awn from the lowest as well as the higher walks of life. On this rank soil, in the metropolis of Greek vice, a Christianity sprang up of abounding vitality, but rife with seeds of strife and corruption (1 Co 15 61, 2 Co 12-21, ete.). In Corinth the Jews had no popular influence, and Paul was able to stay for eighteen months. He was encouraged by a vision assuring him of personal safety and of a rich harvest of souls (Ac 18°"), Paul ex- perienced at Corinth the full benefit of the es tection of Roman law. The proconsul Gallio, known through his brother Seneca as an amiable and large-minded man, dismissed contemptuously the charge of illegal action brought by the Jews against Paul, and winked at the beating there- upon given to the accuser by the Greek bystanders (vv.2-17), In no other great city, with the excep- tion of Syrian Antioch, did the aposte‘ic Church experience so little persecution.
he date of the FrrsT EPISTLE TO THE THESS. is determined by comparison of 1 Th 3° and Ac 185 as falling within the first period of St. Paul’s so- jou at Corinth, within six months probably of iis leaving Thessalonica. The SECOND EPISTLE followed speedily after the First ; for it deals with the same situation, aggravated in some particulars, and corrects a misapprehension due in part to mis- understanding or perversion of the First (2 Th 22). These two Epp., with the Address at Athens and the allusions of 1 Co, show the prominence of the doctrine of the Last Things in St. Paul’s teaching at this epoch. Though his specific doctrine of the Cross is only once alluded to in the Thess. letters (1 Th δ5. 10), the Epp. to Corinth and Galatia prove, by their references to his preaching on the second journey (1 Co 2! 3, Gal 3}, ete.), that this was his central theme throughout.
The course of the Second Journey, possibly, throws some light upon the obscure figure of ‘ the man of lawlessness’ in 2Th2. Many indications
oint to the apostle’s interested study of the Roman impire and its relations to the kingdom of Christ. The majesty and equity of Roman law, the ability of Roman administration, the unity and peace which Roman rule gave to the civilized world,
PAUL THE APOSTLE PAUL THE APOSTLE 709
Paul appreciated; they had created the field for is great work. He saw in the Roman magistrate ‘the restrainer’ of evil forces that might have crushed the Church in its infancy. But there was one feature in the Roman system that must have stirred his extreme abhorrence—the Cesar-worshi then rapidly spreading in the provinces, whic was becoming, in fact, the religion of the Empire. This development of opera autocracy was, in pricaule, quite distinct from the authority of the tate, and could be regarded by Paul rane as the climax of lawlessness. The attempt of a er in the year 39, to place his statue in the temple at Tanisalan had horrified the Jewish world; the blasphemous freaks of this Caesar were probably in the apostle’s mind when he wrote 2 Th 24, In their progress through Asia Minor the missionaries were confronted with multiplied signs of the imperial religion ; not improbably ra passed, €.g., through Pergamum (marked out in Rev 218 as the place ‘where Satan dwelleth’), where stood the Augusteium, in which the godhead of the Divus Augustus was honoured by a splendid cultus re- nowned through the peninsula. Such observations ere a sharper edge to St. Paul’s conception of ‘the ingdom’ ; and his reflexions upon this antithesis may well have affected his language in such a way as to lend colour to the charge made against him at Thessalonica (Ac 177-8). On this subject he had 7 Spec more freely than he ventures to write (2 Th
). The OT forecasts of Antichrist, combined with the contemporary deification of the Cesars, mrply the material for the image of the ἀντικείμενος of h. This same Cesar-worship inspired the hatred of Rome which burns through the Apoca- lypse. St. Paul and St. John, with profound insight, discerned in this cult the true rival of Christianity among the forces of the time; the numen of Cesar, as the great martyrdoms proved, was the crucial alternative to thatof Jesus. Anti- christ was latent in the world-god of the Palatine.
In his progress westwards Paul was increasingly ateahed yet repelled, at each step by the gran- deur of Rome. The second missionary tour was the time of the apostle’s boldest enterprises, his largest conquests. In a single march the gospel was carried over more than half the breadth of the eastern Roman Empire, and Corinth was brought into fellowship with Jerusalem. But these rapid successes in Galatia and Corinth prepared for the apostle his greatest sorrows.
The second tour, occupying scarcely less than three years, closed with Paul’s voyage to Cesarea for Jerusalem. On the way he called at Ephesus, where he left Priscilla and Aquila, promising to return. This fourth visit to Jerusalem was of the briefest. At Antioch he spent ‘some time’—an expression probably covering the ensuing winter.
(qd) THE THIRD MISSIONARY JOURNEY com- menced with the spring, when St. Paul set out for ‘the Galatian region and Phrygia,’ accompanied by Timothy (Ac 18), During the interval between the second and third journeys we place (with Neander, Wieseler, A. Sabatier) St. Peter’s visit to Antioch and collision with St. Paul, re- lated in Gal 2", The defeat of Ac 15 must have arrested the Judaistic movement for the time; nor is St. Peter, to say nothing of St. Barnabas, likel at once to have stultified his action at the Council. The Epp. to the Thess, give no indication that St. Paul’s mind was disturbed during his first mission in Europe by controversy with the legalists, as it could hardly fail to have been if the settlement made at Jerus. had been already peopenies by ‘the dissimulation’ of Peter and Barnabas and the renewed activity of the ψευδάδελφοι παρείσακτοι. The proceedings of the ‘ certain from James’ at the time of St. Peter's visit to Antioch amounted to