Paul’s companion once more. (On this journe see Ramsay’s St, Paul the Trav. xiii.). St. Paul's reception by St. James and the Church of Jeru- salem signalizes his victory over the legalists. THE EP. TO THE ROMANS sums up the develop- ment of St. Paul’s work and thought at this central epoch. The struggle with the Judaistic reaction which he has just passed through, was in effect a rehearsal of the internal conflict that issued in the conversion of Saul the Pharisee and his call to the apostleship of the Gentiles. He saw his converts in Galatia and Corinth, and those who ‘had been delivered’ to the same ‘form of teaching’ in Rome (6” 1617-18), in danger of bein reduced to the very bondage from which he ha himself been rescued by the signal intervention of Jesus Christ (Ro 74-84, Gal 2+° 431-54), The Ep. to the Galatians is a vehement apologetic reasser- tion, and the Ep. to the Romans a luminous and methodical exposition, of ‘the truth of the gospel’ in which Paul’s experience of twenty years, as a converted Christian man and an evangelist to Jews and Gentiles, was comprised. It is here unfolded In its mature expression, the form into which it was wrought by dint of use and conflict and through profound and intense reflexion, embrac- ing in its oe the whole course of sin and redemption, and the relations of Israel and of man- kind to God viewed in their largest aspects. Such a treatise and manifesto it was fitting for the apostle to send to Rome—addressing himself ‘ urbi et orbi,’ and with an eye robably to other readers besides those of the lowly Christian Church he expected to visit there. Fronting the imperial city, Paul rises to a higher stature and assumes a loftisar accent. The added stateliness of diction
PAUL THE APOSTLE
and amplitude of treatment betray an imagina- tion, and a statesmanlike sense, touched by the majesty of Rome. Standing at Corinth, with the east behind him and a line of churches, now securely established, studding the road to Jeru- salem, and with new fields before his sight stretch- ing westwards to Spain (Ro 15'7-*), the apostle pauses to review his proerees and to give account of his mission and his doctrine that have been subject to so fierce a challenge. At the same time there is present to his mind the contingenc that his voyage to Jerus. may have a fatal end, and that the Ep. he is now writing may prove to be his legacy rather than his introduction to the Roman Church (15°; see Hort, Prolegomena to Romans and Ephesians, pp. 42-50). The situa- tion, while it explains the critical importance and representative character of the Ep. to the Romans, accounts also for its limitations. This writing is retrospective; it is the consummation of the legalistic controversy, and of Paul's mission- ary course ‘from Jerusalem round about unto Illyricum’: it is no more than this. The apostle’s life was to open into a new period fraught with other conflicts ; changed surroundings and demands will turn his thoughts in directions as yet unfore- seen ; and the later groups of Epp. contain develop- ments and applications of doctrine that are implicit, rather than realized, in the series of writings which concludes with the grand Ep. to the Romans.
The apostle to the Gentiles now stands at the summit of his career. During the third missionary tour he has founded the prosperous Asian Churches; he has written his four great Epp. and repelled the Judaistic invasion of Gentile Christianity, while he has preserved peace with the mother Church in Judea. But these hardly-won successes engendered for the soldier of Christ new perils and conflicts.
(e) Fifth Period.—Under many omens and fore- bodings of danger St. Paul travelled to Jerusalem. Though he was ‘ gladly received’ by ‘the brethren’ there, the language of Ac 21%" shows that the mass of Jewish believers were alienated from him. At St. James’ suggestion he took the occasion of publicly conforming to Mosaic practice, becoming ‘to the Jews as a Jew’ in the same conciliatory spirit in which he wrote the Ep. to the Romans. But this did not propitiate Jewish hostility. The Asian Jews at the feast, who would have murdered Paul in the temple but for the Roman guard, de- nounced him as the universal enemy of Judaism (Ac 217%), Through all the regions where he had laboured he was now a marked man in the eyes of his compatriots, the apostate, the waster of Israel, the protaner of its holy things.
To this furious hatred Paul owed his four years’ imprisonment and the long suspension of his missionary work. His addresses of defence—(1) before the people from the temple steps, Ac 22; (2) before the Banhedsim 23; (3) before the pro- curator Felix, 24; (4) his appeal to Czesar before the procurator Festus, 25; (5) his apology before Herod Agrippa U. at the court of Festus, 26— enable us to follow the course of the proceedings against him. The Roman judges saw that Paul was innocent of civil crime, but that the Jews, whose fanatical violence they feared to provoke, were bent on his destruction. Asa Roman citizen, he must not be sacrificed to the Jews; his detention seemed the safest course; and Felix in the first instance had hoped that a bribe would be offered for his release (24°). A vision, on the first night of his imprisonment (234), encouraged Paul’s long- cherished hope of ‘seeing Rome’ (19); and when the change of governors at Czsarea led to a re- newal of the abortive local trials, Paul determined to accomplish that purpose by the words Appella