But, it may be objected, Barnabas had wavered, and it is not accurate to represent him as a champion along with Paul. We reply that Paul does not make it clear how far Barnabas had gone with the tide : the matter was one of tendency, more than of complete separation. Peter began to withdraw and separate himself1 from familiar communion with the Gentile Christian : the resident Jews joined him in concealing their real sentiment and their ordinary conduct towards the non- Jewish members of the Church : even Barnabas was carried off his feet by the tide of dissembling. These words would be correct, if Barnabas had merely wavered, and been confirmed by Paul's arguments in private. Paul's public rebuke was not addressed to Barnabas, but only to Peter. There is a certain difficulty in the record ; but I confess that, after trying honestly to give full emphasis to the difficulty, I see no reason why we should not, as the issue of the facts in Gal. II 11-14, conceive Barnabas to have come forward as a thorough- going advocate of the Pauline doctrine and practice.
Moreover, the difficulty remains, and becomes far more serious, on the ordinary view that the incidents of
1 Imperfects, not aorists^
164 The Apostolic Council. Chap. VII.
Gal. II 11-14 occurred after the Council in Jerusalem. According to that view, Barnabas, when delegates came from Jerusalem {Acts XV 2, 24), resisted them stren- uously, represented the cause of freedom as an envoy to Jerusalem, and obtained an authoritative Decree from the Apostles disowning the action of the delegates, and emphatically condemning it as " subverting your souls " : thereafter delegates came again from James, the same Apostle that had taken the foremost part in formulating the recent Decree ; x but this time Barnabas, instead of resisting, weakly yielded to their arguments.
Worse, almost, is the conduct of Peter in that view. When the case came up before the Council to be con- sidered in all its bearings and solemnly decided, he, " after there had been much discussion " (in which we may be sure that the consequences were fully empha- sised by the Judaising party), appeared as the most out- spoken advocate of freedom, and declared that " we must not demand from them what we ourselves have been unable to endure ". Shortly after the Council (on that view), Peter went to Antioch and put in practice the principle of freedom for which he had contended at the Council. But "certain persons came from James," the same Apostle that had supported him in the Council ; these persons reopened the controversy ; and Peter abandoned his publicly expressed conviction, which in a formal letter was declared with his approval to be the word of the Holy Spirit.
We are asked to accept as a credible narrative this recital of meaningless tergiversation, which attributes to
1 " The Apostolic letter seems to have been drawn up by him " (Lightfoot, Ed. Gal., p. 112, II 12).
Sec. 2. The Dispute in Antiocn. 165
Peter and to Barnabas, not ordinary human weakness and inability to answer a grave issue at the first moment when it is presented to them, but conduct devoid of reason or sanity. Who can wonder that many who are asked to accept this as history, reply that one of the two authors responsible for the two halves of the recital has erred and is untrustworthy? For the truth of history itself one must on that theory distrust one of the two documents. That is not the faith, that is not the conduct, which conquered the world ! The only possible supposition would be that the Apostles were men unusually weak, ignorant, and inconstant, who con- tinually went wrong, except where the Divine guidance interposed to keep them right. That theory has been and is still held by some ; but it removes the whole de- velopment of Christianity out of the sphere of history into the sphere of the supernatural and the marvellous, whereas the hypothesis on which this investigation is based is that it was a process intelligible according to ordinary human nature, and a proper subject for the modern historian.