•*V',W Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Fll /i"l: Rom. viii. 31, &c. CILICIAN HOME. 11 "secondly" when he has begun with "firstly"! This does not imply that the Apostle was totally deficient in culture. His was the culture of the Hebrew, which recognizes other laws of beauty in style. Now Paul remained a Hebrew in his inter- course with Greeks, even when necessity made him a Greek author. His actual Greek Epistles prove that he thought in Hebrew all his life long, and that the voice which spoke to him on the way to Damascus spoke in Hebrew.^ His syntax is Hebrew, so is his use of the particles ; he often goes so far as to use words in the various senses of their Hebrew synonyms.^ A play upon words, such as that between Sinai and Hagar, Gal. iv. 25, could only occur to a mind thinking in Hebrew, for which Sinai was simply hahar, the mountain.^ His last speech in Jerusalem, hebraidi diaUdo^ proves that, after his many years' work among the Greeks, the speech of Canaan still came easily to him. We must therefore look for the school of the Apostle, not in the leafy alleys of the philosophers beside the Cydnus, where the scholars of the grammarians sat like waterfowl and intoxi- cated themselves on water, but solely in the Jewish quarter of Tarsus and the synagogue, where the barbarous philosophy of the Sophists seemed the wildest error of human intelligence. Paul's spirit was nourished on the culture supplied by every Jewish house, by the service in the synagogue and instruction from the Rabbis. Therefore he acknowledges himself to be no Hellenist, but a Hebrew of the Hebrews and a Pharisee after the law.^ ^ Acts xxvi. 14, ^ So 1 Thess. V. 12, ipwrav is used in the sense of " beg," because ^Wtt7 means both "inquire" and "beg;" Ka'Xelv, Rom. iv. 17, in the sense of "rule," because MHp means "call" and "rule;" besides other examples. 3 Gal. iv. 25. * Acts xxii. 2. The same thing is proved by the fact of his continuing to reckon by the Jewish calendar in addressing Greeks. 2 Cor. viii. 10. 6 Phil. iii. 4. 12 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. Yet it cannot be asserted that his upbringing in a Greek and cosmopolitan city was without influence on his development, nor that it was mere chance tiiat Christianity received its greatest missionary from a city of tlic Dispersion. A cursory examination is enough to find on every page of the Pauline Epistles some trace of a writer who came to maturity in the stir and movement of a gi'eat city. The earliest impressions of youth are never outgrown ; and if our spiritual individuality is the sum of our conceptions and the special form in which they are combined, we must not under-estimate the impor- tance of such a birthplace upon later spiritual characteristics. "Who could fail to see in the contrast between the Sermon on the Mount and the Pauline Episths that the speaker in the Gospel creates his pictures from memories of the life of lake and mountain, plain and wood, while the writer of the Epistles grew up in the narrow streets of a great city, under the influ- ence of the busy traffic crowding in from every quarter of the earth ? As Jesus speaks to the people on the mountain, by the lake or in the rocky solitudes of the wilderness, so the son of the Jewish streets all his life long preferred the synagogue, the upper-chamber, or the quiet room in a remote quarter of the market-place. As the words of the Lord lash the leaders of the people and the sins of the great, so it is the sins of humbler folk and the secret vices of petty burgesses which Paul fights against. As Jesus shunned Jerusalem, so Paul sought the great cities, and brought the fresh air of Gennesareth with him into the sunless houses. Jesus drew his similes from nature ; his preaching is filled with the scent of Galilean lilies, the twittering of birds under the open sky, the glow of the sunrise ; Paul drew as many more from life within doors. His similes delight to touch the familiar surroundings of a Jevvisli house. The mazzoth and the lamb of the Passover, the mother with the child at her breast, the woman in travail, the dough on the hearth, furnish him with ready comparisons, and his own handicraft supplies the image when he compares consideration for the weaker brethren CILICIAN HOME. 13 with the custom of employing dress to bestow more ahundant honour upon those members of the body which nature has made less honourable. Undoubtedly Jesus' similitudes have a different atmosphere. The others betray the work-room in which they grew ; and if Paul does attempt a different picture, as when in Eom. xi. 17 he makes the husbandman graft young shoots upon old olive- trees, the mistake proves the townsman and the Kabbi. Other similes are borrowed from the drill-ground, the armoury, the barrack, familiar to the townsman.^ Paul even takes the shift- ing of scenes on the stage as a similitude for the great trans- formation impending over the world ;^ or he compares his life incidentally to a play in the amphitheatre, before an audience of men and angels.^ It is clear from such comparisons how Gentile environment affected even "a Hebrew of the Hebrews," and introduced non-Jewish elements into his thought. A native of Palestine would hardly have compared life in God to a race- course, giving all the details of the contest, which the youthful aspirants enter upon after weeks of sober and chaste life, in pursuit of a crown which one alone can gain ; or, again, in which they run and fight with bandaged eyes for the sport of the crowd, till at length the victor drags his prisoner bound to the gate, while the herald stretches himself and proclaims aloud the rules of the contest and the names of the victors, after a struggle from which he himself has wisely held aloof. Such images also show plainly the greater freedom of mind enjoyed by Jews of the Dispersion in their judgment of heathen manners and customs.^ The Jew of Palestine never in his life 1 1 Tliess. V. 6, 8, 14. To the same category belong the simile of the triumph, 2 Cor. ii. 14, which leaves the scent of incense behind it ; of the savour of death from the pestilence which settles in the narrow streets, ibid.; the pedlars, who adulterate tlieir goods, 2 Cor. ii. 17; the ox and ass unequally yoked, 2 Cor. iii. 18. 2 1 Cor. vii. 31. ^ i Cor. iv. 9. * Thus precisely the same similes are to be found in Philo, Quod. Prob. Lib. 1. c. 14 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. quitted his attitude of active and passive resistance to heathen customs, one and all. The author of the Apocalypse, driven to Ephesus by the stress of war, is filled with genuine indignation against the heathen customs which surround him, and we have seen elsewhere what opposition tlie Eahbis of Jerusalem offered to the introduction of heathen theatres and gymnasia. Even the enlightened author of the Fourth Book of Maccabees sees Jerusalem desecrated by the Syrians opening a " circus for naked youths" on Zion.^ Paul, on the contrary, whether in Ephesus, where he wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians, or Eome, where he wrote the Epistle to the Pliilippians, looked upon these contests in the theatre without the aversion of his Jewish contemporaries ; nay, the words in which he recalls tlie foot-race, and the boxing, and the Isthmian crown of pine, betray a certain joy in the play of human strength and the exercise of natural capacities.- His native city being recognized as the source of Paul's com- parisons, there is in him, further, something of the townsman's quick sense, observing everything and comprehending every- thing, with eye and ear on the watch for customs or proverbs, of which, indeed, he has incorporated a considerable number, both Greek and Hebrew, in his writings.^ But one thing above all must be reckoned among the moulding influences of his youth — his ability to converse with Greeks, and his extraordi- nary gift of tact in dealing with men of every stamp and every nationality. Although his family life was confined within narrow Jewish limits, a wider life was opened to him by the lively foreign commerce which permeated the city, by the inde- pendent institutions of political life, by repeated contact with different classes and nationalities, by the habit, from youth up, of moving with dignity and address among men of the most various kinds. All this engendered tliat knowledge of men, ^ 4 Mace. iv. ; cf. also 2 Mace. iv. 14, seq., \\{i\\ 1 Cor. ix. 24, seq. 2 1 Cor. ix. 24— 26; Phil. iii. 12—14. 3 1 Cor. xii. 12 ; xv. 32, 33 (2 Thess. iii. 2). CILICIAN HOME. 15 that confidence of address, that capacity to direct, that gift for organization and for holding the threads of many affairs or supervising a hundred different interests, for multiplying yet not losing himself, which are so remarkable in Paul. They are gifts far more easily assimilated by one who is accustomed, from his earliest years, to the bustle of cities, than by the son of a country cottage, who is bewildered by such turmoil. The name " Ecclesia," given to the Christian Church by Paul, was first heard by him in the agora of Tarsus, wlien the demos assembled to sanction the proposals of the senate. Is it likely that so powerful a mind should have learnt no more than its bare name from this striking institution ? Assuredly it is no mere chance that the Apostle of the great cities was the tent- maker of Tarsus and not the fisherman of Capernaum. Though the most essential factors of his character must be sought for elsewhere, one certainly is traceable to Tarsus, namely his own breadth of view and ripeness of character, his address and confidence inspiring confidence. It was this induced the Jewish Sandedrin to repose important duties in his skilful hands ; this made him the favourite messenger of the Christian Church, and sought after by all distracted or oppressed congregations. But all this did not prevent Paul from being, as he often asserts, a son of the old belief in its special sense, a " Hebrew" to the backbone. It is a fact of the highest importance that Greek and Hebrew culture were not interfused in his native city as they were in Alexandria ; otherwise he would probably have become an unfruitful and unproductive soul like so many of the degenerate offspring of that fusion. As it was, all that was noblest in the Semitic spirit crystallized in him hard and clear as diamond. The vein of religion in which lay the greatness of Israel, re-appears in him as pure gold, untainted by any foreign element. National originality alone is productive, not a hybrid cross ; it is by far the most frequent source of the self-unity necessary to produce a strong effect on others. This national view, infected 16 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. with no cloubtings, the unadulterated Jewish faith, was Paul's own. This is why his words affected the course of history vastly more than all the Alexandrian writings put together. At the same time, the possibility of so quick an intelligence proceeding to appropriate certain Hellenistic, even certain Hellenic ideas, is not, of course, thereby excluded. 2. Jewish Education. The orthodox Israelite and Roman citizen of the tribe of Benjamin, who was the father of Saul or Paul, belonged to the Jewish community of Tarsus, capable, courageous and conserva- tive in belief, as we have seen it to be.^ It may be inferred from the fact of the Apostle's father being a Eoman citizen and yet an adherent of the strictest sect of Judaism, that he had the same outspoken, clear-cut character as his son displayed from the outset of his career. How he acquired his Eoman citizen- ship is an ancient matter of discussion. May it not turn out Ihat only the Acts ascribed this right to Paul ? for as we know, the idea of his relation to Rome is here used on occasion to repel the charge that the Christians were enemies of the Roman empire. Meanwhile, many Tarsians possessed the citizenship ,2 and if, as is stated in the Acts, Paul could appeal to Caesar, he, too, enjoyed it. But in spite of this Roman citizenship, the family of the * Phil. iii. 5. The infonnation given by Hieronjrmus, Cat. Scr. Eccl. v., Comment, in Phil, xxiii., that Paul came to Tarsus with his parents from the little town of Gishala in Galilee, is contradicted by the express state- ment of Acts xxii. 3, which in any case relates an older tradition. The confusion of placing this change of domicile after the Jewish war, is not removed by referring it to the war of Varus ; for the war cum tola inovincia Rornana vastaretur manu et dispergcrenhor in orhe Judcei can only be the war of Titus. This "myth" of the Father of the Church clearly springs from a time when every town in Palestine appropriated a saint with a view to pilgrimages. 2 Dio Cass, xlvii. 31. JEWISH EDUCATION. 17 Apostle maintained the purity of their Jewish descent from the tribe of Benjamin. His father, and perhaps his grandfather before him, were Pharisees.^ In the evening of his life the Apostle looks back, not without irony, on all that he used to be told of the superiority of his descent. He had been circumcised on the eighth day, in conformity with the law ;'^ he was no Idumsean or half-Jew, but of the house of Jacob ; nor from any of the renegade tribes, but from the one that remained faithful.^ He was born a Hebrew of a purely Jewish marriage. His lips first uttered the language of Paradise, not that of the Gentiles. He was brought up according to tlie traditions of the Pharisees, and belonged to the energetic party of their school, the Zealots. All this he was taught to regard as " gain," but afterwards came to regard it as a disadvantage. We know already what was the nature of this Jewish educa- tion which is to be assumed in the case of Paul.^ At the age of five, the child of the Pharisee attended the reading of the Scrip- tures at home;^ a little later, he went to the synagogue at the three hours of prayer, which signified to the Jews of the Disper- sion the three daily sacrifices in the temple at Jerusalem. On Mondays, Thursdays and the Sabbath, there were expositions of the law to be listened to.^ Thus the scholar was gradually trained, first by the school, then by his own efforts as teacher. He read the law, tried his hand at exposition, and joined in controversy. Learning in the law was completed by attending exercises in catechism and dis- putation, and by ardour in transcribing the law. These prepara- tions for office in the synagogue, or a seat and vote in the Sanhedrin, were given everywhere. In this way an energetic youth could rise to being ruler of the synagogue, or even arclion ^ Rom. xi. 1 ; Phil. iii. 4; 2 Cor. xi. 22; Gal. i. 14. 2 Phil. iii. 4, after Gen. xvii. 12. ^ Ezra iv. 1. * Cf. Time of Jesus, Vol. i. pp. 85—91 (Eng. trans.). 6 Pirke Ab. v. 21. Filius quinque annorum ad biblia. 6 Philo, De Septen. et Fest. M. 1178. VOL. III. C 18 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. or ethnarcli of the Jews, without giving up his father's home, his haiulicraft and his own family. Tiius every Jewish coniniunily was an altar of the true wor- ship of God. In the case of I'aul himself, we can see vividly how the obscurest Jewish quarter of the remotest city was quickened and peopled by the imperishable scenes and figures from the youth of mankind, how the stars of Abraham still shone in the heaven of a strange land, and the youngest Jewish child of the Dispersion was refreshed in spirit by the breeze that murmured in the grove of Mamre. Other poetic gifts he has none ; yet how vividly he summons up before him the his- tory of his forefathers. The patriarch Abraham, with whom God made a covenant because he believed, rises before his eyes.'^ To him, Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, are not colourless outlines, but the eternal types of humanity. To him, Israel's years of wanderings are a living scene ;^ he has pondered its least detail in all its bearings. He shows us (1 Cor. x.) the interminable procession of Israelites, overshadowed to the last man by the pillar of cloud. None were excluded from its pro- tection, a point, indeed, which had given Paul food for thought. So, too, all traversed the Eed Sea dry-footed. Corah's rebellious band no less than Joshua and Caleb, Zimri and Phineas. The spiritual feast of manna was showered upon all alike, the spiritual drink gushed from the miraculous rock for all. Then he hears the stubborn people, untouched by so many tokens of favour, sigh after the fish and gherkins and melons, the leeks and the flesh, they once enjoyed in Egypt. He sees the Israelites encamp round the golden calf ; he sees them eat and drink and stand up to dance ; sees them hurry to Baal Peor and bring daughters of Midian into the camp. When at last they reach the goal of their wanderings, the spies come back with the news that tlie promised land is inhabited by giants, so that Israel begins to blaspheme against the sacred goal itself. Thus the nation finds it a disadvantage to be the chosen 1 Gal. iii. G ; Rom. i.x. 9. ^ 1 Cor. x. 4, seq. JEWISH EDUCATION. 19 people; for, says Paul, God was not well pleased with the majority of those who had been thus miraculously guided. He sees them smitten down by the destroying angel ; some lie fainting, others die of hunger ; here men sink under the bite of serpents, there others are consumed by the sword ; the angel of pestilence shoots his darts at the murmurers. But at last Israel reaches the goal ; he sees six tribes stand on tlie barren rock of Ebal, six on the fertile Gerizim ; he hears one company cry aloud the dark words of cursing, the other utter words of blessing as a promise of the Gospel.^ How inspiring a subject; how instinct with life. We may still, perhaps, see how it filled the boy's imagination with reveries and made his heart swell ; for there are scenes that either live in youth or never, and such, in our opinion, were these meditations. The depth of his interest in the Scriptures must be apparent to any who have examined a single epistle, and noticed how the Apostle's thought is thought in quotations. He has so impregnated himself with the Scripture that everything presents itself to him in Scripture forms. His knowledge, too, is com- plete and perfectly uniform. He quotes the Law as often as the Prophets, while among the sacred writers he has made the Psalmist especially his own. That this "Hebrew of the Hebrews" nevertheless used the Greek Bible regularly, is hardly astonishing at a time when the original text always needed interpretation to the Jews. Josephus, the native of Jerusalem, is in the same position. Still Paul was not dependent on the Greek Bible ; where the Hebrew text suits his argument better, he always comes back to it, while correcting various errors in the Septuagint.^ Yet, as was the liberty of 1 Gal. iii. 10. 2 Thus Paul emends the translation of the LXX. in 1 Cor. xiv. 21 just so far as serves his purpose to make the prophecy of the stammering lips and strange tongues of the people, in Isaiah xxviii. 11, refer to the Christians' speaking with tongues. It is the same with the well-known passage, Gal. C 2 20 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. the time, he also clung to the incorrect translation where this brouf^'lit out his meaning more clearly.^ "While, then, the Apostle was acquainted with tlie canon in both its forms, he is equally studious to follow the new sacred literature which we call the Apocrypha. The application of Deut. XXX. 11 in Eom. x. 6 is an echo of Baruch iii. 29. In particular, the Apostle has a wide knowledge of the Book of Wisdom, written in liiH own day, and perhaps not till after liis conversion. The fact guarantees the study of other Hellenistic writings as well. Not only are parallels to be found here for his views that death came into the world through sin, and con- sequently through tlie devil,^ or, again, that on the day of the Messiah the righteous Israelite shall judge the heathen,^ or his censuring the representation of the Eternal God in earthly images;^ but the dependence of his writings on such studies throws a striking light on his eagerness to "prove all things, hold fast that which is good."^ Various similes of the keen Alexandrian have been transferred to the Pauline Epistles,^ e.g. the panoply of the faithful, who puts on righteousness as a breastplate, and true judgment as a iii. 11, where the Apostle has an interest in restoring the correct reference of " faith" to the man who shall live, and not to Jeliovah, as the LXX, wrongly translates Hahak. ii. 11. He undertakes a similar emendation of Exod. ix. IG, to bring into relief his doctrine of predestination, Rom. ix. 17. ^ Thus in 2 Cor. iv. 13 he employs the incorrect LXX. translation of Ps. cxvi. to find the profound saying, " I believed and therefore have I spoken," in words indifferent in themselves; or in Gal. iii. 16 draws infer- ences from the LXX.'s word cnz'tpfirtTi (Gen. xii. 7) in the singular number, which are not in the least justified by tlie Hebrew 37"iT. 2 Wisd. ii. 24. 3 i Cor. vi. 2, cf. with Wisd. iii. 8. * Koin. i. 23, cf. with "Wisd. xiii. 13, 14. Cf. Liidemann, Anthropologie d. Paul us, 119. 5 1 Thess. v. 21, v. 7, seq. ; Rom. ix. 20, seq. Also the reference, Rom. i. 20, seq., to the revelation of God in the creation, is taken from Wisd. xiii. 5, 8. Cf. further Rom. i. 24 with Wisd. xiv. 21. '^ Rom. ix. 21 with xv. 7; Rom. ix. 22 with xii. 20; Rom. xi. 32 with xi. 24; 2 Cur. v. 4 with Wisd. ix. 15; 1 Thess. iv. 13 with Wisd. iii. 18. JEWISH EDUCATION. 21 helmet, and sharpens his wrath for a sword ; ^ or 'the potter who from the same clay moulds both the vessels that serve for clean uses and for the contrary.^ Others, too, were read by Paul in Apocrypha lost to us, and sometimes cited with the prefatory formula, " The Scripture says." Thus, according to the opinion of the ancients, the proverb, " Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature," comes from a lost "Apocalypse of Moses." ^ Another of the Apocrypha lost to us must have contained the grand words of 1 Cor. ix. 10 : "He that plougheth shall plough in hope, and he that thresheth in hope shall be partaker of his hope." Another must have supplied the words of 1 Cor. ii. 9 : " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath revealed unto us by his spirit."^ Besides these Greek Apocrypha, however, pithy sayings of the Eabbis attest the breadth of his education. "Not above that which is written;"^ "If thou be a breaker of the law, thy cir- cumcision is made uncircumcision;"^ "All the law is fulfilled in one word. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself;"'^ "If any will not work, neither shall he eat;"^ — are epigrammatic phrases, manifestly " sayings of the fathers," from their tone or likeness to other passages, and once more proving how true it is that an active spirit has many teachers. Examining Paul's manner of using the Scripture in greater detail, it soon becomes clear that he received his understanding 1 Wisd. V. 17. 2 wisd. xv. 7. 3 1 Cor. vii. 19; Gal. v. 6, vi. 15. Cf. SynceU. Chron. p. 27, ed. Bonn, p. 48. * Viz. an Apocalypse of Elias, according to Origen's testimony, in Matt. Com. 117. Cf. Fabric. Cod. Apocr. p. 342. Zachar. Chrysop. (Harm. Evang. p. 343) professes to have read the actual words in the above-named book. See the Commentary on 1 Cor. ii. 9. 5 1 Cor. iv. 6. * Rom. ii. 25. Parallels in Eisenmenger, ii. 239. ^ Gal. V. 14. 8 2 Thess. iii. 10, if a Pauline nucleus is to be ascribed to this Epistle. 22 THE EARLY CAREER OF RAUL. of it from' the Jewish scliool. His quotations still bear to a great extent traces of the liabbinical hands from which he received them. However much of the liabbinical ingredients Paul rejected, the history of Israel presented itself to him diffe- rently in many respects from what we find it in the documents, liabbinical glosses and expansions How involuntarily from his pen ; they are not contained in the text, but were familiar in the teaching of the Apostle from youth up, so that for the moment he is unable to decide which is the word of Scripture and which tradition. To begin with the history of the Creation. It was a tradition of the Eabbinical school that the Adam of the first account of the creation (Gen. i.) was a different personality from the Adam of the second (Gen. ii.);^ and Paul bases all his teaching con- cerning man and Christ upon this distinction.^ To proceed to the story of the Fall. Gen. iii. undoubtedly professes to explain the origin of evil in the world, i.e. to show why man must till a soil full of thorns and thistles, why woman must bear children in sorrow, why both are subject to death. Paul, on tlie contrary, conceives of this narrative as the explana- tion why a double law rules our members, and the law of death rules our inner man. Kindred thoughts recur in the book of Enoch and the "Wisdom of Solomon;'^ and it scarcely admits of doubt that here, again, the exegesis of his school determined his view. So, too, he points to a fall through sin on the part of the angels, his opinion being that they were seduced by the beauty of women.* Proceeding to the history of the patriarchs, Paul, according to Eom. iv. 5, 13, shares the opinion of the Jubilees that Abraham ' Philo, De Opif. Mundi, Mang. i. 32 ; Leg. AUeg. 49. * Rom. V. 12, seq. ; 1 Cor. xv. 21, seq., 47, seq. ; Phil. ii. 6. 3 Enoch ]xix. 11, seq., xcviii. 4, 5. Also Dillmann, p. 12; Wisd, i. 13, 14, ii. 23, 24. 4 1 Cor. xi. 10, Cf. the Tttrgum on Gen. vi. 2. JEWISH EDUCATION. 23 was an idolater before his conversion,^ and that he received the promise of inheriting the earth, neither of whicli stands in the text of Scripture. So Gal. iv. 23, asserts that Isaac was not begotten after the flesh, but by the creative word of God.^ Paul represents the patriarch's youth as troubled by persecutions of Ishmael.^ These are not known to Scripture, but to the Book of Jubilees, which tells how Ishmael allured his half-brother into the fields, shot at him with arrows, dragged him about, and ill- treated him under pretence of playing with him. The opinion of the Apostle seems also to be that it was one of Satan's angels who wrestled with Jacob in the shape of an angel of light,* a view equally far from the text. The story of Moses is one which Paul saw most decidedly through the medium of Eabbinical tradition ; it is one indeed, as is clear from Philo's and Josephus' biographies of the lawgiver, where legendary embellishment was especially rife. Thus we read in 1 Cor. x. 4, that the rock from which Moses smote forth water was not a natural rock, but the Messiah, who followed the train of the children of Israel in this semblance ; whereas in the meditations of the Eabbis the rock figures as rolling after the wandering people through the sandy waste to give them drink.^ Further, in 1 Cor. x. 1, the statement that God went before Israel as a fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day,*^ is inter- preted as if the divine Shechinah had overshadowed the whole train of Israelites ; indeed, Paul assumes that water fell from this cloud to baptize the children of Israel unto Moses. The statement, in Gal. iii. 19, that the law was proclaimed on ]\Iount Sinai by angels, accords with Eabbinical and Samaritan theo- 1 Cf. Time of Jesus, Vol. i. p. 109 (Eng. trans.). 2 Cf. Rom. iv. 19, ix. 9. Jubil. Getting. Jahrb., 1850, s.v. ; S. Beresch, R 53, 15. 3 Gal. iv. 29. * 2 Cor. xi. 14. * Onkelus in Numb. xxi. 18 — 20. Cf. the Commentary on 1 Cor. x, 4. s Exod. xiii. 21. 24 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. logy;i and presuinably the further inquiry, in 2 Cor. iii. 2 — 16, as to whether the rejection of tlie divine glory was extinguished, or continued to shine on Moses' face under the veil which he put on as he came down from Sinai, was the subject of Eabbinical controversy. In this way the Scripture narratives, viewed tlirough the prism of Eabbinical tradition, appeared to the Apostle with bright edges of divers colours, and lost their clearness of outline. In general, however, the background of his thought was formed by the ideas of the Eabbis. Paul counts the third heaven as above tlie clouds, the seventh as paradise f and with regard to demon- ology and eschatology, completely shares the common ideas of Judaism, such as we have already m'^t with in the Apocalypse. While Paul, then, read the Scriptures under the influence of Eabbinical tradition and the scheme of things held by contem- porary Judaism, individual points in his exposition of Scripture also show clear traces of his school of exegesis. His attitude towards Scripture, thus determined by his school, presents itself firstly in his strong tlieory of inspiration. In his eyes, the Scrip- ture is but the phenomenal form of the Divine Spirit, so that he speaks of it as of a living being. The Scripture " foresees,' " concludes," 3 " enjoins," " speaks," " is not contrary,"* and makes disposition with regard to the future.^ In other words, like the authors of the A])ocrypha, the Apostle holds the Scripture to be Wisdom revealed to view in the book of the law. It is identical with God ; the expressions, " the Scripture says" and " God says" are the same. Paul therefore does not hesitate to attach most important con- secj^uences to the most trifling particulars in the Scripture. After ^ So the LXX., Dent, xxxiii. 2. Rabbinical passages in Schottgen and Wctstein on Gal. iii. 19; Delitscli on Heb. ii. 2; Joseph. Ant. xv. 5, 3. 2 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4. Cf. Schottgen, Hor. p. 718, seq. ; Eisenmeng. Entd. Jndentli. i. 4G0 ; Rev. ii. 7 ; Enoch xxv. 1. 3 Gal, iii. 22. * Gal. v. 23. « Gal. iv. 23-25. JEWISH EDUCATION. 25 his separation from Lot (Gen. xiii. 15), Abraham receives the promise of the Lmd of Canaan for himself and Ms seed. From this word seed, used in the singular hj the LXX., Paul draws the far-reaching inference that the Messiah is here meant, the one Abrahamid, and not the multitude of the people of Abraham.^ From this identification of the Divine Spirit and the Scripture, arises further the exclusiveness of the proof from Scripture. Proof by reasoning is only found incidentally in Paul.'^ His method of proof is quite that of the Rabbinical school, which always prefers authoritative proof by quotation to the direct conclusions of reason ; and instead, as it were, of attaining its object by a single stride over the stream, steps slowly from stone to stone, and, after extraordinary divagations, arrives where a simple argument from reason and experience would have brought it sooner. The upshot is, that not reason, but the Scripture, should decide in matters of faith ; and thus Paul did not write a single sentence without immediately basing it upon the Scrip- ture ; while texts upon texts are strung together into sorites in a manner found nowhere else but in the Talmud. Besides this community of method, however, we see Paul making use of certain essentially Hellenistic ideas which charac- terize his conception of the world more deeply. Foremost among these comes the doctrine of a double meaning in the Scriptures ; one for ordinary comprehension, the other a deeper spiritual meanmg, with its dependent conception that certain occurrences in ancient history were prophetic types of future events. The supposition of a double meaning in Scripture and the habit of allegorical explanation had also made their way into the schools 1 Gal. iii. 16. Deutscli, Talmud, p. 39, adduces a kindred Rabbinical passage in wliich the Rabbis refer the words of Jehovah, " The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground," to the fact that the murderer was made responsible for all life, not only for that which he had destroyed ; because in Gen. iv. 10, the word " blood" is used in the plural (■^TTIS "^Xi"^), not the singular. ^ So 1 Cor. xi. 14, ix. 4 — 13, where Paul, however, expressly adds that he only speaks kut' dv9pnjTrov, and consequently set no value on such reasons. 26 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. of the Hebrews, for they are everywhere the necessary conse- quence of an overstrained theory of insph-ation. But the mind can never wholly renounce its independence. If, then, it is hampered by the opiuimi Lluit truth is unconditionally contained in a holy Scripture, it will still read its own thought into this IScripture, and from the Scripture again explain away all that contradicts its thouglit by interpreting certain elements as pictorial, as unessential or simply allegorical, "VVe have seen before how Hellenism came to seek a deeper spiritual meaning behind the plain words of the text. Touching this, Philo lays down the principle that the law did not deal with unreasonable beings, but always had in view those endowed with reason and sense ; and so, too, Paul declares in 1 Cor. ix. 9 that God does not take care for oxen, interpreting the fine precept (Deut. xxv. 4) against muzzling the ox that treads out the corn as declaring the right of God's preachers to claim the means of subsistence from the churches. In the same way that Philo translated the patriarchs mto virtues, I*aul interpreted their wives as covenants. In the strife between the two women, Sarah and Hagar, he only sees an alle- gorical representation of the relation between the old and the new covenant. This is not an ordinary history, says Paul, in Gal. iv. 24 ; it has a deeper allegorical meaning. Hagar is the covenant of Sinai, as the learned in the law would see at a glance from the name of the mountam, called Hadshar by the Arabians. It answers in reality to the servitude of Jerusalem, whicli, like Hagar, is for the time a slave. On the other hand, the free woman, Sarah, signifies the new covenant, the heavenly Jerusalem, which is free. The proof of this is found by Paul in Isaiah liv, 1, where the Jerusalem which is to be rebuilt is spoken of by the prophet in terms which apply e(|Uidly well to Sarah : "Sing, barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child; for more are children of the desolate than the children of the married wife." If the new Jerusalem is here represented as JEWISH EDUCATION. 27 Sarah, childless and yet rich in children, conversely Sarah is merely an allegory of the new covenant. But if Hagar and Sarah signify the old and new covenant, then their children Ishmael and Isaac signify the children of the old and the new covenant, i.e. Jews and Christians, or unbelieving and believing Israel. Hence the Christians are persecuted by the Jews as Ishmael persecuted his brother. But the end of the allegory, " Cast out the son of the servant ; he shall not inherit with the son of the free woman," clearly signifies what is to be the end of the strife between Jew and Christian. Similarly, in Eom. x. 6, the Apostle treats the righteousness by faith of Deut. xxx. 11 — 14 as a deeper meaning of the Scrip- ture, not understood by Moses himself. In fact, he contrasts Moses with righteousness by faith. Moses, he says, writes in Lev. xviii. 5 of righteousness by the law, " which, if a man do, he shall live in them." But of righteousness by faith, Deut. xxx. 12 says : " Say not. Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it iinto us," &c. Now according to the principles of the Eabbis, both the former and the latter were written by Moses ; Paul therefore considers that in the second passage the lawgiver imparted something, the deeper meaning of which he did not understand. Again, in Eom. iv. 23 — 25, Paul declares it was said of Abraham that his faith was imputed unto him for righteous- ness ; and it was written, not for his sake alone, but also for us, to whom it shall be imputed. It was therefore written prima- rily, indeed, for Abraham ; but the Scripture already entertained the purpose, unknown to Moses, of extending the same grace to the Christians. Just as Paul deals with the doctrine of the deeper meaning of Scripture, as a long-established method of exegesis, so, further, he deals with the idea of the type, another essential aid to the scriptural exposition of his time. Now the idea of the type implies that events or persons were at the same time emblems of men or things destined to appear 28 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. liereafter in fuller perfection. The Melchizeclek of antiquity lived indeed, but was essentially a prophecy of Jesus, the future priest-king. God only created hiin to point the way to some- thing higher, wherein the prophetic element in himself would he fulfilled. This conception, moreover, is unmistakably Hellenic in its origin, based upon the Platonic sclienie of the world. In l*latonism everything is a type, i.e. moulded after the idea which some day we shall behold in the fields of truth. But now Judaistic Hellenism identified the world of ideas and the king- dom of the Messiah. In the Jewish view, the world of ideas will descend in the last days ; the heavenly Adam, the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly heaven will Ijecome actually visible when the hour of fulfilment comes ; meantime, they cast their shadows upon this world of sense. The earthly Jerusalem is the impression, or, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the shadow of the heavenly ; and in so much as the Jerusalem above will some day descend from heaven, it is a promise of what is to come. Melchizedek is a copy of the heavenly high-priest ; in so much as this heavenly high-priest will one day actually come upon earth, he is a prophecy, a type, a prophetic emblem. Thus, too, the first Adam is a type of the heavenly Adam ; in so much as tliis heavenly Adam will come in person as the second Adam, the type contains a prophecy of the prototype. This Platonic view translated into Judaism means, therefore, that somewhere in the future the ideal world will realize itself in the Messianic kingdom. All copies, shadows or types, are therefoi'e portraits of " what shall come to pass." They are premonitions, the shadows which coming events cast before them, thus prefiguring in the manner of prophecy what will only be realized later. But according to Paul, God has put typical events of this kind before our eyes that later generations may take warning by them. The wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness, their baptism in the cloud and the sea, their food the manna, and their sacred drink from the rock of Christ, all appeared, according to 1 Cor. x., as a prophetic admonition JEWISH EDUCATION. 29 to the future Church, which should come forth from Egypt, be born anew by water and the Spirit, and be fed to everlasting life by the bread and cup of heaven. " These things happened for our examples," says Paul. Their lusting after the flesh-pots of Egypt was once more a shadow and type of things to come, for the later Christians, too, lusted after the old privileges of their heathen temples. They worshipped the golden calf to prefigure the relapse of some from Christ into heathenism. They went astray with the daughters of Moab, even as lost Christians should some day go after the wor- ship of the Pandemos. They were pierced with the sword for their discontent, to exemplify the fate of discontented Christians. In short, " all these things," Paul says, " happened unto them for ensamples ; and they are written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the world are come." One more point, in particular, shows how deeply Paul was penetrated and dominated by this subtle idea of all the past being a prophecy of the fulness of time, that the history of God's people was but the shadow cast upon earth by the king- dom of heaven before descending. Very real institutions of the old covenant frequently appear to him as symbolical indications whereby the Spirit of God shows, in forms of sense, what shall come to pass hereafter. He is capable, therefore, of plunging deep into speculation upon the undeciphered symbols which, from the beginning, pointed to him who has since come. Thus the Paschal lamb is a promise of the victim who was slain on the day of preparation for the Passover ; the unleavened bread is a type of the spiritual purity in which the Church of the Lamb has its life ; the casting out of the leaven is a type of the casting out of sin from the household of Christendom. Similarly we find a more crude and downright application of allegory and type, yet the same method, in the book of Aristeas, where the prohibition against eating birds of prey signifies to the adept that righteousness and moderation are the will of God ; animals with cloven feet may be eaten because their feet signify the 30 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. severance between the heathen and the people of the covenant ; and the permission to eat creatures that chew the cud typifies the blessing of recollection of the law. Here, tlien, we come again upon matter derived from the Jewish schools ; moreover, Paul agrees with the Eabbis in treat- ing the deeper and spiritual sense of the Scripture as something esoteric, which can only be imparted " to them that are perfect." ^ Indeed, he actually distinguishes between exoteric and esoteric elements as milk and meat, the same image as was used by the Ealibis and Philo.^ There is a strong flavour of the schoolmen in all this ; in essence, nevertheless, it is no more than could be found in any intelligent Israelite who had been trained from childhood in the Scripture, and had closely followed the expositions of the teachers and the course of the disputations in the synagogue. In Paul, however, there exist elements of cultivation belonging to a more advanced stage ; betraying, in fact, the special training of the Scribe. The Acts calls him a pupil of the Piabbis ; and he says of himself that he surpassed many of his equals among the Jews in eagerness for the traditions of their fathers f or, as he expresses it in the Epistle to the Philippians, " as touching the law, a Pharisee." He is therefore to be accredited with more than the usual Jewish education ; and this surplus is to be found in his Epistles. 3. Paul as La'w^'er and Pharisee. The manner in which Paul speaks of his education after the law in the Epistle to the Philippians, leaves it an open question whether he received this education in Tarsus or Jerusalem. In the next century, however, the Acts is able to state that Paul ^ As is shown by tlie formula with which in 1 Cor. x. 1 he elucidates the typical meaning of the history of Israel, and in 1 Cor. ii. 6 expressly explains it. 2 1 Cor. iii. 2. Cf. Philo, De Agricult. Mang. p. 301. 3 Qal. i. 14. PAUL AS LAWYER AND PHARISEE. 31 came early to Jerusalem and was " brought up in this city."^ Now as the story of Paul's appearance at the trial of Stephen follows immediately upon this statement, it seems as though Paul's pre-Christian period belongs essentially to the capital of Judaism, and as though he had proceeded straight from the school to join in the persecution of the Christians, since the Acts expressly mentions him as a youth at this occurrence. But this insistence on his youth perhaps belongs to the apolo- getic tendency of the book, which pleads the youth of Stephen's judge, regardless of the fact that Paul could hardly have been a youth in 36, if he describes himself in the Epistle to Philemon as an old man in 60.^ Now the very part played by Paul in the persecutions pre- cludes the unripeness of youth. In Judaism, particularly, where it was an established principle that wisdom was only to be found in the old, a mission of such responsibility as the extirpation of Christianity in Damascus would never have been entrusted to a " youth" in our sense of the word.^ But if it may be taken that . the apologetic tendency of the Acts has generally affected the representation of Paul's youth, it is a pertinent question whether the same desire to commend him to Judaeo- Christians, which determined the Acts to make him closely connected with the primitive community, to give him teachers " blameless according to the law,"* and to ascribe to him five pilgrimages to Jerusalem and two ISTazirite vows, did not also give rise to that legend of his youth, wMch states that he was brought up in the holy city and educated at the feet of the gentle Gamaliel. Apart from the fact that in the next century, when nothing ^ Acts xxii. 3. His relations there, xxiii. 16. 2 Philem. 9, 7rpE(T/3yr»;e. 3 AVhen Paul (Gal. i. 14) saj^s that he excelled all his awrfKiKuoTaQ in the Jews' religion, he speaks of a time seventeen years before ; but it is not necessary to take the word " equals" in the sense of playfellows or childish companions, for iiKiKia is each age, and yXiKiojrrjs can stand in the sense of contemporaries. * Acts xxii. 12. 32 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. but legend was known of tlie yontli of Jesus, it is liardly likely that truer recolleetions existed of the Ayjostle's youth, there are very considerable reasons against assuming that Paul was in Jerusalem heforc the persecution of Stephen, and belonged there to the school of Gamaliel. Granted that our materials do not allow of any certain ctjnclusions, still it is noteworthy that Paul, who made the proceedings of the year 36 his life-long reproach, considers himself entirely blameless for those of the year 35. He never saw Jesus, as he must if he had taken part in tlie fatal Passover, for he speaks in 2 Cor. v. 16 of those who had known Jesus in the flesli as boasting a superiority over him. Nor did he stand among the crowd wdio cried, " Crucify him ! crucify him !" His conscience is free from the rejection of the Messiah, or there would be no lack of self-reproach. As it is, he reproaches the princes of this world for crucifying the Lord of glory.^ Consequently he was blameless of any share in the matter ; but how could he have been in Jerusalem without declaring himself on this question, the one of all others that stirred his own party ? We should have to ask him, with the disciple of Emmaus : "Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days ?" It is always possible, indeed, that a chance absence during the eventful l^issover spared the Ai)ostle from sharing the guilt of the Messiah's blood. But his silence refers to all the pre- vious history of the preaching of the kingdom as it had stirred Palestine from the year 34 onwards. The vigorous Baptist movement also left no impression on him. As for the l^aptist, whom Jesus ranked so high, Paul never so much as mentions him. In every branch of evangelistic tradition, the origin of the gospel is John the Baptist ; but Paul knows of no relation to him, either direct or indirect. Could such a movement as then started from Judsea and swept through Samaria and Galilee have left no deeper traces upon the spirit 1 1 Cor. ii. 8; also 1 Tlie.-s. ii. 15. PAUL AS LAWYER AND PHARISEE. 33 of the Apostle if at the time he had been in Jerusalem or even Judtea ? It is scarcely conceivable. Paul, too, invariably represents his first contact with Christ as arising from his persecution of the already existing Church. His adherence to Judaism did not consist in his rejection of tlie Messiah, but in his attack upon the Church.^ Of temper so severe in judging his past, he would not have been silent if lying under the reproach of resistance to the Baptist, if he had lifted up his voice with the generation of vipers against the prophet by the banks of Jordan, or had helped other Pharisees to fabri- cate charges against Jesus, and, like them, had preferred Barabbas to the Messiah. Had he wished to be silent, we know how good a memory his adversaries had for his past. The fact that even they nowhere urge this against him proves that Paul took no share either in the opposition to the Baptist or in the Phari- sees' strife against Jesus. In all probability, therefore, he was not in Jerusalem at all during 34 and 35. What, then, becomes of the assertion that he was brought up at Jerusalem and was educated at the feet of Gamaliel ? In later times he always regards Tarsus, not Jerusalem, as the home to which he returns ; he is everywhere " unknown by face " "-^ in Judaea ; his handicraft is the one that has its home in Tarsus and its name from Cilicia. The assertion is, to say the least, unsupported by these facts, while what we know of Gamaliel is entirely opposed to it. Tlie Acts itself and the ordinances ascribed to Gamaliel the elder in the Mishiia, show him as the man of mildness, of gentle methods, of unrufHed patience ; Paul, on the contrary, calls himself a Zealot, and his assertion is borne out by the Acts.^ Now the difference between Gamaliel and the Zealots was not a division merely within the same school. The Zealot was no disciple of Gamaliel, but of Sham- mai, the opponent alike of him and his grandfather. Shamraaites and Hillelites, or, to speak in the words of the Gospel, Zealots and Herodians, are opposed to one another ; and while Gamaliel, 1 Gal. i. 1.3, 14. 2 C4al. i. 22. 3 Gal. i. 14; Phil. iii. 5. VOL. 111. D 34 THE EARLV CAREER OF PAUL. appointed chief of the Sanhedriii by Herod Agrippa, represents the Pharisaic tendency to follow the example of the pattern king and aims at harmony with the Gentiles, the name of Zealot betokens bitter resistance to every form of heathenism. We are already acquainted with the precepts ascribed to Gamaliel by the Talmud.^ These made him out by no means zealous for tlie traditions of the fathers, like his reputed disciple. AVhile the latter describes himself as more zealous for the tradi- tion of the teachers than many others, we still possess this wise saying of Gamaliel's : " Tithe not overnmch on conjecture" — a motto that clearly shows the idea of his theology, namely, to purge Pharisaism of its over-scrupulousness.^ The same ten- dency is to be seen in Gamaliel's synediial ordinances. There are regulations to facilitate divorce, to prevent annoyance of those who had been divorced, to secure the fortune of widows, and to make second marriages easier both for widows and divorced women by relieving them of troublesome formalities. The Sabbath-day's journey is liberally defined for the benefit of the country people who wished to return home from Jerusalem to their neighbouring villages ; not to mention other milder inter- pretations of the Hillelite school re-introduced by Gamaliel. He is also accredited, more or less reasonably, with a series of regulations which permitted the Gentile poor to glean in Jewish fields, allowed the Gentile the greeting of peace even when on the way to the idolatrous temple, besides other tolerant decrees which might curb the eagerness of the Zealots. Further, Gamaliel was a decided Herodian. Herod Agrippa IT. had made him president of the Sanliedrin, so that he is the representative of the party friendly to Rome,^ — the very party, therefore, opposed to the Zealots and ready to come to terms with the Gentiles contrary to the traditions of their fathers. All ^ Cf. Derenbourg, Pal. xv. p. 230, seq. 2 Gratz, Gesch. des Judenth. iii. 274; Sepp, Leben Jesu, 179, 198; Deren- bourg, Pal. 239, seq. 3 Derenbourg, 1. c. PAUL AS LAWYER AND rilAlUSEE. 35 the hatred of the Shammaites against Hillel was consequently transferred to Gamaliel. It is well known how in the Jewish war the Pharisees, with this tendency to compromise, were assailed by the Zealots with all the horrors of war. How, then, can Paul have been a Zealot, how can he go so far as to call himself a Zealot beyond his contemporaries, or say that he excel- led all in the Jew's religion in eagerness for the traditions, if he really was the disciple of the man who was cried down for his laxity, for his inclination to lighten the burden of the law and make the tradition of no avail by his mild interpretations ?^ We must not even overlook the detail that in the Talmud Gamaliel orders the targum of the book of Job to be burnt, while Paul quotes the book as canonical.^ Moreover, the account of Paul's previous history does not stand in the narrative portion of the Acts, where the writer works from documents, but in one of those speeches peculiar to himself in which he generally gives expression to the apologetic tendencies of his book. All the more reason for suspecting that the writer named the best known Jewish Rabbis as Paul's teachers, and espe- cially the one whose name sounded best in Christian ears, and who remained the longer in remembrance because his grandson, Gamaliel IL, chief of the school of Jamnia, still kept his memory alive in the second century. The upshot is, that the account of the Apostle's youth, as it stands, is impugned by considerations of more than ordinary weight. The probability is that Paul was not educated as a Pharisee in Jerusalem, but came there a zealous Pharisee already, to plunge at once into the vortex of party strife whence, after a brief delirium, he emerged a Christian. Such being the case, the source of the Apostle's Eabbinical training must instead be sought in the synagogue of the Cilician Jews. The local importance of the Jews ensures the existence of such a synagogue somewhere on the banks of the Cydnus. 1 Cf. generally the part played by the word Zf/Xoc in Paul ; Rom. x. 2 ; 1 Cor. iu. 3 ; 2 Cor. vii. 7, xi. 2, xii. 20 ; Phil. iii. 6 ; Gal. v. 20. 2 Derenbourg, 1. c. D 2 36 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. Xutliing indeed is known of its teacliers, its numbers or its pro- selytes ; Init in a synagogue so strongly nationalist in character, the Pharisaic element must certainly liave been strongly repre- sented, and Paul and his father would not have been the only members of this party. How far, tlien, does the current of his spiritual life and stre- nuous ideas spring from Jewish sources ? At what point is it lost in the new current which sets in with his conversion ? This is not so difficult to extract from his existing Epistles, for the schooled jurist and Eabbi is visible in them as well as the former Pharisee. In the first place, a study of the Scriptures such as we must assume in Paul, was at the same time a constant study of the law. In a theocracy, God decides. The lawyer, therefore, is he wdio has knowledge of God's word. Now the Epistles of Paul show, both directly and indirectly, that he studied the Scripture from this practical point of view, as to what, namely, W'as lawful among his people. Considering this more closely, we are at once struck by the strongly legal tendency of his thought, the quantity of legal expressions, and the frequent reference to peculiarities of tlie Jewish law. The whole of the Apostle's doctrine of justification from guilt incurred, which God cannot pardon unless it has been atoned for by some objective satisfaction, is founded on principles of law no less than of theology. In particular, also, his images are very often taken from the domain of legal relations. He says, for instance, in 2 Cor. i. 22, that God has sealed us and given the arrabon or earnest-money of the spirit in our hearts. God, as it were, on calling us has made a payment on account, so that He cannot draw back without prejudice ; nay, He has even sealed the contract. Similarly, election is in Paul's eyes an "inheritance"^ or "cove- nant""^ confirmed by both parties. Eor him, Christ's death is, in relation to the law, an " end of tutelage," when old claims cease.^ On the legal principle that a contract cannot be altered by one 1 Gal. iv. 1, iii. 18. 2 Gal. iii. 17. ^ Qal. iv. 2. PAUL AS LAWYER AND PHARISEE. 37 party to it only, he denies the oLligation of the hxw, which was only added 430 years later to the covenant between Abraham and God.^ According to the legal ideas of the East, he could speak of the heir under age as being devoid of rights like a slave,^ because neither is sui juris. This is the argument of Gal. iv. 1. The heir, as long as he is a cliild, differeth nothing from a servant. Even the saying, " If we are sons, then we are heirs," recals the Jewish rights of inheritance, which partially excluded daughters from the inheritance.^ A Jew with less instruction in the law would probably have written : " If we are children, then heirs." We find a similar legal detail from the depart- ment of marriage-rights in Eom. vii. 2, seq., where the argument proceeds from the legal principle that a woman is only bound during the life-time of her husband. Elsewhere, too, the old lawyer incidentally breaks out in Paul, as in the unusual vehemence with which he attacks the habit of the Corinthian Christians* to go to law before Gentile judges, contrary to the strict command of the Rabbis ; while the only sentence of condemnation we read in him is an old official for- mula from the days of the Sanhedrin, cited by him in the customary form of Rabbinical law : " Put away from among yourselves that wicked person" (Deut. xvii. 7).^ The Rabbinical education traditionally ascriljed to Paul is therefore justified in fact ; and it is equally just to recognise, in its effects upon him, his attachment to the Pharisaic party, sup- ported as it is by his own testimony. That such a personality as Paul could be a Pharisee with heart and soul, — and that after all disillusions he was still able to bear witness to the zeal of the Zealots that it was a zeal for God and therefore worthy of all sympathy,^ — confirms the view already brought forward in these pages as to the aims and value of Pharisaism. Pharisaism in those days contained all the nobler spirits, all who were in earnest with the faith of Israel ; 1 Gal. iii. 15. ^ q^^^ j^ ^ 3 C4al. iv. 7. * 1 Cor. vi. 1. * 1 Cor. v. 1 3. « Kom. x. 2. 38 THE EARLY CAREER OF RAUL. with hardly an exception, it was left to the self-seeking of the priests and the indittbrence of the common herd to walk in other ways. In liis fundamental principles Paul clung so tena- ciously to the views of his school that, as late as the year 59, according to the account in the Acts,^ he could appeal to the Pharisees of the Sanhedrin : " Men and brethren, I am a Phari- see, the son of a Pharisee ; of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question." This means that the expectation of the near approach of the " kingdom," which was the religious atmosphere of Pharisaism, remained as the great hope and pur- port of his life as well as theirs. What we find in him is not the Essene's hunger for purity, not the Sadducee's fanaticism for the temple, but the characteristic temper of the Pharisees, with their imagination of the things to come, their eager watch for the signs of the times, their tense expectation of the approaching end and judgment of the whole world, and of the resurrection and the glory of the Messiah.^ All the other views, the reality of which was hotly contested between Pharisees and Sadducees, belief in direct intercourse with a supersensuous world, in angelic visions, heavenly voices, marvellous signs and powers, and revelations of every kind, made up the spiritual world from whose dominion Paul never got free. He grew up in this conviction, and searches the Scriptures because it was written " for our admonition upon whom the ends of the woild are come. "Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall."^ The history of mankind is a measure that grows full ; and this measure needs but a few drops more to make it overflow.'* Nothing shows more clearly the height to which the apoca- lyptic temper of this generation could rise, than his declarations that it is scarcely worth while to free others, or to be set free ; ^ Acts xxiii. 6. 2 Cf. Time of Jesus, Vol. i. p. 145 (Eng. trans.) ; Lipsius, Der Ap. Pauliis, in the Jahrb. das Deutschen Prot. Ver. 18G9, p. 60. 2 1 Cor. X. 11. * 1 Thess. Hi. 16. PAUL AS LAIVYER AND PHARISEE. 39 that it is wiser to endure bondage for the short time longer in order to receive a higher reward, " for the time is short ; it remaineth that both they that have wives be as though they had none ; and they that weep, as though they wept not ; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not ; and they that use this world, as not abusing it; for the fashion of this world passeth away."^ Thus tears brought him no bitterness, and joy no sweetness, on the eve of the last day. He wishes that there might be no more marrying, for this generation is assuredly the last.^ Such at this time was the view of many eager Zealots. Years before the outbreak of the great Jewish war, a popular prophet at Jerusalem, Joshua ben Anan, was never weary of raising his mournful dirge over the " Bride and Bridegroom."^ He, too, did not believe there was time for marrying before the coming of the great day of wrath. Paul in the same way does not hesitate to invoke the approach of the great calamity even in purely practical questions ; con- fronted by petty ambitions, he demands whether men would occupy themselves with such concerns on the day of the Mes- siah.* To him, as to the Essene and Pharisee, the religious duty of Israel is limited to the tense expectation of the Messiah ; he even confesses, "All prophets have prophesied of nothing else but of the days of the Messiah."^ Nay, more : in sympathy with the profoundest spirits among his people, Paul is conscious of a yearning for redemption which even embraces the material world. As the Scribes dreamed of a coming glorification of earthly nature, which, with thorns and thistles and all creatures, is for man's sins subject to the curse of a painful existence and death and decay, until the Messiah shall restore it to the glory of Paradise, so Paul, too, hopes for a day when the whole crea- 1 1 Cor, vii. 29, seq, 2 j Cor. vii. 6. 3 Bell. \\. 5, 3. M Cor. iii. 15. ^ Time of Jesus, Vol. i. p. 163 (Eng. trans.). 40 THE EAllLY CAREER OF PAUL. tiun sliall l»c' ck'livcred from the lHiiid;i<;v of corrujitioii.^ And lieiu we see how the eschatological expectation is coloured with Jewish ideas even more deeply than in the Gospels, so that we are almost reminded of the dreams of universal transformation ill the book of Enoch. Herein, indeed, consists the underlying riiarisaism of Paul's consciousness, which lie maintained to the last as the basis of his scheme of the world. In contradiction to this firmly-rooted assurance tliat the Mes- sianic time was now close at hand and the kingdom of heaven had begun to dawn, stood certainly the prior belief of the Pharisees, that their petty arts and subtleties in fidfilling the law were indispensable for ushering in the day of Jehovah. But this contradiction was pre-existent, as the law expressly made the fulfilment of the promise depend upon the fulfilment of the law. Xone but a rigliteous i)eople might inherit the kingdom. So it was Init natural that the quarrel, often referred to by Josephus, should break out between the tliree Jewish parties, as to whether man has the power to bring about his own right- eousness or whether this also is God's concern.^ The Essenes' denial of all liuman freedcjm, making every event dependent on God's omnipotence, is thoroughly in harmony with their belief that God would bring the kingdom immediately. God, then, in answer to the prayers of the saints, will speedily bring to pass both the righteousness of the people — that is, the new heart in place of the heart of stone — and the fulfilment of the promise. Even now His is both will and performance, and He fashionetli some to vessels of honour, others to vessels of dishonour; for liuman volition caniiot stand before His omni- potence. ^ The sources of this side of the expectation of the kingdom are to be looked for in Isaiah xi. 6 — 8, Ixv. 17, Ixvi. 1 ; Ps. cii. 27. Cf. Eisenmeng., Entd. Judenth. ii. 367, seq., 824, seq. ; Schoettg., Hor. Hebr. ii. 71, 76. This tradition is tlie source drawn upon by Paul when he says, " We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Rom. viii. 22. ^ t'f. Time of Jesus, Vol. i. p. 148 (Eng. trans.). PAUL AS LAWYER AND PHARISEE. 41 This view also was afterwards adopted Ijy Paul. As an Apostle, his doctrine of election Ly grace did but shake off the incomplete- ness and inconsistency of the Pharisaic teaching, which thought to harmonize divine grace with the necessity of human fulfilment of the law. But this was the very point in which his own testi- mony shows that he then sought the true " Judaism." He, too, tormented himself more than others with the judgments of the school, and maintained the necessity of fulfilling the "whole law." He was a zealot for these judgments, for others must not be allowed to shake off the fetters that bound himself so strictly. But it was precisely this strict rule of the law, interfering at every step even in the most natural actions of material and spiritual life, which invested things with a powder of allurement and temptation they would never have had apart from their prohibition. In Rom. vii. 7, the Apostle notes the fact with keen self-criticism : " Is the law sin ? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin but by the law ; for I had not known lust except the law had said. Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occa- sion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of con- cupiscence : for without the law sin was dead .... for sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me and by it slew me." Paul's experience was the experience of ascetics in all ages. The physical life of the senses was roused to energy by the very fact that the spirit watched for its every manifestation with strained attention, seeking to check and dam its course. Accord- ingly Paul himself gives the necessary outcome of this struggle in the accents of moral despair : " O wretched man that I am ! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death ?" He him- self never doubted that the struggle between the law and his mind, far from being imaginary, was a real battle with conse- quences of victory and defeat. Compared with this gloomy and oppressive life, his conversion to Christ seems afterwards, in the eyes of the Apostle, the entrance into a realm of grace and freedom. " Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God," he says in Rom. v. 1. A feeling of relief came over 42 THE EARLY CAREER OF PATL. him as he compared the present with the past. The severity of his hvter jiulgiiu'uts on all legal conceptions, his radical breach with the law, which was only there to increase sin, his uncom- promising view of the "flesh," which by nature could not but lust more and more strongly against God's spirit, all show that, as a Pharisee, he took his creed seriously, that he had attempted to fulfil the law, but had found tlie flesh too weak. Tlius he arrived at the extreme dualistic view that the flesh is naturally evil, and that for redemption there needs a new creation of humanity after the pattern of another Adam. But these are fundamentally nothing but conclusions from Pharisaic premises ; so that here also he did not work out the ideals of his youth. Seeing that his whole tljeology issues in the ques- tion. How does man become righteous before God ? seeing that he only thinks in the categories of individual righteousness, of righteousness before the law, and righteousness before God ; seeing, in short, that his theology is essentially a doctrine of righteousness, — we may say of his development that it proceeds throughout along the lines of his Pharisaic origins ; so that he could justly say at the end of his career : " I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee," 4. His Personality. Our authorities for the circumstances of Paul's career are less abundant than for his spiritual education. In dealing with them, therefore, we cannot proceed beyond tlie uncertainty of conjec- ture. Behind the legend of his youth in the second century, tlie Epistles afford occasional glimpses of a very different early life. If the dates in the Epistle to Philemon are to be trusted, Paul must liave stayed in his Cilician home till he had reached maturity. It seems to follow, from 2 Cor. viii. 16 — 24, that Paul had a brother whom he afterwards converted to Chris- tianity ; while a sister of his at Jerusalem is mentioned in Acts xxiii. 16. More important is the question whether Paul, as HIS PERSON ALITY. 43 Luther and the reformers in general inferred from 1 Cor. vii. 8, was married at the time of his migration to Jerusalem. The passage runs as follows : " I say, therefore, to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I."^ According to this, the Apostle seems to count himself in the category of widowers. The sound sense of Luther felt long ago that ordinances concerning married life, such as are given by the Apostle immediately before this declaration, can only come well from one who is or has been married, and knows from experience what he is talking about.^ An unprejudiced perusal of 1 Cor. vi. 12 — vii. 10 will confirm this judgment of Luther's. Many other passages in the Pauline Epistles display a depth of feeling and breadth of experience in family life such as only serve to deepen this impression. How clear an image he draws (1 Thess. ii. 7) of the nurse keeping the child warm, giving it food, and delighting in its every advance ! How well he understands the heart of a mother who feels intui- tively that her child is sanctified, though it comes to her from an unconverted husband !^ When, in Gal. iv. 19, he calls the Galatians his children of whom he travails in birth again, it is the image of a husband who knows the pangs which precede the hour of deliverance. Apt, again, is his comparison in 1 Thess. V. 4, when he likens the time to a woman who knows that she is approaching her deliverance, but will yet be surprised by the hour when she least expects it. It is not likely that an unmar- ried man would have compared himself to a woman in labour or a nursing mother, or would have repeated again and again that he was the begetter^ and nurse ^ of his churches, feeding them with ^ The ayajiQi are widowers, as follows from the fact that Paul begins by- saying abont the unmarried, that it is good for them not to touch a woman, and then proceeds to married persons, and in v. 8 comes to the widowed, aydjioig Kai raig xfipaiQ. 2 Cf. Ewald, Gesch. Isr. vi. 371, and Sendschreiben d. Ap. Pauh p. 161. Among the Fathers, Paul is declared to be married, though on incorrect grounds, by Clemens Alex. Stromata, iii. 6 ; and Euseb. H. E. iii. 30. 3 1 Cor. vii. 14. « 1 Cor. iv. 15. ^ i Thess. ii. 7. 44 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. milk like babes.^ A deep feeling for the family runs througli all the Apostle's writings ; and however we may understand liis supposed celibacy, it is certain he was not the solitary Kabbi, as many like to think him, but speaks like any other man in the tune of one who has passed through such experiences. Moreover, only a man of experience is likely to gain that confidence of all ages and both sexes which is accorded to the Apostle throughout his churches. The testimony of the Acts is responsible for the statement that the hiborious, wearisome and ill-paid handicraft exercised by Paul was the preparation of cilicium, a coarse stuff woven of hair, and used for cloth shoes, coverlets, cloaks, and especially tents, for which reason Paul is directly named a tent-maker in the Acts. This was a trade that ranked very low, and only poor people used the Cilician stufl', or as Martial puts it : " Such hair as from the goats of Cinyphus The crookt shears of Ciliciau herdsmen crop."- The shoes of cilicium in particular were of the coarsest in use : " For these not wool, but rank goat's hair was grown ; Cinyphian gulfs where feet might lurk unknown."^ At the same time this industry flourished at Tarsus. From the Alps of Taurus the goatherds brought tlie fleeces of their goats to Tarsus in quantities. Here the hair was first spun into thread and then made up into cilicium. Thus the handicraft that Paul exercised was a mean one, but it left Ids brain free ; and the learned in the law, wlio were bound to learn a craft, according to the principle of their teachers that forbade them to make the law a mattock to till the ground with,* might often prefer such occupations as left their thoughts unconstrained. The natural consequence was that such work was ill-paid; 1 1 Cor. iii. 2. 2 Mart. vii. 95. 3 Mart. xiv. 140, on the udones Cilicii. Cf. Aristot. Hist. Animal, viii. 23 ; Varr. Re Rust. ii. 11. * Pirke Aboth, 4, 5. niS PERSONALITY. 45 whence Paul's repealed complaints that he had to labour " niglit and day, to be chargeable to no man."^ The modest circumstances in which the Tarsian scholar there- fore lived were matched hj his personality. Paul clearly was one of those natures, disregarded by the multitude, which neverthe- less win the firm attachment of a small circle because they sym- pathize with every individual in it and take up every matter as their own affair. He himself speaks of how he saw himself in the consciousness of others ; for the most contradictory judg- ments are passed upon him, scornful contempt face to face with adoring reverence. To his adversaries he gives the impression of exaggerated humility ;^ they think his bodily presence weak, and his speech contemptiljle.^ They reproach him with attempt- ting to please men and essaying flattery.* Sometimes he abases himself lower than the good citizens think permissible,^ so that some consider him insincere;*' and as he cannot always bring himself to refuse a wish, they say his modesty is deceitful and little reliance must be placed on his yea and nay.'' But, on the other hand, what signs of l»lind confidence and adormg reverence ! He is contended for on every side ; he pro- mises his visit as a "a gift of grace" or as "a second benefit."*^ He is bound to give thanks in every Epistle for the abundant love they offer him ; while even in the least friendly churches the latent cause of their discontent is only that he cannot visit them as often as they desire. This apparent contradiction shows how characteristic of Paul's personality was this antithesis between outward weakness and inward abundance, recognized by himself in 2 Cor. iv. 7 and 16. As to the richness of his inward nature, there is no need of entering upon a detailed proof. He feels within him the con- sciousness of a spiritual pre-eminence, which bids him say 1 1 Thess. ii. 9. ^ 2 Cor. x. 1, 2. 33 Cor. x. 10. 4 Gal. i. 10 ; 1 Thess. ii. 4. ^ 2 Cor. xi. 7. e 2 Cor. xii. 16. 7 2 Cor. i. 12—18. « 2 Cor. i. 15. 46 TUE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. proudly: "The woiipons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds ; casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalted itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ, and having a readiness to revenge all disobedience."^ Indeed, his Epistles will give every reader the impression of spiritual power working with the most vehement energy, pur- suing an irresistible course towards its objects. To attain hid ends, he deploys argument, proof, entreaty, menace and warning, adjuration and invective ; he skilfully brings innumerable argu- ments to bear upon the mind of his reader, yet could all the while do much more, and is always conscious that he has not wholly expressed his mind. This inner driving force, however, is not simply his own will. He is utterly devoid of egoistic and subjective interests. His motive power is something beyond him, which rules him from without. His personality is but the "vessel" that holds a divine content. In the days when he was a Pharisee, he sped to his goal of blood, urged by the will of the law contrary to his own gentle nature ; so now as a Christian he expresses the constitu- t.on of his mind in the striking phrase : "I live, yet not I."^ Now this submission to the thought which dominates him, finds its counterpart in the physical deficiency so contemptuously noted by his adversaries. As late as the middle of the second century, when the author of the Acts composed his history of the Apostles, it was still remembered that Paul had possessed but a small and insignificant personality ; for the book tells how the citizens of Lystra beyond the Taurus called Barnabas, his more imposing companion, Jupiter, and himself Mercury, the small and eloquent messenger of the gods.^ At the same time his adversaries in Corinth w^ould not so much as listen to the 1 2 Cor. X. 4, 5, 2 Gal. ii. 20; Acts ix. 15; Rom. ix. 21. 3 Acts xiv. 12. HIS PERSONALITY. 47 eloquence assumed by the Acts. They say : " His letters are weighty and powerful ; but his bodily presence is weak and his speech contemptible."^ It may be inferred without hesitation that in figure Paul was insignificant and far from striking, bearing no sort of resemblance to the imposing orator whom Raphael sets on the steps of the Areopagus. In every one of his books we come across complaints of the tyranny which his body exercised over him ; of illnesses by which he was visited, troubling his inner balance and check- ing the free exercise of his spiritual powers. " I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling," he writes to the Corinthians ;^ and to the Galatians/ "Through infirmity of ^'- the flesh I preached the gospel unto you." He lay under an oppi'ession which forbade him to attain the cheerful vitality of health, while it led him to write, as though expressing a general experience : " So long as we are in our earthly house, we groan, and are burdened, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven." * The same sense appears where he calls his body the earthen vessel in which the divine treasure is concealed, or declares that he always bears about in his body the dying of Jesus.^ Thus all his life long his handicraft in the close workshops was an effort and weariness to him, a burden crushing his weak body to the ground. He comes to speak of it once at least in every Epistle.^ His feeble frame suffered less from cruel mar- tyrdoms than from the most ordinary labour for daily bread. Yet he, who had so many wounds to tell, counts it his only glory that he had taken this burden on himself for love of the churches.'^ If it now be asked what was the origin of this susceptibility, Paul himself speaks of an affliction which he classes as demoniac, ^ 2 Cor. X. 10; 1 Cor. ii. 3; Gal. iv. 13. 2 i Cor. ii. 3. 3 Gal. iv. 14. 4 2 Cor. v. 2, 4. ^2 Cor. iv. 7, 10. « 1 Thess. ii. 6, 9 ; 2 Thess. iii. 8 ; 1 Cor. ix. 2, seq[. '' 1 Cor. ix. 15 ; 1 Thess. ii. 6, 9. 48 THE EAr.LY CAREER OF PAUL. and whose attacks therefore deprive him of consciousness.^ " There was given me," he says in 2 Cor. xii. 7, " a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me. For this thing I besouglit the Lord thrice that it might depart from me. And he said unto me : My grace is sufticient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness."^ Now the Apostle regards this aflliction as a compensation for the extraordinary revelations vouchsafed to him from time to time. Connected together as they are by l*aul, these " extra- ordinary revelations," with their profound uplieaval of psychical life and the mysterious bodily convulsions in which a demon buffets the sufferer and drives a thorn into his flesh, are pheno- mena wliich, it is notorious, often appear together in the field of religious history. Seizures of this nature, together with a tendency to dreams, which grows more active as life goes on, occur, not only in the visionary saints of the middle ages, but also in men of mighty intellect, such as Socrates, Julius Ceesar, ]\Iohammed and Napoleon.^ There were times when the superiority of mental over bodily activity in Paul culminated in visionary trances, and he could not say whether he was in the body or out of the body.* A slow preparation took place within him ; the depths of his soul were stirred ever more profoundly, more painfully, as by a goad, till he was Hung to the ground, and his inward emotion took outward shape before liim as a vision or revelation. Connected with these ecstatic states, and indeed only a lower grade of the same phenomenon, is the gift of speaking in tongues. He prided himself on possessing it to a greater extent than any other member of the Church, this inarticulate, incoherent utter- ance of the spirit, echoed even in the Epistles by an Abba, Father, or Maran Atha. 1 Cf. Time of Jesus, Vol. i. p. 127 (Eng. trans.). - 2 Cor. xii. 7—9. 3 Plato, Sympos. 174 D; Suet. Ca3s. 45; Sprenger, LeLen Moh. i. 200, seq. ; Forster, Gesch. der Freiheitskriege, iii. 1017. * 2 Cor. xii. 3. ^7^ PERSONALITY. 49 It can hardly be doubted that these conditions were primarily pathological in their nature, to judge from the descriptions he himself gives in 2 Cor. xii. 3 and Gal. iv. 13, seq. Indeed, they bear a strong resemblance to the visions of Mohammed, who likewise is tortured by an angel during his revelations, so as to foam at the mouth and strike wildly around him, till a deep, death-like sleep falls upon him and renews his exhausted strength. 1 Similar conditions are related of the mediseval visionaries. When the spiritual excitement begins to assail their sensitive bodies, their whole vitality seems to retreat to the over-irritated brain, which in turn, by its spontaneous activity, induces such irritation in the nerves of sight and hearing that visions and voices are created of themselves. At the same time, the activity of all the sensory and motor nerves is suspended, and the hyper- sensitized condition of the brain ends finally in an epileptic fit or catalepsy, which passes away in sleep. ^ In the case of pro- found and richly -endowed religious natures, such as Ansgar, Bernard and Francis, Catherine of Siena, and the anti-Trini- tarian David Joris, all these circumstances repeat themselves with scarcely any variation, so that it would be difficult to deny some inner connection between the deep mental life of a religious genius and the disorder of his more delicate organs which so often ensues. Paul's temperament is thus characterized throughout by the sensitiveness peculiar to such tender and abnormal organiza- tions. Hence the quick rise and fall of his moods and feelings. " I breathe again, I was cast down, I was afraid, I thank God," are words which betray in tu7-n the pause or the hurry of his pulse, the incessant ebb and flow of his heart. So it is not unnatural to find him cutting short one sentence in a burst of anger, and straightway breaking into an anacoluthon of exceed- ing tenderness.^ He begins an Epistle severely and with passion, 1 Sprenger, Leben. Moli. i, 200, seqq. 2 Cf. Holsten, Zum Evang. Paulus u. Petrus, p. 29. 3 Gal. iv. 12. VOL. III. E 50 TlIK EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. plunging at once into tlie subject on hand ; but for all his harf h and abrupt beginning, his last words are, Amen, my brethren. His / and we continually betray his personal excitability. There is none of the divine peace, the even harmony, of spiritual life. He can be passionate, even unjust ; but, on the other hand, shows love and self-sacrifice of which colder natures are incapable. He is thus one of those sensitive beings who are excited and even made ill by contradiction. Further, the strength of his expressions corresponds to this ready excitability. Where we should say, " You have not despised me," he exclaims, " You have not spurned me" (lit. spat me forth) ;^ where we say, " I am thought of small account," he says, " I am the filth of the world, and the off-scouring of all things;'^ where we should say, " I set no value on it," he says, " I count it but dung."^ Not seldom the inward turmoil finds utterance in flashes of wit and shafts of irony, which never fall beside the mark, but often wound deeply.* "With this degree of irritability it can be understood that there is no lack of examples to show either that Paul regrets the personal warmth of his advocacy, and is forced to acknow- ledge that he wishes he had adopted a different tone,^ or that he excused vehement letters with the assurance that he wrote 1 Gal. iv. 14. 2 1 Cor. iv. 13. 3 pi^ii. iii. g. * Fox" Paul's irony, cf. 1 Cor. iv. 3, where the Corinthians have fixed a day, and sit in judgment upon him ; or (iv. 8) where he prays for a little .share in the Messianic glory of his own churches; or, in Gal. v. 11, advises the friends of circumcision to be more logical. There is more good- nature in the wit of the Epistle to Philemon, or the warning of Gal. v. 15 : " If ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another;" or the conclusion of the list of virtues, Gal. v. 23: "against such there is no law." A broad jest, too, occurs in his expression, " solving to his adoV (Gal. vi. 7), of the institution of circumcision. Finally, this list should include the humour with which Paul regards his handwriting at the end of the Epistle to the Galatians. AVe may say, then, that Paul does not lack the bitter wit of the Jew, but, like all men of earnest temper, reserves it for satire. The only exception to this is the Epistle to Philemon. ^ Gal. iv. 20. niS PERSONALITY. 51 " out of much affliction and anguish of heart, with many tears. "^ Even after Damascus, the change from Saul to Paul is often seen in small tilings ; yet even wliere he goes wrong, and fails to carry his point, his personal relations are unshaken, for people cannot do without him. He is suspicious, like all sickly organisms ;^ once, indeed, he misapplies tales that have come to his ear ;^ but love always re-asserts its supremacy. For this portrait contains more gentle traits than harsh. Bitter and passionate as his individual judgments often sound, his general judgments are extremely temperate, such as nothing would give but true knowledge of men. This eye for goodness, even amongst many misunderstandings, which is never granted to the hard nature, evinces an abundance of love and true wisdom. It is only necessary to compare the judgment of the writer of the Apocalypse upon the Christian churches. He utterly abhors them ; casts down their lights from their places ; makes them naked, poor and powerless ; while Paul gives thanks everywhere for all gifts of grace which are to be found abundantly among the chosen saints. The churches, in either case, cannot have been much worse or much better ; indeed, they are partly the same ; but Paul had a woman's tenderness in the depths of his heart. His temper is certainly choleric, but his kindly disposi- tion is superior to his temper.* Here, then, we are confronted by an individuality no less excitable than profovmd, no less passionate than scrupulous, Paul is a man of unique temper. While, in general, his Semitic blood and the passionate zeal of the Jew are unmistakable, still he is by no means fashioned after the usual Jewish pattern. To complete the contradiction of his type, this utter dependence of his nature on temperament must be combined with a keen- 1 2 Cor. ii. 4. 2 Cf. the perfectly improbable motive ascribed to his adversaries, Phil, i. 17 ; Gal. ii. 13, vi. 13. 3 1 Cor. i. 11. See also below. 4 Cf. Rum. ix. 1 ; 2 Cor. xi. 29; Gal. iv. 12—20. E 2 52 THE EARLY CAREER OF PAUL. ness of reasoning and intellectual energy which pursues every thouglit to its ultimate principle, every principle to its ultimate conclusion, and unravels the motives of others in their most secret involutions. "Warm-hearted as he was, and catholic in sympathy, his hair-splitting dialectic and proofs fine-drawn to Lreaking-point would rival those of any EabLi taught after the manner of his school to make mountains hang upon a horse's hair. Is salvation promised to the seed or the seeds ? Did Abraham receive the promise before or after circumcision ? Did Moses' countenance continue to shine under the veil, or was its glory quenched ? These are all questions which profoundly exercise his hypercritical ingenuity, so that one hardly believes that the same man should be gifted v/ith an eminently practical temper and admirable capacity to manage men and rule them. But it is clear from his own utterances that from the moment of entering into party strife in Jerusalem he took a leading position among all his contemporaries. The Jewish Sanhedrin placed no less confidence in the spiritual weight of this physi- cally insignificant person than afterwards the numerous congre- gations of the ]\Iessianic Church, which often thought their very existence dependent on his presence. For these abnormally excited temperaments are often the best adapted to bring all elements into combination, and to overcome the inertia of matter. In far higher degree than the healthy and comparatively stolid nature, they are gifted with quickness to act on first impressions, with restless vitality, with strenuous energy, with momentary demonic impetuosity against the resistance of brute matter; theirs, above all, is that persistent labour on one point which sooner or later attains its object.^ ^ Cf. Holsten, Zuin Evang. cles Paulus u. Petrus, p. 87, seq. S^onb- glbbmiT. THE CONYEESION OF PAUL. THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. 1. The Miracle of Damascus. Shortly after the death of Jesus, if our premisses are correct/ the Cilician student of the law, now of ripe age, migrated to Jerusalem, where we find him actively engaged in public life, and closely connected with the Sanhedrin. Considering the zeal which then animated Paul, so that he " profited in the Jews' religion above many his equals, being more exceedingly ^ The chronological data of Paul's life are as follows : the conversion takes place in the year 36 (2 Cor. xi. 32 ; Aretas' retreat from Damascus, according to Ant. xviii. 5, 3, shortly before the death of Tiberius, 16 March, 37), i.e. seventeen years (Gal. i. 18, ii. 1) before the Sabbatical year (Tisri) 53, which is being kept by the Galatians at the time the Epistle to the Galatians was composed. The Sabbatical year is established by Ant. xiv. 16, 2, and xv. 1, 2. — First visit to Jerusalem, 39, according to Gal. i. 18. Apostolic preaching, 53, according to Gal. ii. 1. Journey through Galatia and Epistle to Galatians, after the first of Tisri, therefore autumn 53. accord- ing to Gal. iv. 10. Journey through Macedonia and arrival at Corinth, before the death of the emperor Claudius (died 13 October, 54), according to Acts xviii. 2. Migration to Ephesus in 56 (Acts xviii. 11). The Ephe- sian period, including the travels, lasts considerably over two years (Acts xix. 10, 22, and xx. 1). At the Passover of 58 Paul is still in Ephesus (1 Cor. v. 7, xvi. 8). At the beginning of winter 58, we find him in Mace- donia (cf. 2 Cor. ix. 2 with 2 Cor. xvi. 5, 6). For three months (Acts xx. 3), the Apostle stays in Corinth, and at Easter 59 (according to Acts xx. 6) he starts from Philippi for Jerusalem, where he is arrested at the Pentecost of 59. Felix leaves him in prison at Caesarea for two years (Acts xxiv. 27), and it is not till the autumn of 61 that Festus sends him to Rome, wheie he arrives early in 62, and stays two full years (Acts xxviii. 30), till his death, in Nero's persecution of the Christians, in August, 64 (Tac. Ann. XV. 44). Euseb. H. E. ii. 22 and 25. 56 THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. zealous of the traditions of liis fathers,"^ it must be supposed that he ilung himself with all his soul into every one of the quarrels about the temple treasures, the pool of Siloam and the votive shield, which were the burning questions of the hour. In addition, the struggle with Pilate, over whom the Pharisees had already won so many victories, was not yet at an end. Then the procurator fell, through his interference with the Messianic dreams of the Samaritans. The Pharisees might have condoned this act of interference, considering that they followed his example that same year against the disciples of Jesus. But this did not prevent them from profiting by the revolution ; and Paul enjoyed the delec- table year, so grateful to the hearts of the pious, when Vitellius sought by great concessions to make the inflammable material in Judaia safe amid the conflagration that raged round it in every quarter of the world. The Holy City was relieved of taxation, and the sacred robes were restored to the priests. The question of the tribute-money was settled for the Pharisees, the question of the fleet for the Sadducees ; and at the Passover of the year 36 the people of Jerusalem raised the same hosannahs to the proconsul of Syria as the year before to the Prophet of Galilee. Such were the questions on which Paul " was zealous beyond his contemporaries." The ricli endowment of his own nature prevented him from realising the emptiness of the forms he con- tended for, because he filled them with the fervour of his own religious feeling. Thus he believed he was finding support in them, while in reality his imagination was feeding on itself.^ Not only does his zeal against the Christians show that the sight of the temple and the theocracy filled him with a new joy in the unique destiny of Israel, but his imagination had long been dominated by the impressions of the temple ritual, with which he is fond of comparing all that is loftiest in his own life and worship. What pleases him is " a sweet smell, a ^ Gal. i. 14. 2 Holsten, Evang. des Paulus u. Petrus, 95, THE MIRACLE OF DAMASCUS. 57 sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God."^ That things must be ordered in the Christian community as in the temple, that sacrilege must be punished, that every pious heart is a temple wherein dwells the spirit of God — these are to him easy and natural comparisons.- His Lord and Master himself he com- pares to the Paschal lamb slaughtered at the feast,^ and to a sacrifice offered to God "for a sweet-smelling savour."'* He is moved to write to his churches, as if he were a Levite : " Do ye not know that they which minister about holy things live of the things of the temple, and they which wait at the altar are partakers with the altar ?"^ Following the same imagery, again, he sees in his converts sacrificial victims driven by him to the temple — creatures in which no spot or blemish may be f or first-fruits brought joy- fully by him as an offering to God ;" or the lump of bread which is holy because the first-fruit of it has been dedicated.^ And again, he, the priest, will finally be the drink-offering poured upon the sacrifice and service of their faith on the glorious day of his martyrdom.^ It is thus plain that the events of this period were deeply graven on his heart, and in after days served him as symbols of all high and holy things that touched the deepest chords of his heart. We can therefore easily understand how such a speech as Stephen's against the temple services, not to mention the whole blasphemous preaching of a crucified Messiah, roused the passion of his sensitive nature, and urged him against the new and dan- gerous sect in a fury of fanaticism. The scandal of the cross, the absence of any of the expected signs of the Messiah, which he himself points out as the special hindrance of the Jews,^*^ were doubtless for him too " the stumbling-stone, the rock of offence, the snare of stumbling." ^^ The far-fetched interpretation of 1 Phil. iv. 18. 2 1 Cor. iii. 16, 17. 3 1 Cor. v. 7. * Eph. V. 2. s 1 Cor. ix. 13. ^ i Thess. v. 23. 7 Rom. viii. 23; 1 Cor. xvi. 15. 8 Rom. xi. 16. 9 Phil. ii. 17. 10 1 Cor. i. 22. " Rom. ix. 33, xi. 9. 58 TifE royvEiisiox OF rJUL. Deut. xxi. 23 in the Epistle to the Galatians,' shows at least that Paul must have employed this expression against the Nazarenes : " Cursed is every one that hangolli on a tree," and was then impelled later, by the memory of his own use of it, to interpret the text conversely in favour of the doctrine of Jesus' vicarious death.^ His personal share in the disputations of the Hellenistic synagogues remains uncertain, for he took part in the stoning of Stephen and the persecution of the Christians less as tlie leader of a faction than as a deputy of the Sanhedrin. It was in this capacity that he arrested, examined, imprisoned, tortured and stoned, until, as he thought, the Church of Jerusalem was suppressed.^ AVhen the sectaries sought refuge in the surround- ing Syro-Phoenician cities, it was resolved to attack them in those places, at all events, which were accessible to the Sanhe- drin. Damascus, which possessed the largest Jewish population of all the adjacent heathen cities — some 20,000 souls at leasf* — had a Jewish ethnarch, zealous for the faith, by the favour of the victorious Aretas.^ Here, then, at all events, it was possible to seize the fugitives, and Paul was despatched to fulfil this mission. He bears witness himself that he became a Christian on this journey.*' Owing to the value set upon tlie fact of Paul's direct call from Christ by the author of the Acts, working with the Judaists in mind, we possess three detailed accounts of this event, which, according to the narrative, took place in the imme- diate neighbourliood of Damascus. But the fact that each of these three accounts represents the occurrence differently, shows that the author had no documentary authority for his account, but dealt freely with oral tradition. In the ninth chapter, where Paul is spoken of in the third 1 Gal. iii. 13. 2 Cf. Lipsius, Die Grundansch. d. Urgemeinde. Jalirb. des d. Prot. V. 1871, p. 89. 3 Gal. i. 13. * Bell. ii. 20, 2. & 2 Cor. xi. 32. c Gal. i. 17; 2 Cor. xi 32. TEE MIRACLE OF DAMASCUS. 59 person, we learn that near Damascus Paul fell to the ground, blinded by a light, and heard a voice cry : " Saul, Saul, why per- secutest thou me ?" while those who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no one. ^ Conversely, Paul tells in chap. xxii. that his followers saw vl' ■''' the light indeed, but did not hear the voice. Finally, the 26th chapter gives a third version, that all fell to the ground ; and (j* this time the voice speaks to Paul in words which the former account gives to Ananias of Damascus. Hence it appears that the author of the liistory did not work from documents, but left the exact form of the scene on each occasion to his talent for historical composition. The story given by the Acts can, therefore, neither be accepted as an objective fact nor translated into a vision. It is better to ask what Paul himself has to say about his conversion. In the first place, it is certain that Paul had visions of Jesus. His adversaries reproach him with boasting of his visions and revelations, and Paul admits the charge by describing the con- tent of one such ecstasy, experienced eight years after his con- version.^ Fiirther, he asks expressly, in 1 Cor. ix. 1 : " Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord ?" Now it is probable that the latter vision comcides with his conversion, because it is placed by Paul in the same series with the visions of the year 35, vouchsafed to the twelve apostles, and he regards his own vision as the last of this series, for he says : " Last of all he was seen of me as of one born out of due time ; for I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am."^ Clearly, then, both the violent birth of his Christianity — whether he calls it a painful birth or untimely — and his call to the apostolate, are here referred by Paul to the appearance of Christ vouchsafed to him. If we add that, in Gal. i. 12, Paul expressly says he received his gospel by a revelation of Jesus 1 2 Cor. xii. 1, seq. 2 i (jor. xv. 8—10. J 60 THE CO N VERS 10 y OF PAUL. Christ, no reason of any weight remains for doubting Paul's conversion by means of a vision. Now tliis makes it the easier to understand why Paul should declare his whole faith in Christ to be void and vain if Christ were not risen. For he himself had been brought to his faith by the vision of the risen Christ. If Christ were not risen, then he himself would be of all men most miserable, for the occasion of liis belief would then be deception.^ It follows that the cause of Paul's l)ecoming a Christian was a Christophany. Further, it is possible to show what was the substance of this vision. Paul states more than once the form under which he represents Christ to himself ; and it is not likely that this representation differed from the form of his vision. In other words, the substance of Paul's vision is to be obtained by realising what was the image of Christ which dwelt in Paul's mind after the vision.^ Here, however, we are met by the familiar figure of Daniel's Son of Man, whom Paul identifies with the heavenly man of the first account of the creation.^ The representation in the Acts also approaches very closely to Paul's recollection in describing the Christophany as essentially a blaze of light, for Paul pictures the heavenly body which we shall some day assume, and ivhich is made like to the bochj of Christ, as a liody of light, shining like the stars, eternal, incorruptible, glorious, spiritual, made of the spiritual radiance which is the substance of the divine glory. That which appeared to Paul was therefore a divine figure of light, the Son of Man in the book of Daniel, the heavenly Adam of the paradise above. Hence Paul speaks also of " the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God,"^ which fails to shine on those only whose eyes have been blinded by the god of this world.^ And he represents his conversion as the 1 1 Cor. XV. IC— 19. 2 Cf. Holsten, Evang. des Paulas u. Petrus, p. 71. 3 1 Thess. iv. 16, seq. ; 1 Cor. xv. 22, 45—49. * 2 Cor. iv. 4. ^ 2 Cor. iv. 4. TUE MIRACLE OF DAMASCUS. 61 moment in which God, " who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."^ We, too, shall some day be changed into the image of this form of light " from glory to glory." ^ Such, then, was the substance of the vision, of which Paul says, " He was seen of me also." But the particular form the vision took — not as he who bled upon the cross, nor he who raised himself from the grave, but as the heavenly man, a human figure coming upon the clouds — only admits of explanation on the supposition that Paul had already thought of the Messiah as the heavenly Adam and Son of Man. It has been shown above that the conception of the Messiah coming as Daniel's Son of Man was current in the time of Jesus.^ Thus Paul also, as a Pharisee, would have looked for this divine figure,* the " Man upon the clouds," as later Eabbis expressed it. Moreover, the identification of this heavenly man with the Adam of the first account of the creation, which forms the peculiar kernel of Pauline Christology, belongs originally to the Jewish schools. At least the Jewish Sibyl, in a pre-Christian passage, points to this combination ; ^ and when Philo speaks of a heavenly man,^ the archetype of sinful man, the only means of harmonizing this Platonic conception with the ideal world of the Scriptures was to identify his Platonic ideal man with the heavenly man of Daniel. Philo, indeed, did not expressly declare this identity with the Messiah ; but in any case it was naturally involved in the combination of the other two ideas. The figure of the Messiah, therefore, which appeared with such vivid clearness before the eyes of Paul, had long existed 1 2 Cor. iv. 6. 2 g Cor. iii. 18. 3 Time of Jesus, Vol. i. p. 193, and ii. 224, seq. (Eng. trans.); Sibyll. V. 414, seq. ; Friedlieb, p. xlviii. * Gfrorer, Urckristentli. i. 2, 307. For further details, see below. 5 Lib. V. 414, seq. « Philo, De Opif. Mundi, 32 ; and Leg. Alleg. 49 M. Cf. above, Vol. i. p. 161. 62 THE coy VERSION OF PAUL. in the mind of the Cilician scribe, and it only remains to ask how it came about that the familiar form of tlie glorified Son of Man took definite shape as the crucified Jesus whose following I'aul was on the way to destroy. Now even supporters of the traditional view relegate Christ's appearance before Damascus to the mind of the Apostle himself, only maintaining that this inward revelation of Jesus as the Messiah was effected by the direct intervention of tUjd. But when the event is once relegated to the mind of Paul, the ques- tion inevitably follows, whether the conditions necessary for the occurrence of such an event were not pre-existent in the mind itself. For science consists precisely in being able to point out the natural elements of the great mystery involved in all life. The question is doubly urgent with such a personality as was Paul's, a man who prided himself on his repeated visions and revelations, and was reproached with them by his adver- saries.^ Of course it was only possible for what already existed in his consciousness to take conscious form there as a vision ; so that the whole question turns on the point whether the man who had committed so many acts of blood against the followers of the Nazarene could, in the course of an eight or ten days' journey (for this is said to be the length of the journey in ques- tion), have been so profoundly impressed by the truth of what he persecuted that the very object of his persecution appeared to him as the Messiah. First, indeed, it might be asked whether the scenes of horror at Jerusalem were not the best preparation for tliis change. Amid all his zeal and passion, Paul, as we know him from his Epistles, has at bottom an almost womanly character, really unfit for such doings. Yet he was not a mere bystander when Stephen was stoned. He was the chosen witness at whose feet the executioners, according to ancient custom, laid their clothes when they stripped for their hideous task. And yet this bloodstained judge was so tender at heart ! It was but in 1 2 Cor. xii. 1 ; Clem. Horn. xvii. 13, seq. THE MIRACLE OF DAMASCUS. 6M thought he was able to carry out the sanguinary severity of the law. Thus he flung himself into the suppression of the odious sect with all the restlessness of an abnormal temperament, only to find his mind invaded by a still more striking experience. Moreover, tliis persecution was by no means a silent process of annihilation.^ Paul heard not only the forced recantations of the weak, but also the scriptural reasons of those who remained firm ; he beheld the glorified countenances of the martyrs and heard their appeal to Christ, the approaching judge of the world. In the discussions of the synagogue, in the examination of the prisoners and the proceedings of the Sanhedrin, he came to learn the reasons adduced by the Nazarenes for the Messiahship of Jesus. Now these proofs from Scripture are the very arguments which Paul afterwards found so conclusive. The critical pas- sages about the suffering servant of Jehovah, referred by the Nazarenes to Jesus, were not only adopted by Paul, but made the keystone of his doctrine of justification. Moreover, he states expressly that he received this " Scripture" from those who were Christians before him, and that his teaching was not different from theirs.^ As to the other passages appealed to by the Chris- tians, Paul finds them so striking that in 2 Cor. iv. 4 he declares his conviction that Satan himself must have blinded the eyes of the Jews to prevent them from seeing the image of Jesus in the Scripture ; while in iii. 14 he complains that a veil is spread over their eyes and hearts as soon as the Scripture is read. It is certain, then, that Paul convinced himself of the truth of the proof from Scripture given by those he persecuted, and it is impossible to assert that this only took place after his con- version to Christianity ; for Paul most expressly connects his Scripture-proof, or, as he calls it, his Gospel, with the revela- tion at Damascus.^ This Gospel is of no human character ; he received it not by man nor from man, but by the revelation of ^ Cf. Holsten, Zum Evang. des Pauhxs u. Petrus, p. 100, seq. 2 1 Cor. XV. 3, 11. 3 Gal. i. 1, 12, 17. 64 THE coy VERSION OF PAUL. Jesus Christ. At that hour it pleased God to reveal Jesus Christ and the Scripture concerning him to the mind of Paul. The trutli of the CJospel, therefore, i.e. the fact of Jesus being the Christ promised by the Scripture, the fact that all the pas- sages applied to him by the Nazarenes actually refer to Jesus, was revealed to him on the journey from Jerusalem to Damascus, not of man, nor by instruction, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. 1 Granted, then, that this theoretic knowledge was an integral part of the revelation of Damascus, it is easy to fill in the inter- mediate steps which first led to this knowledge, and then proceed to explain the vision. As for the reasons, the truth of wliich now dawned upon him, he had heard them defended by saints and martyrs in Jerusalem with all the eloquence lent by mar- tyrdom. Words of Jesus, such as he had never heard, rang in his ears during their examination or torture; among so many followers of Jesus there must even have existed written records of the sayings of the Lord. As he journeyed to Damascus to convert or extirpate the Christians in that city, what would he have been engrossed in but the passages of Scripture they had appealed to, and the words of Jesus with which they thought to prove that Jesus was the Christ ? When, free at last from the whirl of party contention in Jerusalem, Paul meditated upon these words of Jesus or read them over, must they not have carried ever-increasing conviction to a religious genius such as he ? Could the writer of 1 Cor. xiii. read the Sermon on the Mount without feeling thrilled to his inmost heart ? Must it not have become plain to him that he who thus spoke could be no deceiver nor false prophet ? But the humiliation of the cross? This "rock of offence" and "snare of stumbling"? It cannot be denied that the Mes- siah crucified was a cruel contradiction to the Pharisees' expecta- tions of the Messiah ; but did not the very words of Isaiah, in which Paul's Gospel is revealed, declare that he was to be " a 1 Gal. i. 1, 12. TUB MIRACLE OF DAMASCUS. 65 man of sorrow and acquainted with grief ; and we hid, as it were, our faces from him." If Isaiah liii. really treats of the Messiah, where was the humiliation ? For the Scripture itself showed in the plainest words why it was necessary for the Messiah to be rejected. "The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed." This revelation, that the ]\Iessiah must justify the sinful world by his suffering, put an end to the crying contradiction in the doctrine of the Pharisees above mentioned. Pharisaism looked for the speedy coming of the Messiah ; it was convinced that this was the final age. Yet its watchword was that none but a righteous nation would see the day of the Messiah. Here was a terrible antinomy to torment a scrupulous mind so long as it remained unsolved.^ God could only bring the blessing of the kingdom to a righteous people ; and this people is not righteous, and never will be. This was one of those situations which tragedy used to solve by the appearance of the god ; and here, too, the only solution was for God himself to make the people righteous. He makes it righteous, however, by the vicarious suffering of the Messiah, as shown in the prophecy of the servant of Jehovah. " Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who shall declare his generation ? for he was cut off out of the land of the living ; for the transgression of my people was he stricken."^ This pro- phetic passage, referred to by the Nazarene, was the one thing needful to resolve the contradiction on which the Pharisees made shipwreck and the schools were tormented. It swept away the obloquy of the cross. The Messiah must needs suff'er according to the Scripture, and the Scripture further states the reason for his suff'ering. Why, then, should Jesus not really be this suffering Messiah ? He who had spoken the words which Paul heard from the 1 Holstcn, 1 c. p. 41. 2 Xsaiah liii. 6—8. VOL. III. F 66 TUE coy VERSION OF PAUL. Niizarenes, was assuredly the greatest of all who had stretched out their hand to the diadem of the promise. One thing alone was wanting to him — attestation from without. God might kill and sacrifice His chosen one ; hut he must also be justified by some act of God. In reply, the disciples of Jesus asserted that God had justified him, had raised him up from the dead. So long as Paul liad held the assertion of a crucified Messiah to be blasphemy, he had not so much as considered the question whether Jesus had really risen. True that in his persecution of Stephen he found these men and women manifestly convinced that they had seen the risen Jesus ; but their conviction weighed nothing against the insanity of a crucified Messiah. But what was formerly insanity in his eyes, now proved to be the veritable teaching of Scripture ; so that everything was included in the single ques- tion. Did these Christians really see the risen Jesus, or was the vision a trick of their imagination. A crucial question indeed. If they are right, he is wrong ; he has fought against God and against His anointed ; he has raged with fire and sword against the true object of his own aspirations. All his life long he had been zealous for the ^lessiah who was to come ; had the Messiah now come only to be persecuted by him in his Church ? Thus everything turns upon the question, Has Jesus really risen, does he really live, was it he who was seen by the women and by the twelve and by tlie five hundred brethren at once ? A^'oices of the past echo round him ; new voices arise, terrible images of the last days, piercing cries of pain, looks of ecstasy, — how must all these have worked together in the inmost heart of such a man, with such days behind liim, such thoughts within him, such a task before him. Nearer and nearer he comes to Damascus. He is about to renew his work of blood, to lay informations before the Sanhedrin of Damascus, to send men to the dungeon, the rack or the scaffold, and once more, sick at heart, to behold the glorified countenances of martyrs before THE MIRAGLE OF DAMASCUS. 67 whom heaven opens. At this moment, " he came near Damas- cus, and suddenly there shined round about hun a light from heaven ; and he heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." Lea\T.ng Paul's personality entirely out of the question, we shovdd have under these circumstances to say that the conditions for a visionary apparition were present here, if anywhere. The mental anguish of all these contradictions must be relieved, or the strongest vessel would burst under the strain of their disruptive forces. Now Paul was a visionary, and herein lay his salvation. The accompanying circumstances, added to the Christophany by the Acts, are precisely the same as those which Paul men- tions as attending his other visions. He falls to the ground ; is deprived of the power of sight ; and needs the aid of his com- panions to bring him in his helpless state to Damascus. His later visions are attended by the same phenomena. " It is not expedient for me to glory," he says, 2 Cor. xii. 1 ; " I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I knew a man in Christ, above fourteen years ago (whether in the body I cannot tell ; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell : God knoweth), such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man (whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell : God knoweth), how that he was caught up to paradise, and heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter." We have here an internal, not an external event, as is clear from this personal testimony, which moreover assumes that Paul lost consciousness in these ecstasies, or else he must have known whether he was in the body or out of the body. The Apostle, too, clearly describes, in the passage cited above, those cataleptic states which accompany visions in his own case as in many others, and are hinted at by the Acts. " And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the mes- f2 68 THE coy VERSION OF PAUL. senger of Satan to buffet me. For this thing I Ijesonght the Lord thrice, tliat it might depart from me. And he said imto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness."^ Thus there is a counterpoise to these heavenly revelations which prevents him from being exalted above measure. After his divine raptures he suffers from a thorn in the flesh, and finds himself in an abnormal condition, quivering as if his body were buffeted and driven to and fro by some power from without. When consciousness returned, he felt so unnerved and prostrated, that thrice lie prayed God to take away this messenger of Satan; but his prayers were not granted. Under these circumstances, the narrative of the Acts may tell of a tit, while temporary blindness may very well be associated with ecstasies so deranging to the nervous system. At all events, the Apostle, in Gal. iv. 14, describes his malady as offer- ing a great temj)tation to the Galatians, so that he would not have been astonished if they, like many others,'^ had despised and rejected him ; thougli, far from this, they would have given liim their own eyes if it had been possible." Here, then, we have, in the first vision of Clirist vouchsafed to him, all the pathological conditions which are recognized by Paul as attending his otlier visions. He tells us himself that such visions were not rarely the outcome of passionate inward processes. So, in Gal. ii. 2, he explains in detail the reasons which decided hiui to bring the question of circumcision to an issue in Jerusalem itself ; but in the last resort it was a " reve- lation" in the form of an external and objective voice, bidding him go up to Jerusalem. Again, after all the arguments for and against a journey to Macedonia have been debated in Troas, a man of Macedon appears by night to Paul in a dream, and cries to him clearly, " Come over and help us."* ^ 2 Cor. xii. 7. '^2 Cor. iv. 7, seq., x. 10, seq., xii. 9, seq. 3 Gal, iv. ] 5. Cf. Rlickert's Commentary, ad loc. * Acts xvi. 9 perhaps stood originally in the TraA'el-Docimient. G) THE MIRACLE OF DAMASCUS. 09 Thus, in this case, conclusions, the premisses of wliich are already given, take the form of visions. But if these exter- nal struggles end in visions, how much more the terrible inward struggles which shook him so violently ! Looking back, he hears himself reproached with having persecuted the innocent, insulted God and outraged the Messiah. Looking forward, he is confronted by the prospect of doing what he no longer can nor may. Looking into himself, he finds the voices of his teachers and the glorious history of Israel in open conflict with Jesus' creative word. The nearer he draws to Damascus, the greater the strain of anguish and doubt and darkness. Then a bright light shoue around him — the glory of God, whereof his teachers spoke. All else vanished — Damascus, the earth, the whole world ; heaven fdled his view on every side, and from the opened heaven advanced the familiar figure of the Son of Man, the second Adam, the glorified figure of the Messiah : " I am Jesus whom thou persecutest ; it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." Then he falls to the ground, and others lead him to Damascus.'- 1 Cf. Hirzel's excellent description of the occurrence (essentially based on Ewald, Gescli. Isr. vi. 375, seq.) in Lang's Zeitstimmen of 1864, The Conver- sion of Paul. Kenan also includes the journey through the wilderness among the factors which assist the origin of the vision, and this is not entirely to be rejected. Cf. Furrer's description of the journey from Jeru- salem to Damascus, Wanderg. in Pal. 374—385. Like Kenan, Sprenger falls back upon the peculiar influence of the desert as an explanation of the first vision of Mohammed, Moh. i. 216: "The pure, bracing air of the desert produces an extraordinary elation of the mind ; but the surroundings are so monotonous that they offer no new images. The mind returns upon itself ; past events and scenes from home arise with great vividness. Now it very often happens in nomadic life that people wander alone for weeks together, distressed by hunger and thirst; and under these circumstances the very sanest minds seldom escape without hallucinations. In Arabia it is so /^~^ conmion for solitary wanderers to cry aloud and hear a voice speaking to ( ■* y them, that Arabic contains a special word, Hatif, for this voice ; while in Africa the phantom which appears to riders is called Kagol, the Companion." " Visions often lead the Bedouins astray ; and many a brave man, lured on by the Jinns, has paid the penalty with his life." 70 THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. 2. The Clad Tidings as Jewish Theology. Paul was a Christian on his arrival at Damascus, where he had intended to persecute the Christians. The light tliat made him a Christian was not as one flame kindled in him from another, — it was a lightning-flash suddenly breaking upon him. Hencefonvard it remains an unalterable principle of his con- sciousness that he had become a Christian, " not of men nor by men, but by Jesus Christ whom God raised from the dead," and that it was God himself who revealed his Son " in him." It is the more necessary, therefore, to inquire what was his attitude to the historical origins of the new religion, and how far he, our earliest witness for the history of Christianity, took pains to acquaint himself with the Jesus of history after the latter had been revealed to his inner personality as the Messiah. The very fact that he was converted by the vision while on his journey, would lead us to expect his immediate return to the scene of Jesus' life, in order to learn exactly what manner of man he had now come to believe in. On our mode of procedure he would have been bound to learn the history of Jesus from the lips of his disciples, and not to have rested until he had dis- covered the minutest detail of his life ■ in all its bearings. Instead of this, he adopted the opposite course. " I certify you," he says,^ " that I neither received my gospel of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ But when it pleased God to reveal his Son in me, immediately / con- ferred not loitli flesh and hlood, neither went I uii to Jerusalem to them which ivere apostles before me, but I went into Arabia and returned again unto Damascus." The attitude towards historical fact thus presented is some- what startling, and might lead us to suggest that it would have been better if the Apostle had consulted with flesh and blood, and had inquired of those who were in a position to know the 1 Gal. i. 16. THE GLAD TIDINGS AS JEWISH THEOLOGY. 71 true character of the Jesus who had been revealed to him. Tlie opposite course arouses our suspicion ; and the question how far Paul actually possessed a fairly accurate knowledge of Jesus' life, becomes more significant in proportion as the primitive Church based its conceptions of Jesus upon these very expres- sions of Paul's. For it is easy to show that the theologians of the QEcumenical Councils followed Paul and John rather than the Synoptics in their attitude towards Jesus. The greater, then, is the importance of the question : Had Paul, who never saw him, any adequate information about Jesus ? The first thing that makes it difficult to decide is the fact that we know so little of the period following the vision of Damascus, that is to say, of the special time of the Apostle's training. It is fairly certain that Paul, who baptized others,^ had himself been baptized, and probably some instruction upon the life and teaching of Jesus preceded this baptism. But the account of this instruction in the Acts is interwoven with so much symbolism that it cannot possibly be regarded as history pure and simple. The means, too, by which it is effected are easily seen to be imaginary. Paul's instructor appears as a man faithful to the law, by name Ananias ; but according to the representation ascribed to the Judaeo-Christians, Paul's teachers were one and all faithful to the law.^ He is said to live in the street " called straight ;" but this particular street is the far-famed boulevard of Damascus, and probably the only street known to the author, or indeed to the average man, but hardly one to harbour Jews or poor fugitives.^ On the other hand, Paul's own testimony confirms one point in the account of the Acts. The conversion of the learned emissary of the Sanhedrin provoked such bitterness in the Jewish quarter of Damascus* that his stay was cut short, and 1 1 Cor. i. 16. 2 ^cts xxii. 12, xxii. 3, ix. 26. ' Petennann, Eeisen im Or. 1. 96 ; Renan, Ap. 184. * 2 Cor. xi. 32. 72 THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. lie hiul hardly entered into relations with the Christians hefore they were broken off. The man who had come to extirpate the folliiwers of the false prophet, and now a})peared as one of them, could not but arouse a storm of ill-feeling. Aretas, the Arabian king, had granted the Jews of Damascus an ethnarch of their own who undoubtedly possessed extensive jurisdiction. This newly-created ethnarch ordered the arrest of the apostate from the Sanhedrin. Paul concealed himself, and the gates of the city and the Jewish quarter were watched to prevent his escape. On his own interpretation of the law, stoning would have been the due penalty for his crime, unless the people of Damascus preferred to send back in chains to the Sanhedrin the wonderful emissary it had despatched to persecute the Christians. However, the religious conflict of the Jews was to end this time without blood. Paul's new co-religionists knew of a friendly house, from which a window opened through the city wall. Through this he was let down in a basket, and escaped to Hauran. This night descent in the basket down the lofty wall, while the Jewish spies perhaps were waiting below to arrest him and drag him off to be stoned, remained always with him as a dreadful memory. More tlian twenty years after, he described it more graphically than any other of his sufferings related ; more graphically even than the stoning he once endured, and the shipwreck when he was tossed about upon the sea for a day and a night. From Damascus Paul did not come without mishap to Jerusalem, as is related by the Acts, but departed into Arabia.^ There is no reason to take this as the distant Arabia Felix, tlie land of spice and balsam, whose northern boundary runs from the extremity of the Arabian to the Persian Gulf. Arabia Petra^a would be more likely, the kingdom of Aretas, whose brilliant capital in Mount Seir stands on the caravan route from Damascus to Aila. At this point begins the famous pilgrims' way to Horeb and Sinai, leading to the sacred mountain through 1 Gal. i. 17. TEE GLAD TIDINGS AS JEWISH THEOLOGY. I'A the peninsula of Sinai, with its scanty valleys of palms hidden among the rocky deserts. Now since Paul, in Gal. iv. 21, displays a certain directness of touch in comparing the sterile Sinai with the sterility of the law, and mentions the local Arabic name of the mountain, it is very probable that during the years he spent in Arabia he joined the crowd of pilgrims who yearly flocked along the road to the holy mountains of Horeb and Sinai through the bleak and rocky valleys of the peninsula studded with ancient inscriptions. But in Gal. i. 17, we must understand by "Arabia," as always in Paul, the Eoman district of this name, Hauran or Auranitis. The most important city on the road from Damascus through Arabia was the rock fortress of Pella,^ and this, at the outbreak of the war, had a Christian church in which the Christians of Jerusalem sought refuge. ^ But it is impossible even to conjec- ture whether this " place prepared of God to shelter the woman," as the Apocalypse calls Pella (xii. 6), contained Christians at this time, or whether it was Paul's place of refuge. Apart from this, it is very probable that he kept to the towns along the road from Damascus, because he came back there after his sojourn in Arabia. Since the Apostle had already spoken to the Jews in Damascus, it is safe to assume that he did not refrain from proclaiming the appearance of the Messiah in the synagogues of Arabia. But he was not now travelling with the design of spreading Christianity ; he was seeking rest and retirement, of which he must have stood in need after so violent a revolution. This, indeed, is involved in the words of Gal. i. 16 : "1 conferred not with flesh and blood, but went into Arabia." So, too, the Baptist had withdrawn into the wilderness when the spirit seized upon him ; so, too, Jesus gathers up all his forces in the wilderness for the preaching of the kingdom ; so Josephus flees to the 1 Plin. Hist. Nat. v. 16; Euseb. Onom. Decap, Pompey marclies from Damascus to Pella, Ant. xiv. 3, 4 ; Bell. i. 6, 5. * Euseb. H. E. iii. 5, 3. 74 THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. Dead Sea wlien the Ijetter voices within him gained the upper liand ; so, too, from tliis time on, a whole generation begin the new life with retreat from the world. For the rest, the move- ments of the Tarsian are all the more difficult to follow, because the war between Aretas on the one side, and Antipas and Vitellius on the other, threw this particular district into great confusion. We hear that l*aul returned thence to Damascus, to leave it for Jerusalem in the year 39, three years after his conversion. It is not known whether Paul remained in Arabia during these three years, and only returned to Damascus for a short time, or if he returned to Damascus immediately the re-conquest of Damascus by the Eomans made it possible, so as to make the three years mentioned in Gal. i. 18 refer as a whole to Damascus. At all events, a considerable time had passed before Paul thought, or perhaps even dared think, of returning to Jerusalem. The object of his journey to Jerusalem was, as he himself says in Gal. i. 18, to become acquainted with Peter. Under existing circumstances, it could not be advisable for him to enter into relations with the whole church of Christians, for he had good cause to shroud his visit to the fanatical city in the deepest obscurity. He had the less diificulty in concealment because, in the year 39, Caligula's attempt on the temple had roused the whole population. No one troubled about the Christians when the statue destined for the desecration of the temple was on its way ; and the news of its arrival drew multitudes to suc- cessive places on the route, where they stayed for weeks at a time and raised a great national lamentation, first at Ptolemais, next at Tiberias, and then at Antipatris. So Paul remained undiscovered. According to the Acts, he had great difficulty in approach- ing the church of Jerusalem, until Joses of Cyprus, surnamed Barnabas, made him acquainted with the twelve. On the other hand, Paul himself states that he only saw Peter : " Other of the disciples saw I none, save James, the Lord's brother; before THE QLAD TIDINGS AS JEWISH THEOLOGY. 75 God, I lie not."^ Now the fact of Paul's seeking out any repre- sentative of Jesus' apostles and family must be taken as a sign of his earnest desire to obtain more certain knowledge of the historical origins of his belief. Certain as it is that Paul neither knew Jesus nor was familiar with his disciples, — certain, too, that he was not intimately con- cerned with the historical origins of Christianity, and scarcely ever employs them in his Epistles, — it does not follow that he was unacquainted with them. Two periods of residence in Damascus, and the visit to Jerusalem, with the possession, may be, of a written gospel, sufficed to give him an adequate general know- ledge of the life of Jesus. As to his putting aside the historical part in his Epistles, deducing Jesus' Messiahship from the Old Testament rather than from the life of Jesus, and caring less for the points of Jesus' life than the significance of his death — these are due, not to his imperfect knowledge, but to his specula- tive cast of mmd, which thought in religious postulates, not in actualities. But on occasion he could go into historical details, as is shown by his own expression to the Galatians, that he had set forth Jesus Christ crucified so clearly before their eyes that he never believed he need fear their turning to another gospel.^ Eurther, his knowledge embraces the whole life of Jesus. He mentions the Davidic origin,^ and knows of the baptism, which he practises upon others and converts into symbolism and allegory in his speeches.* He knows the preaching of the kingdom, the sending forth of the apostles, their equipment with power over spirits,^ and is so used to calling them " the Twelve," as in the time of Jesus, that he continued to use the term when it was no longer applicable ;^ while Jesus' life of poverty,'^ with its guiding spirit of mildness and compassion, its self -forgetful, humble, 1 Gal. i. 19, 2 Gal. iii. 1. s Rom. i. 3, ix. 5. 4 Col. ii. 11 ; 1 Cor. x. 2; Rom. vi. 3, 4; 1 Cor. xii. 13; Gal. iii. 27. 6 2 Cor. xii. 12; 1 Cor. xii. 10, xxviii. 29; Gal. iii. 5. 6 1 Cor. XV. 5. 1 Phil. ii. 4—8. 70 THE coy VERSION OF PAUL. ministering love, essential factors of tlie " life of Jesus," is clearly present in the mind of the Apostle.^ So, too, he has better knowledge of the history of the l*assion than the Evangelists themselves. At least his account of the last supper, " on the same night in which he was betrayed," gives a correct solution of all the discrepancies in the Synoptics;^ he is aware that it was the rulers at the time, not the people, who desired the death of Jesus ;^ while the treachery of Judas,* the despiteful treatment of Jesus,^ his humiliation on the cross,^ tlie writing of the proconsul nailed upon it," are one and all so "\ividly before his mind that he could pourtray them to the eyes of others. Clearest and most definite of all, however, is his list of the appearances after the resurrection. We learn through him of two appearances — one to James, one to the five hundred brethren — which have disappeared from the canonical Gospels. This, then, Paul certainly learned "from flesh and blood;" this is a point on which he necessarily " received instruction of men," as indeed he expressly says in passing : " I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received."*^ Again, his knowledge of the sayings of the Lord is as minute as that of the history of Jesus. He obviously took pains to learn the utterances of Jesus on all important questions. "When lie has not this to go upon, he says so openly.^ As to proofs, of course he follows his Eabbinical usage in applying sayings of tlie Old Testament alone, only citing words of the Lord incidentally. But indirect references to the sayings and parables of Jesus are proportionately numerous.^*^ Some- 1 2 Cor. V. 14, seq. ; Gal. ii. 20 ; Phil. i. 8. 2 1 Cor. xi. 23, 3 1 Cor. ii. 8. * 1 Cor. xi. 23. ^ Eom. xv. 3. « 2 Cor. xiii. 4. ? Col. ii. 14. 8 i Cor. xv. 3. ^ 1 Cor. vii. 25. *° A real quotation occurs in 1 Cor. ix. 14 and 1 Thess. ii. 6, based upon Luke X. 7. So 1 Cor. vii. 10, referring to Matt. v. 32. Indirect allusions are more frequent; Rom. xiv. 4, ii. 1, is a reminiscence of tlie uncharitable THE GLAD TIDINGS AS JEWISH THEOLOGY. V7 times, indeed, he seems to refer to -words of Jesus in all proba- bility lost to us.^ If, notwithstanding, the historical influence of the life of Jesus has but a subordinate meaning for Paul, the vision under discussion can only rest upon the superiority of the spontaneous mental activity in him over the receptive. As in his vivid spontaneity he never quotes without adding something of his own, so throughout his life he preached a Son of God who had been revealed " in him." A man with such a development of spiritual activity is, as a rule, seldom of an objective cast of mind. He merges himself in the message he preaches. If it is hard to tell whether Plato's Socrates is more Socrates or Plato, it is still harder to decide how far Paul's preaching of Jesus is of revelation or tradition. Still the vision has another basis : as Jewish theology, it is con- nected with the entire character of his gospel. As to the mode in which Paul arrived at the assurance that Jesus was the Messiah, it must be premised that influences were supplied in the Pharisaic scheme of the world which made this development of thought possible and aided it. A conversion judge in Matt. vii. 1. Matt. xvii. 26, 27, floats before the explanation of Christian liberty and loving-kindness in 1 Cor. vi. 12. The blind guides of Rom. ii. 19 come from Matt. xv. 14, and the description of the kingdom in Rom. xiv. 17 from Matt. v. 3. "Eat what is set before you," 1 Cor. x. 27, is also the watchword of Luke x. 8 and Matt. xv. 11. Faith that removes mountains, of 1 Cor. xiii. 2, is from Matt. xvii. 20. The Fea, yea, of 2 Cor. i. 17, from Matt. v. 37. " Cursed, we bless," from Matt. v. 41, which is thus attested as genuine. But the eschatological discussions of the Apostle are the most deeply imbued with references to Jesus' eschatological discourses. Thus Paul compares himself to the giver of the bride on the day of the Parusia, 2 Cor. xi. 2, seq., recalling the image of the bridegroom, Matt. ix. 15, XXV. 1 — 12. Similarly, the gathering in of the faithful, 1 Thess. iv. 14, seq., comes from Matt. xxiv. 30. The trump, 1 Thess. iv. 16, from Matt. xxiv. 31. The clouds of the Parusia, 1 Thess. iv. 17, from Matt. xxiv. 30. The thief in the night, 1 Thess. v. 2, from Matt. xxiv. 36 ; not to mention many other allusions, e.g. the parables of the sower, the vine- yard, the plough, (fee. ^ So 1 Thess. iv. 15. 78 THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. such as his, without external instruction, without prolonged moral influences, could only be based on a dialectical process wlicreby Paul recognized in the works of Jesus the fullilnient of the postulates of his own thought, no matter whether he reached this knowledge as a logical abstraction of his own or as an outward manifestation by means of a vision. Now under these circumstances there existed no occasion for I'aul to break with his earlier scheme of things, the principles of which had, though unconsciously, led him to his belief in Jesus, and therefore were not in irreconcilable opposition to the gospel. We have seen already that in his Pharisaic speculations on the mode in which man could be justified before God, Paul simply took up the paradox of the crucified Messiah to solve the antinomy established by the Pliarisaic doctrine of justification. Indeed, the whole paraphernalia of Pharisaic thought remained with him so entirely, that out of all the history of salvation the only points of use to his speculations are the death and resur- rection of Jesus. As for the rich actuality of the life of Jesus, spread out before us in the Synoptics, Paul has no use for such parts as are either rhetorical or didactic. He knows the life, but erects nothing upon it. The death and resurrection are the sole events from which his entire theology is developed. To fathom their significance is the sum of his tlieology. If the crucified Jesus was the Messiah spoken of by all the prophets, it was obvious that the secret of the divine intention must be involved in the paradox of the fate of the chosen envoy. Here, then, the true secret of human salvation was to be sought; not in the teaching of Jesus, but in his death. We have, therefore, in Paul's theology, not an expansion of Jesus' thought, but an innnanent development of the Jewisli consciousness, called into being by the new fact of the crucified Messiah. If Paul had settled down to the task of systematically expounding the teaching of Jesus, he must have started from Jesus' loftiest conception — the idea of the kingdom of God. He would have had to describe the attributes of the kiuffdom from THE GLAD TIDINGS AS JEWISH THEOLOGY. 79 the sayings of Jesus; to develop the conditions for entrance into it and exclusion from it ; to define Jesus as sovereign of the kingdom, and a representative, not of its future coming, but of its actual presence. Again, he would have been bound to quote the words of Jesus as often as he quotes the Old Testa- ment, and to speak of the life of Jesus as he speaks of Abraham and of Moses and the law. Now Paul does not make the smallest approach to this course. The very attributes applied by him to the person of Jesus are not taken from expressions of Jesus. Jesus nowhere spoke of himself as the divine man, the second Adam, or the image of God, in which the new creation of humanity is perfected, nor even that in the kingdom of God we shall be made like to his heavenly body. All these conceptions originate in Paul's theory of man, not in the teaching of Jesus. Paul, consequently, did not give up his Jewish theology when he became a Christian, considering that he continues to call himself a Pharisee at the close of his life.^ A new movement entered his Jewish conceptions only so far as he was compelled to face the question. How is the Jewish con- ception of the world, true in itself and universally admitted, affected by the fact that the Messiah died and rose again ? The fundamental postulate which summed up all religion for the Jews, namely, that man must be justified before God, remained unshaken in Paul, no less than the Pharisees' inference that God would not bring salvation to men until they satisfy this postulate. But both these axioms are brought into relation with the crucified Messiah, and give rise to new deductions. In short, before his conversion, I'aul's answer to the question. How shall man be justified before God ? would have been that of his teachers, " By fulfilling the law ;" now it was, " By the vicarious sacrifice of the Messiah." Thus we have not to deal with a development of the teaching of Jesus, but with a doctrine about Jesus. For Paul, Jesus was ^ 2 Cor. xi. 22 ; riiil. iii. 5 ; Acts xxiii. 6, 80 TIIK coy VERS 10 X OF PJCL. not a teacher, luit a inciliator. He diil not teach something; he did something. In raul's eyes, tiierefore, Christianity does not consist in a theory, but in a faith and a condition of life pro- duced by faith. While thus only giving a new answer to an old question, Paul further develops the rich significance of this answer, not in relation to individual words of Jesus, but in constant antithesis to the answers given by the Jewish school. So the chief motives of Pauline theology lie in the antithesis between justification by the law and justification of grace by faith ; and this antithesis bounds the teaching of the Apostle from beginning to end. "With regard to tlic notion of justification, Paul still agrees with his teachers in holding it to exhaust everything demanded of man by God. Justification is the state in which all moral and religious demands made by God are realized ; it is the adequate relation of man to God aimed at by every religion. The Pauline Epistles, in short, turn on the settlement of the question as to what justification can stand before God, what God himself does by grace, what man himself may do by keep- ing the law ; the ideas of justification from God or from faith, of personal justification or justification by the law; but such were the questions Paul dealt with in the days when he was a Pharisee.^ Xow if in answer to the question, " How is man justified before God ? " Paul could say, " By fulfilment of the law," it follows at once that by "the law" he does not merely under- stand the ritual ordinances of Judaism, circumcision, the cus- tomary ablutions, purifications, abstentions, and acts of worship. In his eyes, the law as a whole comprises all religious and ethical duties, not excepting purity of heart, brotherly love, and morality in general. For him the universal moral law and the Mosaic law are identical ; he only speaks specifically of the jMosaic law where we speak of tlie moral law, because he knows no higher expression of the moral law. ^ Cf. Time of Jesus, Vol. i. pp. 145 and 168 (Eng. trans.). THE GLAD TIDINGS AS JEIVISII THEOLOGY. 81 Now his inclusion of the universal postulates of morality in the word " law," without any exclusive reference to the ritual law of Judaism, is shown by the introduction to the Epistle to the Komans, where he ascribes a " law " to the heathens also, and declares that they too had entered upon the path of per- sonal and legal righteousness, but had been as unsuccessful in attaining their object as Judaism. Thus law and faith are opposed to one another as morality and religion, and the question whether one path or the other leads to righteousness is consequently of universal significance. Yet Paul does not deny that fulfilment of the law, that is to say, perfect morality and ecclesiasticism, ensure righteousness before God ; though he does deny that any individual can enter into this state by his own power ; he denies that mere human nature is sufficient of itself to fulfil the law, or, as we should say, to practise true morality. "With this perception that human nature in itself is incapable of living after the divine ordinances, Paul takes his stand within the dualistic scheme of the world, introduced by the Hellenists into Judaism. Human nature belongs to a finite world, and is subject to the laws of this finite existence. The law is divine, spiritual, good ; and for this very reason it is not given to finite humanity to fulfil the law. Now this brings us to the problem of the time, at which the thought of the Gentile world was labouring even more than the Jewish schools. What, in fine, had become the one question of contemporary philosophy was this : How has human nature the power to attain the vita hcata 1 How can it, being imperfect, material, evil, raise itself above the bonds of finitude wdiich encircle it I Greek thought had been wrecked on this problem ; we have now to see whether this new Jewish school can find a solution leading to unity in the conception of the world. Here, as a matter of fact, is the link. But Platonism was to be indistin- guishably mingled with Hebrew conceptions before it succeeded in resolving the antinomy it liad itself engendered. VOL. III. G 82 THE CONy'ERSION OF PAUL. 3. The Sfk. tlativk ruH.MissE.s of Pauline Theology, The contemporaries of tlie Apostle conceived of two worlds standing in antagonism to eacli otlier. On the one side, the heavenly world, the source of all power and life, the dwelling- place of the types of all being ; on the other, the material world, which would be void of shape or being, did not the shadows of the ideas lend it form and life. But this material world is by its nature the contrary of the spiritual. It is inanimate, evil, smful ; at once the basis of opposition to the idea and cause of the corruptibility of all earthly forms. This originally Platonic notion had been for generations the field within which the thought of the civilized world ranged. Judaism, too, with its transcendental idea of God and its spiritual religion, found no difficulty in fitting its religious con- ceptions into this antithesis. Tlie Biblical scheme of things, at all events in the later books, divides the universe into two spheres, earth and heaven. Heaven is the world of spirits ; the substance of which it consists is the substance of light or glory (So^'a). The forms and shapes of the eaithly world are, on the contrary, bound up in earthly matter. It is uimecessary to discuss here how far this particular view was a development from the Hebrew scheme of the world, or how far it was based upon subsequent knowledge of the Parsees' dualistic religion. At all events, there was no difficulty in harmonizing it with the Platonic dualism. This Platonic dualism, then, is a pre-supposition of Pauline theology.^ Paul, it need hardly be said, never discussed the question whether matter existed from everlasting, and how ^ What we call monism is either materialism, idealism, or the view that the world developed itself by evolution from God. By dualism we mean the recognition of a second principle, whose operation cannot be regai'ded as willed by God. In this sense Paul is a dualist, although he knows no hijle, and his predestiuarianism derives everything tu the last resort from God. SPECULATIVE PREMISSES OF PAULINE THEOLOGY. 83 spirit and matter came together as they are, seeing that his theology confines itself to the justification of man. Here, how- ever, the dualistic tendencies of his thought are clearly visible. The First Epistle to the Corinthians^ infers from Gen. ii. 7 that man is formed of earth and animated with a breath of life, so that by nature he is after the flesh (a-dp^), i.e. of matter taken from the earth, and only differentiated from the earth by the breath of life (xpvxi])- The fundamental element of human nature is of the earth earthy ; only the vital force breathed into it by God differentiates it from inanimate matter.^ By its nature it is finite, or, as the Apostle expresses it, corruptible.^ It is unclean, like all matter that passes from generation to corruption.* The antithesis to the flesh consists of the other universal principle, the spirit (Tri'eu/xa), a conception, be it noted, which does not altogether tally with our conception of spirit. For modern thought, in opposing spirit to flesh, begins by denying materiality to spirit. The attitude of ancient thought on this point was diff'erent. Force was inconceivable without some material substratum, and spirit was matter also, but infinitely fine, brilliant matter, mobile and motor, the penetrating fluid which vitalizes inert matter.^ Only thus could Platonism con- ceive of notions or ideas as existences, and Plato speak of the fields of truth, where the souls exercise their steeds. Now the heaven of the Apocalypse, with its deity shining like a ruby,*^ its white-robed souls and visible world of spirits, no more conceives of the spirit from our point of view than does the Platonic world of ideas. Thus Paul also conceives of the Pneuma as a form of matter, although the antithesis of the flesh. Otherwise he could not speak, as he does, of spiritual bodies springing from a seed." ^ 1 Cor. XV. 45, seq. 2 For what follows, see especially Holsten, Die Bedentung des Wortes, (Trtp?, 1. c, and Pfleiderer, Paulismus, p. 47, seq. a 1 Cor. XV. 50, 53, 55 ; 2 Cor. iv. 11, v. 4. * 1 Cor. xv. 50, 42, * Wisdom, viii. 1. ® Rev. iv. 3. 1 Cor. xv. 44. G 2 84 THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. Now the specific physical basis of the notion of spirit is, as the etymology signifies, that of "blowing." The spirit blows whither it listeth. So far the spirit is the motive principle of the universe. The spirit works, creates and drives those that are born of it ; it is the l)reath of the world, and witliout it there would be nothing but the unalterable repose of death and endless desolation.^ Now, in the first place, the spirit is a bright, shining, warming substance. The being of God is "glory;" his likeness in Christ is to be thought of as a shining figure, and those who receive the spiritual body are changed from glory to glory.'-^ "When, therefore, the spirit comes to men, a brighter light is set in their hearts.3 Moreover, the spiritual bodies assumed by the glorified shine in different glory. " For," it is said in 1 Cor. xv. 41, " there is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars ; for one star differeth from another in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead." When this spirit is called holy, the Holy Ghost, this actual holiness, is ascribed to it in the general sense in which things are holy. That is holy which is pure in itself, unspotted by anything else, and therefore acceptable to God. The spirit is holy, because it did not originate by generation, and is not sub- ject to tlie unclean processes of ferment, corruption and death, like all finite being. AVhile material things defile under certain circumstances, if not always, and make an object impure and displeasing to God, the spirit purifies, for it is not subject to these defilino; conditions, as beinc^ of one substance with God, and therefore acceptable to God. Accordingly, on this side also the spirit stands in substantial antithesis to the physical side of hiunanity.^ Finally, the spirit is everlasting and invisible ; 1 Gal. V. 18; Kom. viii. 13. 2 2 Cor. iii. 18, iv. 6; 1 Cor. .xv. 41, xiv. 25; Rom. xii. 11. ^ 2 Cor. iv. 4 — 6; Rom. v. 5, xii. 11 ; 1 Cor. xiv. 2.5. ^ (Vyiof stands in this sense especially in 1 Cor. vii. 14 ; cf. Rom. vi. 19. SPECULATIVE PREMISSES OF PAULINE THEOLOGY. 85 everlasting, because not inanimate matter, but life ; invisible, because light, and therefore transparent.'^ Existence, then, in the mind of the Apostle, is divided into an impure world of sense and the spiritual, holy world, just as in Plato the sensible world is opposed to the ideal. On the one side there is only impurity, death, darkness, sin ; on the other, light, clearness, felicity, purity and holiness. Now it is between these two kingdoms that man is placed. By nature he belongs to the lower ; by God's grace he can attain to the higher. By our "outer man""^ we are tlesh, animated and intelligent matter. It was the "soul" that converted the clod of earth into a living body ; and the Jew conceived of this soul as dwelling in the blood and passing away with the blood. It comes into being with the body, and departs with the body, as the principle of sense and motion in man ; it is not everlasting and immortal, like the heavenly body. Yet, following a distinction common in the schools of Plato and Philo, Paul distinguishes an "inward man" from the outer and phenomenal man.^ This inner man is also called the irvevixa dydpdjTTov, the spirit of man, who has thought and judgment by means of the vovs and self-consciousness in the KapSta. These attributes of holiness and purity belonging to the divine spirit, do not as yet pertain to the human spirit. The irvivjxa dvOpM-n-ov is only the vessel capable of receiving the irvevixa Oeov* as well, indeed, as the influences of evil spirits. 1 Rom. i. 20. 2 Cf. Ludemann, Autliropol. des Ap. Paul us, Kiel, 1872, p. 47. * Cf. Fritzsche on Rom. vii. 22. * The sinful man, devoid of the divine spirit, also possesses a -irvn'iin, as appears from 1 Cor. v. 5, where the incestuous is to be punished 'iva rb ■Kvtvua awQi). Even the incestuous, then, have a soul, which is not immortal in itself, yet may possibly be saved. So in 1 Cor. ii. 11, the spirit of man " which is in him" is distinguished from the Holy Ghost. 2 Cor. ii. 12 speaks of the need of rest in the Apostle's spirit, and 2 Cor. vii. 13 (cf. 1 Cor. xiv. 18) of the capacity of the spirit to be refreshed. Therefore man too has a spirit, which in itself belongs neither to the holy, divine world, nor to the earthly, sinful world, but may be determined to either side. Cf. Ludemann, 1. c. 48. 86 THE COS VERSION OF PAUL. For besides the holy, spiritual world of light, there are various Trvtviiara} though Paul has never stated exactly his idea of these demons. Now considering that this human spirit, the " inward man" (eo-w av^pwTTos), is intrinsically a mere formal means, our whole being is under the dominion of the " flesh," so that it is possible to speak even of a vovs TqXn. The immediate consequence was that /) dfiapria daiiKOiv il<; tov Koffnov." ^ Cf. the use of M/m^nVi in the LXX. XEJF CONCEPTION OF THE LAW. 89 but a state contrary to God, not involving subjective volition any more than Levitical uncleanness, for even purely physical and objective conditions can provoke God's anger. In this sense the sensible, material, physical basis of our existence is unholy and sinful ; suljjective sin, or transgression, on the other hand, only began with the revelation of the law. As, however, sinful tendencies are natural to the flesh, the " inward man," however strongly determined by the law, is still powerless against the flesh. Man now fulfils the impulse of the flesh only against his better knowledge and will, and thus sin becomes transgression. Now, too, it first becomes conscious, and guilt which may be imputed. And yet man was incapable of doing otherwise. Sin is a necessity of human nature precisely because it is physical and a property of the flesh. Man can no more free himself from sin than from his physical frame. From the revelation of the divine will, therefore, there rises in the " inward man" the struggle so movingly depicted by the Apostle: " We know that the law is spiritual ; but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do, I know not. For not what I would, that do I practise ; but what I hate, that I do. But if what I would not, that I do, I consent unto the law that it is good. So now it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing ; for to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not. For the good which I would, I do not ; but the evil which I would not, that I practise."^ Thus in spite of the better insight effected by the law, nothing is brought about but the will of the flesh. Man, consequently, is not free ; he is determined, and from the consciousness of this physical captivity rises the cry : " wretched man that I am • who shall deliver me out of the body of this death ? I delight in the law of God after the inward man ; but I see a different law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my ^ Rom. vii. 14, seq. 90 THE COX VERSION OF PAUL. members." Man therefore is by nature imprisoned under the hiAv of sin, unless he is regenerated by a creative act of God, so that tlie sinful (jualities of the tlesh perish.^ From this point of view it is easy to understand the principle of the Apostle that ' Parallels between Paul's and Philo's views of human nature are interest- ing (cf. Liideraaiin, Anthropologie des Paulas, p. 103, seq.). In Philo, too, we see voT'q and ^lavota engaged in a struggle with sensuality (here called ffdi/Ltor, ra nd9>], >)Sovai, iinQv^iini or frnp?), generally ending in the victory of the latter. Ue Migr. Abr. pp. 438, 440 ; Quod Deus s. ininiut. pp. 281, 253, seq. ; De Gigant. pp. 266, 267. Yet man has from the out.set the means of subduing the oap%, if he only wills it. The irvoi) Zujtjq in the nostril of the earthly Adam immediately gave the vovg ipBaprog the ■rrvtvfia Btiov (Leg. AUeg. p. 50 ; Mundi Opif. p. 32), which, according to Paul, is only given to earthly man after his re- birth, according to the tyj^e of the heavenly Adam. Paul considers man incajjable of fulfilling the law because he denies human nature per se this Trvivfia 9dov, while tlie Hellenist philoso- pher, in this a better Jew, believes human nature capable of fulfilling the law. The state before the awakening of the discriminating faculty is called by Philo childlike innocence. "As long as the divine Word has not entered the soul, its works are free from guilt; unconscious sins, not undeserving of pardon" (Quod Deus s. immnt, p. 293). Paul says of the same state: " Witliout the law, sin is dead. For I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died," Rom. vii. 8, 9. Therefore in Paul's view also the state before the law entered into con- sciousness is a "life," but only because the subject is unconscious of death. Works done in this state, however, are by no means wortliy of divine pardon, but are unholy, impure, an abomination before God, like all things that proceed from (rap?. The condition of childlike innocence ends for Philo with the seventh year (Quis rer. div. heres. p. 515), for at that age the TrvEVfia 6hov in man becomes conscious of the antithesis between the will of God and the will of the flesh (Leg. Alleg. pp. 46, 47). In Paul this moment comes when the law enters the human consciousness (Rom. vii.). But while in Philo the vovi; is free and incurs death by conscious yielding to the flesh (Odvarov rov am rif-iiopic}, Leg. Alleg. j). 65), in Paul the vovq is subject to the flesh, and procures him no more than the consciousness of being therefore liable to death. In the latter case, then, the difference between Philo and Paul stands thus : with Philo the Trvtvfia Gtlou belongs to human nature as an original dower, while Paul reserves the notion of the TTVivfia eaov for the doctrine of Christ (Liidemann, op. cit. p. 105), and does not allow the believer to participate in it until the new birth after the type of the StvTfpoe 'Acdfi. Thus the theories of liuman nature in Philo and Paul are combinations, in different proportions, of Platonic and Jewish thought. Philo draws more from the Greek source, Paul more from the Jewish. NEfV CONCEPTION OF TEE LAW. 91 no flesh is justified by works of the law, considering that it is impossible for any flesh to fulfil these works. The law, therefore, contributes absolutely no aid to a state of justification. To work righteousness, the law would not merely have to tell man what God wills, but also to impart to him a portion of the divine spirit which alone is fitted to produce godly works. Only thus would man have an instrument for accomplishing things spiritual. But the law does not possess this power. This is precisely the point, according to Eom. viii. 3, in which tlie law was weak, and where the means it offered failed.^ The law can indeed prescribe a godly life, but cannot impart the divine spirit, and therefore cannot contribute towards godly works. The causes of this deficiency are treated in detail by Paul in 2 Cor. iii. 3, seq. The law remains outside man ; but though it holds up to him the mirror of God's will, so that he sees his own deformity and shrinks away in terror, it makes no change in him. For its essence is not spirit, but written words ; it does not induce a vivifying inspiration in our hearts, but remains a table of stone with writing written in ink, which terrifies but does not change us. The law brings us death instead of life, by enlightening us upon our state of contrariety to God, without offering us the possibility of escape from it. Therefore, the service of the law is a service of death. The written letter kills ; only the spirit from the other world gives life. Thus from the law we receive a spirit of bondage which intimidates us, for we fall under the curse which it denounces against our sins, and which yet we cannot evade.^ It can be seen that in this melancholy view of the law Paul has arrived at an inverted Pharisaism. Even so the law remains one of the chief factors of his scheme of things ; but instead of the blessing of Israel, he sees in it the curse of God. He had laboured too long in the hope of attaining righteousness by the law to simply break with it after his conversion or come to 1 Cf. also Gal. iii. 2, 5. ^ Rom. viii. 15, iv. 5 ; GJal. iii. 10. 92 THE COX VERSION OF PAUL. terms with it from without. Instead of this, he draws unre- servedly upon the results of his sojourn under the law, in order to incorporate his experience into his system; for men of thought- ful temper, like hiiu, live through no experience in vain. But at this point of view he could not but be confronted by the question. To what end has God, then, given this law, if not to bring us into a state of righteousness ? The answer given by Paul upon the Ijasis of his experience is the most radical conceivable. God gave us the law, not to pre- vent sin, but to increase it. Paradoxical as this may sound, it only records what effects the law produced in reality ; and Paul concludes from it that these are the very results God intended to offer himianity. So far the Apostle restricts himself to description. Once, indeed, he infers from the publication of the law being given, that men passed from their innate but uncon- scious state of sin to conscious opposition to the divine com- mand,^ by now learning God's will and yet having to act against it. Thus sin rises to conscious transgression, and this qualita- tive advance implicitly involves an objective advance, for the express prohibition arouses desire wdiere it would have slum- bered if undisturbed. " I had not known lust,^ except the law had said, Thou slialt not covet ; but sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting, for apart from the law sin is dead. And I was alive apart from the law once ; but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died ; for sin, finding occasion, through the commandment beguiled me, and through it slew me." It was therefore through the law that sin grew in responsibility and extent, and became the preponderant force it is. The law, it follows, is the special strength of sin,^ for it wrought lust upon lust, conscious perver- sion from God, and wdth it eternal death. What, then, always remained w^ith Paul was the negative of the Pharisaic estimate of the law, with the result that he regarded 1 Rom. vii. 7, v. 20 ; Gal. iii. 19. 2 Rom. vii. 7. 3 1 Cor. XV. .56. I NHJV CONCEPTION OF THE LAW. 93 it as the most important historical preparation in the history of mankind. Such moral development as lie perceives (in his eyes, of course, a downward development) is traceable to the influence of the law, which determined the fortune of mankind more pro- foundly than any other historical event. So far it can be said that in his theory the Apostle ascribes to the law greater impor- tance than did even the Judaists who observed it. Though it produces sin, Paul declares it expressly to be holy, spiritual and good;^ for whatever its consequences may be, our consciousness must assent to its demands as something good. Thus the objects attainable by the law are actually such as God wills, only they do not consist in the justification of man. This is anything but the effect of the law ; on the contrary, it holds us fast in sin, so that no flesh can be justified but by the Messianic grace reserved by God for the latter days. Although, then, the law is holy, that is to say, willed by God, its aim once more must not be rationalized ; the law must not be simply considered to increase sin in order to bring us to con- sciousness of our need for salvation, or to heighten our longing for it, or to break down our confidence in our own powers. This would be the function of the spirit, and would oppose the prin- ciple that the law works the increase of lust and moral death. It is not for the law to develop in man a condition which fits him for salvation ; for the development initiated by the law can only lead further and further from God, so that mankind was never less ready for grace than when the time was fulfilled. Otherwise men would never have hanged the Messiah on the cross. The real object of the law was simply to keep mankind in sin, so that the justification prepared by God, and none other, should come to pass. God willed to justify mankind through the salva- tion brought by himself, through faith and grace. Therefore he removed every other path to a state of righteousness, by giving men a law whereby they plunged ever deeper into sin. " Before 1 Rom. vii. 13. 9-i THE CONVERSION OF PAUL. faith came," it is said in Gal. iii. 23, " we were kept in ward under the law." The law was our taskmaster, keeping us in slavery to sin ; the gaoler who drove us back into the prison of sin whenever we souglit to escape, uttering his malicious cry : " Thou shall not covet ; hut sin, finding occasion, wrought in me all manner of coveting." Thus the law served grace in guise of the gaoler who watches prisoners during an amnesty, and takes care that they do not escape. For they are to owe tlieir liberty simply and solely to grace, ^ay, this gaoler must only make his prisoners worse by (hiily provocations, tluit they may not even inwardly merit grace, and that grace may be nothing more than grace freely offered to them. A conception tliat makes God the originator of all sin tliat has ever been, could only be l)ased upon a far-reaching and all- embracing sense of dependence. All the harshness of antique thought and the grandeur of tl\e Jewish conception of God speak in these hard sayings, wliich hold the happiness and un- happiness of generations as nothing before the majesty of the divine purpose ; and where God stands so high that it abates nothing from reverence if His purposes plunge a sinful world still deeper into its sin, in order that the whole world may appear sinful and God alone bring salvation. Yet who would say that the accent of personal experience cannot be discerned here in the grand subjection of self which sees everything from God's point of view, the unconditional sense of dependence which feels itself the handiwork of God, and has no complaint to offer against its potter ? Or that after the unimmbered hours of Paul's earnest struggle to satisfy all tlie demands of the law, only to encounter more painful expe- riences, only to learn the full meaning of lust, and finally to bring upon himself nothing l)ut blood-guiltiness and unimagi- nable burdens of conscience, did not this personal experience of his contribute to his hard conception of the law ? Certain it is, at all events, that the law \\as still a leading problem for his THE MESSIAH AS THE SECOND ADAM. 95 reflection, and that so sombre a conception of a once divine ordinance implies his own shipwreck, and not a mere dialectical process. 5. The Messiah as the Second Adam. If, as has been seen, the law was not instituted to bring mankind to a state of justification before God, some other pre- paration to this end must necessarily be found, for God would never have created mankind to be unrighteous for all time. By himself, however, man cannot initiate the process in the flesh. His knowledge of the law and the agreement of his "inward man" with the law are not sufficient to conquer the flesh. Hence an objective intercession of God is needful to make the man after the flesh into a man after God. A more effectual embodiment of the spiritual principle is required than the law had shown itself to be. This is the Messiah. He it is for whom the task of justification was reserved. Before the days of Damascus, Paul was convinced that " the Messiah will come as soon as Israel is righteous ;" now he felt, " the Messiah has come to make mankind rigliteous" If the Messiah was to fulfil this purpose, he must lend man- kind a di\'ine spirit that will counteract the impulses of the flesh and enable man to lead a life after God, i.e. a spiritual life. Xow to imbue fleshly humanity with spiritual life from the spiritual world is such a change in the condition of man that henceforward he is " a new creature." Dust and earth before, given over to corruption, he has now the earnest of the spirit, a pledge from the other world assuring liim of eternal life.^ From a sinful creature, subject to the lusts of the flesh and liable to death and corruption, this breath from the other world turns ^ 2 Cor. V. 5 ; for it follows from 1 Cor. v. 5 that even the Trvevjia avOptJirov, although TrvEu^o, is yet subject to corruption unless associated ■with the TTi'd'na 6iov, 96 TUE COXrERSION OF PAUL. him into a godly, sanctified and immortal being; wherefore this act of imparting the spirit is nothing short of the new creation of man. Mankind created after the earthly man couhl not have the divine spirit, for their ancestor Adam himself had only a living soul. Thus mankind needed to be fashioned anew after the type of anotlier and a spiritual Adam, to live as a new creature, witli now organs, after new laws of life.^ Nothing short of some such total regeneration of human nature could deliver man from the bondage of the flesh ; and this was the very purpose for which the Messiah was appointed by God, for it is said of him long ago in Genesis : " He became a life-giving spirit" (1 Cor. xv. 45). It is clear, therefore, from the general lines of his theory of human nature, that Paul identified the Messiah with the heavenly Adam. In tlie opinion of the Pharisees, the Messianic kingdom could only come to a righteous people. But man can only become righteous if entirely regenerated. Therefore the Messiah must come as a second Adam, the initiator of a new humanity. While some expected the Messiah as a second David, a leader and king, the lion of the house of Judah, the rider on the white horse, the prince of victory who breaks the heathen in pieces like the potter's vessels, — while others, again, conceived of him as a second Moses, the shepherd and lawgiver, the ministering servant of humanity, in brief, as a teacher and propliet, — Paul conceives of him as a second Adam, after whose type man must be re-fashioned to a new creature. It is in this sense only that he connects liini with the heavenly man of tlie book of Daniel, to show the Messiah as the ancestor of a new humanity. But the type of the Messiah in Daniel invited such a render- ing, and the Jewish school appears to have been acquainted with it already. It has been shown before how Daniel's Son of Man, even if intended by the writer of the book to be only a repre- sentative of the Messianic kingdom, soon took shape in the popular consciousness as the Messiah himself. Thus in the fifth i 2 Cor. V. 17. THE MESSIAH AS THE SECOND ADAM. 97 book of the Sibyl we find a Jewish oracle which clearly demon- strates the fact.* As early as this the Messiah is figured as a heavenly man no less than the Son of Man, for the poet sings : " Blest, from the realms of heaven descends a Man, And in his hands a sceptre given of God."^ Similarly, the Greek Bil)le, by referring Ps. Ixxi. (Ixxii.) to the Messiah, said of him, he should live " as long as the sun and he existed before the moon."^ The same thing occurs in the translation of Ps. ex. 3, where, among other manifestations of favour, the Hebrew text promises the king who is addressed : "From the womb of the morning thou hast the dew of thy youth;" while the Septuagint, referring the psalm to the Ales- siah, makes the psalmist lay down the doctrine that God pro- duced the Messiah from his inward parts before the " dawn of the morning." Conversely, in a really Messianic passage, Is. ix. 6, the Septuagint makes the Messiah the angel of the assembling of God's council, while in the same verse the Targum Jonathan introduces the eternal continuance of the Messiah.* On the other hand, as soon as a heavenly and an earthly Adam were distinguished in the double account of the creation in Genesis — for instance, by Philo — it was natural to see in the heavenly Adam that radiant form of man which God created as the first creature, before the sun and the moon and the stars of the morning. Philo, indeed, could hardly avoid this combination ; it forces itself upon his assumption of a heavenly man. At the same time he effected the synthesis of the heavenly Adam and the Platonic ideal man, introduced by him into the account in ^ Sib. V. 514, seq. For the pre-Christian origin of this passage, cf. Langen, Judenth. z. Zeit. Chr. p. 405 ; Friedlieb, p. xlvi, seq. 2 The oi'pav'nuv v