From the founding of Alexandria and Antioch, the Jews were TroXIrai (cives), but in the older Greek cities, except those of which the constitu- tions were altered by Alexander or his successors (HDB V. 104 f. ; Expositor, 7th ser., ii. 37 f.), they were .simply /jl^tolkoi. (incolce, ' residents'). The Jews of Rome whom Cicero mentions as possessing the Roman civitas (pro Flacco, 28) probably belonged to the class of libertini or enfranchised slaves (cf. Ac 6*). Jews of Ephesus, Sardis, Delos, etc., had the Roman civitas, as appears from the edicts pre- served by Josephus (Ant. xiv. 10). St. Paul's citi- zenship (y.u.) of the Hellenistic city of Tarsus (Ac 21*^) is to be distinguished from his Roman citizen- ship (Ac 22-' ; cf. 16^'). The latter right may have been conferred by some Roman potentate on cer- tain important Tarsian families (Ramsay, Ex- positor, 7th ser., ii. 144, 152 ; cf. Schlirer, HDB v. 105 f.). It was not the least important of St. Paul's providential equipments for the Apostle- ship, and was recognized as entitling him to re- spect from Roman officials. The laws of the Em- pire ha,d a high moral value for the Apostle, and he repaid what he owed to them by fervent inter- cessions for those who administered them (Ro 13'"'', 1 Ti 2'- 2).
In St. Paul himself — his training, his conversion, his missionary calling, his Christian achievement — we can study, as in a single picture, the service rendered by the Dispersion to the free course of the gospel. Himself a Jew of the Dispersion, educated in a strict Rabbinical school, he had the two-fold advantage of becoming proficient in Judaism, the religion of his fathers (Gal 1'^), and of growing up in his CUician home under the pene- trating influence of Greek civilization. The ques- tion of Ro 3-*, ' Is God the God of the Jews only ? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also ? ' was one that he must have often asked himself in his Pharisaic daj's ; and when the sight and the call of Jesus had given him the decisive answer, ' Yea, of the Gentiles also,' this became the moving force of his strenuous life (cf. Jch. Weiss, Paul and Jesus, p. 67). He had been a traveller from his youth, for the journey from Tarsus to Jerusalem was not a short one ; but now he took a wider cir- cuit (Ro 15'^), and would fain have embraced the whole world in his travels (v.^), so anxious was he to proclaim what he believed to be the religion of redemption for all mankind. The highest ser- vice that the Dispersion has up till now rendered to the world is its becoming the starting-point of
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the aggressive Christian movement of St. Paul and his fellow-apostles ; what further service it may be designed to render, in the form in wliich it now exists, is yet hidden in the counsels of the Eternal.
It may cause some surprise that St. Paul never visited Alexandria, where the freest develoi^ment of pre-Christian Judaism took place. This develop- ment, however, was in many respects alien to St. Paul's mind. Alexandrian Judaism was ' a cul- tured Unitarianism with strong ethical convic- tions. The old dream of a theocracy was forgotten, and Messianism aroused no interest' (Inge, ERE i. 309 ; cf. Wernle, Beginnings of Christianity, i. 177). This brief account must be qualified, liow- ever, by the statement in Acts (18'-^), that it was a gifted Alexandrian Jew, Apollos, who, after ' the way of God had been expounded to him more carefully,' demonstrated the Messiahship of Jesus publicly, before the Jews in Corinth, with energy and success (cf. Harnack, Acts of the Apostles, p. 121). The illustrious Church of Alexandria must have been founded, like other churches, on ' the Rejected Stone.'
Manj' traits of the Diaspora mentioned above are illustrated by the Acts and the Epistles. The long list of foreign Jews present at Pentecost shows how widely scattered their settlements were. Was it by means of some of these (Ac 2^"), return- ing to their native synagogue ' in the power of the Spirit,' that the faith of Christ first reached the city of Rome? At Antioch, some Cyprian and Cyrenaean Cliristians were the first to take the bold step of ' speaking unto the Gentiles also, preaching Jesus as the Lord' (Ac 11-", 'where the sense of the passage seems to require "EWrjuas' [Gwatkin, Early Church Hist. i. 56n.]). The names of Barnabas of Cyprus, Philip of Csesarea, Lucius of Cyrene, Timothy of Lystra, Jason of Thessalonica, Sopater of Beroea, Crispus of Corinth, Aquila of Pontus, illustrate how largely the Church's assets consisted of Jews settled abroad. Tlie tent-making of Aquila, in which St. Paul joined him, gives a glimpse into the industrial life of the Diaspora. Amongst his ' kinsmen ' in Asia and Europe the Apostle found some of his most efficient coadjutors ; from them too, and not only from the unbelieving portion of them, there came some of his most fanatical opponents.
In Ja P St. James may be addressing the Chris- tian Jews of the Eastern Dispersion, and in 1 P P St. Peter those of the Western (J. B. Mayor, Ep. of Jame^, 1910, p. 30) ; but in 1 P lUt is much more probable that the whole body of Christians living at the time are addressed as being now, spiritually, ' the Israel of God' (Gal &^ ; cf. Hort, First Epistle of Peter, I. l-II. 17, 1898, p. 7).