of confidence in the Pauline authorship of this letter. All the other Epistles seem to be firmly established.

The other source of information about St. Paul's life is the Acts of the Apostles, the value of which as a historical document is very variously estimated. The doubts refer mainly to the earlier chapters, before St. Paul appears on the scene. Sane criticism can hardly dispute that the 'we-passages,' in which the writer speaks of St. Paul and himself in the first person plural, are the work of an eye-witness, and that most of the important facts in the later chapters are from the same source. The difficult problem is concerned with the relation of this writer to the editor, who is responsible for the 'Petrine' part of the book. There is very much to be said in favour of the tradition that this editor, who also compiled the Third Gospel, was Lucas or Lucanus, the physician and friend of St. Paul. It does not necessarily follow that he was the fellow-traveller who in a few places speaks of himself in the first person. Luke (if we may decide the question for ourselves by giving him this name) must have been a man of very attractive character; full of kindness, loyalty, and Christian charity. He is the most feminine (not effeminate) writer in the New Testament, and shows a marked partiality for the tender aspects of Christianity. He is attracted by miracles, and by all that makes history picturesque and romantic. His social sympathies are so keen that his gospel furnishes the Christian socialist with nearly all his favourite texts. Above all, he is a Greek man of letters, dominated by the conventions of Greek historical composition. For the Greek, history was a work of art, written for edification, and not merely a bald record of facts. The Greek historian invented speeches for his principal characters; this was a conventional way of elucidating the situation for the benefit of his readers. Everyone knows how Thucydides, the most conscientious historian in antiquity, habitually uses this device, and how candidly he explains his method. We can hardly doubt that the author of Acts has used a similar freedom, though the report of the address to the elders of Ephesus reads like a summary of an actual speech. The narrative is coloured in places by the historian's love for the miraculous. Critics have also suspected an eirenical purpose in his treatment of the relations between St. Paul and the Jerusalem Church.

Saul of Tarsus was a Benjamite of pure Israelite descent, but also a Roman citizen by birth. His famous old Jewish name was Latinised or Graecised as Paulos (Sahylost means 'waddling,' and would have been a ridiculous name); he doubtless bore both names from boyhood. Tarsus is situated in the plain of Cilicia, and is now about ten miles from the sea. It is backed by a range of hills, on which the wealthier residents had villas, while the high glens of Taurus, nine or ten miles further inland, provided a summer residence for those who could afford it, and a fortified acropolis in time of war. The town on the plain must have been almost intolerable in the fierce Anatolian summer-heat. The harbour was a lake formed by the Cydnus, five or six miles below Tarsus; but light ships could sail up the river into the heart of the city. Thus Tarsus had the advantages of a maritime town, though far enough from the sea to be safe from pirates. The famous pass called the 'Cilician Gates' was traversed by a high-road through the gorge into Cappadocia. Ionian colonists came to Tarsus in very early times; and Ramsay is confident that Tarshish, 'the son of Javan,' in Gen. x. 4, is none other than Tarsus. The Greek settlers, of course, mixed with the natives, and the Oriental element gradually swamped the Hellenic. The coins of Tarsus show Greek figures and Aramaic lettering. The principal deity was Baal-Tarz, whose effigy appears on most of the coins. Under the successors of Alexander, Greek influence revived, but the administration continued to be of the Oriental type; and Tarsus never became a Greek city, until in the first half of the second century B.C. it proclaimed its own autonomy, and renamed itself Antioch-on-Cydnus. Great privileges were granted it by Antiochus Epiphanes, and it rapidly grew in wealth and importance. Besides the Greeks, there was a large colony of Jews, who always established themselves on the highways of the world's commerce. Since St. Paul was a 'citizen' of Tarsus, i.e. a member of one of the 'Tribes' into which the citizens were divided, it is probable (so Ramsay argues) that there was a large 'Tribe' of Jews at Tarsus; for no Jew would have been admitted into, or would have consented to join, a Greek Tribe, with its pagan cult.

So matters stood when Cilicia became a Roman Province in 104 B.C. The city fell into the hands of the barbarian Tigranes twenty years later, but Gnaeus Pompeius re-established the Roman power, and with it the dominance of Hellenism, in 63. Augustus turned Cilicia into a mere adjunct of Syria; and the pride of Tarsus received a check. Nevertheless, the Emperor showed great favour to the Tarsians, who had sided with Julius and himself in the civil wars. Tarsus was made a 'libera civitas,' with the right to live under its own laws. The leading citizens were doubtless given the Roman citizenship, or allowed to purchase it. Among these would naturally be a number of Jews, for that nation loved Julius Cæsar and detested Pompeius. But Hellenism could not retain its hold on Tarsus. Dion Chrysostom, who visited it at the beginning of the second century A.D., found it a thoroughly Oriental town, and notes that the women were closely veiled in Eastern fashion. Possibly this accounts for St. Paul's prejudice against unveiled women in church. One Greek institution, however, survived and flourished--a university under municipal patronage. Strabo speaks with high admiration of the zeal for learning displayed by the Tarsians, who formed the entire audience at the professors' lectures, since no students came from outside. This last fact shows, perhaps, that the lecturers were not men of wide reputation; indeed, it is not likely that Tarsus was able to compete with Athens and Alexandria in attracting famous teachers. The most eminent Tarsians, such as Antipater the Stoic, went to Europe and taught there. What distinguished Tarsus was its love of learning, widely diffused in all classes of the population.

St. Paul did not belong to the upper class. He was a working artisan, a 'tent-maker,' who followed one of the regular trades of the place. Perhaps, as Deissmann thinks, the 'large letters' of Gal. vi. 11 imply that he wrote clumsily, like a working man and not like a scribe. The words indicate that he usually dictated his letters. The 'Acts of Paul and Thekla' describe him as short and bald, with a hook-nose and beetling brows; there is nothing improbable in this description. But he was far better educated than the modern artisan. Not that a single quotation from Menander (1 Cor. xv. 33) shows him to be a good Greek scholar; an Englishman may quote 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin' without being a Shakespearean. But he was well educated because he was the son of a strict Jew. A child in such a home would learn by heart large pieces of the Old Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the _minutiæ_ of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in consequence became extremely retentive. The perfect pupil 'lost not a drop from his teacher's cistern.' At the age of about fourteen the boy would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in St. Paul's case it was Gamaliel. Under his tuition the young Pharisee would learn to be a 'strong Churchman.' The Rabbis viewed everything from an ecclesiastical standpoint. The interests of the Priesthood, the Altar, and the Temple overshadowed everything else. The Priestly Code, says Mr. Cohu, practically resolves itself into one idea: Everything in Israel belongs to God; all places, all times, all persons, and all property are His. But God accepts a part of His due; and, if this part is scrupulously paid, He will send His blessing upon the remainder. Besides the written law, the Pharisee had to take on himself the still heavier burden of the oral law, which was equally binding. It was a seminary education of the most rigorous kind. St Paul cannot reproach himself with any slackness during his novitiate. He threw himself into the system with characteristic ardour. Probably he meant to be a Jerusalem Rabbi himself, still practising his trade, as the Rabbis usually did. For he was unmarried; and every Jew except a Rabbi was expected to marry at or before the age of twenty-one.

He suffered from some obscure physical trouble, the nature of which we can only guess. It was probably epilepsy, a disease which is compatible with great powers of endurance and great mental energy, as is proved by the cases of Julius Cæsar and Napoleon. He was liable to mystical trances, in which some have found a confirmation of the supposition that he was epileptic. But these abnormal states were rare with him; in writing to the Galatians he has to go back fourteen years to the date when he was 'caught up into the third heaven,' The visions and voices which attended his active ministry prove nothing about his health. At that time anyone who underwent a psychical experience for which he could not account believed that he was possessed by a spirit, good or bad. It is significant that Tertullian, at the end of the second century, says that 'almost the majority of mankind derive their knowledge of God from visions.' The impression that St. Paul makes upon us is that of a man full of nervous energy and able to endure an exceptional amount of privation and hardship. A curious indication, which has not been noticed, is that, as he tells us himself, he five times received the maximum number of lashes from Jewish tribunals. These floggings in the Synagogues were very severe, the operator being required to lay on with his full strength. There is evidence that in most cases a much smaller number of strokes than the full thirty-nine was inflicted, so as not to endanger the life of the culprit. The other trials which he mentions--three Roman scourgings, one stoning, a day and night spent in battling with the waves after shipwreck, would have worn out any constitution not exceptionally tough.

We must bear in mind this terrible record of suffering if we wish to estimate fairly the character of the man. During his whole life after his conversion he was exposed not only to the hardships of travel, sometimes in half-civilised districts, but to 'all the cruelty of the fanaticism which rages like a consuming fire through the religious history of the East from the slaughter of Baal's priests to the slaughter of St. Stephen, and from the butcheries of Jews at Alexandria under Caligula to the massacres of Christians at Adana, Tarsus, and Antioch in the year 1909'--(Deissmann). It is one evil result of such furious bigotry that it kindles hatred and resentment in its victims, and tempts them to reprisals. St. Paul does speak bitterly of his opponents, though chiefly when he finds that they have injured his converts, as in the letter to the Galatians. Modern critics have exaggerated this element in a character which does not seem to have been fierce or implacable. He writes like a man engaged in a stern conflict against enemies who will give no quarter, and who shrink from no treachery. But the sharpest expression that can be laid to his charge is the impatient, perhaps half humorous wish that the Judaisers who want to circumcise the Galatians might be subjected to a severer operation themselves (Gal. v. 12). The dominant impression that he makes upon us is that he was cast in a heroic mould. He is serenely indifferent to criticism and calumny; no power on earth can turn him from his purpose. He has made once for all a complete sacrifice of all earthly joys and all earthly ties; he has broken (he, the devout Jewish Catholic) with his Church and braved her thunders; he has faced the opprobrium of being called traitor, heretic, and apostate; he has 'withstood to the face' the Palestinian apostles who were chosen by Jesus and held His commission; he has set his face to achieve, almost single-handed, the conquest of the Roman Empire, a thing never dreamed of by the Jerusalem Church; he is absolutely indifferent whether his mission will cost him his life, or only involve a continuation of almost intolerable hardship. It is this indomitable courage, complete self-sacrifice, and single-minded devotion to a magnificently audacious but not impracticable idea, which constitute the greatness of St. Paul's character. He was, with all this, a warm-hearted and affectionate man, as he proves abundantly by the tone of his letters. His personal religion was, in essence, a pure mysticism; one worships a Christ whom he has experienced as a living presence in his soul. The mystic who is also a man of action, and a man of action because he is a mystic, wields a tremendous power over other men. He is like an invulnerable knight, fighting in magic armour.

It is an interesting and difficult question whether we should regard the intense moral dualism of the Epistle to the Romans as a confession that the writer has had an unusually severe personal battle with temptation. The moral struggle certainly assumes a more tragic aspect in these passages than in the experience of many saintly characters. We find something like it in Augustine, and again in Luther; it may even be suggested that these great men have stamped upon the Christian tradition the idea of a harsher 'clash of yes and no' than the normal experience of the moral life can justify. But it is not certain that the first person singular in such verses as 'O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?' is a personal confession at all. It may be for human nature generally that he is speaking, when he gives utterance to that consciousness of sin which was one of the most distinctive parts of the Christian religion from the first. It does not seem likely that a man of so lofty and heroic a character was ever seriously troubled with ignominious temptations. That he yielded to them, as Nietzsche and others have suggested, is in the highest degree improbable. Even if the self-reproaches were uttered in his own person, we have many other instances of saints who have blamed themselves passionately for what ordinary men would consider slight transgressions. Of all the Epistles, the Second to the Corinthians is the one which contains the most intimate self-revelations, and few can read it without loving as well as honouring its author.

We know nothing of the Apostle's residence at Jerusalem except the name of his teacher. But it was at this time that he became steeped in the Pharisaic doctrines which loamed the framework in which his earlier Christian beliefs were set. It is now recognised that Pharisaism, far from being the antipodes of Christianity, was rather the quarter where the Gospel found its best recruits. The Pharisaic school contained the greater part of whatever faith, loyalty and piety remained among the Jewish people; and its dogmatic system passed almost entire into the earliest Christian Church, with the momentous addition that Jesus was the Messiah. A few words on the Pharisaic teaching which St. Paul must have imbibed from Gamaliel are indispensable even in an article which deals with Paul, and not with Paulinism.