Tiiis epistle, surel}- no unworthy utterance at such an age and in such an hour even of a Paul, brings us, it may well be presumed, close to the end of his life. For what remains, we have the concurrent testimony of ecclesiastical antiquity that he was beheaded at Rome, about the same time that Peter was crucified there. The earliest allusion to the death of Paul is ia that sentence from Clemens Eomanus, already quoted :
PAUL
817
PAUL
"Having gone to the boundarj' of the West, and tes- tified before rulers, so he departed out of the world" (JTTt TO ripi-ta ri'ig cu'ifffwi," iA^wJ' icai fiapTvpiidcti; tm Tiov t'lyovfxivwi', o'vTiog (nrijWayij rov Koffnov), which just fails of giving us anj' particulars upon which we can conclusively relv. The next authorities are those quoted by Eusebius in his IJist. Eccl. ii, 25. Dionysius, bishop of Corinth (A.D. 170), says that Peter and Paul went to Italy and taught there together, and suffered martyrdom about the same time. This, like most of the statements relating to the death of Paul, is mixed up with the tradition, with which we are not here im- mediatel}' concerned, of the work of Peter at Rome. Caius of Rome, supposed to be writing w ithin the 2d century, names the grave of Peter on the Vatican, and that of Paul on the Ostian Wa}'. Eusebius himself entire!}' adopts the tradition that Paul was beheaded under Nero at Rome. Among other early testimonies, we have that of TertuUian, who saj's (Z'e Prcescr. Ilceret. 30) that at Rome " Petrus passioni Dominicse adequatur, Paulus Johannis [the Baptist] exitu coro- natur;" and that of Jerome {Cut. Scr. " Paulus"), " Hie ergo 14'" Neronis aniio (eodem die quo Petrus) Roma3 pro Christo capite truncatus sepultusque est, in via Ostiensi." It would be useless to enumerate further testimonies of what is undisputed.
It would also be beyond the scope of this article to attempt to exhibit the traces of Paul's apostolic work in the historj' of the Church. But there is one indi- cation, so exceptional as to deserve special mention, which shows that the difficulty of understanding the Gospel of Paul and of reconciling it with a true Juda- ism was very earh- felt. This is in the apocryphal work called the Clementines (m K\i)ptvTia), sup- posed to be written before the end of the 2d centur3\ These curious compositions contain direct assaults (for thougli the name is not given, the references are plain and undisguised) upon the authority and the character of Paul. Peter is represented as the true apostle, of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews, and Paul as o tx^pog uv^pojTToc, who opposes Peter and James. The por- tions of the Clementines which illustrate the writer's view of Paul will be found in Stanley's Corinthians (Introd. to 2 Cor.) ; and an account of the whole work, with references to the treatises of Schliemann and Baur, in Gieseler, Eccl. Hist, i, § 58.
HI. Special Iiircstigations. — AVe propose here briefly to take up the various disputed points above referred to, the discussion of which, in their respective connections, would have interrupted the narrative.
1. On the chronology of Paul's life, see the following works: I'earson, A muiles Paulini, in his Posthiim. Op. (Lond. 1G88, and separately at Halle, 1719) ; Hottinger, Penfcis dissertat. Bibl. Chron. p. 305 sq. ; Vogel, in Gab- ler's Journal f. auserl. theol. Lit. i, 229 sq. ; Haselaar, Be nonnullis Act. A post, et Epp. Paul, ad hist. P. pei-- tinent. locis (L. B. 1806) ; Hug, Einkit. ii, 263 ; Siiskind, in Bengel's A rchir, i, 156 sq., 297 sq. ; Schmidt, in Keil's A nalekt. HI, i, 128 sq. ; Schrader, Paulus, vol. i ; Schott, Erurterunff wichtitjer chronol. Puncle in d. Lebensf/esch. d. P. (Jena, 1832) ; Anger, De tempor. in Actis. (Leips. 1833); Wurm,inthe Tubiuff. Zeitschr.fiir Theol. 1833; Wieseler, Chronologic des upostol. Zeitalters (Gotting, 1848); Conybeare and Howson, Zf/e and Letters of St. Paul (Lond. 1850) ; Davidson, Introd. to the New Test. (ibid.) vol. ii ; hev/in, Eleinents of Early Chi'ist. Chron.; Browne, Ordo Saclorum, The fundamental points on which this chronology depends are his joining the Chris- tian Church (Klichler, De Anno quo P. ad Sac. Christ. Conver. est, Leips. 1828), and his journey to Jerusalem. It is of course utterly impossible to determine the year of Paul's birth. According to an old tradition {Oral, de Pctro et Paulo in Chrysost. 0pp. ed. Bened. viii, 10), it falls in the second year after Christ. Schrader places it in the fourteenth year after Christ. It is easier to determine the time of his joining the Church than of his visit to Jerusalem (comp. Acts ix, 22 sq. with 2 Cor.
VII.— F F F
xi, 32). But two difficulties arise : first, we are not cer- tain whether this open act of allegiance to Christianity took place during the first or second stay of Paul, after liis conversion, at Damascus (Gal. i, 17 ; the latter seems probable, according to Acts ix, 26) ; and, second, the year in which an ethnarch of the Arabian king Aretas ruled in Damascus affords no satisfactory ground for chronolog}% (Yet see Neander, P/lanz. i, 127 sq.). It is even urged that the Arabian ethnarch was present only as a pri- vate man (Anger, p. 181) ; but this is improbable in view of the expressions used by Paul (2 Cor. xi, 32). We must, however, be content to give up the hope of using this as a safe starting-point for Paul's chronology. See Aretas. We have, however, the death of king Agrippa (Acts xii), and the arrival of the procurator Porcius Festus in his province of Judaea (Acts xxiv, 27), as the two extreme points between which the active mission- ary life of Paul lies. Now we know certainly that king Agrippa died in the year 44, and the arrival of Festus may be fixed with high probability in the summer of the year 55. See Festus. But with regard to the de- tails of the events which occurred between these periods the widest diversity of opinion exists, even among the ablest investigators, on grounds w-hich we cannot here set forth. See Chkonology. The chronological ar- rangement which seems, on the whole, the most proba- ble, is given under tlie head Acts (q. v.).