PAUL
PAUL
147
a later time ; but tliose who have had exiierienee in such matters will see it in a diilerent light. St. Paul wa.s not only a preacher and a thinker, but an orcanizer. It is true of him, as it is of Jesus Himself, that his etlorts would soon have been swallowed u|i by the sands of the desert had there not been provided for them, thiough the organiza- tion of the Chureh, channels for conveying their results to subsequent ages. Tlumgli it is not stated in every case, it is to be understood that he thus organized the Christian community in every place which he visited and in wliich he found any footing. From the interior the evangelists de- scended to the coast, whence they speedily nmde their way to Antioch ; and the news they brought hack of the conversion of the Gentiles lilled with great joy tho.se wlio had sent them forth.
This .sentiment was not, however, universal. The inlliix of so many Gentiles into the Church threatened to swamp the Jews ; and many of these, at this juncture, began to demand that .all Gentile converts should be circumcised .and com- pelled to live as Jews ; and they cherished any- thing but kindly feelings towards the man through whose labours their own exclusive position in the Church was imperilled. Tbey made light of his authority and proceeded by degrees to deny it altogetlier. At Antioch they were able to estab- lish such a reign of terror on behalf of Jewish strictness that St. Peter, who had been the first to admit Gentiles to the Church, happening to visit the city, refrained from sitting at food with Gentiles ; and even the companion of the recent missionary journey, Barnabas, was carried away by these fanatics. At length they went so far as to send agents to visit the churches which St. Paul had just founded, in order to undermine his authority and to represent his gospel as being not genuine Christianity but a novelty of his own invention. It is easy to understand how such opposition would act on the Apostle's fiery tem- perament. He publicly challenged St. Peter and Barnabas, and exposed their inconsistency ; and he disi)atched to his <'onverts the letter of indignant reproof which we know as the Epistle to the Galatians.
At length it «as decided to refer the whole question to the authorities at Jerusalem, where, accordingly, a Council was held — the first of tlie kind in the history of Christianity. Here both St. Peter and St. James, to whom the Judaizers had appealed, decided the question of principle, through their speeches and votes, in favour of the full and free adniis.sion of the Gentiles ; and St. Paul, on the other hand, for the sake of peace, consented to certain restrictions on the walk and conversation of the Gentile converts. So at least is the issue represented in Acts. But there are those in our day who deny that it can have been so ; by consenting to any compromise, St. Paul would, in their opinion, have betrayed the Christian liberty of which he was the champion ; and, in short, the representation is a fiction invented for a purpose. Tiiis, however, is too cheap a way of dealing with the problems of history. St. Paul was the champion but not the fanatic of liberty, and this was not the only time when he listened to suggestions of compromise from the same quarter. As long as he secured the freedom implied in the non-circumcising of his Gentile converts, he was not the man to ollend again.st the prejudices of those whose experience had not been exactly the same as his own. The prohibition of fornication occasions no ditticulty, except that it is wonderful to see it as.sociated with things which to us seem so trivial. ' Blood ' and ' things strangled ' awoke in a Jew a horror naturalis, and Gentiles had to be reminded that by the use of such thing.» they
were excluding Jews from the very comni\inion to which they were seeking admission themselves ; and it was never the teaching of St. Paul that born Jews should live as did the Gentiles. 'Meats' involved two questions — the frequenting of sacrilicial feasts in idol tcniidcs (1 Co 8'"), and the purchase in the shambles, for domestic use, of meat which was cheap because it had been otlered in sacrillce(l Co 10'-') ; and it was jiossible \itterly to condemn the (me whilst making the other an open question. These renuirks may helji to clear >ip the dilliculties found in the decision of the Comual (.'\c IG-"''"). There may, however, be a simpler solution. If, in accordance with ceitain textual authorities, ' things strangled ' be deleted from the decree, and if ' meats ollered to idols,' ' blood ' and ' fornication ' be understood as idolatry, violence, and sensuality — the sins to which con- verts from paganism were peculiarly expo.sed (cf. Rev ■2'2"') — then tliere was no conij)romise, and the biggest stone of stumbling in the criticism of Acts is removed. (So Harnack, Tka Acts of the Apostles, 1909, pp. 248-263.)
St. Paul may have seen that the compromise — if there was compromise — could be only temporary, and tills may account for tlie silence about it in his writings. But the decree, when delivered to the Gentile communities, created great joj', and there is no reason to doubt that it was satis- factory to St. Paul also. Yet the in.sinuations and niachinali<ms of his enemies were not brought to an end. On the contrary, these continued for years, making St. Paul's life a burden to him. This, indeed, was the greatest controversy of his life, from which comes much of the lire still smouldering beneath the surface in such Epistles as Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Komans.