Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/444

422 PAUL Christian poor. time to the communities, among which that of Rome can hardly have been singular, so the salutations at the end, whether they be assumed to be an integral part of the whole or not, are a wonderful revelation of the breadth and intimacy of his relations with the individual members of those communities. But that which was as much in his mind as either the great question of the relation of faith to the law or the needs of individual converts in Collec- the Christian communities was the collection of alms " for tion of the poor among the saints that were at Jerusalem " (Rom. " xv. 26). The communities of Palestine had probably ^" never ceased to be what the first disciples were, communi ties of paupers in a pauperized country, and consequently dependent upon external help. And all through his mis sionary journeys Paul had remembered the injunction which had sealed his compact with " the three " (Gal. ii. 10). In Galatia (1 Cor. xvi. 1), among the poor and persecuted churches of Macedonia (Rom. xv. 26 ; 2 Cor. viii. 1-4), at Corinth, and in Achaia (1 Cor. xvi. 1-3 ; 2 Cor. viii. and ix.), the Gentiles who had been made partakers with the Jews in spiritual things had been successfully told that " they owed to them also to minister unto them in carnal things " (Rom. xv. 27). The con tributions were evidently on a large scale ; and Paul, to prevent the charges of malversation which w r ere sometimes made against him, associated with himself " in the matter of this grace " a person chosen by the churches themselves (2 Cor. viii. 19-21, xii. 17, 18); some have thought that all the persons whose names are mentioned in Acts xx. 4 were delegates of their respective churches for this purpose. He resolved to go to Jerusalem himself with this material testimony of the brotherly feeling of the Gentile communi ties, and then, " having no more any place " in Greece, to go to the new mission fields of Rome and the still farther West (Rom. xv. 23-25). He w r as not certain that his peace-offering would be acceptable to the Jewish Christ ians, and he had reason to apprehend violence from the Sets out unbelieving Jews. His departure from Corinth, like that from Ephesus, was probably hastened by danger to his life ; and, instead of going direct to Jerusalem (an intention which seems to be implied in Rom. xv. 25), he and his companions took a circuitous route round the coasts of the ^Egean Sea. His course lay through Philippi, Troas, Mitylene, Chios, and Miletus, where he took farewell of the elders of the community at Ephesus in an address of which some reminiscences are probably preserved in Acts xx. 18-34. Thence he went, by what was probably an ordinary route of commerce, to the Syrian coast, and at last he reached the Holy City. The narrative which the Acts give of the incidents of his life there is full of grave difficulties. It leaves alto gether in the background that which Paul himself mentions as his chief reason for making the visit ; and it relates that he accepted the advice which was given him to avail himself of the custom of vicarious vows, in order to show, by his conformity to prevalent usages, that " there was no truth " in the reports that he had told the Gentiles "not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs" (Acts xxi. 20-26). If this narrative be judged by the principles which Paul proclaims in the Epistle to the Galatians, it seems hardly credible. He had broken with Judaism, and his whole preaching was a preaching of the "righteousness which is of faith," as an antithesis to, and as superseding, the "righteous ness which is of the law." But now he is represented as resting his defence on his conformity to the law, on his being " a Pharisee and the son of Pharisees," who was called in question for the one point only that he believed, as other Pharisees believed, in the resurrection of the dead. salein. What colouring of a later time, derived from later con troversies, has been spread over the original outline of the history cannot now be told. While on the one hand the difficulties of the narrative as it stands cannot be over looked, yet on the other hand no faithful historian will undertake, in the absence of all collateral evidence, the task of discriminating that which belongs to a contempo rary testimony and that which belongs to a subsequent recension. From this uncertainty the general concurrence of even adverse critics excepts the "we" section (Acts xxvii. 1, xxviii. 16); whoever may have been the author of those " we " sections, and whatever may be the amount of revision to which they have been subjected, they seem to have for their basis the diary or itinerary of a companion of Paul, and the account of the voyage contains at least the indisputable fact that Paul went to Rome. But his life at Rome and all the rest of his history are enveloped in mists from which no single gleam of certain light emerges. Almost every writer, whether apologetic or sceptical, has some new hypothesis respecting it ; and the number and variety of the hypotheses which have been already framed is a warning, until new evidence appears, against adding to their number. The preliminary ques tions which have to be solved before any hypothesis can be said to have a foundation in fact are themselves ex tremely intricate ; and their solution depends upon con siderations to which, in the absence of positive and deter mining evidence, different minds tend inevitably to give different interpretations. The chief of these preliminary Genuir questions is the genuineness of the epistles bearing Paul s ness * name, which, if they be his, must be assigned to the later a . .!" period of his life, viz., those to the Philippians, Ephesians, and Colossians, to Philemon, to Timothy, and to Titus. As these epistles do not stand or fall together, but give rise in each case to separate discussion, the theories vary accord ing as they are severally thought to be genuine or false. The least disputed is the Epistle to Philemon ; but it is also the least fruitful in either doctrine or biographical details. Next to it in the order of general acceptance is the Epistle to the Philippians. The Epistles to the Ephe sians and to the Colossians have given rise to disputes which cannot easily be settled in the absence of collateral evidence, since they mainly turn partly on the historical probability of the rapid growth in those communities of certain forms of theological speculation, and partly on the psychological probability of the almost sudden develop ment in Paul s own mind of new methods of conceiving and presenting Christian doctrine. The pastoral epistles, viz., those to Timothy and to Titus, have given rise to still graver questions, and are probably even less defensible. But, even if this preliminary question of the genuine- Difficu ness of the several epistles be decided in each instance in ties c the affirmative, there remains the further question whether with they or any of them belong to the period of Paul s imprison- i a ter li ment at Rome, and, if so, what they imply as to his history. It is held by many writers that they all belong to an earlier period of his life, especially to his stay at Cajsarea (Acts xxiv. 23, 27). It is held by other writers that they were all sent from Rome, and with some such writers it has become almost an article of faith that he was im prisoned there not once but twice. It is sometimes further supposed that in the interval between the first and second imprisonments he made his intended journey to Spain (Rom. xv. 24, which is apparently regarded as an accom plished fact by the author of the Muratorian fragment) ; and that either before or after his journey to Spain he visited again the communities of the Mgca.ii seaboard which are mentioned in the pastoral epistles. The place and manner and occasion of his death are not less uncertain than the facts of his later life. The