Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ, his life and work, his epistles and his doctrine. A contribution to the critical history of primitive Christianity

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Preface To The First Edition (1845)

For a considerable number of years I have been engaged in critical investigations chiefly of the Pauline Epistles and the Acts, with a view to a better understanding of the life and work of the Apostle Paul, and of his historical position and importance. The first fruits of these studies appeared in the year 1831, in the Tiibinger Zeitschrift fiir Theologie, 1831, p. 4, and was an essay entitled " The Christ-party in the Corinthian Church, the opposition of Petrine and Pauline Christianity in the Primitive Church, the Apostle Peter in Eome." In this paper I advanced the assertion which I have since maintained and furnished with additional evidence, that the harmonious relation which is commonly assumed to have existed between the Apostle Paul and the Jewish Christians with the older Apostles at their head, is unhistorical, and that the conflict of the two parties whom we have to recognise upon this field entered more deeply into the life of the early Church than has been hitherto supposed. Many points of this essay were noticed by Neander in the first edition of his " Planting and Training of the Christian Church by the Apostles," which appeared soon afterwards, in 1832 ; and it certainly did something to bring about a better understanding of several questions of early Church History. The road which had thus been opened vi PliEFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

soon led me to further results, which I laid before the world m my work on the Pastoral Epistles, 1835, and in the essay on the Epistle to the Eomans, Tub. Ztschr. ftir Theol. 1836, Part 3.

I have long meant to republish the two essays which appeared in our Magazine here, uniting them into a connected work with other cognate discussions. This is what the reader now has before him ; in fact the greatly extended compass of the present work entitles it to the position of a monograph on the Apostle PauL It may also claim to be a special examination of a movement in the early development of Christianity, the proper understanding of which is certainly surrounded with great difficulties, but is nevertheless indispensable for the solution of the great question of our time, what Christianity originally was, and essentially is.

I may assume that my method of historical criticism is well known. The doubtful honour has lately been paid me of being called the founder and master of a new critical school ; against which, even if I thought the compliment was seriously intended, I could do nothing but protest. It would be a poor account of former criticism, if the principles I have followed could with justice be called new ones. It cannot be the novelty of the principles that has given offence ; it must be the results to which they lead when well applied, which have caused the criticism of the new school to be called negative and destructive, ^^^lat do these formidable epithets amount to ? What would criticism he if denuded of the right to deny and to destroy ? The question can only be, what is denied, what is destroyed, and if there is good reason for doing it. And is not that criticism, which is held to he nothing but negative and destructive, really in the best sense conservative ? Does it not proceed on the simple principle that every man is to get and to keep what belongs to him, and nothinc^ but

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. vii

what belongs to him ? To this limitation the conservative principle is essentially subject, and feeling this, I can have no wish to acknowledge claims which are indefensible, to defend traditional opinions which are unfounded and untrue, or to ignore contradictions which are evident and palpable. There are distinctions and differences which require to be clearly set forth, if the matter in hand is to be understood at all; and I cannot be a party to smoothing them over and obliterating them, in order to keep things comfortable on the surface, and save the labour of thought. If this negative and destructive road has led me to results which conflict with the ordinary conceptions, let it be shown that they are wrong ; let them be examined and refuted, if that is possible, let them be denied and destroyed by the power of facts and arguments, if any one feels that he can do so !

There is no limit to controversy on points of detail. The abstract possibility of this and that detail can never be disproved : but this is not the way to dispose of a comprehensive historical theory. Such a theory appeals to its broad general truth, to which details are subordinate, and on which they depend : to the logical coherence of the whole, the preponderating inner probability and necessity of the case, as it impresses itself quietly upon the thoughtful mind ; and against this the party interests of the day will sooner or later cease to assert themselves. In this conviction I leave this work to make its own way.

Table Of Contents

PAGE

Introduction. — The Standpoint of the Inquiry— The Acts of the Apostles as the source of the Apostle Paul's History — Division of the whole subject, . 1

JTtrst Part.

Contents

Chapter IV. p^„.

The First Missionary Journey of the Apostle (Acts of the

Apostles xiii. xiv.), . 90

Introduction

THE STANDPOINT OF THE INQUIRY— THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES AS THE SOURCE OF THE APOSTLE PAUL's HISTORY — DIVISION OF THE WHOLE SUBJECT.

Critical inquiry into the primitive history of Christianity, its origin and first development, as they lie before us in the series of writings which form our New Testament Canon, is one of the great wants of our time; the interests and tendencies of this age earnestly demand a solution of this great problem. It may be justly said of the present age that its prevailing tendency is critical, and that its task is not so much to shape a world still growing, as to grasp one already grown and present, and to understand by what steps and processes it has come to be what it is. The principal efforts of the age in the higher walks of science are critical and historical in their nature ; everything that seeks to assert a position in the world is asked for its warrant in history ; everything found existing is examined down to the very foundation ; it is sought to go back to the beginning, to the first elements in which the germs of the whole process lay, in order to arrive at a clear insight into the whole from the discovered relations of the individual parts. Thought has now, after the laborious toil of many centuries, emancipated itself and cast away its crutches, and it naturally turns its gaze back into the Past. The spirit, at rest in itself in the assurance of its own self-consciousness, stands for the first time on a vantage-ground, from which it can look back

VOL. I. A o upon the paths along which it has passed, as circumstances shaped its course ; it retraces those paths not as at first, when it yielded unconsciously to surrounding influences, but recognising the inner necessity in obedience to which it has grown up to its present form. If in so many walks of human knowledge this critical labour is the necessary process through which the consciousness of the Present finds out its own relation to the Past, where can it be of greater importance than where the Present is linked with the Past by the strictest and closest ties, and where this union has its roots in the deepest interests of our spiritual being ? Christianity is on the one hand the great spiritual power which determines all the belief and thought of the present age, the absolute principle on which the self-consciousness of the spirit is supported and maintained, so that, unless it were essentially Christian, it would have no stability or firmness in itseK at alL On the other hand, the essential nature of Christianity is a purely historical question, whose solution lies only in that Past in which Christianity itself had its origin ; it is a problem which can only be solved by that critical attitude of thought which the consciousness of the present age assumes towards the Past. As soon as the separate elements of the problem which had been long preparing, independently of each other, were gathered together into one view and expressed systematically, the importance of the subject could not fail to appear : and this- was done by Strauss in his critical Life of Jesus. The strength of this criticism consisted in little more than this, that it drew necessary deductions from premisses which had long been in existence ; yet it took the public by surprise with the negative character of its results, and produced a painful impression which sought relief in crude and hasty refutations. How far these were successful, and in what way the pubUc mind has been affected by this great critical agitation, we need not here inquire ; but it is clear that, in spite of all possible results, the criticism was amply warranted on scientific grounds. It must be recognised as a service which the education of the age distinctly called for, and the result of what is said in so many quarters against the work of Strauss is simply to demonstrate the necessity of going still deeper and more thoroughly into the critical process which he began.

The criticism of the gospel history, inasmuch as it immediately concerns the life of the Founder of Christianity, and brings us in contact with so many other momentous questions, will long remain the most important object of the critical labours of our time. The inquiry which -ranks next to it in point of interest is concerned with the question how Christianity, which was at one time so closely interwoven with Judaism, broke loose from it and entered on its sphere of world-wide historical importance. The great historical interest of the Life of Jesus is that we see there the consciousness of the idea of Christianity and of its principle, which he first expressed and exemplified by the entire devotion of his whole being ; this is the great result of the Evangelical history. But when we proceed from the Evangelical history to that of the time of the Apostles, it is the practical realisation of that idea which becomes the object of historical research. And this practical realisation of the idea of Christianity first became a question when, in consequence of the death and resurrection of Jesus, that idea passed into the actual consciousness of men, and became part of them and a living power in them, and when it found in the bounds of the national Judaism the chief obstacle to its reaching the position in the world which was its due, as we can now perceive. How these bounds were broken through, how Christianity, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism, and being ultimately absorbed in it, asserted itself as a separate, independent principle, broke loose from it and took its stand as a new form of religious thought and life, essentially differing froin Judaism, and freed from all its national exclusiveness, is the point of next greatest importance in the primitive history of one Christianity. Here also, as in the Gospel history, the historicocritical inquiry finds itself engaged with the person and character of one man. That Christianity, in the universal historical importance which it achieved, was the work of the Apostle Paul is undeniably a matter of historical fact ; but in what manner he brought this about, how we are to conceive of his relations with the elder

Apostles, whether it was in harmony with them or in contradiction and opposition to them, that he carried out these principles and opinions which he was the first to ennunciate, this still requires a more thorough and searching inquiry. As in the Gospel history, historical criticism has here two accounts before it, which differ from each other and must be weighed and compared, in order to get from them what purely historical matter they may contain. These are the accounts given in the Acts of the Apostles and the historical data to be found in the Apostle's own Epistles. It would appear natural to suppose that in all the cases where the accounts in the Acts do not altogether agree with the statements of the Apostle, the latter must have such a decided claim to be considered authentic tmth that the contradictions in the Acts would scarcely be worth attention, but this rule, which the very nature of the case might seem to have required, has not up to this time been so much followed as it ought. Proceeding on the assumption of the thorough identity of the statements in the Acts of the Apostles and the personal declarations of the Apostle in his Epistles, writers have held that the existing discrepancies, even when they cannot be denied, are too slight and unimportant to need serious consideration, and in some cases the statements of the Acts have been believed, though contrary to the clear assertions of the Apostle. Thus not only is historical truth shorn of its own clear light, but we fall far short of that justice and impartiality which are due to the Apostle in judging of his life and labours. In order to show that his relations to the other Apostles were not disturbed by any serious differences, scholars have not hesitated to ascribe to him in many cases a course of action which, if it really was such as is stated, throws a very equivocal light on his character. A discussion of this part of the primitive history of Christianity, undertaken on the foundation of strict historical criticism, will therefore be at the same time an apology for the Apostle. Neander's History of the Apostolic Age is by no means free from this one-sided manner of treatment ; it makes a point of bringing the whole historical material into apparent harmony, and in this°way it has done much to distort and obscure the view of the chief events of this period of the development of Christianity.

The Acts of the Apostles first presents itself as the chief source of the history of the apostolic life and labours of the Apostle Paul. But the historian cannot take his stand on this work without first making himself acquainted with the relation in which it stands to its historical materials. Between the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles, as far as the historical contents of the latter can be compared with the former, there will be found in general the same relation as that between the Gospel of John and the Synoptical Gospels. The comparison of these two sources leads us to the conclusion that, considering the great difference between the two statements, historical truth must be entirely on one side or entirely on the other. To which it does belong can only be decided by applying the undisputed historical canon that the statement which has the greatest claim to historical truth is that which apppears most unprejudiced and nowhere betrays a desire to subordinate its historical material to any special subjective aim. For the history of the Apostolic Age the Pauline Epistles must in any case take precedence of aU the other New Testament writings as an authentic source. On this account alone, if this were all, the Acts must take a secondary place ; but there is also the further consideration that the same rule which defines the relation of the Synoptical Gospels to the Gospel of John finds its application in the case of the Acts of the Apostles. The opinion which I have here to express on the Acts of the Apostles, in order to indicate the standpoint of the following inquiry, is that the facts with which it deals do not appear to be narrated simply and directly, but to be modified by certain subjective aims which the writer had in view. And here I am very glad to be able to refer to a critical investigation which I have no scruple in following, its results being in fact what I had myself arrived at some time ago in a different way.-' Schnecken-

1 Solineckenburger " Ueber den Zweck der Apostelgeschichte,'' Berne, 1841. See my review of this Essay in the Jahrbucher f iir wissensohaftliohe Kritik, March, 1841. No. 46.

burger designated the aim of the Acts of the Apostles as apologetic. According to the results of his inquiry, we have to consider this work as a defence of the Apostle Paul in his apostolic dignity and his personal and apostolic conduct, especially in the matter of the Gentiles, as against the attacks and accusations of the Judaizing party. The idea that runs through the whole is that of a parallel between the two Apostles Peter and Paul, and pervades each ofthe two great sections into which the work is divided^ (chapters i. to xiL, and xiii. to the end). The unity of the work consists in this idea ; its chief tendency is to represent the difference between Peter aiid Paul as unessential and trifling. To this end Paul is made in the second part to appear as much as possible like Peter, and Peter in the first part as much as possible like Paul. Thus it is sought to bring the two as near to each other as possible, so that the one may be, as it were, answerable for the other ; and the author being undoubtedly a Paulinist, this has been done in the interests of PauL Hence, as Schneckenburger points out, the second part omits no possible proof of Paul's righteousness according to the law (such as zealous keeping of feasts, frequent journeys to the Temple, private asceticism, and- circumcision) ; and, on the other hand, there is no trace of that side of Pauline religion which was a protest against legalism. The same Judaizing tendency which meets us in the personal conduct of Paul is also evident in the account of his official labours. Paul pays all due consideration not only to the elder Apostles, who are completely at one with him (chapter xv.), but also to the Jewish people. In one point this is especially insisted on ; we are told again and again, as often as the occasion requires, that wherever he went, he first proclaimed the Gospel to the Jews, and that only when they rejected him and his Gospel did he turn to the Gentiles. Schneckenburger, with much acuteness, further endeavours to prove that aU the important omissions in the Pauline history are to be accounted for by this apologetic tendency of the

1 This idea, and the view of the aims of the Acts of the Apostles dependiog on '^'l first enunciated in my treatise Ueber den Ursprungdes Episcopats, Tiibiugen Zcitschnft fur Theologie, 1838, pt. 3, p. 142. ■. i > e

Acts. They refer to persons or events, the mention or description of which would have involved an essentially different picture of Paul from that suggested by the story as it stands. They save the writer, in fact, from mentioning the prejudices and misrepresentations of the Judaizers which we hear of in the Pauline Epistles. The most remarkable instance of this kind is the utter silence of the Acts of the Apostles with regard to the scene related in the Epistle to the Galatians between Peter and Paul at Antioch ; and with this may be connected the omission of the name of Titus in the Acts. The first part of the Acts is constructed in accordance with the same apologetic aim. The Jewish opponents of the Apostle Paul, as we see especially in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, would not allow that the visions which he claimed for himself were any proof of his apostolic mission. In this view the vision ascribed to Peter (chapter x), and its acknowledgment by the Primitive Church, is of importance as an indirect legitimation of the Pauline visions. But this vision has reference to the conversion of the first GentUe, Cornelius. If therefor^ the Judaizers complained that the Apostle Paul devoted himself to the conversion of the Gentiles, whilst the children of the Covenant were still for the most part unconverted, the first part shows that Gentiles had been baptised long before Paul's time, baptised by Peter himself, the head of the Judaizers. Thus the whole question of the admission of the Gentiles had been decided by a divine vision, by the assent of the Primitive Church, and by the most distinct expressions and acts of the Apostles. Paiil therefore had only to tread in the footsteps of the older Apostles. In particular, a comparison of the passages (xv. 7, 14) shows an unmistakable design to claim for Peter the earliest labour among the Gentiles, and through this precedent to impress on the activity of Paul, so blamed by some, the seal of legitimacy given by the whole Primitive Church. Everything shows how desirous the author of the Acts of the Apostles is to prove that Peter began the conversion of the Gentiles. He did this by divine command after the indifference of the Jews in general had been proved by experience. , ^neckenburger rightly finds another great proof of this apologetic tendency of the Acts of the Apostles in the fact that whilst the second part makes Paul believe and speak as much as possible in conformity with the demands of the Judaizing party, the same principles of equal participation by Jews and Gentiles in the Messianic salvation which Paul develops at length in the Epistle to the Eomans are laid down and carried out in practice by the Judaeo- Christian Apostles in the first part. The universalism of Christianity and the propriety of preaching to the Gentiles were so distinctly recognised by Peter that no doubt can be entertained that the narrator intended the words of Jesus (i. 8) to convey an intimation of this doctrine.

Schneckenburger has incontestably proved that the Acts of the Apostles is to be understood from this apologetic point of view. It might indeed be asked whether it was written exclusively in this apologetic interest, whether it does not also contain passages which cannot be so easily reconciled with such a purpose, and in which the aim seems to be the general one of furnishing a historical narrative. But the great aim of the work is perfectly clear, and we need not give it up even though there should be some passages of such a kind. The second part, which is occupied exclusively with the Apostle Paul, offers no difficulty in this respect, for although the narrative of the Apostle's travels might seem to contain more personal and special details than the apologetic aim required, still it is clear that this very narrative is coloured throughout in accordance with that aim. In the first part indeed the purely historical interest would seem to predominate over the apologetic one, if we did not take into consideration that the author had first of all to secure his historical basis for the parallel which he has in view, and also that his apologetic aim was forwarded, indirectly at least, to a considerable extent, by the care and accuracy which he employs in his account of the circumstances and arrangements of the first Christian Church. His description of the early church was the part of his work which would appeal most to the Judaists, and by dweUing on it at some length he secured a good introduction for his main theme, the apology of the Apostle Paul, which thus appeared in the form of a simple historical narrative.

In reality, however, we ought not to set the apologetic in such direct opposition to the historical interest ; they are not inconsistent with each other: the first may be established in such a way as to leave ample room for the second : indeed the apologetic aim cannot be carried out without a proper historical foundation on which to proceed. Another and much more important question here suggests itself, namely, how the supposition of the apologetic aim of the Acts of the Apostles which we have indicated affects the historical trustworthiness of the work and the authorship of Luke ? Sehneckenburger takes great pains to show that the book need not suffer in these particulars, though his results be true. He is anxious to refute tlie opinions of those who differ from him in casting suspicion on the historical trustworthiness of the Acts, and pronounces repeatedly and decidedly in favour of the traditional vview that Luke was the author. But it is not possible for him to carry out his view of the aim of the Acts without sometimes granting more than seems to be compatible with the supposition of its being the work of an author standing in so close a connection with the Apostle. In .this point of view, how suspicious are such admissions as the following : " Luke's plan evidently did not suggest to him a complete historical picture of Paul, but as brilliant a one as possible. He may not have incorporated in his work any unhistorical feature, yet the picture is obviously incomplete, wanting, as it does, the chief features of the Pauline character which meet us in his own writings" (p. 58). " The picture it presents .of Paul and his labours is a partial one, not always nor in ev«ry detail in conformity with the description he gives of himself in the Epistles, and is one that could not have been drawn by a Paulinist writing without any apologetic aim " (p. 92). "There may be really -some dif&culty in reconciling the later historical fact of the Judaizing of Peter with the Paulinist teachings and labours which are .attributed to Peter in the first part ; and on the other hand Paul seems in the second part to have accommodated himself more to Jewish wishes and prejudices than

■we could have expected ; to say the least, the characteristic Pauline decisiveness nowhere appears either in teaching or action (p. 210). That in speaking of the Apostle's journey to Jerusalem the author has not only forborne to mention the collection, for the sake of which we know that it was undertaken, but even given a different reason for the journey in order to fill up the gap thus made (p. 113) ; that the objective succession of events is internally improbable (p. 145); that he has permitted himself to use an unhistorical exaggeration (p. 182), etc. etc. ; — all this Schneckenburger cannot deny, however lightly he passes over such points, and careful though he is throughout to prevent any suspicion of historical fiction from attaching to the author of the Acts of the Apostles. In spite of all he thinb the historical credibility of the work stands unshaken ; but after admissions like these this is no longer possible.

This silence of itself, and the distortion of facts which it involves, is enough to show that the writer was not too truthful oi too conscientious even to deny the truth of history when he found it his interest to do so. If we go through the whole series of particulars in which Schneckenburger traces the parallel which the writer sought to draw between the two Apostles, and then carefully consider how analogous the one is to the other, who can believe that the author took all this only from the history lying before him, and did nothing but select what suited him ? This remarkable fact is just what leads us to the assumption of a special aim, in the light of which the work is to be read. But supposing Schneckenburger's view of the author's trustworthiness to be the true one, what the better are we? The phenomenon before us remains unexplained : if the facts occurred as they are here narrated, then our writer need have been nothing more than a mere chronicler, and it becomes extremely doubtful if he did follow the apologetic aim which is imputed to him, a thing which he himself nowhere mentions. The more clearly we trace an apologetic aim in his narrative, the more questionable must it appear whether what he gives us is a purely historical narrative; and it cannot be denied that possibly, if not probably, he has in many cases altered the true history, not only negatively, by ignoring actions and circumstances which bear essentially on his subjectmatter, but also positively.

The most weighty reason for this opinion is, that the Paul of the Acts is manifestly quite a different person from the Paul of the Epistles. "Evidently," says Schneckenburger himself (p. 150), " we do not here get a full and entire account of Paul's relation to the law, but a one-sided one, and there is really nothing laid before us to explain how the other side of that relation is to be reconciled with this one. When we consider how this view of Paul's relation to the law is here embodied in a historical narrative, and how, when the writer comes to discuss the charge brought against Paul of unfaithfulness to the law, he simply, and without any explanation, makes him perform an act of legal conformity in order to prove that charge a slander (Acts xxi. 20 sg.) (Paul himself makes good his position (Kom. iii. 31), voimov ov KaTapyovfiev Sia T77? Triarecoi}, aXXa vofiov la-Toifiev, in a different way, by force of the keenest dialectic), the conjecture is surely allowable that a special purpose is to be served in presenting Paul to the readers of the Acts in this particular light." The two views which are to be taken together to make one Paul are, in fact, so divergent and heterogeneous that the connection that is necessary to harmonise them is anything but self-evident. If the writer of the Acts be, after all, a faithful reporter of history, then the means for harmonising the two representations must be sought for in the Apostle himself; that is to say, the historical character of the author can only be maintained at the cost of the moral character of the Apostle.