Part 47

Of the Apostle's mode of thought when fresh from his conversion no memorial exists; his earliest extant writing being of a date fourteen or fifteen years later, and the report in the Book of Acts not being altogether reliable--as Mr. Jowett has shown[61]--for historical accuracy. But we learn from his own remarkable statement to the Galatians, that he kept aloof from the churches in Judæa, and was unknown to them by face; that it was three years before he entered Jerusalem, or saw an Apostle; that he then made acquaintance with Peter, and met James, but without its affecting his independent course, which ran through eleven years more ere it brought him to Jerusalem again; that his errand, on this second visit, was to take security against being thwarted by Jewish jealousies sanctioned at head-quarters; that from James, Cephas, and John--the "seeming pillars" of the Church--he learnt nothing that he cared to hear; that they, on the other hand, could not gainsay the independent rights of so fruitful an apostleship, and agreed with him not to cross his path, if he would leave them theirs. The emphasis with which, in this animated passage, St. Paul dwells on the separate sources of his own faith, and disowns any obligation to the prior Apostles, renders it certain that the biography, the discourses, the human personality of Jesus, were indifferent to him; and that with only the cross and the resurrection (contained as data in the vision of conversion) he could construct his scheme. The unmistakable sarcasm of the expressions, οι δοκουντες,--δοκουντες ειναι τι--οι δοκουντες στυλοι ειναι,--betrays a state of mind, in regard to the twelve, out of all sympathy with the grounds of their authority. And the necessity, in order to agreement, of marking out for each, not a separate geographical beat, but a distinct religious and ethnologic ground, shows that, with external mutual toleration, there is yet wanting the inner unity of an identic faith. Only in the absence of a common Gospel would each party have to take its own, and spare the other. Indeed, the difference was so fundamental as to involve everything that St. Paul then, and Christians now, would deem characteristic of their religion.

The question was this,--"How might a born Gentile become a Christian?"--"By becoming a Jew first, and then accepting Jesus as appointed to be the Jews' Messiah," was the answer at Jerusalem. "By believing in Jesus straightway," was the reply of Paul. With irresistible force he contended that, according to his opponents' view, the Gospel opened no door at all, and was simply nugatory. For it had _always_ been possible for a Gentile to become a Jew; and if, without this step, faith in Christ was unavailing, the real efficacy must lie in what the Jew brought to Christ, not in what he received from him; so that it was hard to say what good there could be in passing on from Moses at all, or what essential difference between the unconverted and the converted Hebrew. And, in truth, they were _not_ strongly contrasted in Jerusalem; and in habit, thought, and feeling, the twelve were probably much nearer to Gamaliel than to Paul. The altercation between Peter and Paul at Antioch is full of instruction on this point; proving, as it does, that the intensest form of ritual exclusiveness--the refusal to partake at table with the uncircumcised--was retained in the parent church, and enforced with jealous vigilance. In the Syrian capital the Gentile disciples were numerous, the Pauline comprehensiveness prevailed, and the intercourses of life were unhindered by ceremonial scruples. Peter, thrown amongst them on a visit, yields to the local impression, and, as long as he can do so unobserved, falls in with their free ways; feeling all the while, no doubt, like the Quaker from home tempted into a ball-dress or regimentals. Soon, however, the strict brethren at Jerusalem send to look after him or the Antiochians, and instantly his liberality is gone; he is the prim Jew again, and the Gentile dishes are all unclean. And who then are these new witnesses, that he should fear their report? They are deputies from James, "the brother of the Lord," who, on account of this affinity,[62] was the recognized head of the Judæan Christians; and of whose ascetic abstinences, and constant devotions _on the temple pavement_, till "his knees were become like the knees of a camel," Hegesippus preserved the tradition.[63] It was clear, therefore, that Peter's association with the Gentile Christians was exceptional,--a violation of his professed rule, and of the allowed usage of the Apostolic Church. To own brotherhood with the uncircumcised believer, was a forfeiture of character, probably an outrage on his own conscience, to the Christian Apostle! This was the result, among his first disciples, of nearly twenty years' belief of Christ in heaven. There could be no real sympathy between such an evangile and Paul's. It let him make converts, but would not acknowledge them when made. It could not resist the fact of his success, but treated his "children in the faith" as in a doubtful case, left to Heaven's "uncovenanted mercies," and needing to be put in a securer state, as soon as his back was turned, and teachers could be sent to complete the task. Hence the opposition that tracked the steps, and so much marred the work of the Apostle, wherever he went; and in repelling which he wrote his chief Epistles, and matured the form of his great theology. Mr. Jowett, whilst allowing that this opposition was systematic and persistent, and in some degree connived at by the twelve, is yet anxious to lay it mainly to the charge of their followers, and defines the relation of the two sections thus: "Separation, not opposition; antagonism of the followers rather than of the leaders; personal antipathy of the Judaizers to St. Paul, rather than of St. Paul to the twelve." (I. 326.) These are fine distinctions, and for this very reason likely, we fear, in the rough movement of human passions, to be more ideal than real. True, the feeling of a leader is ever apt to run into exaggeration among the followers; nor probably was Apostolic control over the mass of believers so complete as to exclude this danger. But the Epistle to the Galatians is written by one leader, and speaks of the others; and the impression it conveys is surely one of very decided antagonism, and that, too, not accidental, but depending on permanent differences of principle, which discussion did not smooth away, and which penetrated into the very organism of daily life. In the altercation with Peter, what was the point of Paul's rebuke? Did he simply censure his moral weakness and inconsistency? Not so, or he would have exhorted him to take whichever course he approved, and stick to it. Did he find fault with his _exceptional_ act, of eating with the Gentile Christians? Not so, for he did the same himself. The thing he blamed was nothing less than the rule and usage by which Peter _habitually lived_, and which, it is declared, virtually made Christ of none effect. Here was a collision of irreconcilable principles, and every subsequent occasion of personal contact, under like conditions, would be as liable to produce it as the first. Nor have we, in fact, any reason to suppose a closer approximation at a later part of the Apostolic age. That Paul looked with any particular respect on the other Apostles, is surely not proved, as Mr. Jowett imagines, by his appeal (1 Cor. xv. 5) to their testimony respecting the _fact_ of their Lord's resurrection, or by his claiming (1 Cor. ix. 5) to stand on a like footing of privilege with them.[64] To produce the spectators of an event as its proper witnesses, is no expression of feeling towards them at all; and to say, "Are the other Apostles to have the right of taking their wives with them at the cost of the Church, and may not I take or decline my mere personal maintenance as I think proper?" institutes a comparison in which it is difficult to discover any strong sentiment of "respect." Nor do the doctrinal agreements, of which, as well as of the personal relations of fellowship, our author makes the most, amount to any substantial concurrence, when we penetrate to the essence from the form. On both sides, says Mr. Jowett, the disciples were baptized into the _same name_. (I. 340.) Yes; but how different the _object named_ as present to their thought; in the one case, the human life in its detail, with the resurrection as its crown; in the other, the cross of Christ that stands between them, and his life in heaven that passes beyond them! Both sections, it is again said, find their _ground_ in the Old Testament. (I. 341.) True: but the one on Moses, the tables, and the holy place; the other, on Adam's nature, and the patriarchs' freedom, and the prophets' insight; the one, moreover, using the ground to intrench the Law for ever; the other, to drive the ploughshare over its ruins, and make it a fruitful field. Once more, it is said that on both sides there was a looking for "the day of the Lord," an expectation of Christ's return to end the world within that generation. (I. 341.) Assuredly, but with such differences in the vision, that, in the apocalyptic picture of the one, Paul is not among the Apostles, or his followers among the white-robed and crowned (Rev. xxi. 14, and ii. 2, 14, 20); while in that of the other, the advent will but perfect and perpetuate a union with Christ, already present to their consciousness, and open to all who live with him in the Spirit. In short, twenty years after the death of Christ, the two elements that were harmonized in him, but are ever apt to part in our imperfect minds, the ethical and the mystical, the historical and spiritual, ascetic concentration and outspreading trust, fell into determinate antithesis, realizing their conflict in the immediate question of Jew and Gentile, and finding their respective representatives in the twelve and St. Paul.

Whether, besides and beyond this general development of the Christian system, there was also a special development of doctrine into higher degrees of spirituality within the mind of St. Paul himself, is a question of less interest and more difficulty. Both Mr. Stanley and Mr. Jowett find traces of such a change in the modified sentiment of his later writings, and even make the Apostle himself depose to his own enlargement of view. We must confess that this speculation, though excluded by no antecedent improbability, appears to us less well supported than anything in these volumes. It is ingeniously presented and argued by Mr. Jowett in his introduction to the Thessalonian Epistles; and by means of it he explains the marked absence from these letters of St. Paul's usual topics and manner, and gets rid of the objection urged on this ground to their authenticity. Applied at the other end of the Apostle's career, the hypothesis accounts for the prominence, in the Epistles to the Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, of certain conceptions, doubtfully traceable elsewhere, of the place of Christ in the hierarchy of the universe, and of his union with his disciples as his "body." The pastorals may be left out of consideration, as their mixed phenomena cannot be much used in the service of this theory. The broad facts are undoubted,--that the four great central Epistles (Galatians, Corinthians, Romans) must be taken as our foci of authority for the characteristics of St. Paul; that, in the earlier Thessalonians, these characteristics are overshadowed by the more Judaic doctrine of the "day of the Lord," and in the later Ephesians, &c., by the more Gnostic conception of a spiritual hierarchy and pleroma. But these facts are quite overworked when set to prove our author's thesis. In order to establish a process of personal development, they ought to exhibit certain natural links of psychological and moral succession, and not mere abrupt and unrelated contrasts of subject. To look for such organic indications in the sparse productions of the Apostle's pen, is to ask too much from a few incidental letters, bearing to his whole life the proportion of a dozen pages of random excerpts to a cyclopædia. If only the matters treated be different, the whole group of writings may very well express, in its several parts and aspects, one simultaneous state of mind. If the types of thought be such as could scarcely co-exist, the cause may be sought as reasonably in a plurality of authors as in a succession of beliefs in the same author; and only a most delicate combination of symptoms can rescue the problem from this indeterminate state of double solution. Nor ought we to forget, in weighing the probabilities, that the whole set of Epistles comprising the phenomena of difference were written within nine years; and that, ere the first of them was produced, St. Paul had been a convert fifteen years, and had reached the age of fifty. The earlier and longer of these periods is a more natural seat of mental change than the later and shorter; especially of a change not apparent so much in particular judgments and opinions, as in the whole complexion of spiritual feeling and idea.

But, we are assured, the Apostle directly testifies to his own progress in doctrine; and intimates (2 Cor. v. 16) that there was a time when he had "known Christ according to the flesh,"--had preached him "in a more Jewish and less spiritual manner,"--though "henceforth he would know him so no more." Mr. Stanley, explaining this much-disputed phrase, says:--

"Probably, he must be here alluding to those who laid stress on their having seen Christ in Palestine, or on their connection with him or with 'the brothers of the Lord' by actual descent; and if so, they were probably of the party '_of Christ_.' But the words lead us to infer that something of this kind had once been his own state of mind, not only in the time before his conversion (which he would have condemned more strongly), but since. If so, it is (like Phil. iii. 13-15) a remarkable confession of former weakness and error, and of conscious progress in religious knowledge."--Vol. II. p. 106.

Did St. Paul then ever "lay stress on having seen Christ in Palestine"? or on actual blood-connection with him? or on "something of this kind"? To personal relations with Jesus in his ministry or family he had no pretensions; and the spirit with which he had _always_ treated everything "of this kind," is so apparent from his narrative to the Galatians as to contradict Mr. Stanley's inference. Mr. Jowett gives the phrase a different turn. Finding (Gal. v. 11) the Apostle charged with at one time "preaching circumcision," he accepts this as synonymous with "knowing Christ according to the flesh" (i. 12). This, however, would imply that he was originally no "Apostle to the Gentiles," but insisted on _mediate_ conversion into the Gospel through the law. Feeling the irreconcilable variance of such an hypothesis with the autobiographical notices in the Epistles, Mr. Jowett lowers his phraseology, and attributes to St. Paul's early teaching only such sentiments as "_might be thought_" to make him "a preacher of the circumcision." And so we lose ourselves again in "something of the kind." Yet at last, in the following passage, we find the critic's finger distinctly laid on the doctrine which he proposes to id entify with the Apostle's "knowing Christ according to the flesh."

"That such a change" (in the Apostle's teaching) "is capable of being traced, has been already intimated. Both Epistles to the Thessalonians, with the exception of a few practical precepts, are the expansion and repetition of a single thought,--'the coming of Christ.' It was the absorbing thought of the Apostle and his converts, quickened in both by the persecutions which they had suffered. Not that with this expectation of Christ's kingdom there mingled any vision of a temporal rule over the kingdoms of the earth. That was far from the Apostle. But there was that in it which fell short of the more perfect truth. It was not, 'The kingdom of God is within you'; but, 'Lo here, and lo there.' It was defined by time, and was to take place within the Apostle's own life. The images in which it clothed itself were traditional among the Jews; they were outward and visible, liable to the misconstruction of the enemies of the faith, and to the misapprehension of the first converts,--imperfectly, as the Apostle saw afterwards, conveying the inward and spiritual meaning. The kingdom which they described was not eternal and heavenly, but very near and present, ready to burst forth everywhere, and by its very nearness in point of time seeming to touch our actual human state. Afterwards the kingdom of God appeared to remove itself within, to withdraw into the unseen world. The earthen vessel must be broken first, the unbeliever unclothed that he might be clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life. He was no longer 'waiting for the Son from heaven'; but 'desirous to depart and be with Christ' (Phil. i. 23). Such is the change, not so much in the Apostle's belief as in his mode of conception; a change natural to the human mind itself, and above all to the Jewish mind; a change which, after it had taken place, left the vestiges of the prior state in the Montanism of the second century, which may not improperly be regarded as the spirit of the first century overliving itself. Old things had passed away, and, behold, all things became new. And yet the former things--the material vision of Christ's kingdom--have ever been prone to return; not only in the first and second century, but in every age of enthusiasm, men have been apt to walk by sight and not by faith. In the hour of trouble and perplexity, when darkness spreads itself over the earth, and Antichrist is already come, they have lifted up their eyes to the heavens, looking for the sign of the Son of man."--Vol. I. p. 10.

If to announce the coming of Christ is to "know him according to the flesh," St. Paul assuredly did not keep his resolve "henceforth to know him no more." For the expectation reappears, without any perceptible change, in his later Epistles; as in Rom. xiii. 11, 12: "Do this the rather, knowing the time,--that now is the time to awake out of sleep: for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed: the night is far spent; the day is at hand";--and in Phil. iv. 5: "The Lord is at hand."[65] Moreover, it is utterly impossible that _this_ element of his teaching could be adduced in proof of his "preaching circumcision." It had nothing to do with the question of Jew and Gentile; with the most opposite solutions of which it is equally compatible.

In truth, our author has here combined two passages, which throw no light on one another, and has extracted from each what neither is able to yield. The words (in Gal. v. 11) "if I _still_ preach circumcision," do not really imply that the Apostle once _did_ so preach; though in an accurate writer this sense might be insisted on. He is not thinking of _his own_ former notions, but of _other people's_, continuing unaltered after they ought to have changed. There _were_ persons who, in spite of the dispensation of the Spirit, _still_ preached circumcision after its significance was gone. This did not Paul; but he was charged with doing so: and he says, "Well, if so, I am a Judaizer like you, and I cannot be _also_ chargeable with teaching that the cross of Christ supersedes the Law." The true sense is, therefore, given by the rendering, "If I preach circumcision _still_,"--that is, as _still necessary_; and no tale is told of the Apostle's earlier teaching.

The other passage (2 Cor. v. 16) _does_ undoubtedly refer to a former state of the writer's own mind, when he "recognized Christ according to the flesh." But he alludes, we apprehend, to the period when he was a "Hebrew of the Hebrews"; and had no conception as yet of a suffering, dying, and heavenly Christ;--when he was full of the thoughts still occupying the twelve, who did not take in the significance of the cross, but carried past it their old Messianic notions. "There may have been a time," he means to say, "when I thought only of a national, Israelitish, historical Messiah, bound by the law of his fathers, and binding to it. Had this been the true conception of him, then would it have been a matter of privilege and pride to be near his person, to stand in natural relations with him, and be mixed up with the incidents of his local career. But ever since I understood the cross, and saw that Messiah's life began in death, a far other truth has dawned upon me. When he gave up the ghost, all the accidents of his humanity--his lineage, his nationality, his earthly manifestation--were left behind and died away; and they must carry with them into extinction whatever feelings had collected round them,--family pride, Jewish exclusiveness, and the memories of personal companionship. From that moment, clear of earthly entanglements, Christ in the spirit draws to him a community of human spirits,--one with him in self-abnegation, dying to the earthly past; one with him in re-birth, living to heavenly union with God. Thus, if any one be in Christ, it amounts to a new creation; his old self has passed away; behold, all things have become new." The Apostle, therefore, sets up the death of Christ, as cutting off, for all disciples, the prior time from the subsequent; as flinging the former, with all the human conceptions that cling to it, into eclipse and annihilation, and beginning a new and luminous existence in the latter; as breaking the very identity of the believer, and delivering him from the thraldom of nature into the freedom of the Spirit. The cross had already done its work ere St. Paul became a disciple. He had never known his Lord but in the spirit; and the "Christ," whom he had "known according to the flesh," was the Jewish Messiah of his previous and unconverted conception. Mr. Stanley's objection, that the Apostle could hardly have spoken of his unconverted state without stronger condemnation, might perhaps hold, were the allusions to his fit of persecuting violence against the Church. But there was no occasion for self-reproach in describing the picture of a national Messiah, on which, in common with his countrymen, he had permitted his imagination to dwell.[66]