PAUL. It is probable that no man ever swayed the religious opinions and destinies of mankind so powerfully as Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles. He was greater than some of the greatest servants of Christ in many single capacities; a greater preacher than Chrysostom, a greater missionary than St Francis Xavier, a greater theologian than St Thomas of Aquinum, a greater reformer than Luther, a greater organiser than St Gregory the Great. Collectively he exercised over the world a mightier influence not only than all of these put together, but even than his fellow apostles St Peter and St John. The secrets of his unparalleled success were—regarded on their human side—the secrets of all success in the field of religious effort—burning zeal, absolute self-sacrifice, undaunted courage, and a strong conviction that he was fulfilling a ministry to which he had received a special call from God.
Our chief and all but exclusive authorities for his life are the Acts of the Apostles and his own epistles. The few particulars added by Christian tradition are highly dubious, and the calumnious inventions of Talmudic malice and Ebionite heresy may be dismissed with silent contempt. Paley in his Horæ Paulinæ has shown with wonderful skill and originality how remarkably the credibility of St Luke's history is supported by authentic touches of autobiography, even in cases where there is a seeming and superficial discrepancy. He shows us that even the undesigned coincidences can be counted by scores. From combination of the two sources we are able to arrive at a true picture and estimate, though both are entirely fragmentary. The life of St Paul is like a manuscript of which the beginning and end are irrecoverably lost. All that we really know of his life lies in the thirty years between 36 A.D. and 66 A.D., which form its central period. We can only form slight and uncertain conjectures respecting Paul's childhood, youth, and early manhood, and respecting all that befell him after St Luke drops the curtain upon his first Roman imprisonment with the words, 'teaching with all boldness unmolestedly.' But even in this central period the records are quite fragmentary. In 2 Cor. xi. 24-33, written about 57 A.D., some ten years before his death, St Paul briefly alludes to the strange and severe diversity of his trials; and yet of those which he mentions no less than eleven specific trials are not so much as alluded to in the Acts. St Luke does not mention one of the five scourgings with Jewish thongs; only one of the three flagellations with Roman rods; not one of the three shipwrecks, though he minutely describes a fourth. He makes no allusion to the 'night and day in the deep,' and only mentions two of what Clement of Rome tells us were seven imprisonments. Nor, again, does St Luke refer to any one of the perils of watercourses, perils of robbers, perils in the wilderness, perils among false brethren, hunger, thirst, fasting, cold, and nakedness, for which we can only find places in the travels of the apostle by reproducing in imagination the character of the countries through which he made his long and toilsome journeys.
St Jerome, perhaps following a true but confused and anachronistic tradition, says that St Paul was born at Giscala in Galilee, and taken by his parents to Tarsus of Cilicia in early infancy. The conjectural date of his birth is about 3 A.D. Tarsus was at that time 'no mean city.' It was beautifully situated on the river Cydnus, and was a centre not only of political power and commercial enterprise, but also of learning and philosophy. He grew up in the midst of paganism, but was trained 'a Hebrew of the Hebrews,' in profound acquaintance with the Jewish Scriptures, and with some slight knowledge of classical literature. Being of the tribe of Benjamin, he received the famous tribal name of Saul. Tarsus was only an urbs libera, but in some unknown way St Paul was a Roman citizen, and it has been conjectured that his father may have been one of the Tarsians carried by Cassius to Rome, and may there have obtained the civitas. He was sent, probably as a boy, to relatives at Jerusalem, where in after days he seems to have had a married sister. He there became an illustrious and learned Pharisee of the famous school of the Rabbani Gamaliel (q.v.), a grandson of the sweet and noble Hillel. At the feet of this eminent doctor he sat for many years, endeavouring to attain to the legal blamelessness which was the ideal of Pharisaic virtue, but which could give little satisfaction to his deepest yearnings. It was hardly wonderful that he should have imbibed the spirit of fanatical hatred against that new and immeasurable force of the gospel, which to a Pharisee seemed to involve the overthrow of all his most cherished idols and formalities. If, as he seems to imply, he had a vote in the Sanhedrin (Acts, xxvi. 10), he must have been married; and from the context of 1 Cor. vii. 8 it has been inferred that he was a widower, and remained a widower by choice (1 Cor. ix. 5). Gamaliel approved of the wise policy of toleration; but Saul, less wise herein than his teacher, was hurried by what he himself afterwards and remorsefully described as a spirit of frenzied rage (Acts, xxvi. 11) into the attitude of a most violent persecutor. He haled men and even women to prison, hunted them out for punishment through every synagogue, scourged them (Acts, xxii. 4), voted for their execution, and did his best to make them blasphemers. The persecution culminated in the martyrdom of St Stephen by stoning, and on this occasion the executioners laid their garments at the feet of Saul. Fanaticism enabled him to witness that horrible death, but he was haunted long years afterwards by the memory of the angel face (Acts, vi. 15), the light of which he had seen quenched in blood (Acts, vii. 58-60, xxii. 20; 1 Cor. xv. 9; Gal. i. 13).
When he had finished his bad work as an inquisitor at Jerusalem, and had, as he hoped, extirpated the odious sect of Nazarenes, he obtained letters of authorisation from the high-priest, and went as commissioner of the Sanhedrin to root them out from Damascus. On his journey he met the crisis of his fate. He was, as he regarded it, arrested—apprehended by Christ, dashed to the ground, taken captive, led in triumph, branded as a slave with the stigmata of the Lord Jesus, when the dazzling vision, which outshone the Syrian noon, wrapped him as in a blinding sheet of flame, and filled him with the unalterable conviction that he had both seen and heard his risen Lord. From that moment he was a changed man. He felt that the fire of God had melted the iron sinews, and the hammer of God had shattered the stony heart. What is certain is that from that time forth the proud man became utterly humble, and the fierce persecutor a tender-hearted evangelist. The hard and self-sufficient Rabbi, abandoning for ever his national arrogance, his rabbinic wisdom, his legal scrupulosity, became thenceforth the suffering and despised preacher of an exalted faith.
It is needless to follow in detail the further narrative of the Acts or the personal indications of the epistles. Healed by Ananias of his temporary blindness, he retired for about three years to Arabia, and then returning to Damascus began powerfully to preach the gospel which he had heretofore toiled to destroy. Driven from Damascus by Jewish animosity, he contrived to escape down the city wall in a basket, and made his way to Jerusalem, where, as was natural, he was received with coldness and suspicion, until Barnabas generously intervened to remove the prejudices of the brethren. After a trance and vision in the temple, in which his future destiny was foreshadowed to him, he was driven to Tarsus by a plot to murder him, and there he stayed with his family, waiting and preparing for his work. Meanwhile the capital of Christianity was being gradually transferred from Jerusalem to Antioch, and Barnabas, realising the importance of the vast sphere of labour which was there opening before him, set out to seek Paul as his fellow-labourer. At Antioch he laboured for a year with ever-widening influence, and went to Jerusalem with Barnabas in the year 44 to carry contributions to the necessitous mother-church. Soon after his return began the first stirring of the missionary spirit, and Barnabas and Saul were set apart by divine consecration to preach Christ to the Jew first and afterwards to the Gentile. They set forth accompanied by Mark, who was the cousin (Col. iv. 10) of Barnabas, and sailed to Cyprus, where they converted the proconsul Sergius Paulus, and confounded the false prophet Elymas, by whom he had been duped. From that time Saul assumes the Gentile name of Paul. Thence they sailed to Perga, and travelled through the passes of the Taurus to the Pisidian Antioch. Driven from thence, and afterwards from Iconium, by the jealous fury of the Jews at the success of their preaching among the Gentiles, they went to Lystra, where, healing a cripple, they were at first taken for gods; but a revulsion of feeling against them was again caused by the Jews, and Paul was stoned and left for dead. It is probable that he carried with him to the grave the marks of this cruel martyrdom; but at Lystra he had the happiness of winning a young convert named Timotheus, the beloved son and companion of many later trials and travels, even to the end of his life. From Lystra they fled secretly to Derbe, and thence retraced their steps to Antioch, appointing in each place elders over the infant churches. Such was the first flight of the eagle, the first journey of Christian missionaries. It confirmed Paul in his destined work as the Apostle of the Gentiles.
Shortly after their return to the Syrian Antioch the church began to be troubled by the Pharisaic converts, who wished to reduce Christianity to the level of a local faction by forcing on Gentile converts the crushing yoke of Jewish circumcision. It is difficult after the lapse of ages to estimate the daring courage and originality which it then required to pronounce obsolete and abrogated, and to characterise as 'weak and beggarly elements,' what all Jews regarded as the infinitely sacred and eternally inspired institutions of that Mosaic ceremonialism which had covered religion with the scurf of petty obligations indefinitely multiplied by tradition and the oral law. But Paul took this part boldly and decisively from the first and at all costs—willingly facing the obloquy heaped upon him as a renegade and a seducer of the people—he carried out to the end the indignant battle which saved Christianity from being degraded into a narrow sect and made it the universal religion of spiritual freedom. It was necessary for Paul and Barnabas to visit Jerusalem to obtain from the first church synod the decision of this great question, and the victory gained in that synod, mainly by the genius of St Paul aided by the manly convictions of St Peter, is the most momentous in the history of early Christianity. It was indeed only a partial victory in the form of a local decision; but it practically conceded the main point of issue, and enabled St Paul to enforce on reluctant Judaists the emancipation of their Gentile brethren from a host of worrying restrictions, which, if unabolished, would have been justly fatal to the spread of Christianity. How strained were the relations between the two divisions of the church we see from the fact that shortly afterwards at Antioch Paul had to rebuke even the chief of the apostles publicly for something like tergiversation, into which he had been led for a moment by fear of his Jewish co-religionists. This was never forgotten, and we see from the Pseudo-Clementine writings that perhaps a century later there were Judaising heretics who because of it dared to indulge in malignant calumnies against St Paul.
It was shortly after this memorable scene that St Paul's missionary arduor led him to propose to Barnabas another evangelistic journey. The wish of Barnabas to take with him his cousin Mark, and Paul's disinclination to admit the companionship of one who in his judgment had put his hand to the plough and looked back in the first journey, led to a sad disagreement between the two friends. This ended in a life-long separation, though much later Paul desired the presence of Mark at Rome because he found him profitable for the ministry. Paul, with Silas as his companion, went through the Cilician Gates to Derbe and Lystra. At Lystra he circumcised and ordained Timothy, who continued to be his dearest companion for many years. Thence they went through Phrygia and Galatia, preaching and founding churches. In Galatia Paul had a severe illness, in which he was cheered by the bright enthusiasm of his Galatian converts. Thence, by providential intimation, they were led to Troas, and there St Paul was joined by St Luke, and saw the vision of the 'man of Macedonia,' which led to the momentous decision to carry the gospel into Europe. They sailed to Neapolis, and were received at Philippi by the generous hospitality of Lydia. The church here founded was the most beloved by St Paul of all his infant communities. The healing of the girl with 'a spirit of divination' led to an uproar, in which Paul and Silas were unjustly and illegally scourged and imprisoned. An earthquake in the night alarmed the Philippian praetors, and the two prisoners, who had converted their gaoler, were honourably dismissed. They went to Thessalonica, and founded another church, where Paul, who was generally able to support himself by his trade of tent-maker, was aided by the generous Philippians. Another riot, stirred up by Jewish jealousy, compelled their flight to Berea, from which St Paul was again driven by Jewish machinations, and made his way to Athens. He preached on the Areopagus amid the jeers of Stoics and Epicureans, but won some important converts, and proceeded to Corinth. There, with the aid of his fellow tent-makers, Aquila and Priscilla, he founded an important church; but another riot arose in which both Jews and Greeks were involved, which was treated with disdainful indifference by the proconsul Gallio, the brother of Seneca.
After a stay of some months at Corinth, he revisited Jerusalem (his fourth visit), touching at Ephesus on the way. After saluting the church at Jerusalem he went back to Antioch, whence, after a period of rest, he started on his third great missionary journey. He confirmed the churches of Galatia and Phrygia, and then went to Ephesus, where he made a full convert of the eloquent Apollos, and stayed for two years. The immense success of his preaching led to the riot of the silver-smiths in the theatre. Compelled to fly, he made his way to Troas and retraced his steps through Macedonia as far as Illyricum, and thence to Corinth. It was during this period that he wrote his most important group of epistles. He was greatly occupied also in raising a contribution for the perennial destitution of the mother-church at Jerusalem, which was taken thither by chosen delegates of the contributing churches. A sudden plot of the Jews to murder him compelled him to return through Macedonia. He spent the Passover with Luke at Philippi, sailed to Troas, where he raised Eutychus from death, and then among the isles of Greece to Miletus, where he had an affecting parting with the elders of the Ephesian Church. A voyage past Coos, Rhodes, and Patara brought him to Tyre, where he was warmly welcomed by the church, and parted from them in prayer on the seashore. At Cæsarea he stayed in the house of Philip the Evangelist, and thence, in spite of the warnings of the prophet Agabus, went up to Jerusalem for his fifth visit. He was the guest of Mnason of Cyprus, and was received by James, the Lord's brother, and the elders, to whom he handed over the Gentile contributions, in accordance with the old instructions of the synod of Jerusalem, 'to be mindful of the poor.' Afraid that his presence in the Holy City might arouse tumults among the Jewish fanatics, St James suggested to him that he should take a share in the expenses of a Nazarene vow. The suggestion turned out unfortunately. He was recognised in the Court of the Women, and charged with having taken Trophimus, a Gentile Ephesian, into the temple. He was rescued from the brutal fury of the mob by the chief captain Lysias, who, taking him for an impostor, was on the point of having him scourged, when he discovered that he was a Roman citizen. Under the protection of the Romans he was tried before the Sanhedrin, but threw the assembly into a tumult by taking advantage of the rivalry between the Pharisees and Sadducees. Amid these perils a vision assured him that he should yet preach the word in Rome. Discovering that forty Jews had bound themselves under a curse to assassinate Paul, Lysias sent him to the procurator Felix at Cæsarea. He was tried before Felix, and made a deep impression; but, as he had no money to bribe the avaricious governor, he was left two years in prison. He was then tried afresh by the fair and energetic Festus, who also gave him an opportunity of pleading his cause before King Agrippa II. and Berenice. Weary, however, with the long and unjust detention, he had appealed to Cæsar, and
Festus sent him, in charge of the centurion Julius, to Rome. St Luke, who, with Aristarchus, was his companion, gives us a minute account of the voyage to Myra, and thence in an Alexandrian wheat-ship to Crete, where they lay windbound at Fair Havens. Continuing the voyage in spite of Paul's warning, the crew were caught in a cyclone called Euro-aquilo, and the ship, in spite of undergirding and every other precaution, became a complete wreck. Amid the despair and misery of all on board, St Paul, comforted by a vision, assured them of their safety, and though the vessel finally became a total wreck at Ras el Koura, in Malta, every life was saved. At Malta he waited three months for another ship. He was held in great honour by the barbarous natives because he had shaken a viper off his hand unhurt, and healed the father of Publius, the Protos of Malta. The prisoners were taken to Italy on board the Castor and Pollux, and landed at Puteoli, proceeding by land to Rome. Paul was met by Christian brethren at Appii Forum and the Three Taverns, and went along the Appian Road to the capital, where he was handed over to the observatio of Afranius Burrus, the prætorian prefect. For two years he continued a prisoner at Rome, and, as the Jews refused to accept his preaching, he did what he could to make the gospel known to the Gentiles, gaining converts even among the prætorian soldiers and the slaves of Cæsar's household, and being suffered to live in his own hired apartment, under the supervision of the soldiers. From the pastoral epistles we securely infer that his trial ended in a complete acquittal. His next movements are uncertain, but we find traces of his probable visits to Colossæ, Crete, and Nicopolis, and of his final arrest in the house of Carpus at Troas. He seems to have been tried and imprisoned at Ephesus, and again sent to Rome. Meanwhile the Neronian persecution had broken out, and his second imprisonment, in which nearly all deserted him, was far more imperilled and miserable than the first.
At his first trial—perhaps before Nero in person—he seems to have been remanded; but at a second trial we learn from unanimous Christian tradition that he was condemned to martyrdom, probably, as he was a Roman citizen, by decapitation. His 'trophy,' or martyr's memorial, was a familiar object in Rome in the 2d century, but his death was so lonely and unrecorded that not even tradition has preserved a single trustworthy detail respecting it. All that we can see from his last writings is that he remained heroic, indomitable, cheerful, faithful to the end, never doubting, amid an apparent failure which the world might well have regarded as absolute, that the hundredfold harvest of eternity would spring up from the grain which he had sown in tears. Yet it is unlikely that even he, on this side the grave, was at all able to estimate the far-reaching grandeur and many-sidedness of the work which it had been given him to do. He had set an example of life-long zeal and devotion in the willing endurance of numberless perils and privations, such as has never been equalled, much less surpassed; and he had done this with a mind acutely sensitive to the blasts of hatred which came to him from every region of the Jewish and Gentile world, and with a body weakened by chronic disease. He had formulated the language and systematised the doctrines of theology. He had saved the gospel from dwindling into a Pharisaic Judaism, and had established for ever its freedom from the yoke of priestly and ceremonial bondage. He had carried the faith over a vast extent of Asia from Jerusalem to Antioch, to Ephesus, to Macedonia, to Athens and Corinth, to Rome, and perhaps even 'to the farthest limit of the west.' He had been the founder of many flourishing churches. He had written epistles of various orders, of which even the most casual is 'weighty and powerful,' and which constitute him one of the greatest moral and spiritual teachers whom the human race has ever seen.
It only remains to glance at these epistles. They are thirteen in number, and fall into four well-marked chronological and doctrinal groups. The first group (1, 2 Thess., written 52-53 A.D., during the second missionary journey) are mainly eschatological, and represent St Paul's earliest stage of thought. The second group, written during the third missionary journey, may be called broadly epistles of Judaic controversy. 1 Corinthians (written at Ephesus in 57) is mainly polemical and ecclesiastical. 2 Corinthians (written at Philippi in 58?) is the apostle's Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ. Galatians and Romans (written at Corinth in 58) are mainly doctrinal and soteriological. The third group are the epistles written during St Paul's first imprisonment at Rome. Philippians (62) is personal and ethical. Colossians and Ephesians (63) are Christological, Ephesians being especially the epistle of the ascension. Philemon is an exquisite personal epistle, the first charter of emancipation, and was written (63) as a sort of annex to the Epistle to the Colossians. The fourth group contains the pastoral epistles of St Paul's closing years. 1 Timothy and Titus may have been written in Macedonia about 66, 2 Tim. about 67 in Rome.
They may also be classified according to their forms, as (1) Circular letters to the churches (Eph. and Romans), which are rather treatises than letters; (2) Letters to special churches, or little groups of churches (1 and 2 Thess., 1 and 2 Cor., Philip., Col., and Gal.); (3) Letters to friends (Philemon, Titus, 1 and 2 Tim.).
The genuineness of some of these epistles has been fiercely contested. Four (1 and 2 Cor., Gal., and Romans) are absolute homologoumena, of which not even the school of Tübingen questioned the genuineness; but they regarded 1 and 2 Thess., Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon as antilegomena, of uncertain authenticity, and the three pastoral epistles as spurious. The Christian church has amply met the arguments against the authenticity of all the epistles, and even Renan only rejects the pastoral epistles, and that mainly on historic and chronological grounds, because with many others he holds that St Paul perished in the Neronian persecution in 64 A.D.
The mission of St Paul was fourfold. Had he done nothing more than set the world an example of saintly self-sacrifice, his work would have been sufficiently memorable to make him immortal; but besides this he was a missionary, a moralist, a reformer, and a theologian.
(1) Of his missionary work we have spoken, and have shown that to him pre-eminently belongs the honour of having made known the gospel to the civilised world around the basin of the Mediterranean; so that before his death the Christians had grown from a little community of 120 Galileans in an upper room at Jerusalem into a number of flourishing Asiatic and European churches, and even in that early day Christ had His followers in the Prætorian camp at Rome, and in Cæsar's household.
(2) As a moralist St Paul laid down, with incomparable clearness, the relations of ethics to the gospel, and the secret of the loftiest moral standard as rendered possible by the new life. No moralist before him had more distinctly illustrated the eternal principles taught by Christ, by showing their bearing on the simplest concrete duties of life. To take but one example—no moralist ever dealt with the duty of purity, so universally ignored in the ancient civilisations, with such unrivalled delicacy yet with such absolute precision. By insisting on the new truth, 'Know ye not that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, who dwelleth in you?' he placed chastity on a wholly new basis, and contributed indefinite force and meaning to Christ's elucidation of the duties implied in the seventh commandment as extending even to the thoughts of the heart.
(3) As a reformer St Paul not only relieved the world from that yoke of petty Levitic observances which even St Peter pronounced to have been intolerable, but he emancipated all true religion from the burden of external Pharisaic restrictions, from all oral laws and traditions of the elders, and ecclesiastical tyrannies of ceremonialism, and all terror of humanly-invented sins. He was the divinely-appointed champion of the principle 'Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.' This is the keynote of one of his most important epistles—that to the Galatians—in which he alludes no less than eleven times to the privilege and duty of 'standing fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free' (Gal. ii. 4; iii. 28; iv. 22, 23, 26, 30, 31; v. 1, 13). Hence this epistle powerfully swayed Wyclif, Huss, Savonarola, Luther, Tyndale, Wesley, and all great religious reformers. The truths which Luther learned from it became in his hands the instrument for the deliverance of the church from the tyranny of Rome. 'The Epistle to the Galatians,' he said, 'is my epistle. I have betrothed myself to it. It is my wife.' Bengel calls this epistle 'the sum and marrow of Christianity,' and says of v. 1-6 'in these stands all Christianity.'
(4) In the Epistle to the Galatians we also find the germ of that great doctrinal system which makes St Paul the chief founder of Christian theology. In the doctrinal section of the epistle (iii. 1-iv. 30) he had proved the doctrine of our justification by faith. He had shown that justification is not attainable by outward ordinances. His proofs had been drawn from the Christian consciousness (iii. 1-5), from the Old Testament (iii. 6-18), and by establishing the secondary position of the law both objectively (iii. 19-29) and subjectively (iv. 1-18). In the Epistle to the Romans, which was probably a circular treatise, sent round with different appendices of personal greetings to various churches, the theme of justification is more systematically worked out. The keynote of that epistle is the recurrent word all, as illustrative of the spiritual universality of the gospel to meet the universality of man's need for the gospel. In this epistle the four main positions are (1) all are guilty before God; (2) all need a saviour; (3) Christ died for all; (4) we are all one body in Him. In Adam all are equally guilty (i. 18-iii. 20), in Christ all are equally redeemed (iii. 21-30). The grand fundamental theme of the epistle is given in Rom. i. 16, 17. It is stated not as a doctrine of sin, or a theory of imputations, or a theological shibboleth, but as a momentous practical truth. The elements of that great summary are (1) justification; the righteousness of God imputed to man; (2) faith; man's belief, rising first to self-surrender, then to mystic union with Christ, which becomes the germ of a new life in the heart; (3) this plan of salvation by free grace is offered gratuitously to all; (4) the object of this faith is Jesus Christ, whose life and death are for man a ransom and a propitiation; (5) Christ's sacrifice was necessary as a vindication of God's righteousness in the pretermission of past sins; (6) the end to be obtained was that God might justify every man whose root of life is faith in Christ.
St Paul dwelt therefore on three cardinal points—the Grace of God, the Redemption of Christ, the Faith of Man. Luther rediscovered this truth theoretically by reading the epistles to the Romans and Galatians in the library of his monastery at Erfurt, experimentally by the facts of his own religious life. Wesley learned it, partly from the Moravians, and partly from Luther's commentary on the Galatians, after his return from Georgia. But this cardinal doctrine of justification by faith is ignorantly misunderstood and perilously misinterpreted when faith is confused with mere belief. Hooker (Eccles. Pol. I. xi. 6) long ago corrected this error; and of recent critics, both Baur (Paul, ii. 149) and Pfeiderer (Paulinismus, sect. 5) have given the true meaning of St Paul. Baur shows how faith, beginning in hearing, and becoming faith in Christ (Gal. ii. 16, iii. 26), and more especially in Christ's blood (i.e. the communication to man of His essential life, Rom. iii. 24-27), becomes more intense as it narrows from stage to stage, and passes from theoretic consent to dominant conviction. Pfeiderer shows that there are ascending degrees and qualities of faith, passing from dead faith, which produces no works, and theoretic persuasion, first into faithfulness and moral surrender, and then into mystic union with Christ, which does not remain receptive, but becomes the spirit of life—a living power and impulse (1 Cor. vi. 17), so that, in its true sense, as Luther says, 'Faith is a divine work in us, which changes us and creates us anew in God.' The modern sense of faith as a body of doctrines (the faith) may, in this connection, be left out of sight altogether, since the word is only thus used in the Pastoral Epistles.
(5) But complete as is St Paul's statement of this central doctrine, which he characterised as his gospel (Rom. ii. 16, xvi. 25; Gal. i. 7, ii. 2; 2 Tim. ii. 8)—complete, that is, so far as we can give such a title to truths which touch, on every side, upon insoluble mysteries—we are thankful that the same essential truths are represented in a less controversial and more directly spiritual form in the epistles of the captivity—those especially to the Ephesians and Colossians. The mind of St Paul—as we see at once when we read his epistles in chronological order—was not only intensely susceptible to surrounding conditions of life and controversy, but was also one which was constantly in a state of growth and progress. The theodicy which he had been led to formulate in the 'storm and stress' of Judaic controversy assumed larger, richer, less rigid and antagonistic forms when he had to wean the infant church from the dangerous glamour of incipient Gnostic heresies. Olshausen calls the epistles to the Romans and Galatians soteriological—i.e. they contain, so to speak, the philosophy of the plan of salvation; and the epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians Christological—i.e. they insist on the immediate relation of the soul and of the church to Christ. The epistles are closely connected, though that to the Colossians is less exquisite and gracious than that to the Ephesians, which may well be called the Epistle of the Ascension, the Epistle of 'the heavenlies.' The idea of the Epistle to the Colossians is 'Christ all in all,' and its moral is summed up in the words 'Walk in Him, in Him alone.' The idea of the Epistle to the Ephesians is Christ in the universal church. In the Epistle to the Romans the doctrine of salvation is set forth psychologically. It is built on the moral facts of the universality of sin, the insufficiency of man, the justification of the believer by union with Christ. In the later epistles the statement of the doctrine is theologic. Christ is set forth as the central being of the universe, and we see God's eternal plans realised by the unity of redeemed humanity in Christ with the family of heaven in the heavenlies.
Round these central truths all the other views of St Paul are crystallised. The fierce disputes in which rival dogmatists—St Augustine and Pelagius, the Jesuits and Jansenists, the Calvinists and Arminians, and many others—have combatted over his opinions arise from the futile attempt to systematise exorbitant inferences drawn from isolated phrases, to build upon their apexes inverted pyramids of argument, to obscure the whole heaven of Christianity with smoke made to issue ‘from the narrow aperture of single texts.’ Such attempts must always fail. St Paul’s letters were écrits de circonstance. They were casual; they were fragmentary; they were the outcome of the special conditions with which they immediately dealt. St Paul ‘never recoils before a paradox;’ he never cares to remove an apparent contradiction; he knew that truths which apparently contradict others are often complementary truths; he leaves side by side the apparent antinomies which arise from the contact of finite reason with infinite truth. He was well aware that when reason steps beyond the limits of experience it comes into collision with mysteries not only insoluble, but apparently opposite to each other. Since omnia exeunt in mysterium, he was not concerned to reconcile the opposite facts of predestination and free-will; of universal restoration and a twofold end of probation, of the necessity for human effort and yet its ineffectualness. He knew that such antinomies involve no perplexity in the region of practical life. While he created the language of Christian theology, and often enshrines a whole world of thought in a single word, he lends no sanction to the theological controversialists who, with mutual bitterness, have persisted in rending Christendom asunder by pursuing the great saving truths of religion into speculative extremes.
The literature bearing on St Paul is vast in extent; the following are merely the names of the more important modern books: (1) LIFE.—K. Schrader, Der Apostel Paulus (1830–36); Neander, Gesch. der Pflanzung u. Leitung der Christl. Kirche durch die Apostel (vol. i. 1832; Eng. trans. 1851); F. C. Baur, Paulus der Apostel Jesu Christi (1845; 2d ed. by Zeller, 1866; Eng. trans. 1873–75); A. Hausrath, Der Apostel Paulus (1865; 2d ed. 1872); Ch. F. Trip, Paulus nach der Apostelgeschichte (1866); Renan, Les Apôtres (1866) and Saint Paul (1869); F. Bungener, S. Paul, sa Vie, son Œuvre, ses Épîtres (1867); M. Krenkel, Paulus, der Apostel der Heiden (1869); W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson, The Life and Epistles of St Paul (1852); F. W. Farrar, The Life and Work of St Paul (1879); Lewin, The Life and Epistles of St Paul (1851; new ed. 1874); and good shorter studies by O. H. Taylor (1884), J. Stalker (1884), and Professor Iverach (1891).
(2) THEOLOGY.—Ritschl, Die Entstehung der Altkatholischen Kirche (2d ed. 1857); A. Sabatier, L’Apôtre Paul (1870; 2d ed. 1881); K. Holsten, Zum Evangelium des Paulus u. Petrus (1868), and Das Evangelium des Paulus dargestellt (1880 et seq.); R. Schmidt, Die Paulinische Christologie (1870); O. Pfeiferer, Der Paulinismus (1873; 2d ed. 1890; Eng. trans. 1877), and Hibbert Lectures (1885); Ernesti, Die Ethik des Apostels Paulus (1868; 3d ed. 1880); J. H. Scholten, Das Paulinische Evangelium (1881); E. Menegoz, Le Pêché et la Rédemption d’après St Paul (1882); H. Gunkel, Die Wirkungen des Heil. Geistes nach der popul. Anschauung der Apostol. Zeit. u. nach der Lehre des Apost. Paulus (1888); and Ch. Rogge, Die Anschauung des Apostels Paulus von die relig.-sittl. Char. des Heidenthums (1888); also the general works on the theology of the New Testament by Chr. F. Schmidt (edited by Weizsäcker, 1853), Baur (1864), B. Weiss (1868; Eng. trans. 1888–89), and J. J. van Oosterzee (1869; 2d ed. 1886).
See also the relevant parts of the Introductions of Bleek, Weiss, S. Davidson, Salmon, Holtzmann, &c., and especially the works devoted to the Acts by Overbeck (1870, in De Wette), Zeller (1854; Eng. trans. 1875–76), H. Wendt (1883, in Meyer), and K. Schmidt (vol. i. 1882); also C. Weizsäcker, Das Apostol. Zeit- alter der Christl. Kirche (1886). See also the countless Commentaries on the individual epistles of St Paul, the names of which will be found under the special articles thereon. Of these may here merely be mentioned, as masterpieces in their kind, those of Godet on Romans and Corinthians, and Lightfoot on Philippians, Galatians, Colossians, and Philemon.
Specially noteworthy articles on St Paul are those by Hausrath in Schenkel’s Bibel-Lexicon; Beyschlag in Riehm’s Handwörterb. des bibl. Alterthums; Lange in the first edition of Herzog’s Real-Encyclopädie, W. Schmidt in the second edition; and Hatch in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.). The so-called Tübingen theory of the fundamental distinction between the Pauline and Petrine parties in the early church is maintained in the books by Baur (q.v.), Holsten, Zeller, and Scholten, already mentioned. See the article CHRISTIANITY in the present work.