It would appear that Paul was disappointed and perhaps disillusioned by his experience in Athens. He felt that he had gone at least as far as was right in the way of presenting his doctrine in a form suited to the current philosophy ; and the result had been little more than naught When he went on from Athens to Corinth, he no longer spoke in the philosophic style. In replying afterwards to the unfavourable comparison between his preaching and the more philosophical style of Apollos, he told the Corinthians that, when he came among them, he " determined not to know anything save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified " (I Cor. II 2) ; and nowhere throughout his writings is he so hard on the wise, the philosophers, and the dialecticians, as when he defends the way in which he had presented Christianity at Corinth. Ap- parently the greater concentration of purpose and simplicity of method in his preaching at Corinth is referred to by Luke, when he says, XVIII 5, that when Silas and Timothy rejoined him there, they found him wholly possessed by and engrossed in the word. This strong expression, so unlike anything else in AcU, must, on our
Sec. 3. The Speech before the Council. 253
hypothesis, be taken to indicate some specially marked character in the Corinthian preaching.
4. CORINTH. (XVIII I) AFTER THESE EVENTS HE LEFT ATHENS AND WENT TO CORINTH. (2) AND, FINDING A CERTAIN JEW NAMED AQUILA, A MAN OF PONTUS BY BIRTH, WHO HAD LATELY COME FROM ITALY, AND PRISCILLA HIS WIFE, BECAUSE CLAUDIUS HAD COMMANDED ALL THE JEWS TO LEAVE ROME, HE ACCOSTED THEM. (3) AND BECAUSE HE WAS OF THE SAME CRAFT, HE ABODE WITH THEM, AND WROUGHT AT HIS TRADE [FOR THEY WERE TENTMAKERS BY THEIR CRAFT]. (4) AND HE USED TO DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE EVERY SABBATH, AND TRIED TO PERSUADE JEWS AND GREEKS. (5) AND WHEN SILAS AND TIMOTHY ARRIVED FROM MACEDONIA, HE WAS WHOLLY ABSORBED IN PREACHING, ATTESTING TO THE JEWS THAT THE ANOINTED ONE IS JESUS.
Almost all MSS. add to v. 3 the explanation which we have given in parentheses ; but it comes in very awkwardly, for Luke, who said at the beginning of the verse, " because he was of the same craft," did not intend to say at the end, " for they were tentmakers by craft ". The Bezan Text and an old Latin Version {Gig.) omit this detail ; and they must here represent the original state of the text. In order to make the explana- tion a little less awkward, the two great MSS. read, " he abode with them and they wrought ". The explanation is a gloss, which crept from the margin into the text. It is doubtless very early, and perfectly trustworthy : its vitality lies in its truth, for that was not the kind of detail that was invented in the growth of the Pauline legend.
Aquila, a man of Pontus, settled in Rome bears a
254 Athens and Corinth. Chap. XI.
Latin name ; and must therefore have belonged to the province and not to non-Roman Pontus. This is a good example of Luke's principle to use the Roman provincial divisions for purposes of classification (pp. 91, 196).
There is here a reference to Imperial history. Aquila and Priscilla had come recently from Rome, on account of an edict of Claudius expelling the Jews from Rome. Suetonius says that the expulsion was caused by a series of disturbances " due to the action of Chrestus " ; and in all probability this Chrestus must be interpreted as " the leader of the Chrestians" (p. 47 f.), taken by a popular error as actually living. In the earliest stages of Christian history in Rome, such a mistake was quite natural ; and Suetonius reproduces the words which he found in a document of the period. As Dion Cassius mentions, it was found so difficult to keep the Jews out of Rome on account of their numbers, that the Emperor did not actually expel them, but made stricter regulations about their conduct. It would therefore appear that the edict was found unworkable in practice ; but Suetonius is a perfect authority that it was tried, and it is quite probable that some Jews obeyed it, and among them Aquila. Neither Suetonius nor Dion gives any clue to the date ; but Orosius says that it occurred in Claudius's ninth year, 49. I believe that this date is a year wrong, like that of the famine (p. 68), and for the same reason : the edict must be placed in the end of 50, and thus Aquila arrived in Corinth six or seven months before Paul came in Sept. 51.