Last Messages
SaLuTE Prisca and Aquila, and the household of Onesiphorus, Erastus abode at Corinth: but Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick. Do thy diligence to come before winter. Eubulus greeteth thee, and Pudens, and Linus, and Claudia, and all the brethren. The Lord Jesus Christ be with thy spirit. Grace be with you. Amen. A.V.
Salute Prisca, and Aquila, and Onesiphorus’ house. Erastus stayed at Corinth; Trophimus left at Miletus, ill. Do thy very best to come before winter. There greets thee Eubulus, and Pudens, and Linus, and Claudia, and the brethren all,
The Lord be with thy spirit. Grace be with you. Amen.
WE come to the last lines of the dying Letter. Let 2 Tim. iv. us treat them as simply as possible; the deep, the 19-22. sacred human interest of them, human, but full of The Close. the message of God to the inmost soul, will gain
nothing by elaboration.
True to his familiar methods of address the Apostle Personal dictates a few personal greetings and details before Messages. he ends. Two dear friends of many years are present to his affectionate heart; they were then at Ephesus, apparently; Timothy could visit them. Prisca must be greeted, and Aquila, the now fast ageing companions of his life; true, self-sacrificing (see Rom. xvi. 3), absolutely sympathetic in faith and hope; they will not be long behind him on the immortal shore.
Then there is Onesiphorus’ family. He has thought of them earlier in the letter, and has invoked ‘mercy’ upon their heads; now he wishes them to receive his
M 177
2 Tim. iv. direct personal salutation, for their father’s dear
19-22,
Absent
Friends.
Present
Friends.
sake and their own. Next he thinks of those who were, or who might be, around him, and for whose greetings Timothy would look. Two well-tried friends were absent, whose presence Timothy might apparently assume. Krastus — possibly the Christian citytreasurer of Corinth (Rom. xvi. 23), a man of whom we would gladly know more, but more probably the faithful chaplain, if we may call him so, of Acts xix. 22 — had been with St. Paul when he was seized (so we may infer), and had contrived to keep near him as far as Corinth, but there had stayed behind. Earlier on the sad voyage, at Miletus, the port sacred with the memories of the Farewell of Acts xx. 17, another friend, who would have accompanied him to Rome had it been possible, had been taken ill and compelled to stay; it was Trophimus, the Asian Christian (Acts xx. 4, xxi. 29), his companion and attendant on his last visit to Jerusalem. But although these were away there was still a little circle able to find entrance on occasion to the dungeon, and to share with the always present Luke the sacred privilege of cheering the solitude of St. Paul. Eubulus was one; and there was Pudens, and Linus; and other ‘brethren’ were within reach. With them one woman is grouped, Claudia, bearing the clan-name of the imperial House, though this is no sure evidence for what is in itself unlikely, in the total absence of any such tradition, her relationship to the Casars. Singularly enough there is a bare, an almost vanishing, possibility, too subtle for discussion here, that she was a Briton, daughter of the British king Cogidubnus,
Last Messages
whose capital was what we know now as Chichester. 2 Tim. iv. And there is the like thin shadow of support for a 19-22. conjecture that the Pudens mentioned just before was a Roman gentleman who, so a complimentary poem of Martial’s informs us, married a British Claudia, a wedding of interest at the time in Roman society... But nothing can well be more frail than the evidence for the surmise here mentioned, and the names lie before us with only this for our certainty about them, but this is inestimable, that they are names of members of the family of God, and that we shall, in our Father’s mercy, see them hereafter with our Elder Brother in the eternal home. More solid, for early tradition favours it, and there lies no difficulty in the way, is the belief that the Linus here named is the first Christian pastor to be entrusted with the bishopric of Rome in the early and holy simplicity of that great office, with its frequent calls to martyrdom. Yet even here the more certain and more fruitful reflection is simply this, that Linus, with Paul, and Timothy, ‘and the brethren all,’ was ‘a man in CHRIST.’
So the letter closes. Only two last messages The remain for our reverent notice, one from the human ode heart, the other from the grace of God. ‘Do thy very best to come before winter’; pathetic sentence, breaking in upon the friends’ dear names and the mention of the missing invalid; a sentence the actual answer to which God only knows. Then in conclusion, to Timothy first, and finally to the disciples
1 Jn the- Poem below this possibility is taken, with a versewriter’s license, for fact; line 391.
2 Tim. iv. with him — for we note the closing plural, ‘you’ —
19-22,
there comes a living benediction to complete the dying Letter. St. Paul invokes the presence of the beloved Saviour, abiding close to the very ‘spirit’ of his longed-for correspondent, and he asks that the power of the eternal grace may follow him and his : — ‘Tur LorD BE WITH THY SPIRIT. GRACE BE WITH YOU ALL. AMEN.’
*,* For an explanation of the plan of the following Poem, written in 1876, the reader is referred to the Prefatory Note, p. Vii.