Paul's First Gospel: Sources of His Christian Education

What was the nature of that gospel which marked the beginning of Paul’s missionary life? Was it universal, or was it particular? Was it an equal invitation to all the world, or was it tinged as yet with a certain leaven of Judaism? I believe that in one sense it was universal, and in another sense particular. I think that, on the one hand, the vision of the resurrection Christ had already impressed Paul with the glorious destiny of the Gentile nations; yet it seems to me that, at this stage of his history, he had not wholly emancipated himself from the trammels of the national faith. We shall therefore take up these aspects one by one. We shall begin by considering in what sense Paul’s gospel was even now a universal invitation, and we shall afterwards go on to consider in what sense it was still bound with the grave-clothes of a dead past.

And first, Paul had made a discovery. He had found that in the religion of Judaism the conservative was the true liberal. In the large number ol religious beliefs, the progress of liberal thought is proportionate to the advance of time; Paul had discovered that in Judaism the order of development was in the inverse ratio. He had found that, in proportion as he retraced his steps towards a distant past, the spirit of the Hebrew nation became more large and charitable, — that in this respect it had the aspect of a triangle, and was broadest at its base. The days of Moses had been days of restriction, of limitation, of narrowness. But when Paul went back to the age earlier than Moses, when he directed his view to that patriarchal period in which were laid the beginnings of the national life, he found that the beginnings of this life had been marked by universal aspirations. The horizon which had stretched before the eyes of Abraham had been an unlimited horizon. God had taken him out beneath the stars, and had shown him in a moment of time all the points of the compass. There had flashed before his gaze a vision of humanity itself, in its length and its breadth, its height and its depth. There had come into his heart the thought of a universal brotherhood, of a brotherhood which he owed to man as man, without national distinctions, and without local limitations. There had entered into his mind the hope that he himself might be destined to be a missionary to this universal race, a pioneer of its civilisation, a forerunner of its development. There had risen before his eyes the image of a great deliverer, who was to come from his own loins, and be the fulfiller of his own aspirations, — a hope which expressed itself in the world wide prophecy, “in thy seed shall all families of the earth be blessed.” In this universal promise, in this unlimited aspiration, had the germ of Judaism be gun. Its earliest period had been its most catholic; its beginnings had been free, Unrestrained, bounded only by humanity. The faith of Abraham, as it appeared to Paul, was the faith in a universal man. It was the belief that, in the fulness of time, there would come forth from his own lineage one whose perfect righteousness would expiate the unrighteousness of all the world, — a life whose untarnished beauty would stand before the face of the Father as an atonement for all in the past which had been unbeautiful, as a vindication and justification of the ancient mandate “let us make man.”

Such, in the view of Paul, was the original code of Jewish righteousness. But now, as with earnest heart he ponders the subject, he makes a further and a more remarkable discovery; he finds that, as a matter of fact, this code had never been repealed. He finds that the law of Moses, whatever interpre tation might have been put upon it in later times, had never in its origin been designed to supersede the faith of Abraham. He finds that this law had been given not as a cure of badness, but as a cure only of the manifestation of badness — in other words, of crime. l i The law was added because of transgressions.”2 It was imposed upon men not for the pur pose of making them righteous, but with the view of restraining them from deeds of injustice and violence. It was sent to keep man from violating the rights of man, — to prevent him from leaping the

i Qftl. 111. 17. 2 Gal. ill. 19.

fences and pilfering from the ground of his brother. It superseded no code of original righteousness; it came only to supplement that code when the ideal of the heart had lost the freshness of its first glow. It came to invest the present with that sense of awful majesty which the future had ceased to wear, and to substitute the fear of a temporal penalty for that hope of a coming glory which had in the days of old been adequate to the life of man.

In the view of Paul, then, the law was never meant to be a guide to moral life. It was only designed to be a line of boundary between the moral and the immoral, to constitute a regiment of police which should prevent the passions of men from breaking forth into deeds of crime. Accordingly, it follows that, in the view of Paul, the perfect keeping of the law was by no means equivalent to a perfect fulfilment of righteousness. I am aware that I am here at variance with the popular opinion. It is commonly thought that, in the view of Paul, the law was introduced just to show man how spotless the righteousness of God was, and how impossible it was that man should keep it. I can only say that in this case the law miserably failed in its design so far as Paul himself was concerned. He certainly regarded the keeping of it as a very easy thing, so easy that, to his mind, the achievement did not indicate any great amount of righteousness at all. He says that he himself was, l i touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” How could he say that he was blameless? Remember that when he uttered these words he was already a Christian, looking back with dismay upon the days when he was not a Christian. Should we not have expected that he would have stigmatised these days as full of blame? Should we not have thought that he would have contrasted the riches of the new state with the pinching poverty of the old? Is it not surprising, then, that in looking back he should have pronounced that old state to be blameless? It would be indeed surprising on the common view that Paul held the righteousness of the law to be a perfect righteousness. But is it not plain from this very passage that he held the reverse? Is it not evident that he means to teach what a miserable standard the righteousness of the law must have been when he himself was able, in looking back even from a Christian standpoint, to feel that he had kept it perfectly, that, touching its righteousness, he had been blameless? He does not mean to praise himself, but to indicate how poor must have been a rule of righteousness which should have allowed such a man as he, not only to believe himself, but actually to be blameless according to its requirements.

Such, then, was Paul’s position in relation to the law. He never doubted that a man could keep it perfectly, never doubted that he himself had fulfilled it. Its very reproach to him was just the fact that it could be kept by men whose hearts were steeped in sin. Its defect lay not in its impracticableness, but in its inadequateness. Paul felt that a man might be legally blameless, and a deep-dyed sinner still. He felt that he might keep the law without even offending in a single point, and be yet at that very moment in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity. He felt that the conviction of such a righteousness would never satisfy any man, had never satisfied the Jew himself. What was the reason that the best men of his nation had ever been the most impressed with sin? Why had the dissatisfaction always been expressed most loudly by those who had reached the top of the hill? Was it not because the revelation was there made that the top of the hill was not the top of the universe? Was it not because the conscience of Israel had at all times been more exacting than its code, and asserted its claims most strongly just when its code had been observed? It demanded from man in behalf of God a perfect righteousness, a righteousness which should indeed fulfil the law, but which the law itself could never fulfil. The moral hope of the nation had really rested in an incipient Christianity, had reposed in the aspiration contained in the faith of Abraham, that the latest fruit of the tree of life would atone to the Father for the comparative barrenness of the intermediate branches.

I have now answered the first of the proposed questions — To what extent Paul’s new gospel had divorced him from the ancient Judaism? I have arrived at the conclusion that he had reached a liberal attitude by assuming a more conservative position. He had gone back from the legal to the patriarchal age, from the law of Moses to the faith of Abraham. He had found there that the period of the most primitive development had been the period of the most enlarged hope for humanity. The stream had been wiaest at its source. The aspirations of Judaism had been least narrowed and confined precisely at that stage in which they had begun to be. At that stage Paul stood. He took his stand in the patriarchal period, side by side with Abraham, and he shared the hope of Abraham in the advent of a life whose humanity would be unlimited, and whose blessing would be universal.

Had Paul, then, ceased to be a Jew? Had he emancipated himself from the last trace of national ism? Had he now become what he afterwards was — the apostle of the Gentiles distinctively and unqualifiedly? It is my opinion that he had not. He had passed from Judaism into Hebraism, but there was one point in which the Hebrew was united to the Jew. There was a rite which the age of legalism had confessedly derived from the patriarchal age — the ordinance of circumcision. In accepting the faith of Abraham, it is natural on the very surface to suppose that Paul accepted this faith with all its accompaniments. He left behind him as non-essential whatever was of later origin, but he probably embraced with all the more tenacity every element of that period from which he had elected to begin. Circumcision was one of these elements. It belonged to the age of Hebraism as distinguished from that of Judaism. It was interwoven with the first universal hope of humanity, was closely associated with the belief that a blessing was reserved for all mankind. Would it be surprising if, at the outset, Paul should have deemed it an essential coni Gen. xvii. 10.

dition of that blessing? Would it be wonderful if he should have accepted it as incumbent on those who would be partakers of the faith of Abraham? Even in the absence of any further evidence, would it not be natural to suppose that, in adopting the universal scope of Abraham’s promise, he should have expected those who embraced it to enter through Abraham’s gate?

But we are not left without any further evidence. There are two passages in St. Paul’s letters which seem to me to bear directly on this question. The first of these is expressed in the memorable reminiscence: “Henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more.”1 The point to be here observed is, that Paul declares there was a time when he knew Christ after the flesh; in other words, when he had a more super ficial view of Christianity than that at which he had then arrived. When was that time of comparative superficialness? The common interpretation relegates it to the days of Saul of Tarsus. Paul is supposed to mean that he recognised a physical Messiah in the period previous to his adoption of Christianity. I shall waive altogether the question whether the reference to a time so far remote is compatible with the words of the passage before us, whether the phrase “now henceforth” can legitimately and grammatically be reckoned equivalent to “for these fourteen years back.” Letting that pass, I shall simply ask whether Paul, in looking back from a Christian standpoint, would have been likely to have dignified with the name of Christian knowledge his original reverence for the Jewish Messiah. Is it probable that this man, who is conscious that he has received from Christianity a radical change, should, in the very face of that consciousness, have honoured his worship of the national ideal by calling it a knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth? Has he not elsewhere declared that when he became a Christian he held to be loss the things which he had formerly counted gain? Is it compatible with such a declaration that he should have maintained his recognition of the Jewish Messiah to have been identical in kind, and only different in degree, from the knowledge of that Jesus of Nazareth who was now the object of his hope and love?

The truth is, Paul is not here speaking of the difference between his present Christianity and his former Judaism, but of the difference between his present Christianity and the Christianity of his early days. What he says in effect is this — I have now arrived at a stage in which I value no man according to his circumcision or his uncircumcision. I admit, indeed, there was a time in which my opinion of circumcision was so high, that I believed it to be the necessary gate even to Christianity itself. That period has now passed away, and I have come to see that a man’s acceptance of Christ is altogether unconditioned by the observance of any fleshly ceremony.’ But if this is Paul’s meaning, it clearly contains a most valuable biographical reminiscence. It tells us in the clearest language that

Paul in emerging from Judaism did not emerge all in a moment, that there was a period of dim dawn between his hour of night and his hour of morning. He left the gate of legalism that he might stand by a wider gate, but the wider gate was still Jewish, and the more liberal standpoint was still national. He desired all men to be made partakers of the privileges of Israel, and he desired that these privileges should be disencumbered from the burdens of the law, but as yet he still held it to be inevitable and imperative that the blessings of the faith of Abraham should come through the door of circumcision.

The second passage which corroborates my view of this subject is the question addressed to a church of Judaic tendencies, “If I yet preach circumcision, why do I yet suffer persecution”?1 It is designed to answer a charge of inconsistency, but we have nothing to do with this here. The point on which I wish to lay stress is the phrase, “if I yet preach circumcision.” It clearly implies that there was a time when Paul did preach circumcision. When was that time? The popular view is that Paul is alluding to the period when he was still unconverted to Christianity, that he is recalling the days in which he had stood forth as a defender of the rights of Judaism against the encroachments of the new faith. But, I ask, how could it be said that at that time Paul was a preacher of circumcision? What ever he defended as Saul of Tarsus, it was not the doctrine of circumcision. That doctrine had never

i Gal. v. 11. been assailed by Christianity, had never been the question on which the new faith had separated from the old. Even at the moment in which Paul was writing this passage, his brother apostles were all believers in circumcision. The new religion had never dreamed for an instant of overturning this rite. Its aim had been rather the realisation than the degradation of Judaism, and it had sought to accomplish its aim rather by enhancing than by disparaging the institutions of the old life. By no stretch of language could Saul of Tarsus be called a preacher of circumcision; in no proper use of language could he be styled a preacher at all. He was a statesman, a councillor, a diplomatist, a partisan, an advocate, but in no strict sense a religious teacher. His work lay in the Sanhedrim, not in the temple; his genius was political, his efforts were for the service of the State. The office of preaching was reserved for his Christian consciousness; it had no place in the heart of his Judaism.

We must conclude, then, that when Paul speaks of having at one time preached circumcision, he is speaking of a Christian and not of a Jewish period. He is virtually telling us that, when he first went out from Jerusalem, he did not at once go to Ephesus, or Corinth, or Rome, but only the length of Mesopotamia. In emerging from the creed of ancient Israel, he did not all at once stray beyond its borders, did not wholly pass the limits of the old tradition. He passed beyond the environments of legalism so far as these professed to be the ultimate standard of morality; he went back from the age of

Moses to the freer atmosphere of the age of Abraham, and found in that atmosphere a more healthy respiration; but he still attached himself and his Christianity to an institution of that age which was purely ceremonial, and he was still unable to dissociate the universal hope from the national rite of circumcision.

I have now answered the two questions proposed at the beginning of this chapter. I have indicated to what extent the gospel of Paul was as yet universal, and to what extent it was still limited and particular. The result has been to establish the position that the Christian illumination of Paul was a process of education, — a process by which he proceeded step by step from the knowledge in part to the knowledge in full. This, accordingly, seems now the proper place to inquire what were the sources of Paul’s Christian education. One would imagine beforehand that he had peculiar facilities for such an education. True, he had been born a little out of due time; he had not been an actual spectator of the life and work of the Master. Yet in the strictest sense he was a contemporary of that life and work. His years probably ran nearly parallel to the years of Jesus. The disciples of Christianity’s dawn were still alive and active, and we have evidence from Paul’s own epistles that they were accessible to his intercourse. Under these circumstances we should expect that Paul would have immediately proceeded to fill up the blanks in his own Christian knowledge by a reference to contemporary experience. His vision of Christ had been only a vision of the closing drama, and precisely of that stage of the drama where the scene was transferred from earth to heaven. The first step of Paul’s education must clearly be the filling up of the earthly blank in his knowledge of the Son of man. His vision had been only that of a resurrection Christ; his earliest journey must be a retracing of his steps into those human scenes which preceded the resurrection. In seeking a knowledge of that past, should we not have expected that Paul would have gone directly and immediately to the living sources of tradition? Should we not have thought that, in the very presence of contemporaries whose memory was charged with the personal incidents of the Master’s life, he would have hastened at once to supply the vacancy by seeking from these a first-hand portrait of Jesus? It seems at first sight of all things the most natural that Paul, in his earliest search for the human memories of Christ, should have drawn his information from that band of primitive disciples who had been with Him from the beginning, and had followed Him to the end.

And yet we must confess that in this matter we are doomed to experience a surprise. In point of fact Paul’s earliest resort for information is not to contemporary sources. Desirous as he must have felt to supply that which was lacking in his knowledge of the earthly life of Jesus, he does not immediately repair to those streams of living tradition from which at once the want could have been compensated. On the contrary, his immediate resort is to the Old Testament. His resurrection vision had told him that Jesus was the Messiah: instead of inquiring what this Messiah had actually been, he immediately proceeds to inquire what He must have been. He does not repair, as we should naturally expect, to the living voices of Peter, James, and John, but to the prophetic voices of Isaiah, Hosea, and the Psalmist. He wants to know, not so much what really happened as what the Scriptures predicted would happen. In his earliest epistles we look in vain for any historical reminiscence of the man Christ Jesus. Neither in the two letters to the Thessalonians, nor in the single letter to the Galatians, do we find the slightest reference to the daily life of the Christ of Palestine. It is only when he comes to write to the Corinthians that we discover unmistakable evidence of his sympathy with the historical tradition. His proofs of the resurrection Christ embrace a circumstantial narrative of facts which could only have been learned from contemporaneous sources; but even here it would be too much to say that it was based on these facts. On the contrary, we are continually surprised to find that the main stress of Paul is laid upon the proof that Christ was raised ’ l according to the Scriptures. “We marvel at the tenacity and at the pertinacity with which he reiterates the assertion; and from our modern point of view, we wonder at the importance with which he invests it. We want to hear about the five hundred by whom Jesus was beheld simultaneously; we want to know what manner of men they were, and with what degree of emphasis they asserted their conviction. It is rather damping under these circumstances to be perpetually directed to~~a remote past, and told to find our comfort in the fact that He was raised 1 1 according to the Scriptures.”

Yet a deeper reflection will convince us that, how ever unnatural all this seems, it is only unnatural from our point of view. If we throw ourselves back from the nineteenth century into the first, we shall find that Paul’s conduct in this matter is not only free from artificialness, but is the genuine impulse of a spontaneous human nature. For, let us consider the difference between the religious standpoint of the first and nineteenth centuries. In our age the objection to Christianity is its miraculousness; in Paul’s age the objection to Christianity was its seeming unscripturalness. The opposing element in the mind of Paul was not the supposed violation of nature’s law’involved in a Messiah rising from the dead; it was the apparent verdict of the Old Testament that the Messiah could not be dead at all. To the mind of his countrymen, originally to the mind of himself, the notion of a suffering Messiah was at variance with that will of God which was expressed in the Jewish scriptures, and which to him was synonymous with the law of nature. When therefore Christianity presented itself, his first and foremost question was, What did the Bible say? He did not ask whether it would violate the laws of the physical universe; that was to him a subordinate consideration. His immediate concern was whether it would violate that order of Divine prophecy which had permeated like a thread the contents of the Old Testament, and had constituted to the heart of Israel the most unchangeable thing in the universe.

Let me illustrate the feeling by a familiar ex perience of modern life. There is a widespread belief in some quarters that there are at the present day certain spiritual manifestations revealed through the movements of certain articles of furniture. If the evidence for this belief were to be estimated simply by the number of those who have professed to witness the manifestation, it would be as demonstrable as any proposition of Euclid. Measured by such a standard, the ufive hundred brethren at once” would be nowhere; the testimony for this later miracle embraces not hundreds but thousands. And yet, the large majority of professing Christians would never dream of even examining one of the witnesses; they would, and actually do, reject the testimony without inquiry. Why? Simply because the thing which is attested appears to them to be at variance with the doctrine of the Bible. They would deem it impiety to take into a moment’s’consideration any of those outward circumstances which seem to make for or against the theory, because they are convinced beforehand that, if the theory were proved, the Old and New Testaments would be disproved. It is no opposition to the miraculous that prompts the ordinary Christian to foreclose this question of modern spiritualism. Every Christian believes in something equally miraculous, and miraculous, moreover, in a somewhat similar direction. The Catholic recognises the truth of transubstantiation, the belief that the Divine Spirit can transmute itself into material elements; the Protestant, without accepting a transmutation, equally coincides in the conclusion that the Divine Spirit can manifest itself in these material elements. It is therefore no sense of supernaturalism that repels the Christian consciousness from the modern belief in the manifestation of spirits through material forms. It is the Christian consciousness itself that constitutes the ground of the repulsion. It is the belief that the new life is opposed to the old, the conviction that the modern form of revelation would contradict in its earthliness and compromise in its humanness those lofty and Divine precepts which have descended from the spirit of Christianity.

Let us apply this to Paul. Previous to his con version, he was told on every hand that there had appeared in the heart of the Jewish theocracy a series of new spiritual manifestations. Paul did not make the slightest effort to test the reality of these; he decided beforehand and in advance that they could not be real. His reason for this decision was not any sense of scientific uniformity. He had no objection to a miracle, and was quite ready to admit any alteration in the law of nature, provided it did not touch the first link of the chain. That first link of the chain was to him the will of God, as revealed and expressed in the pages of the Old Testament. But then, in the view of Paul these new spiritual manifestations did touch the first link of the chain; they seemed to him to be at variance with the prophecies of the Old Testament. Such a consideration was sufficient to his mind to decide the case at once. No amount of external testimony would have warranted the acceptance of statements whose acceptance would contradict the verdict of the Jewish Scriptures. Even if such statements had been verified it would have availed them nothing. To the mind of the Jew there were in existence undoubted facts, which were with equal undoubtedness to be refused admission into the mind of man — facts which had their origin in a power which was not Divine, and their place in an economy which was founded on other laws from those of truth.

By-and-by Paul was converted, not by the force of external testimony, but by the force of a subjective and personal experience. Even then, how ever, the difficulty which had presented itself to the anti-Christian leader continued to present itself to the Christian missionary. The main obstacle to be combated as an apologist was precisely that obstacle which originally had made him an opponent. He had been so inveterate a Judaiser that the habit survived his entrance into Christianity. On the threshold of his new call, it never occurred to him that the question of his opponents could be other than this, * l Where is Abel, thy brother,” what have you done with the Old Testament? It was a sense of that question that drove him at the outset, not into Jerusalem, but intc Arabia, not towards the scene of the new manifestations, but into the region of the ancient covenant. He communed not with flesh and blood, just because flesh and blood could not give the testimony he desired. He wanted not the testimony of the present but the witness of the past; he was in search, not of facts to corroborate the words of men, but oi something to harmonise the words of men with the word of God.

This explains the seeming waste which, from an educational point of view, is involved in Paul’s Arabian journey. It seems to the reader as if, even from his own standpoint, he must have been consciously losing time; was it not like going to a school of mathematics for the purpose of learning music? Undoubtedly; but it so happened that Paul could not begin to learn music without a knowledge of the mathematics. He was deeply impressed with the beauty and the inherent harmony of the Christian principle, but he wanted to know that the Christian principle was itself in a straight line with the principles of his fathers. He wanted to ascertain for purposes of defence what he had formerly denied for purposes of aggression — the unity between the new covenant and the old, the conformity of the life of Jesus to the prophetic will of God.

It was when Paul emerged from Arabia, it was when he came forth into the vicinity of Gentile scenes, that he began to feel the inadequacy of his method. To begin his defence of Christianity by a study of the Old Testament was a fitting course for a missionary to the Jews; was it the fitting course for the Apostle of the Gentiles? Was it not clear that to them the main subject of inquiry was not the consistency but the veracity of the alleged facts, — not their congruity with the Old Testament, but their compatibility with human experience? Paul felt that it was so. He felt that his previous method had been one-sided, adapted only to a class. He desired to adapt Christianity to the other class — those for whom he felt himself specially destined. But how was he to accomplish this? The new method clearly demanded a new training. His knowledge of the Old Testament was an advantage among the Jews; it could contribute nothing to his success among the Gentiles. To succeed amongst them he must go to school not with his fathers but with his brethren. He must consult his contemporaries who had been the contemporaries of Jesus. He must learn from eye and ear witnesses what had been the actual history of that life of which he had been only permitted to see the ideal glory.

And this leads me to counteract an impression which prevails extensively in Christian circles — that Paul professed to have derived his information concerning the events of Christ’s life from supernatural sources. The opinion is based upon the passage in Galatians i. 11-16, in which Paul lays claim not only to an originality of thought, but to an originality in the mode of its communication. He declares that the gospel which he preached was neither after the manner of man, nor received from man, that it had come to him directly and immediately from the revelation of God. The natural inference has been that Paul here professes to have received a knowledge of the gospel history without the aid of history, — a record of the life and acts of Jesus without any medium to record them. But, however natural be the inference, the thought is highly unnatural. Are we to suppose that Paul received facilities for obtaining a knowledge of the life of Jesus which were not received by those whose actual commission was to write that life? The third evangelist, in the preface to his gospel, is not ashamed to confess that his knowledge of the life of Jesus was based upon sources not supernatural but natural, — that he was inspired to write his narrative by the fact that others had written on the same theme, and that he was in possession of traditions derived from the earliest contemporary witnesses. Are we to suppose that Paul, whose mission was not that of a biographer but of a preacher, should have deemed himself beyond the necessity of consulting those records of the time which the third evangelist had made the basis of his sacred history?

But the truth is, Paul makes no such claim. In the passage from Galatians which seems to express the claim, he is speaking not of a gospel history, but of a gospel call. The message which he professed to have received by an original channel was not the account of Christ’s life, but the revelation of Christ’s universality. One has only to read the passage in order to be convinced of this. Strictly speaking, the originality to which Paul lays claim is an originality of ordination. He says, When it pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood.” He means to say that his commission to preach the equal privileges of the Gentiles was not a commission derived from any authority delegated to him by the original apostles; it came to him by a direct act of Divine ordination which had made him one of their number, and had placed him in a position as independent as their own. He had been the first to receive a revelation of the universal scope of Christianity, and he had received that revelation by a communication of the Divine Master equally direct, though not equally visible. He had been set apart to his specially apostolic work by a special act of priestly consecration, and that act of priestly consecration had been performed in his inner spirit by a hand and by a voice impalpable to the earthly sense.

And this explains what otherwise would be inexplicable in the reasoning of Paul’s argument in this chapter of Galatians. On the popular view that Paul intended to lay claim to a supernatural communication of the gospel facts, how are we to account for such words as these? l i After three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.”1 Does he mean to imply that the fact of having only seen two contemporaries was a proof that he had received his facts supernaturally? If so, Paul was on this occasion singularly illogical and wonderfully unlike himself. In order to obtain a natural knowledge of the gospel facts, he only required to meet precisely those two

i Gal. L 18, 19.

Paul’s First Gospel. 10 Y

persons whom by his own admission he did meet. The whole length and breadth of the earthly life of Jesus was compassed by their testimony. Or will it be said that the strength of his argument lies in the shortness of that period during which he abode with Peter? I must reply that, if his design was merely to avoid the imputation of receiving facts by natural means, the time of his abiding was much too long. Fifteen hours would have been amply sufficient to have put him in full possession of all the salient features of the gospel history; fifteen minutes would have sufficed to have thoroughly established in his mind a conviction that the faith in Christianity rested upon a purely historical basis. If Paul’s motive was to suggest the inference that he had received no outward knowledge of the facts because he had only seen two disciples, he managed to suggest an inference of precisely the opposite intent.

But the case is very different if we suppose his object to have been the proof of his independent ordination. Two of the original apostles could very easily have taught him; two could never have ordained him to the apostolic office. From the historical narrative of the Acts we gather that the apostolic brethren were in the habit of supplying vacancies left in their ranks, but we learn from the same narrative that the vacancy was supplied by the brethren as a whole. If Paul had been set apart for his apostolic work merely by the delegated authority of the original apostles, his own position is that he must have received that authority from a general conclave of all the apostles together, whereas in point of fact, previous to obtaining such a position, he had only seen two of them. He had never been in a situation in which he could receive the hands of the presbytery. He had never met in conclave with those original disciples of the Lord from whose united assembly, and from whose combined will, could alone come an ordination to the apostolic office. The circumstance that he had only seen two was an incontrovertible evidence that, whencesoever he derived his authority to be an apostle, he did not and could not derive it from the will of man.

It is in this light that we must interpret another passage in which Paul seems to lay claim to a supernatural avenue for the attainment of historical knowledge. I allude to the passage, 1 Corinthians xi. 23, in which, speaking of the Lord’s Supper, he says, ‘I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread.” Paul is here commonly supposed to mean that the historical fact of the institution of the Supper was communicated to him in a manner unhistorical, and by a process supernatural. The original disciples learned it through their actual presence at the scene; Paul was not present at the scene, and therefore on this matter he had no direct historical testimony. Under these circumstances it would have seemed the most natural course to get the historical evidence next best — to consult the testimony of those who had been so present. Paul, however, is supposed to be stating that he scorned such subservience. He is supposed to indicate that he had received an account, through a supernatural channel, of those precise words of institution which had fallen upon the natural ear of the original disciples.

A thought more grotesque, an idea more incongruous with the spirit of the New Testament in general, and with the spirit of Paul in particular, was perhaps never conceived. It is contrary to every analogy, contrary to the whole Divine economy. The New Testament emphasises the parsimony of miracles, and disparages the use of wonderful signs; Paul, throughout the whole course of his epistles, never alludes to one such individual sign as occurring in his own experience. But if we look at the matter in the light of Paul’s claim to apostolic ordination, it all becomes clear. The original disciples had prided themselves on the fact that they had received the Lord’s Supper from the Master’s own hand. Paul denies that in this respect he is one whit behind them: “I too have received of the Lord that which I have delivered unto you.” He is not speaking, as I take it, of the words of institution at the sacrament, but of the sacrament itself. He says that no contrast can be drawn between his apostolic ordination and that of the original disciples on the ground of intercourse with the Master. He claims as immediate an intercourse with the Master as ever they possessed. He refuses to admit that their first participation in the Lord’s Supper enjoyed any privilege which had not equally been granted to him. If they had received the sacred elements from the Master’s own hands, so had he. If they had listened to the Master’s own voice in the words of original institution, so had he. If they had recognised the Master’s actual presence in the holy feast, so had he. He was conscious that when he had first participated in that bread and wine, he had been as really and truly in contact with Jesus as those who had heard His voice and seen His form on the shores of the Galilean lake. The ordination which he claimed was a priesthood after the order of Melchisedec — a priesthood which he had derived from no second-hand source, but from the actual touch and impact of the Divine life itself; and it was to emphasise this conviction that he uttered the words to the Church of Corinth, “I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you.”

We arrive, then, at this conclusion, that Paul’s claim to originality was the claim not to an independent channel for the communication of facts, but to an independent channel for the receiving of ordination. At no time does Paul profess to have obtained a knowledge of facts in any other than a natural way. At the stage where we have now arrived he wanted above all things to obtain such a knowledge. He “vras beginning to find that the conformity of the gospel history to the prophecies of the Old Testament, however powerful an argument it might be with the Jew, had no value what ever with the Gentile. The Gentile demanded a proof for that alleged history itself. Where was Paul to get such a proof? He never dreamed of getting it supernaturally; it was clear to him that, if it came at all, it must come through the medium of contemporaneous testimony. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that it is to such testimony Paul makes his earliest appeal in the sphere of his Gentile apostleship. We learn from the passage already quoted from Galatians that his first visit to Jerusalem after his Arabian struggle, was a visit just to those two men who, of all others, were best adapted to satisfy such a need — Peter and James. It was not merely as leaders of the Christian Church that Paul sought their intercourse; they were only leaders of the Christian Church because they had been contemporaneous witnesses of leading incidents in the life of the Master. The incidents to which they witnessed were not identical; the testimony of the one supplied what was lacking to the other. The witness of Peter ranged over the days of the Master’s manhood; the witness of James embraced the period of His early youth. Peter had been with Him from the opening ministry on the shores of Galilee to the closing scene in the Garden of Gethsemane; James had been with Him ere ever that ministry had begun, and had been a spectator of His life around the family altar. These two lives were precisely the medium through which Paul’s Christian education required to travel. He had begun, as we have seen, at the closing stage of the Master’s history. His first introduction to Christianity had been precisely on that spot where the earthly eyes of the earliest disciples had bidden it farewell. Paul had begun where they ended — with the scene of resurrection. His first impression had been a sense of Christianity’s Divine power; it was necessary that he should move backwards to take up that humanity which he had left behind. He had seen the ideal Christ, but he had not yet beheld the earthly man. That vision he could never behold in the flesh; he must receive it on trust from those who had been companions of His human way. Where could he better receive it than from the testimony of those two lives which, when taken together, embraced both the man and the child — the life of him who had followed the Master on the sea of human trouble, and the life of him who, on the shores of Galilee, had witnessed the development and the dawn?