The story of St. Paul's life and letters

Front matter

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. Copyright, taoe, by James Pott # Oo. New For*.

THE STORY

Prefatory Note

During several years past, for some months each year, I have treated my Sunday morning congregation as a great Bible-class, taking them straight through the whole Bible in broad outline. This book is the substance of one of these lecture-series, which accounts for a few phrases and peculiarities of diction not easily eliminated.

J. p. s.

St. George's, Montreal, Easter, 1917.

Part III The Master Builder

VI. The Fight for Freedom 53

VII. Second Missionary Tour 67

VIII. How the Gospel Came to Europe 78

IX. In Athens 88

X. The New Testament in the Making 102

XL Diana of the Ephesians 115

XII. The Care of All the Churches 129

XIII. Faith and Works 134

XIV. The Works of the Law in the Twentieth Cen-

tury 14 1

vii viii CONTENTS

Part IV To Prison And To Death Chapter Page

XV. Going up to Jerusalem 151

XVI. Riot and Arrest 159

XVII. Four Cesarean Pictures 169

XVIII. The Shipwreck 183

XIX. In Chains 191

XX. Letters from Rome 199

XXI. Letters from Rome — Continued , 206

XXII. The Passing of Paul 213

Part I Introductory

THE STORY OF ST. PAUL'S LIFE AND LETTERS

PART I INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER I How to Study St. Paul

One sometimes wonders why we should have in the Bible so much more of the Life and Letters of the one apostle whom Christ appointed after His Ascension than of the others whom He appointed in His earthly life. But we have no doubt that if only one was to be given that one should be St. Paul. For no one of the others, not St. Peter, not even St. John, counted for so much in the beginnings of the Christ tian Church.

It is almost impossible to overstate what Paul meant to Christianity. The simple, affectionate peasant men of Galilee could tell with convincing power, as no others could, of the wonderful three years when they walked 'with Jesus over the fields of Palestine, how they learned to love Him as no man was ever loved before, how they saw Him dead, how He came back to them alive, how their deep affection rose into wonder and awe and adoration as they realized who He was who was their Comrade and Friend. As one of themselves puts it long afterward 1 " We declare to you that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld and our hands handled concerning the Word of Life. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." No one else could do what they did. The simple story, the deep conviction, the personal touch were irresistible.

But the Church had to go out into the pagan world and down into the coming centuries, to meet cold indifference and clever scepticism and fierce opposition and controversies too keen for " unlearned and ignorant men." Was that why the Lord of the Church intervened, who had promised to be with it always to the end of the world ? He called to Him a man, gave him personal touch with Himself, convinced him. beyond all gainsaying, won his passionate, adoring gratitude and love — a man who was a genius, a scholar, a thinker and intellectual leader of men and, above all, a man who in his utter devotion all his life after delights to call himself " the bond-slave of Jesus Christ." That is the marvellous thing in the story of Paul who had never seen Jesus in the flesh and who was so obstinately unbelieving — the utter trust, the complete surrender, the close, reverent, personal love which the Lord won from him in that mysterious hour on the road to Damascus.

1 Johni:i;" John 1:14.

HOW TO STUDY ST. PAUL 3

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We are to study his life-story. It is not easy, for the beginning and the end of the story are cut off. We have only the record of his middle life from the day when in his mature manhood St. Luke met him and began putting him into his diary to the day, thirty years later, when the diarist dropped his pen, probably stricken from him by the hand of death. We have no record of his youth, no record of his old age, nor of the end. Though in another sense than his Lord he seems to come to us like Melchisedek "without father or mother or genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life.'V"

And even that imperfect story is full of gaps. The biographer was not always present. There were many things that he did not know. Take for example this one sentence out of one of Paul's letters l : "Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one; thrice was I beaten with rods; once was I stoned; thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils among false brethren, in hunger and thirst, in fastings, in cold, in nakedness."

Not one of the five scourgings finds place in the history; not one of the three shipwrecks, though a later one is described fully. No word of that terrible night and a day clinging probably to a raft in the wide Mediterranean. Think of all the romantic interest of the robber attacks in the mountains; of the rivers suddenly rising in flood to sweep away the boats. What an interesting life of Paul we should have if we knew it all!

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Happily, we are not quite left to St. Luke's diary. There are thirteen of St. Paul's letters bound up in the New Testament. Some others seem to have been lost, and unfortunately, we have so badly arranged those thirteen as to spoil their value in some degree to the general reader. There is no attempt at chronological order, no attempt it would seem at any order except that of placing them according to length, which not only confuses the sequence of facts mentioned in them but also obscures the gradual development of the writer's thought and teaching. We have known all this for a long time but we are too conservative to alter it. Let us hope that some Bible publisher will some day put it right. In this book I have attempted to place the letters in their order and as far as possible to put each in its right setting.

These letters illumine the whole story. They not only gives us additional facts, but they do much towards giving us the man himself. For they are real letters, not formal treatises or sermons (except perhaps the Epistle to the Romans). Genuine letters to living men whom he knew and cared for, giving immediate answers to pressing questions and warnings and exhortations bearing on the everyday life of people with whom he was intimate — easy, natural letters like our own giving the personal touch, the impetuous temper, the affectionate nature of the man.

Indeed for our purpose they are rather better than our own letters, for they are dictated and so come straight from his heart. Busy men then as now dictated their letters, and perhaps Paul's eyesight made

HOW TO STUDY ST. PAUL 5

it more necessary. So we read: e.g., "I, Tertius, who write this epistle salute you." Then at the close Paul scrawls in his ending: "I, Paul, salute you with mine own hand, which is my token in every epistle."

The man just talked as he walked the room, or sat on the floor working with the tent-cloth on his knees. You can hear him talk, you can see him impetuously break off in the middle of a sentence as a new thought strikes him. It puzzles commentators, but it gives you the living Paul.

IV

It is well worth while for any Bible reader to give several months of his Bible-reading time to the careful deliberate study of St. Paul. Let him take a month, if necessary, to one epistle. One book thoroughly studied is worth a dozen superficially read, and each book so studied will whet the desire and strengthen the habit of studying other portions with similar care. 1

Perhaps the reading of this present little volume may help as a preliminary to such study. For further help I offer a few suggestions:

In reading the history in the Acts of the Apostles let imagination play on it, supplying form and colour, living in the scene, making pictures. It is the main secret of pleasurable reading, 'Put yourself in his place,' not merely in picturing the outward scene but also, in so far as may be, entering into the mind of the speakers and actors. Anyone can do it and it is

1 There is much to be said in favour of steady, systematic reading according to a calendar by which the portion for each day is definitely fixed. Yet as a rule one can seldom do very thorough study by that way alone. Perhaps for some readers it would be well to combine it with the method here recommended — to read, say, in the morning according to the calendar, and at night to aim at the slower and more thorough study of certain special books as suggested above. , -- worth the effort. True, a more vivid imagination will give one an advantage over another, but all that is really needful is some little knowledge of the circumstances and surroundings and the effort to think oneself into them.

To do this you must bring in the Epistles. You want to feel his mind, you want to read his letters, if you would know Paul. It is in letters to his friends that a man shews his heart.

When you have got the right setting for it, first read your Epistle rapidly straight through two or three times to get your grip of it as a whole. Then go over it in detail with a simple commentary (e.g., The Cambridge Bible for Schools). Try to put yourself into the place of the writer and the readers. Do not read it as if addressed to you. He had no thought of you. He did not write for publication. He never imagined in his wildest dreams that he was writing scriptures for the Church for all the ages. True, the Holy Spirit was guiding him, but if you are to understand the letters of St. Paul you must take them quite naturally as letters written like your own, with no thought of anyone but the persons you are writing to.

Read the letters naturally. Get in sympathy with the writer. Feel with him in his rejoicing, in his despondency, in his exultant fighting moods, in his keen irony, in his sensitiveness when people have hurt him by ugly insinuations. Feel with him in his affectionate greetings, "God is my witness, how I long after you all," in his impetuous temper, where he is vexed with these "fools of Galatians," in his love for his fellow countrymen, "I would be willing to be accursed from Christ for the sake of my brethren."

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Watch the little personal touches. He sends his love to Rufus and his mother, "who is also a mother to me," and you see the gratitude of a lonely man to a dear, kindly old lady who had mothered him. Watch him in Rome chained to a soldier as he writes the familiar ending to his epistle, "I, Paul, salute you with my own hand. Remember my chains." You can hear the fetters clanking as he tries to write. Or read that exquisite little note to Philemon, whose young slave had robbed him and run off to Rome to have a good time. Paul seems to have met the scamp and won him to religion and grown to love him dearly. Now he is sending him back with this note in his pocket. "Receive him," he says, "he is my child Onesimus whom I have begotten in my bonds. I will repay that money. I might have demanded this favour of thee, for thou owest me thine own soul. But for love sake I only entreat it as Paul the aged prisoner of Jesus Christ."

I have been thinking chiefly here of the human side, of the human interest in the Bible, for the ignoring of it by religious people has tended much to make Bible reading uninteresting and unreal. Is it necessary here to remind any reader that the more he habituates himself to read his Bible naturally and sympathetically, recognizing fully the human side of it, the more necessary it is to remember with reverence and awe that God is, in the truest sense, its author; the more he enjoys the personality of the writers, the more needful to keep in mind that the writings "came not by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost"?

CHAPTER II The Greek, the Roman and the Jew- Fully to understand Paul's life we need to understand Paul's world. We turn to secular history for the picture of his environment- — the people amongst whom he moved. It helps us to appreciate his eagerness and the need and heart hunger of that lonely world.

Paul's world was the Roman Empire. Here are three great varieties of national life. The Greek, and the Roman, and the Jew divide the world between them. When Pilate wrote the inscription on the Cross in Hebrew, Greek and Latin it was for them. It expresses the position as it appeared to Pilate — as it appeared to Paul — the three people Hebrew, Greek and Roman. We shall afterward see how wonderfully in God's providence they were combined to prepare for, the coming of the Christ. The Jew with his bible and his religion, and his hope of the Messiah. The Greek with his flexible language, the universal language of civilization, making a vehicle for the gospel message. The Roman welding together in the strong framework of the empire, the incoherent provinces and peoples on which Christianity was to act.

Keep these people steadily before you. Paul was always in the midst of them. Whether in Jerusalem, or Corinth, or Athens, or Rome, or in his boyhood home in Tarsus — everywhere was the Greek and the

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Roman, and the Jew. It was to them he brought the story of the crucified Christ. He knew their need.

They from their high position looked down with contempt on him. But he, from his higher position, looked down with love and pity on them, for he knew that in its inner heart that poor world was tired and lonely, and that only Christ could help.

But we cannot discuss that here. I want you to see these people amongst whom Paul lived. I want to bring that old world before you.

II

There were the Greeks, the proud, eager, restless, beautiful Greeks, with their noble art and literature and philosophy, and their love of the beautiful, and their poetic imagination which peopled Olympus with the gods. To this day the whole civilized world looks to these ancient Greeks with wonder and gratitude. We owe to them the best of our culture. Above all things they stood for culture. Never was any nation prouder of its culture. Never had any nation better reason to be proud.

But, alas, we are learning in these days what culture can come to without religion, and the poor Greeks of St. Paul's day were learning what Germany may some day learn for her eternal good, that the world cannot get on with culture only. I picture these Greeks as like the modern Parisians, a light, pleasant, quickwitted people, who like to amuse themselves, to enjoy themselves. But the enjoyment was a good deal on the surface. Down underneath life was a bit pathetic. Their best days were over. The golden age of Greece was in the past. Their political integrity was lost.

They spent their time in frivolity, and worse. Profligacy and corruption were eating like a cancer, and their beautiful religion had no power to check their bad propensities. How could it? Even in the best days their beautiful gods on Mount Olympus were not very moral. You could not imagine anyone offering them spiritual prayers.

But at any rate, their gods were real to them then. They had some spiritual vision. They were men. Jove was the good-natured father and creator. Their gods fought with them at the Pass of Thermopylae, where the famous 300 laid down their lives for Greece and for right.

But now they were a hopeless and effeminate race. Though they kept up their forms and their images, they had utterly lost all real belief. Their mythology had become a fairy tale. "Men had climbed up into Olympus and found no gods there." And so it was a lonely world. The Bishop of Tokyo told me the other day that this is the condition of Japan to-day. In young, happy days nations and men can get on with frivolity and pleasure, and statues and poetry, but there are days when these things fail. In our sorrowful times we want a god of some kind to turn to. Even Jupiters and Junos will be some use provided we believe in them. But, alas, if we do not!

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Then there were the Romans. The Roman Empire in Paul's day was in no decline like the Greek. The Romans were the masters of the world. It was a proud boast even of Paul himself to be a Roman citizen — a member of the great Roman Empire, with its wise

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laws, its splendid armies, its boundless wealth, its world-wide rule. Rome was the very personification of pagan power and pride and mastery. That was her imperial ambition. For that she kept her unconquerable armies ; for that she trampled weaker peoples into the ground. The Roman was the German of those ancient days in his pride of power and mastery and success. The Roman was the superman. His kingdom was utterly a kingdom of this world. It was a brave, splendid, magnificent world. You cannot help admiring it.

But read the great historians and you see that underneath all the power and magnificence was a sink of rottenness. Tourists are shown in Rome to-day the splendid marble palaces of the emperors. Paul's emperor, Nero, lived in one of these palaces. He was outwardly a scholar and a polished gentleman. But in his marble palace he executed his old mother and kicked his wife to death, and in later days covered Christians with tar and burned them for torches to light the palace grounds.

Travellers to-day wonder at the Roman amphitheatres, the stupendous relics of national greatness. The Coliseum held 30,000 spectators; the Circus Maximus held 200,000. But the historians teach us that they were built on blood and agony by hosts of wretched slaves. That when built they were crowded daily with maddened, yelling multitudes of men, women, and even children, citizens of Rome, watching the horrible carnivals of blood. Under Trajan 10,000 gladiators were used up in a half year. Men fought with lions and tigers. Serpents and crocodiles were brought to keep up the novelty. Women fought women, dwarfs fought dwarfs, blindfolded men fought each other, while the citizens cheered and laid bets on the fight. How could they be other than degraded and brutalized. You want to realize the position if you are to understand the terrible intensity of St. Paul with his gospel of Christ.

Slavery was the blackest curse of the empire. The invincible armies brought multitudes of captives from all over the world. Strong men, beautiful women, many of them refined, educated people, reduced to slavery. Two men out of every three who walked the streets of Rome were slaves. Aye, and two women out of every three, and two girls out of every three. Think of it. When every man could do what he liked with his slave. Every gust of passion, every suggestion of lust, the slaves must bear it. The slaves were wretched. The best of them crowded into Christianity for comfort. The worst of them debauched Rome. They brought in new, unnatural, abominable vices. They corrupted their masters. They corrupted the children. Every passion of the golden youth of Rome was ministered to by them. In the purlieus of the bath, and the circus, and the stage, the Roman boys learned what they should never have known. They grew old and jaded, and rotten with indulgence of vice before they were out of their teens. A world without God.

Yet they had gods in multitudes, in every street, in every home. If a man wanted money, or success in some evil scheme, he hired a priest and invoked the gods. But prayer had no moral significance. No man would think of unburdening his soul to his gods.

Then they wanted novelty in their religion. In Paul's day they had begun to introduce the oriental religions with their shameless impurities, and the wild

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orgies of prostitution in the open temple, in the sight of the sun, before the altars of the Goddess of Fruitfulness. Here one dare not do more than hint at these abominations. I only hint at them at all that you may be helped to realize the awful need of Christ in that splendid, successful, godless world. How deeply Paul felt it is indicated in his terrible first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, "God gave men up to ununcleanness through the lusts of their own hearts."

IV

The Greek, the Roman and then the Jew. The mysterious, miraculous Jew. You can hardly doubt God's hand, and the providential preparation for Christ, when you see spread out over the empire the one race set apart from of old, with their genius for religion; their worship of the one holy God; their complete Old Testament as we have it to-day. They were everywhere. From distant Babylon, the land of Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego, to all the coasts around the Mediterranean. You remember the list of them that came back to the Pentecost — "Parthians and Medes, and Elamites, and dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Pontus, and Asia, in Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and Libya/' etc. Think what it meant in that poor unholy world, with its multitude of degrading gods, to have in every city the worship of the one God, holy and pure; men with the spiritual vision of sin and righteousness; men with the inspired Bible in their hands; men with the eager outlook for a golden age in the future when Messiah should come to bless the people of God.

True, they were a narrow and bigoted people; true, when Messiah came they crucified Him; true, they were the bitter enemies of the Church which set out to preach that crucified Messiah. But you can see how their presence all over the empire laid a broad foundation for Christianity to build on. And in one of their Jewish homes in the city of Tarsus they were rearing up a boy named Saul.

Part II Youth And Preparation Time

PART II YOUTH AND. PREPARATION TIME

CHAPTER III The Thoughts of Youth are Long Long Thoughts

Unexpectedly, suddenly, out of the unknown, Saul of Tarsus makes his first appearance on the stage of history. The curtain rises on a howling Eastern mob and stones hurtling through the air and a young Jewish rabbi in the background with white robes piled at his feet. Amid this crowd of cursing fanatics gnashing with their teeth "they stoned Stephen calling upon God and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man's feet whose name was Saul."

This is our first sight of Saul of Tarsus. He is here called a young man, but he is already prominent in Jerusalem, so we may set him down as probably about thirty years of age. We have no earlier knowledge of him except from a few hints in his letters and speeches, but we can gather something from them.

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We can go back twenty years. -When the boy Jesus was playing in the carpenter's shop, and the boy John, his forerunner, was growing up in the hill country of Judea, away across the sea in the pagan city of Tarsus was another boy who in human sight had no connexion with either, but who learned in later years that God had destined him from his mother's womb 1 to stand beside them both in the eternal purpose of humanity.

The memories of childhood are the most lasting of all. I want you to see " the pictures that hung upon memory's wall " when Paul thought of his boyhood.

Tarsus was a town rather like Montreal in its earlier days, a university town and a great central mart of trade, especially the lumber trade. You could see the barefoot loggers riding on the logs and prizing open the jam above the Cydnus Falls. 'It was in a fine position for commerce. Behind it through the mountains ran the 'Cilician gates,' the traders' mountain pass to the lands beyond the Taurus. Through the midst of the town the navigable river Cydnus ran down to the sea, with its crowded ships, and quays, and dockyards. Saul's grandfather saw the mountain as a robber's fastness, and the river as a shelter for the pirates of the Levant. When Saul's father was a boy (b. c. 41), all Tarsus crowded on the river's bank to see the gorgeous pageant that day when Cleopatra sailed up the Cydnus attired as Venus in her golden barge to meet Mark Antony. I am not sure whether the banquet was at Tarsus or Alexandria when she dissolved her pearls in the wine, but at any rate the old Pharisee would not have been invited there. So you see Tarsus was not without its romantic stories.

There I see the boy Saul watching the ships with his companions; shouting to the lumbermen floating past; climbing on the bales of goods piled along the quay; listening to the traders, in their varied costumes and varied dialects, from all parts of the empire. And the lad evidently took notice, for long afterwards in his letters we find the illustrations of the sealing, and the earnest money, and the branding of bales, and the hucksterings, and the adulterations of goods. And I note that in the providence of God the man who was to spend his life in pagan cities was brought up in a pagan city. He who was to preach a universal religion for all races was brought up, not on the green hills of Galilee, but in a crowded centre of trade where all races met.

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He was proud of his native town. "It was no mean city," he says. And he was proud of his ancestry. The Roman boy might look down on the Jewish boy, but the Jewish boy knew he belonged to a race that was making history before Rome was born. He belonged to the famous little tribe of Benjamin, and was namesake of the famous Benjamite, King Saul. When the other Tarsus boys played soldiers in the woods or dreamed, as boys do, of old heroic days — of the fight at Marathon— of Romulus and Remus — and

"How Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old,"

Saul fed his imagination on Abram and Jacob, and the brilliant adventures of Joseph in Egypt — on Elijah and Saul and David and Daniel and Shadrach, Mefehach and Abednego, and the wild days, dear to a boyish mind, when Samson was smashing the Philistines' skulls with an ass's jawbone. That is the sort of thing that appeals to a boy.

And when the other boys learned of Jupiter and Juno and Venus, Saul learned of the Almighty, allholy Jehovah, the God of his own people.

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His father in that business town was probably a merchant. He was evidently a man of some position (the fact that his son was a tent-maker proves nothing against this. Every Jewish boy learned a trade). He had won the proud distinction of citizenship of Rome. Paul says he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, of the strictest sect of his religion. You can see him walking in his broad phylacteries, strict in ritual observances. I think of him as an austere man, a righteous man, silent, strict, bigoted, like the old Scotch Covenanters. I wonder if he was in St. Paul's mind when he wrote "Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath." I should not wonder if he did not spare the rod on young Saul. I should not wonder if young Saul needed the rod, judging from Saul, the fierce, passionate persecutor, and even from the Paul of later life, though chastened and softened by the grace of God. I can well imagine that his father found him a passionate, strong-willed boy, not very easy to bring up, and I can well believe that in later days, heart-broken by that son's apostasy, when he disgraced the proud old name, and became a renegade from the faith, that that father could choke down his love and disown his son, and turn him out penniless to follow the sect of the Nazarenes. Perhaps that was why he was so poor all his days, and so sensitively proud that he would not allow his people to help him.

We learn that Saul had a sister who was afterwards married in Jerusalem, and some cousins or kinsmen, who he says, "were in Christ before me." x I wish we knew something of his mother. One always wants to know what the mothers of great men were like. He never mentions her. Perhaps her husband made her cast him off when he disgraced the family. Perhaps she died early. Somehow, I always think of him as a motherless boy. Perhaps that accounts for the touching little reference in the close of one of his letters. "Salute Rufus and his mother, who was also a mother to me" 2 — that kindly old lady who took his mother's place for him.