HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK
13. God’s Plan.-Persons
whose conversion takes place after they are grown
up are wont to look back upon the period of their life
which has preceded this event with sorrow and shame
and to wish that an obliterating hand might blot the
record of it out of existence. St. Paul felt
this sentiment strongly: to the end of his days
he was haunted by the specters of his lost years,
and was wont to say that he was the least of all the
apostles, who was not worthy to be called an apostle,
because he had persecuted the Church of God.
But these somber sentiments are only partially justifiable.
God’s purposes are very deep, and even in those
who know Him not He may be sowing seeds which will
only ripen and bear fruit long after their godless
career is over. Paul would never have been the
man he became or have done the work he did, if he
had not, in the years preceding his conversion, gone
through a course of preparation designed to fit him
for his subsequent career. He knew not what he
was being prepared for; his own intentions about his
future were different from God’s; but there is
a divinity which shapes our ends, and it was making
him a polished shaft for God’s quiver, though
he knew it not.
14. Birth and Birthplace.-The
date of Paul’s birth is not exactly known, but
it can be settled with a closeness of approximation
which is sufficient for practical purposes.
When in the year 33 A.D. those who stoned Stephen
laid down their clothes at Paul’s feet, he was
“a young man.” This term has, indeed,
in Greek as much latitude as in English, and may indicate
any age from something under twenty to something over
thirty. In this case it probably touched the
latter rather than the former limit; for there is
reason to believe that at this time, or very soon
after, he was a member of the Sanhedrin-an
office which no one could hold who was under thirty
years of age-and the commission he received
from the Sanhedrin immediately afterward to persecute
the Christians would scarcely have been entrusted
to a very young man. About thirty years after
playing this sad part in Stephen’s murder, in
the year 62 A.D., he was lying in a prison in Rome
awaiting sentence of death for the same cause for
which Stephen had suffered, and, writing one of the
last of his Epistles, that to Philemon, he called himself
an old man. This term also is one of great latitude,
and a man who had gone through so many hardships might
well be old before his time; yet he could scarcely
have taken the name of “Paul the aged”
before sixty years of age.
These calculations lead us to the
conclusion that he was born about the same time as
Jesus. When the boy Jesus was playing in the
streets of Nazareth, the boy Paul was playing in the
streets of his native town, away on the other side
of the ridges of Lebanon. They seemed likely
to have totally diverse careers. Yet, by the
mysterious arrangement of Providence, these two lives,
like streams flowing from opposite watersheds, were
one day, as river and tributary, to mingle together.
15. The place of his birth was
Tarsus, the capital of the province of Cilicia, in
the southeast of Asia Minor. It stood a few miles
from the coast, in the midst of a fertile plain, and
was built upon both banks of the river Cydnus, which
descended to it from the neighboring Taurus Mountains,
on the snowy peaks of which the inhabitants of the
town were wont, on summer evenings, to watch from
the flat roofs of their houses the glow of the sunset.
Not far above the town the river poured over the
rocks in a vast cataract, but below this it became
navigable, and within the town its banks were lined
with wharves, on which was piled the merchandise of
many countries, while sailors and merchants, dressed
in the costumes and speaking the languages of different
races, were constantly to be seen in the streets.
The town enjoyed an extensive trade in timber, with
which the province abounded, and in the long fine
hair of the goats kept in thousands on the neighboring
mountains, which was made into a coarse kind of cloth
and manufactured into various articles, among which
tents, such as Paul was afterward employed in sewing,
formed an extensive article of merchandise all along
the shores of the Mediterranean. Tarsus was
also the center of a large transport trade; for behind
the town a famous pass, called the Cilician Gates,
led up through the mountains to the central countries
of Asia Minor; and Tarsus was the depot to which the
products of these countries were brought down, to
be distributed over the East and the West.
The inhabitants of the city were numerous
and wealthy. The majority of them were native
Cilicians, but the wealthiest merchants were Greeks.
The province was under the sway of the Romans, the
signs of whose sovereignty could not be absent from
the capital, although Tarsus itself enjoyed the privilege
of self-government. The number and variety of
the inhabitants were still further increased by the
fact that, like the city of Glasgow, Tarsus was not
only a center of commerce, but also a seat of learning.
It was one of the three principal university cities
of the period, the other two being Athens and Alexandria;
and it was said to surpass its rivals in intellectual
eminence. Students from many countries were to
be seen in its streets, a sight which could not but
awaken in youthful minds thoughts about the value
and the aims of learning.
16. Who does not see how fit
a place this was for the Apostle of the Gentiles to
be born in? As he grew up, he was being unawares
prepared to encounter men of every class and race,
to sympathize with human nature in all its varieties,
and to look with tolerance upon the most diverse habits
and customs. In after life he was always a lover
of cities. Whereas his Master avoided Jerusalem
and loved to teach on the mountainside or the shore
of the lake, Paul was constantly moving from one great
city to another. Antioch, Ephesus, Athens, Corinth,
Rome, the capitals of the ancient world, were the
scenes of his activity. The words of Jesus are
redolent of the country, and teem with pictures of
its still beauty or homely toil-the lilies
of the field, the sheep following the shepherd, the
sower in the furrow, the fishermen drawing their nets;
but the language of Paul is impregnated with the atmosphere
of the city and alive with the tramp and hurry of the
streets. His imagery is borrowed from scenes
of human energy and monuments of cultivated life-the
soldier in full armor, the athlete in the arena, the
building of houses and temples, the triumphal procession
of the victorious general. So lasting are the
associations of the boy in the life of the man.
17. Paul’s Home.-Paul
had a certain pride in the place of his birth, as
he showed by boasting on one occasion that he was a
citizen of no mean city. He had a heart formed
by nature to feel the warmest glow of patriotism.
Yet it was not for Cilicia and Tarsus that this fire
burned. He was an alien in the land of his birth.
His father was one of those numerous Jews who were
scattered in that age over the cities of the Gentile
world, engaged in trade and commerce. They had
left the Holy Land, but they did not forget it.
They never coalesced with the populations among which
they dwelt but, in dress, food, religion and many
other particulars remained a peculiar people.
As a rule, indeed, they were less rigid in their
religious views and more tolerant of foreign customs
than those Jews who remained in Palestine. But
Paul’s father was not one who had given way
to laxity. He belonged to the straitest sect
of his religion. It is probable that he had not
left Palestine long before his son’s birth,
for Paul calls himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews-a
name which seems to have belonged only to the Palestinian
Jews and to those whose connection with Palestine had
continued very close.
Of his mother we hear absolutely nothing,
but everything seems to indicate that the home in
which he was brought up was one of those out of which
nearly all eminent religious teachers have sprung-a
home of piety, of character, perhaps of somewhat stern
principle, and of strong attachment to the peculiarities
of a religious people. He was imbued with its
spirit. Although he could not but receive innumerable
and imperishable impressions from the city he was
born in, the land and the city of his heart were Palestine
and Jerusalem; and the heroes of his young imagination
were not Curtius and Horatius, Hercules and Achilles,
but Abraham and Joseph, Moses and David and Ezra.
As he looked back on the past, it was not over the
confused annals of Cilicia that he cast his eyes,
but he gazed up the clear stream of Jewish history
to its sources in Ur of the Chaldees; and, when he
thought of the future, the vision which rose on him
was the kingdom of the Messiah, enthroned in Jerusalem
and ruling the nations with a rod of iron.
18. The feeling of belonging
to a spiritual aristocracy, elevated above the majority
of those among whom he lived, would be deepened in
him by what he saw of the religion of the surrounding
population. Tarsus was the center of a species
of Baal-worship of an imposing but unspeakably degrading
character, and at certain seasons of the year it was
the scene of festivals, which were frequented by the
whole population of the neighboring regions, and were
accompanied with orgies of a degree of moral abominableness
happily beyond the reach even of our imaginations.
Of course a boy could not see the depths of this
mystery of iniquity, but he could see enough to make
him turn from idolatry with the scorn peculiar to
his nation, and to make him regard the little synagogue
where his family worshiped the Holy One of Israel
as far more glorious than the gorgeous temples of the
heathen; and perhaps to these early experiences we
may trace back in some degree those convictions of
the depths to which human nature can fall and its
need of an omnipotent redeeming force which afterward
formed so fundamental a part of his theology and gave
such a stimulus to his work.
19. Trade.-The time
at length arrived for deciding what occupation the
boy was to follow-a momentous crisis in
every life-and in this case much was involved
in the decision. Perhaps the most natural career
for him would have been that of a merchant; for his
father was engaged in trade, the busy city offered
splendid prizes to mercantile ambition, and the boy’s
own energy would have guaranteed success. Besides,
his father had an advantage to give him specially useful
to a merchant: though a Jew, he was a Roman citizen,
and this right would have given his son protection,
into whatever part of the Roman world he might have
had occasion to travel. How the father got this
right we cannot tell; it might be bought, or won by
distinguished service to the state, or acquired in
several other ways; at all events his son was free-born.
It was a valuable privilege, and one which was to
prove of great use to Paul, though not in the way
in which his father might have been expected to desire
him to make use of it. But it was decided that
he was not to be a merchant. The decision may
have been due to his father’s strong religious
views, or his mother’s pious ambition, or his
own predilections; but it was resolved that he should
go to college and become a rabbi-that is,
a minister, a teacher and a lawyer all in one.
It was a wise decision in view of the boy’s spirit
and capabilities, and it turned out to be of infinite
moment for the future of mankind.
20. But, although he thus escaped
the chances which seemed likely to drift him into
a secular calling, yet, before going away to prepare
for the sacred profession, he was to get some insight
into business life; for it was a rule among the Jews
that every boy, whatever might be the profession he
was to follow, should learn a trade, as a resource
in time of need. This was a rule with wisdom
in it; for it gave employment to the young at an age
when too much leisure is dangerous, and acquainted
the wealthy and the learned in some degree with the
feelings of those who have to earn their bread with
the sweat of their brow. The trade which he
was put to was the commonest one in Tarsus-the
making of tents from the goat’s-hair cloth for
which the district was celebrated. Little did
he or his father think, when he began to handle the
disagreeable material, of what importance this handicraft
was to be to him in subsequent years: it became
the means of his support during his missionary journeys,
and, at a time when it was essential that the propagators
of Christianity should be above the suspicion of selfish
motives, enabled him to maintain himself in a position
of noble independence.
21. Education.-It
is a question natural to ask, whether, before leaving
home to go and get his training as a rabbi, Paul attended
the University of Tarsus. Did he drink at the
wells of wisdom which flow from Mount Helicon before
going to sit by those which spring from Mount Zion?
From the fact that he makes two or three quotations
from the Greek poets it has been inferred that he
was acquainted with the whole literature of Greece.
But, on the other hand, it has been pointed out that
his quotations are brief and commonplace, such as any
man who spoke Greek would pick up and use occasionally;
and the style and vocabulary of his Epistles are not
those of the models of Greek literature, but of the
Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures,
which was then in universal use among the Jews of the
Dispersion. Probably his father would have considered
it sinful to allow his son to attend a heathen university.
Yet it is not likely that he grew up in a great seat
of learning without receiving any influence from the
academic tone of the place. His speech at Athens
shows that he was able, when he chose, to wield a style
much more stately than that of his writings, and so
keen a mind was not likely to remain in total ignorance
of the great monuments of the language which he spoke.
22. There were other impressions,
too, which the learned Tarsus probably made upon him:
its university was famous for those petty disputes
and rivalries which sometimes ruffle the calm of academical
retreats; and it is possible that the murmur of these,
with which the air was often filled, may have given
the first impulse to that scorn for the tricks of
the rhetorician and the windy disputations of the
sophist which form so marked a feature in some of his
writings. The glances of young eyes are clear
and sure, and even as a boy he may have perceived
how small may be the souls of men and how mean their
lives, when their mouths are filled with the finest
phraseology.
23. The college for the education
of Jewish rabbis was in Jerusalem, and thither
Paul was sent about the age of thirteen. His
arrival in the Holy City may have happened in the
same year in which Jesus, at the age of twelve, first
visited it, and the overpowering emotions of the boy
from Nazareth at the first sight of the capital of
his race may be taken as an index of the unrecorded
experience of the boy from Tarsus. To every Jewish
child of a religious disposition Jerusalem was the
center of all things; the footsteps of prophets and
kings echoed in the streets; memories sacred and sublime
clung to its walls and buildings; and it shone in
the glamor of illimitable hopes.
24. It chanced that at this
time the college of Jerusalem was presided over by
one of the most noted teachers the Jews have ever possessed.
This was Gamaliel, at whose feet Paul tells us he was
brought up. He was called by his contemporaries
the Beauty of the Law, and is still remembered among
the Jews as the Great Rabbi. He was a man of
lofty character and enlightened mind, a Pharisee strongly
attached to the traditions of the fathers, yet not
intolerant or hostile to Greek culture, as were some
of the narrower Pharisees. The influence of such
a man on an open mind like Paul’s must have been
very great; and, although for a time the pupil became
an intolerant zealot, yet the master’s example
may have had something to do with the conquest he
finally won over prejudice.
25. The course of instruction
which a rabbi had to undergo was lengthened and peculiar.
It consisted entirely of the study of the Scriptures
and the comments of the sages and masters upon them.
The words of Scripture and the sayings of the wise
were committed to memory; discussions were carried
on about disputed points; and by a rapid fire of questions,
which the scholars were allowed to put as well as
the masters, the wits of the students were sharpened
and their views enlarged. The outstanding qualities
of Paul’s intellect, which were conspicuous
in his subsequent life-his marvelous memory,
the keenness of his logic, the super-abundance of
his ideas, and his original way of taking up every
subject-first displayed themselves in this
school, and excited, we may well believe, the warm
interest of his teacher.
26. He himself learned much
here which was of great moment in his subsequent career.
Although he was to be specially the missionary of
the Gentiles, he was also a great missionary to his
own people. In every city he visited where there
were Jews he made his first public appearance in the
synagogue. There his training as a rabbi secured
him an opportunity of speaking, and his familiarity
with Jewish modes of thought and reasoning enabled
him to address his audiences in the way best fitted
to secure their attention. His knowledge of the
Scriptures enabled him to adduce proofs from an authority
which his hearers acknowledged to be supreme.
Besides, he was destined to be the
great theologian of Christianity and the principal
writer of the New Testament. Now the New grew
out of the Old; the one is in all its parts the prophecy
and the other the fulfillment. But it required
a mind saturated not only with Christianity, but with
the Old Testament, to bring this out; and, at the
age when the memory is most retentive, Paul acquired
such a knowledge of the Old Testament that everything
it contains was at his command: its phraseology
became the language of his thinking; he literally
writes in quotations, and he quotes from all parts
with equal facility-from the Law, the Prophets,
and the Psalms. Thus was the warrior equipped
with the armor and the weapons of the Spirit before
he knew in what cause he was to use them.
27. His Religious Life.-Meantime
what was his moral and religious state? He was
learning to be a religious teacher; was he himself
religious? Not all who are sent to college by
their parents to prepare for the sacred office are
so, and in every city of the world the path of youth
is beset with temptations which may ruin life at its
very beginning. Some of the greatest teachers
of the Church, such as St. Augustine, have had to
look back on half their life blotted and scarred with
vice or crime. No such fall defaced Paul’s
early years. Whatever struggles with passion
may have raged in his own breast, his conduct was
always pure. Jerusalem was no very favorable
place, in that age, for virtue. It was the Jerusalem
against whose external sanctity, but internal depravity,
our Lord a few years afterward hurled such withering
invectives; it was the very seat of hypocrisy,
where an able youth might easily have learned how
to win the rewards of religion, while escaping its
burdens. But Paul was preserved amidst these
perils, and could afterward claim that he had lived
in Jerusalem from the first in all good conscience.
28. He had brought with him
from home the conviction, which forms the basis of
a religious life, that the one prize which makes life
worth living is the love and favor of God. This
conviction grew into a passionate longing as he advanced
in years, and he asked his teachers how the prize
was to be won. Their answer was ready-By
the keeping of the law. It was a terrible answer;
for the Law meant not only what we understand by the
term, but also the ceremonial law of Moses and the
thousand and one rules added to it by the Jewish teachers,
the observance of which made life a purgatory to a
tender conscience.
But Paul was not the man to shrink
from difficulties. He had set his heart upon
winning God’s favor, without which this life
appeared to him a blank and eternity the blackness
of darkness; and, if this was the way to the goal,
he was willing to tread it. Not only, however,
were his personal hopes involved in this, the hopes
of his nation depended on it too; for it was the universal
belief of his people that the Messiah would only come
to a nation keeping the law, and it was even said
that, if one man kept it perfectly for a single day,
his merit would bring to the earth the King for whom
they were waiting. Paul’s rabbinical training,
then, culminated in the desire to win this prize of
righteousness, and he left the halls of sacred learning
with this as the purpose of his life. The lonely
student’s resolution was momentous for the world;
for he was first to prove amidst secret agonies that
this way of salvation was false, and then to teach
his discovery to mankind.
29. At Jerusalem.-We
cannot tell in what year Paul’s education at
the college of Jerusalem was finished or where he
went immediately afterward. The young rabbis,
after completing their studies, scattered in the same
way as our own divinity students do, and began practical
work in different parts of the Jewish world.
He may have gone back to his native Cilicia and held
office in some synagogue there. At all events,
he was for some years at a distance from Jerusalem
and Palestine; for these were the very years in which
fell the movement of John the Baptist and the ministry
of Jesus, and it is certain that Paul could not have
been in the vicinity without being involved in both
of these movements either as a friend or as a foe.
30. But before long he returned
to Jerusalem. It was as natural for the highest
rabbinical talent to gravitate in those times to Jerusalem
as it is for the highest literary and commercial talent
to gravitate in our day to the metropolis. He
arrived in the capital of Judaism very soon after
the death of Jesus; and we can easily imagine the
representations of that event and of the career thereby
terminated which he would receive from his Pharisaic
friends.
We have no reason to suppose that
as yet he had any doubts about his own religion.
We gather, indeed, from his writings that he had already
passed through severe mental conflicts. Although
the conviction still stood fast in his mind that the
blessedness of life was attainable only in the favor
of God, yet his efforts to reach this coveted position
by the observance of the law had not satisfied him.
On the contrary, the more he strove to keep the law
the more active became the motions of sin within him;
his conscience was becoming more oppressed with the
sense of guilt, and the peace of a soul at rest in
God was a prize which eluded his grasp.
Still he did not question the teaching
of the synagogue. To him as yet this was of
one piece with the history of the Old Testament, whence
looked down on him the figures of the saints and prophets,
which were a guarantee that the system they represented
must be divine, and behind which he saw the God of
Israel revealing himself in the giving of the law.
The reason why he had not attained to peace and fellowship
with God was, he believed, because he had not struggled
enough with the evil of his nature or honored enough
the precepts of the law. Was there no service
by which he could make up for all deficiencies and
win that grace at last in which the great of old had
stood? This was the temper of mind in which
he returned to Jerusalem, and learned with astonishment
and indignation of the rise of a sect which believed
that Jesus who had been crucified was the Messiah
of the Jewish people.
31. State of the Christian Church.-Christianity
was as yet only two or three years old, and was growing
very quietly in Jerusalem. Although those who
had heard it preached at Pentecost had carried the
news of it to their homes in many quarters, its public
representatives had not yet left the city of its birth.
At first the authorities had been inclined to persecute
it, and checked its teachers when they appeared in
public. But they had changed their minds and,
acting under the advice of Gamaliel, resolved to neglect
it, believing that it would die out, if let alone.
The Christians, on the other hand, gave as little
offence as possible; in the externals of religion they
continued to be strict Jews and zealous of the law,
attending the temple worship, observing the Jewish
ceremonies and respecting the ecclesiastical authorities.
It was a kind of truce, which allowed
Christianity a little space for secret growth.
In their upper rooms the brethren met to break bread
and pray to their ascended Lord. It was the most
beautiful spectacle. The new faith had alighted
among them like an angel, and was shedding purity
on their souls from its wings and breathing over their
humble gatherings the spirit of peace. Their
love to each other was unbounded; they were filled
with the inspiring sense of discovery; and, as often
as they met, their invisible Lord was in their midst.
It was like heaven upon earth. While Jerusalem
around them was going on in its ordinary course of
worldliness and ecclesiastical asperity, these few
humble souls were felicitating themselves with a secret
which they knew to contain within it the blessedness
of mankind and the future of the world.
32. But the truce could not
last, and these scenes of peace were soon to be invaded
with terror and bloodshed. Christianity could
not keep such a truce; for there is in it a world-conquering
force, which impels it at all risks to propagate itself,
and the fermentation of the new wine of gospel liberty
was sure sooner or later to burst the forms of the
Jewish law.
At length a man arose in the Church
in whom these aggressive tendencies embodied themselves.
This was Stephen, one of the seven deacons who had
been appointed to watch over the temporal affairs of
the Christian society. He was a man full of
the Holy Ghost and possessed of capabilities which
the brevity of his career only permitted to suggest
but not to develop themselves. He went from synagogue
to synagogue, preaching the Messiahship of Jesus and
announcing the advent of freedom from the yoke of
the law. Champions of Jewish orthodoxy encountered
him, but were not able to withstand his eloquence and
holy zeal. Foiled in argument, they grasped at
other weapons, stirring up the authorities and the
populace to murderous fanaticism.
33. Stephen.-One
of the synagogues in which these disputations took
place was that of the Cilicians, the countrymen of
Paul. May he have been a rabbi in this synagogue
and one of Stephen’s opponents in argument?
At all events, when the argument of logic was exchanged
for that of violence, he was in the front. When
the witnesses who cast the first stones at Stephen
were stripping for their work, they laid down their
garments at his feet. There, on the margin of
that wild scene, in the field of judicial murder,
we see his figure, standing a little apart and sharply
outlined against the mass of persecutors unknown to
fame-the pile of many-colored robes at his
feet, and his eyes bent upon the holy martyr, who
is kneeling in the article of death and praying:
“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”
34. The Persecutor.-His
zeal on this occasion brought Paul prominently under
the notice of the authorities. It probably procured
him a seat in the Sanhedrin, where we find him soon
afterward giving his vote against the Christians.
At all events, it led to his being entrusted with
the work of utterly uprooting Christianity, which the
authorities now resolved upon. He accepted their
proposal; for he believed it to be God’s work.
He saw more clearly than any one else what was the
drift of Christianity; and it seemed to him destined,
if unchecked, to overturn all that he considered most
sacred. The repeal of the law was in his eyes
the obliteration of the one way of salvation, and
faith in a crucified Messiah blasphemy against the
divinest hope of Israel. Besides, he had a deep
personal interest in the task. Hitherto he had
been striving to please God, but always felt his efforts
to come short; here was a chance of making up for all
arrears by one splendid act of service. This
was the iron of agony in his soul which gave edge
and energy to his zeal. In any case he was not
a man to do things by halves; and he flung himself
headlong into his task.
35. Terrible were the scenes
which ensued. He flew from synagogue to synagogue,
and from house to house, dragging forth men and women,
who were cast into prison and punished. Some
appear to have been put to death, and-darkest
trait of all-others were compelled to blaspheme
the name of the Saviour. The Church at Jerusalem
was broken in pieces, and such of its members as escaped
the rage of the persecutor were scattered over the
neighboring provinces and countries.
36. It may seem too venturesome
to call this the last stage of Paul’s unconscious
preparation for his apostolic career. But so
indeed it was. In entering on the career of
a persecutor he was going on straight in the line
of the creed in which he had been brought up; and
this was its reduction to absurdity. Besides,
through the gracious working of Him whose highest
glory it is out of evil still to bring forth good,
there sprang out of these sad doings in the mind of
Paul an intensity of humility, a willingness to serve
even the least of the brethren of those whom he had
abused, and a zeal to redeem lost time by the parsimonious
use of what was left, which became permanent spurs
to action in his subsequent career.