Volume III Part 19 (1/2)

It is argued that the Twelve had not sufficient authority over their followers to prevent such interference with Paul, and that the relation of the Apostle to the Twelve was: ”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.”(3) It is not difficult to believe that the antipathy of Paul to the Judaizers was less than that felt by them towards him. The superiority of the man must have rendered him somewhat callous to such dislike.(4) But the mitigated form of difference between Paul and the Twelve here a.s.sumed, although still very different from the representations of the Acts,

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cannot be established, but on the contrary must be much widened before it can justly be taken as that existing between Paul and the elder Apostles. We do not go so far as to say that there was open enmity between them, or active antagonism of any distinct character on the part of the Twelve to the Apostle of the Gentiles, but there is every reason to believe that they not only disliked his teaching, but endeavoured to counteract it by their own ministry of the circ.u.mcision. They not only did not restrain the opposition of their followers, but they abetted them in their counter-a.s.sertion of judaistic views. Had the Twelve felt any cordial friends.h.i.+p for Paul, and exhibited any active desire for the success of his ministry of the uncirc.u.mcision, it is quite impossible that his work could have been so continuously and vexatiously impeded by the persecution of the Jewish Christian party. The Apostles may not have possessed sufficient influence or authority entirely to control the action of adherents, but it would be folly to suppose that, if unanimity of views had prevailed between them and Paul, and a firm and consistent support had been extended to him, such systematic resistance as he everywhere encountered from the party professing to be led by the ”pillar” Apostles could have been seriously maintained, or that he could have been left alone and unaided to struggle against it. If the relations between Paul and the Twelve had been such as are intimated in the Acts of the Apostles, his epistles must have presented undoubted evidence of the fact Both negatively and positively they testify the absence of all support, and the existence of antagonistic influence on the part of the elder Apostles, and external evidence fully confirms the impression which the epistles produce.(1)

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From any point of view which may be taken, the Apocalypse is an important doc.u.ment in connection with this point. If it be accepted as a work of the Apostle John--the preponderance of evidence and critical opinion a.s.signs it to him--this book, of course, possesses the greatest value as an indication of his views. If it be merely regarded as a contemporary writing, it still is most interesting as an ill.u.s.tration of the religious feeling of the period. The question is: Does the Apocalypse contain any reference to the Apostle Paul, or throw light upon the relations between him and the elder Apostles? If it does so, and be the work of one of the [------], nothing obviously could be more

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instructive. In the messages to the seven churches, there are references and denunciations which, in the opinion of many able critics, are directed against the Apostle of the Gentiles and his characteristic teaching.(1) Who but Paul and his followers can be referred to in the Epistle to the Church of Ephesus: ”I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and that thou canst not bear wicked persons: and didst try them which say they are Apostles and are not, and didst find them liars”?(2) Paul himself informs us not only of his sojourn in Ephesus, where he believed that ”a great and effectual door” was opened to him, but adds, ”there are many adversaries” [------].(3) The foremost charge brought against the churches is that they have those that hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling-block before the sons of Israel, ”to eat things offered unto idols.”(4) The teaching of Paul upon this point is

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well known, 1 Cor. viii. 1 ff., x. 25 ff., Rom. xiv. 2 ff., and the reference here cannot be mistaken; and when in the Epistle to the church of Thyatira, after denouncing the teaching ”to eat things offered unto idols,” the Apocalyptist goes on to encourage those who have not this teaching, ”who knew not the depths of Satan, [------],(1) as they say”

the expression of Paul himself is taken to denounce his doctrine; for the Apostle, defending himself against the attacks of those parties ”of Cephas” and ”of Christ” in Corinth, writes: ”But G.o.d revealed (them) to us through his Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, even the depths of G.o.d” [------]--”the depths of Satan” rather, retorts the judaistic author of the Apocalypse. [------] does not occur elsewhere in the New Testament Again, in the address to the churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia, when the writer denounces those ”who say that they are Jews, and are not, but a synagogue of Satan,”(2) whom has he in view but those Christians whom Paul had taught to consider circ.u.mcision unnecessary and the law abrogated? We find Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians, so often quoted, obliged to defend himself against these judaising parties upon this very point: ”Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they Abraham's seed? so am I.”(3) It is manifest that his adversaries had vaunted their own Jewish origin as a t.i.tle of superiority over the Apostle of the Gentiles. We

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have, however, further evidence of the same attack upon Paul regarding this point. Epiphanius points out that the Ebionites denied that Paul was a Jew, and a.s.serted that he was born of a Gentile father and mother, but that, having gone up to Jerusalem, he became a proselyte and submitted to circ.u.mcision in the hope of marrying a daughter of the high priest. But afterwards, according to them, enraged at not securing the maiden for his wife, Paul wrote against circ.u.mcision and the Sabbath and the law.(1) The Apostle Paul, whose constant labour it was to destroy the particularism of the Jew, and raise the Gentile to full, free, and equal partic.i.p.ation with him in the benefits of the New Covenant, could not but incur the bitter displeasure of the Apocalyptist, for whom the Gentiles were, as such, the type of all that was common and unclean. In the utterances of the seer of Patmos we seem to hear the expression of all that judaistic hatred and opposition which pursued the Apostle who laid the axe to the root of Mosaism and, in his efforts to free Christianity from trammels which, more than any other, r.e.t.a.r.ded its triumphant development, aroused against himself all the virulence of Jewish illiberality and prejudice. The results at which we have arrived might be singularly confirmed by an examination of the writings of the first two centuries, and by observing the att.i.tude

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a.s.sumed towards the Apostle of the Gentiles by such men as Justin Martyr, Papias, Hegesippus, and the author of the Clementines; but we have already devoted too much s.p.a.ce to this subject, and here we must reluctantly leave it.

The steps by which Christianity was gradually freed from the trammels of Judaism and became a religion of unlimited range and universal fitness were clearly not those stated in the Acts of the Apostles. Its emanc.i.p.ation from Mosaism was not effected by any liberal action or enlightened guidance on the part of the elder Apostles. At the death of their Master, the Twelve remained closely united to Judaism, and evidently were left without any understanding that Christianity was a new religion which must displace Mosaic inst.i.tutions, and replace the unbearable yoke of the law by the divine liberty of the Gospel. To the last moment regarding which we have any trustworthy information, the Twelve, as might have been expected, retained all their early religious customs and all their Jewish prejudices. They were simply Jews believing that Jesus was the Messiah; and if the influence of Paul enlarged their views upon some minor points, we have no reason to believe that they ever abandoned their belief in the continued obligation of the law, and the necessity of circ.u.mcision for full partic.i.p.ation in the benefits of the Covenant. The author of the Acts would have us believe that they required no persuasion, but antic.i.p.ated Paul in the Gospel of uncirc.u.mcision. It is not within the scope of this work to inquire how Paul originally formed his views of Christian universalism. Once formed, it is easy to understand how rapidly they must have been developed and confirmed by experience amongst

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the Gentiles. Whilst the Twelve still remained in the narrow circle of Judaism and could not be moved beyond the ministry of the circ.u.mcision, Paul, in the larger and freer field of the world, must daily have felt more convinced that the abrogation of the Law and the abandonment of circ.u.mcision were essential to the extension of Christianity amongst the Gentiles. He had no easy task, however, to convince others of this, and he never succeeded in bringing his elder colleagues over to his views. To the end of his life, Paul had to contend with bigoted and narrow-minded opposition within the Christian body, and if his views ultimately triumphed, and the seed which he sowed eventually yielded a rich harvest, he himself did not live to see the day, and the end was attained only by slow and natural changes. The new religion gradually extended beyond the limits of Judaism. Gentile Christians soon outnumbered Jewish believers. The Twelve whose names were the strength of the judaistic opposition one by one pa.s.sed away; but, above all, the fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Christian community secured the success of Pauline principles and the universalism of Christianity.

The Church of Jerusalem could not bear transplanting. In the uncongenial soil of Pella it gradually dwindled away, losing first its influence and soon after its nationality. The divided members of the Jewish party, scattered amongst the Gentiles, and deprived of their influential leaders, could not long r.e.t.a.r.d the progress of the liberalism which they still continued to oppose and to misrepresent. In a word, the emanc.i.p.ation of Christianity was not effected by the Twelve, was no work of councils, and no result of dreams; but, receiving its first great impulse from the genius and the energy of Paul, its ultimate

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achievement was the result of time and natural development.

We have now patiently considered the ”Acts of the Apostles,” and although it has in no way been our design exhaustively to examine its contents, we have more than sufficiently done so to enable the reader to understand the true character of the doc.u.ment. The author is unknown, and it is no longer possible to identify him. If he were actually the Luke whom the Church indicates, our results would not be materially affected; but the mere fact that the writer is unknown is obviously fatal to the Acts as a guarantee of miracles. A cycle of supernatural occurrences could scarcely, in the estimation of any rational mind, be established by the statement of an anonymous author, and more especially one who not only does not pretend to have been an eye-witness of most of the miracles, but whose narrative is either uncorroborated by other testimony or inconsistent with itself, and contradicted on many points by contemporary doc.u.ments. The phenomena presented by the Acts of the Apostles become perfectly intelligible when we recognize that it is the work of a writer living long after the occurrences related, whose pious imagination furnished the apostolic age with an elaborate system of supernatural agency, far beyond the conception of any other New Testament writer, by which, according to his view, the proceedings of the Apostles were furthered and directed, and the infant Church miraculously fostered. On examining other portions of his narrative, we find that they present the features which the miraculous elements rendered antecedently probable. The speeches attributed to

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different speakers are all cast in the same mould, and betray the composition of one and the same writer. The sentiments expressed are inconsistent with what we know of the various speakers. And when we test the circ.u.mstances related by previous or subsequent incidents and by trustworthy doc.u.ments, it becomes apparent that the narrative is not an impartial statement of facts, but a reproduction of legends or a development of tradition, shaped and coloured according to the purpose or the pious views of the writer. The Acts of the Apostles, therefore, is not only an anonymous work, but upon due examination its claims to be considered sober and veracious history must be emphatically rejected. It cannot strengthen the foundations of supernatural Religion, but, on the contrary, by its profuse and indiscriminate use of the miraculous it discredits miracles, and affords a clearer insight into their origin and fict.i.tious character.

PART V. THE DIRECT EVIDENCE FOR MIRACLES

CHAPTER I. THE EPISTLES AND THE APOCALYPSE