Paul : the man, the missionary, and the teacher

Front matter

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Preface

SINCE the beginning of serious biblical study a profound interest has been felt in the personality, life, and teachings of the great apostle to the gentiles. This interest is not confined to Bible-students, but has extended to the large number of persons who are attracted by the history of civilisation and of liberty and by the study of the causes which have effected the enfranchisement and progress of human thought. Its highest degree and its widest extent are amply justified both by the wonderful character and genius of the man and by the epoch-making force of his thinking and his religious insight. It is not to be put to his credit that he emancipated Christianity from Judaism. To have separated it from what is best in the Jewish religion and ethics would have been to render it a great disservice. That he liberated it from bondage to externalities and formalism, and gave it to mankind not only as a doctrine, but also as a power of the Spirit and as , an ethical life, is his indefeasible merit.

One of the most remarkable phenomena of the history of mankind is presented in the personality and character of this man who suddenly appeared "as one born out of due time" with incalculable force and resistless enthusiasm upon the field of primitive-Christian activities. Though he be called a man of God, a providential man, in the eminent sense of the words, he must remain inexplicable until he is

vil via PREFACE

interpreted with due regard to his natural antecedents and his intellectual and religious environment. From these he could not free himself. By the highest flights of his genius he could not escape from the atmosphere in which his spirit drew the breath of life. It is in the hope of contributing somewhat to such an interpretation of the life and teaching of the greatest of the apostles of Jesus that this book has been written. Aware of the difficulty of the task and conscious of his own limitations the author craves the considerate judgment and the helpful criticism of his readers.

It is not in accordance with the purpose of this book, which it is hoped will meet the wants of the general reader interested in its subject, as well as satisfy the requirements of the biblical student, to enter upon an elaborate criticism of the Pauline Epistles. The discussion of the apostle's teachings has, however, been based upon those writings of his which are accepted as genuine by all except a small minority of scholars. These six Epistles, Romans, i and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, i Thessalonians, and Philippians, not only contain all that is important in his teaching, but also present his views in the most succinct and self-consistent form.

The consideration of the apostle's missionary work has been conducted not from the external point of view of Acts, but from the inward aspect presented in the Epistles, which reveal the internal condition of the churches, as well as the personality of the great teacher and his demeanour in the midst of the trials and conflicts incident to his work, while they disclose the forces which were operating in primitive Christianity.

PREFACE IX

The frequent reference to certain doctrines of the apostle in the course of the book will not incur the criticism of repetition from any one who considers how intimately his fundamental teachings are related not only to one another, but also to numerous subsidiary matters treated of in the Epistles.

A few of these chapters have been previously published in The New World and The American Journal of Theology, but they have all received revision and additions.

O. C.

Chapter I

OF the early years of the great apostle to the gentiles we have unhappily only meagre information. As to his education in boyhood and youth and the influences and associations amid which he grew up, we have no definite knowledge, and must resort to conjectures drawn from what we know of his situation and surroundings and of the customs of the time. His birthplace. Tarsus, in Cilicia, the southwest province of Asia Minor, was a city of some commercial importance, one of the chief occupations of whose inhabitants was the manufacture of sail-cloth from the hair of goats. This handicraft the young Saul doubtless acquired here, and we may assume that his early years were occupied with its pursuit. That he was of humble parentage and under the necessity of supporting himself by his own labour is as evident as it is that he did not think self-support discreditable. Rather he was inclined to boast of the renunciation of his right to be nurtured by his churches and of living by the work of his own hands (i Cor. ix. 5-15 ; i Thess. ii. 6, 9). The fact that it was the custom for Jewish boys to learn a trade does not render the poverty of Saul's family improbable. It is evident from his own declarations that he was not a man of fortune or even of a competency, and that his missionary travels and work were performed under the conditions attendant upon extreme indigence. Here in Tarsus the youthful Saul was surrounded by the unadulterated cult of the rankest heathenism. But the seclusion of the Jewish quarter, his education at home, and the natural antipathy of a Jew to polytheistic rites, must have preserved him from close contact with the corrupting influences of idolatrous worship. On the other hand, it is not improbable that the impression made upon his young mind by the moral degradation of heathen Tarsus was reproduced in the dark picture of gentile vice and shame drawn in Rom. i. 21-32, just as the inscription upon the pedestal of the statue of Sardanapalus in a neighbouring city : " Eat, drink, enjoy thyself; the rest is nothing," may have suggested the pessimistic words : " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die " (i Cor. xv. 32).

The schools of the sophists, the rhetoricians, and the grammarians in Tarsus appear to have excited disgust rather than interest in the mind of the young man, who later in life could speak only with contempt of the "disputes" and "the wisdom of this world" (i Cor. i. 20). It is probable accordingly that he was less influenced by Greek culture than some have supposed, a strong repugnance to which as degrading and corrupting was a settled feeling in Jewish houses. An education in the Greek language would have rendered him more skilful in writing it than he was according to his own confession (Gal. vi. 11), and would have made it unnecessary for him to dictate his letters to amanuenses. His Greek style denotes that his knowledge of the language was not acquired in the schools of the rhetoricians, but was rather such as a Jew of the Dispersion, a Hellenist, might gain from living in a cornmunity in which it was spoken and from the reading of the Greek translation of the Old Testament and the apocrypha. As to Greek literature in general, there is no indication in his writings of an acquaintance with it. He does not write like a man who has formed his style upon Greek models, and he certainly does not reason after the manner of a student of the Grecian philosophers. His citation of current adages from Greek poets should not be adduced as an evidence of his familiarity with their writings. The quotation from Menander, " Evil communications corrupt good manners'* (i Cor. xv. 33), was probably in everybody's mouth, and attention has been called to the circumstance that in writing it the apostle ** missed the metre," and thus showed that he was not familiar with the Greek prosody. Whatever culture he had was that of a Hebrew who had diligently studied the literature of his own people. He thought in Hebrew, expressed himself in the Hebrew idiom, and his writings betray throughout the absence of the breadth and refinement of a cosmopolitan literary training. His own boast was that he was " of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews ; as touching the law, a Pharisee " (Phil. iii. 5), and his entire performance as a writer makes good the boast.

Whether Saul could ever have become Paul the apostle to the gentiles or not, if he had been reared in a Palestinian village instead of in the commercial centre Tarsus, is a question that we need not discuss. If, however, we take account at all of natural causes in his development, we may well believe that a youth passed in Tarsus could not be without important consequences in the production of such a capacity for dealing with men as the apostle displayed. Natural qualifications must of course have their rights ; but these do not come to their fruitage without dependence upon early influences and associations. The impressions and impulses received in youth may contribute to form breadth of view and great policies in manhood, just as they show themselves in the writer, while he cannot tell how it happens that his style is such as it is. The contrast has been pointed out between the illustrations employed by Jesus and those with which Paul embellished his teachings, the former drawn from the fields and gardens of Palestine, the latter from the Jewish household, the city, and the arena. The difference, however, is not altogether due to education and environment in youth. To Paul was wanting the poetic soul of Jesus. Tarsus was surrounded by magnificent natural scenery, and in his journeys the apostle passed where the most delightful views of mountain and plain must have been before him. But he does not appear to have been impressed by the grandeur and beauty of nature, and of close observation of the outer world he could have had none, or he would not have assumed that a wild olive slip was grafted upon a fruitful tree (Rom. xi. 17). Who will say that his disposition toward the gentiles, which made his mission as their apostle possible, did not have its roots in the same early associations and culture that led him to introduce as a matter of course into an Epistle to one of his churches an illustration from the Grecian games, which were an abomination to the average Jew >

As "a Hebrew of the Hebrews" the youthful Saul must have had in his father's house the education and training of the Jewish boy of pious parentage. An outline of this preeminently religious education has been gathered from Jewish sources, and is in general to the following purport : ** With the fifth year began in the house of the Pharisee the reading of the Scriptures, and not much later the visiting of the synagogue on the three

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES J

hours of prayer, which to the Jews of the Dispersion signified the three daily sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem. On Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the reading of the law was listened to. The scholar gradually grew into the school and into the office of a teacher. He read the law, undertook its interpretation, and shared in the controversies. Attendance upon the catechetical and disputatorial exercises and zeal in copying the sacred Scriptures completed the scribe.** This was essentially a biblical training, by means of which the boy became familiar with the text of the Old Testament, lived in the history of his race, that wonderful history of miracles and providential guidance, and held converse with the great lawgiver and with prophets and psalmists. One cannot read a page o\ PauFs writings without finding the traces of such an education. So penetrated was he with the ideas of the Old Testament that he could not write on a doctrinal or religious theme without reference to them. Hence it has been said that he ** judaised,** and that " his thinking was a thinking [ in quotations.*' It cannot, however, but appear to us with our regard for exact interpretation of the text as an inconsistency in the apostle that, holding the Old Testament to be the word of the Spirit, he should have been so indifferent to the actual meaning of passages in it as to employ the incorrect Septuagint version whenever it gave a sense better suited to his purpose than that of the Hebrew.

In order, however, that the Old Testament should be one of the formative influences in the education of the young man, it must be interpreted, and its interpretation is itself an influence which has innumerable hazards. The interpretation dominates the book, and subjects it to its point of view and purpose. Accordingly, it should not surprise us to find that the Old Testament pure and simple, that is, interpreted by a strict grammatical and historical method, influenced Paul less than did the method of treating it in which he was reared, or, in other words, than the Jewish theology in the light of which it was expounded to him. In the first place, it was a fundamental principle in this theology that the sacred writings were the immediate expression of the divine thought and will, and as such were to be regarded as an infallible authority. Secondly, there was wanting to its conception and treatment of the Scriptures a definite view of the relation of its parts to one another, or, in other words, an historical apprehension of the whole, so that separate passages instead of being interpreted in their proper connection were arbitrarily torn from it, and applied according to the exigencies of the particular case or occasion. The Jewish theologians also adopted the allegorical method of interpreting the Scriptures. Proceeding from their premises of inspiration, they believed that every passage must contain a profound and important sense, and when the grammatical rendering did not give such a sense, they made the passage mean something else, or allegorised it.*

This allegorical method of interpretation, conspicuously represented by the Alexandrian school, was adopted by Paul in conformity with the ideas of the time, and he makes frequent use of it apparently without a consciousness and certainly without a purpose of distorting the Scriptures in order to make them subserve his ends. Wishing to maintain by a biblical passage the doctrine that the preachers of the gospel were entitled to support from the churches, he refers to the direction in Deut. xxv. 4, that the ox which threshes the corn should not be muzzled, and declares that it was not written on account of the oxen, since God does not care for them, but with reference

* From AXXa and dyopevuf, " to say other things," i,e, other things than the literal or obvious sense conveys.

to the missionaries, "for our sakes" (i Cor. ix. 9, 10). A sense directly opposed to that conveyed by the word in the original Hebrew is imposed upon " seed " in Gal. iii. 16, where reference is made to the promise to Abraham that in his seed should all nations be blessed. In order to make an application of the passage to Christ he says that the singular form of the word, which evidently means the entire posterity of Abraham, is used, and that the writer did not mean, " and to seeds as of many, but as of one, and to thy seed, which is Christ.*' In Gal. iv. 22-27 the history of the two sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, is allegorised in the sense that they represent the two covenants, although in the original there is not the slightest hint that such a meaning was in the thought of the writer. " Hagar," he remarks, ** is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children." In this laboured allegorising he overlooks the fact that the legislation of Sinai was given to the descendants of Isaac, and that it was they who were " in bondage " to the law. Sarah, nevertheless, represents the "Jerusalem which is above," the free Jerusalem, " which is the mother of us all ; " and in proof of this he quotes from Isaiah words addressed by the prophet to the new Jerusalem that was to be built, as if they had application to Sarah and her descendants. In like manner he reads into the account of Abraham's faith, which was reckoped to him for righteousness, the quite foreign sense that this was not written for his sake alone, but for us also, " if we believe on Him who raised up our Lord Jesus from the dead " (Rom. iv. 23 f.).

In this connection an argument is constructed to prove that the promise to Abraham was not to " his seed through the law," that is, to his Jewish descendants, but to " his seed through the righteousness of faith." This turn is lO THE MAN

given to the passage in order to bring the gentiles under the promise, and the proof is found in the words from the Old Testament, "I have made thee a father of many nations." This citation is made with the utmost natvet/, as if the writer quoted were thinking of the same application which Paul makes of the passage, while it is evident that such a sense was as remote as possible from the intention of the former. This imposing upon a passage of a meaning remote from its original sense cannot be regarded as furnishing a proof from Scripture even on the presumption of its authority by any one who holds to established principles of interpretation, and it is not surprising that Luther thought this kind of scriptural argument "too weak to hold." But Paul's preoccupation with a dogmatic purpose led him to see in the Jewish Scriptures the ideas which filled his own mind, and his education in the current theology of his time had not taught him to read his Bible with a view to ascertaining its historical sense. In this respect he was as truly a child of his age as was Philo, and his exegesis must be judged as we judge that of the latter.

To one who does not regard the matter in this light, it is surprising to find the apostle proceeding nafvely to condemn the Old Testament doctrine of legal righteousness out of that collection itself by bringing different parts of it into conflict with one another. In order to prove, for example, his great proposition that righteousness is not by the works of the law, he quotes Deut. xxvii. 26, " Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them '* — a passage which evidently implies that every one ought to keep the law, and can keep it if he will, and so avoid the curse. Then in order to show that this very thing is impossible, and that " no man is justified by the law," he

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES II

quotes from Habak. ii. 4, "The just shall live by faith," as if the writer of Habakkuk had in mind precisely the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. Immediately he adds, " And the law is not of faith," and again quotes : " The man that doeth them shall live in them," that is, the man who keeps the commandments of the law shall live in them, the very thing of which he is arguing the impossibility (Gal. iii. 10-12). His preoccupation with justification by faith leads him to another even more arbitrary treatment of an Old Testament passage (Deut. xxx. 11-15) in which the writer represents the law as so near to every man that he is inexcusable who does not observe its requirements. It is not in heaven, that it should be brought down by a messenger sent up for it, and it is not beyond the sea, that some one should go and fetch it, but " it is very nigh unto thee in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou shouldst keep it." The doctrine of righteousness by works, which Paul vehemently repudiated, could not be more explicitly declared than it is here. Yet he interprets the passage to a directly opposite int«nt, by putting the words of Deuteronomy into the mouth of Righteousness by faith personified and referring them to Christ instead of to the law : " But the Righteousness which is by faith speaketh in this wise. Say not in thine heart, who shall ascend into heaven (that is, to bring Christ down from above), or who shall descend into the deep (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what saith it } The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart." This " word," however, is not the word of the law, as in Deuteronomy, but with a most astonishing simplicity the apostle adds, " that is, the word of faith which we preach " (Rom. xi. 6-8).

Paul also learned from his Jewish teachers the interpretation known as the typological, the principle of which is that events and persons of a past time may be regarded as prefiguring occurrences and individuals of a later age. It is evident that if this method of interpretation has any validity at all, it must be because the earlier historian or biographer was conscious of the relation of the historical incidents and personages of his record to the future, and definitely indicated that relation. This alone could furnish a check upon the arbitrary reference of any event or personality in the past to any subsequent occurrences under the relation of type and antitype. The fact, however, is that the typological interpretation, as it was practised by the ancients, was entirely without such a restraint, and was accordingly fanciful and wholly unsound, unless one is willing to adopt the presumption that the writers who employed it were infallibly inspired, and thus qualified to discern in the history of the past relations and profound meanings which the authors of that history give no intimation of having intended to convey. But there is no need to resort to a supernatural explanation of typology, since an historical account of its origin is at hand. It was doubtless an adaptation by the Hellenistic Jews, that is, the Jews whose thought was influenced by Greek ideas, from the Platonic doctrine of idea and type, and was extensively employed by Philo, the Alexandrian Hellenist, to whom the entire Old Testament history was full of types whose antitypes he had no difficulty in finding. The writer of Hebrews, in whom the Hellenistic influence is more conspicuous than in Paul, finds in Melchisedec a type of Christ and in the Jewish sacrifices the " shadow of heavenly things.*' For to him " Christ did not enter into the holy places made with hands, which are a figure of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us." * In like manner Paul interprets the history of the Israelites in the wilderness. They were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, ate the spiritual food, drank the spiritual drink of the spiritual Rock that followed them, that is, Christ, displeased God, became some of them idolaters, and committed fornication. All these things happened to them for ensamples or types, and are written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the world are come (i Cor. x. i-ii). Jewish rabbinical' and Hellenistic influences are manifest in this interpretation. In the rabbinical tradition the rock is represented as having rolled through the desert after the Israelitish host, and the Hellenistic book, the Wisdom of Solomon, finds in the overshadowing cloud the person of the divine Wisdom, while Philo takes the rock for Wisdom and the Logos.

Such coincidences are most naturally explained by the supposition that the education of Paul was influenced by the current ideas of the time, and that he derived from his teachers the method of interpretation which they employed. Various contacts in his writings with ideas and expressions contained in the book of the Wisdom of Solomon already mentioned indicate that Hellenistic ideas as well as the Hellenistic method of interpretation were among the influences that formed the apostle's thinking. "This book, written by an Alexandrian Jew in the first century before Christ, contains a polemic against heathen materialism and idolatry and an apology for the Jewish belief in God as the true Wisdom which secures the blessedness of man in this life and in that which is to come." The author was familiar not only with the Old Testament, but also with the philosophy of the Greeks, of which he makes use in his argument, particularly of the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It is probable that Paul was acquainted with this book, though he so far surpasses its point of view that its influence upon him cannot be regarded as of great importance. If Hellenism gave him his ideas of the outward and inward man, the "mind" (voO?), the " soul " (V^^x*;), " conscience/' and the ** flesh," the use which he makes of them shows how far he passed beyond his teachers, and how the religious genius can transform to divine ends materials which in other 'hands serve only trivial purposes. The Book of Wisdom says that the body weighs down the soul, and oppresses the mind, and in this fact the writer finds an explanation of the defects of the human understanding and of spiritual incapacity. But all that he says bears no comparison with Paul's arraignment of the flesh as the seat of sin and his graphic and powerful delineation of the fruitless struggle of the inward man with the outward, of the mind which serves the law of God with the fatal law in the members (Rom. vii. 15-25). Paul was himself a Hellenist, and owed not a little to Greece, but the ideas which he received from his Hellenistic teachers were subordinated to his gospel of the cross, and came out of his Christian consciousness transformed.

Whether the education of the youthful Saul was completed in the synagogue at Tarsus, or in Jerusalem "at the feet of Gamaliel,** as the writer of Acts represents, is a question which we must leave without discussion.* We have no declaration on the subject in the letters of the apostle, which also contain no intimation of his presence in Jerusalem at the time of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, t His own assertion that he was a Pharisee of the

♦ Acts xxii. 3. The speeches ascribed to Paul in Acts must in the nature of the case be regarded as composed by the writer of that book.

t The fact that Paul gives no intimation in his Epistles of a knowledge of the preaching of the Baptist and of a personal acquaintance with Jesus does not indeed exclude his prior residence for a few years in Jerusalem, The know-

Strictest sort is borne out by his teachings and his attitude in general toward the questions with which the Jewish teachers were occupied. Although the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead underwent important modifications at his hands, and was stripped of its materialistic features, its source is evident His gospel of the cross is Christian rather than Jewish ; but only a man imbued with the Jewish doctrine of satisfaction, of atonement for sin, could have conceived it. His doctrine of righteousness had its roots in Judaism, but it was a bold and radical modification of all that he had learned on the subject from his Jewish teachers. His transformation of the national doctrine of the Messiah furnished him with a solution 6i the problem, how the mass of men in whom the evil impulse predominated could attain the righteousness requisite for the Messianic kingdom, which his teachers were unable to resolve. To them the Messiah was to be a national deliverer, and they had no idea of his religious office as an atonement for sin. Paul solved the problem by the original conception of the Messiah as the second Adam, the representative of the human race, in which capacity his death on the cross satisfied the demands of the law for all, and made accessible to them a new righteousness by faith. In this teaching, however, he

ing of Christ " according to the flesh" (Kara ffdpKo), to which he confesses in 2 Cor. V. 16, does not imply a personal acquaintance with him, but rather denotes a knowledge of him prior to his conversion the opposite of that spiritual apprehension of his person and mission which he afterwards entertained. The interpretation of the passage given by Jowett ( TAg Epistles of Si. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians^ and Romans^ Vol. I., pp. 8 ff.) to the effect that the knowledge " according to the flesh " was " in a more Jewish and less Christian manner," that it was subsequent to the conversion, and that the apostle later attained a more spiritual point of view, is not supported in the Epistles. The fact that the profounder apprehension of Christ does not appear in i Thessalonians is explained by the point of view of that letter and the matters with which he had to deal in writing it.