HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY
145. The version of the apostle’s
life supplied in his own letters is largely occupied
with a controversy which cost him much pain and took
up much of his time for many years, but of which Luke
says little. At the date when Luke wrote, it
was a dead controversy, and it belonged to a different
plane from that along which his story moves.
But at the time when it was raging, it tried Paul
far more than tiresome journeys or angry seas.
It was at its hottest about the close of his third
journey, and the Epistles already mentioned as having
been written then may be said to have been evoked
by it. The Epistle to the Galatians especially
was a thunderbolt hurled against his opponents in this
controversy; and its burning sentences show how profoundly
he was moved by the subject.
146. The Question at Issue.-The
question at issue was whether the Gentiles were required
to become Jews before they could be true Christians;
or, in other words, whether they had to be circumcised
in order to be saved.
147. It had pleased God in the
primitive times to choose the Jewish race from among
the nations and make it the repository of salvation;
and, till the advent of Christ, those from other nations
who wished to become partakers of the true religion
had to seek entrance as prosélytes within the
sacred enclosure of Israel. Having thus destined
this race to be the guardians of revelation, God had
to separate them very completely from all other nations
and from all other aims which might have distracted
their attention from the sacred trust which had been
committed to them. For this purpose he regulated
their whole life with rules and arrangements intended
to make them a peculiar people, different from all
other races of the earth. Every detail of their
life-their forms of worship, their social
customs, their dress, their food-was prescribed
for them; and all these prescriptions were embodied
in that vast legal instrument which they called the
Law. The rigorous prescription of so many things
which are naturally left to free choice was a heavy
yoke upon the chosen people; it was a severe discipline
to the conscience, and such it was felt to be by the
more earnest spirits of the nation.
But others saw in it a badge of pride;
it made them feel that they were the select of the
earth and superior to all other people; and, instead
of groaning under the yoke, as they would have done
if their consciences had been very tender, they multiplied
the distinctions of the Jew, swelling the volume of
the prescriptions of the law with stereotyped customs
of their own. To be a Jew appeared to them the
mark of belonging to the aristocracy of the nations;
to be admitted to the privileges of this position
was in their eyes the greatest honor which could be
conferred on one who did not belong to the commonwealth
of Israel. Their thoughts were all pent within
the circle of this national conceit. Even their
hopes about the Messiah were colored with these prejudices;
they expected Him to be the hero of their own nation,
and the extension of His kingdom they conceived as
a crowding of the other nations within the circle
of their own through the gateway of circumcision.
They expected that all the converts of the Messiah
would undergo this national rite and adopt the life
prescribed in the Jewish law and tradition; in short,
their conception of Messiah’s reign was a world
of Jews.
148. Such undoubtedly was the
tenor of popular sentiment in Palestine when Christ
came; and multitudes of those who accepted Jesus as
the Messiah and entered the Christian Church had this
set of conceptions as their intellectual horizon.
They had become Christians, but they had not ceased
to be Jews; they still attended the temple worship;
they prayed at the stated hours, they fasted on the
stated days, they dressed in the style of the Jewish
ritual; they would have thought themselves defiled
by eating with uncircumcised Gentiles; and they had
no thought but that, if Gentiles became Christians,
they would be circumcised and adopt the style and
customs of the Jewish nation.
149. The Settlement.-The
question was settled by the direct intervention of
God in the case of Cornelius, the centurion of Caesarea.
When the messengers of Cornelius were on their way
to the Apostle Peter at Joppa, God showed that leader
among the apostles, by the vision of the sheet full
of clean and unclean beasts, that the Christian Church
was to contain circumcised and uncircumcised alike.
In obedience to this heavenly sign Peter accompanied
the centurion’s messengers to Caesarea and saw
such evidences that the household of Cornelius had
already, without circumcision, received the distinctively
Christian endowments of faith and the Holy Ghost, that
he could not hesitate to baptize them as being Christians
already. When he returned to Jerusalem, his
proceedings created wonder and indignation among the
Christians of the strictly Jewish persuasion; but he
defended himself by recounting the vision of the sheet
and by an appeal to the clear fact that these uncircumcised
Gentiles were proved by their possession of faith
and of the Holy Ghost to have been already Christians.
150. This incident ought to
have settled the question once for all; but the pride
of race and the prejudices of a lifetime are not easily
subdued. Although the Christians of Jerusalem
reconciled themselves to Peter’s conduct in
this single case, they neglected to extract from it
the universal principle which it implied; and even
Peter himself, as we shall subsequently see, did not
fully comprehend what was involved in his own conduct.
151. Meanwhile, however, the
question had been settled in a far stronger and more
logical mind than Peter’s. Paul at this
time began his apostolic work at Antioch, and soon
afterward went forth with Barnabas upon his first
great missionary expedition into the Gentile world;
and, wherever they went, he admitted heathens into
the Christian Church without circumcision.
Paul in thus acting did not copy Peter.
He had received his gospel directly from heaven.
In the solitudes of Arabia, in the years immediately
after his conversion, he had thought this subject out
and come to far more radical conclusions about it
than had yet entered the minds of any of the rest
of the apostles. To him far more than to any
of them the law had been a yoke of bondage; he saw
that it was only a stern preparation for Christianity,
not a part of it; indeed, there was in his mind a
deep gulf of contrast between the misery and curse
of the one state and the joy and freedom of the other.
To his mind to impose the yoke of the law on the
Gentiles would have been to destroy the very genius
of Christianity; it would have been the imposition
of conditions of salvation totally different from
that which he knew to be the one condition of it in
the gospel.
These were the deep reasons which
settled this question in this great mind. Besides,
as a man who knew the world and whose heart was set
on winning the Gentile nations to Christ, he felt
far more strongly than did the Jews of Jerusalem,
with their provincial horizon, how fatal such conditions
as they meant to impose would be to the success of
Christianity outside Judaea. The proud Romans,
the highminded Greeks, would never have consented
to be circumcised and to cramp their life within the
narrow limits of Jewish tradition; a religion hampered
with such conditions could never have become the universal
religion.
152. But, when Paul and Barnabas
came back from their first missionary tour to Antioch,
they found that a still more decisive settlement of
this question was required; for Christians of the strictly
Jewish sort were coming down from Jerusalem to Antioch
and telling the Gentile converts that, unless they
were circumcised, they could not be saved. In
this way they were filling them with alarm, lest they
might be omitting something on which the welfare of
their souls depended, and they were confusing their
minds as to the simplicity of the gospel. To
quiet these disturbed consciences it was resolved by
the church at Antioch to appeal to the leading apostles
at Jerusalem, and Paul and Barnabas were sent thither
to procure a decision. This was the origin of
what is called the Council of Jerusalem, at which this
question was authoritatively settled.
The decision of the apostles and elders
was in harmony with Paul’s practice: the
Gentiles were not to be required to be circumcised;
only they were enjoined to abstain from meat offered
in sacrifice to idols, from fornication, and from
blood. To these conditions Paul consented.
He did not, indeed, see any harm in eating meat which
had been used in idolatrous sacrifices, when it was
exposed for sale in the market; but the feasts upon
such meat in the idol temples, which were often followed
by wild outbreaks of sensuality, alluded to in the
prohibition of fornication, were temptations against
which the converts from heathenism required to be
warned. The prohibition of blood-that
is, of eating meat killed without the blood being
drained off-was a concession to extreme
Jewish prejudice, which, as it involved no principle,
he did not think it necessary to oppose.
153. So the agitating question
appeared to be settled by an authority so august that
none could question it. If Peter, John and James,
the pillars of the church at Jerusalem, as well as
Paul and Barnabas, the heads of the Gentile mission,
arrived at a unanimous decision, all consciences might
be satisfied and all opposing mouths stopped.
154. Attempt to Unsettle.-It
fills us with amazement to discover that even this
settlement was not final. It would appear that,
even at the time when it was come to, it was fiercely
opposed by some who were present at the meeting where
it was discussed; and, although the authority of the
apostles determined the official note which was sent
to the distant churches, the Christian community at
Jerusalem was agitated with storms of angry opposition
to it. Nor did the opposition soon die down.
On the contrary, it waxed stronger and stronger.
It was fed from abundant sources. Fierce national
pride and prejudice sustained it; probably it was
nourished by self-interest, because the Jewish Christians
would live on easier terms with the non-Christian
Jews the loss the difference between them was understood
to be; religious conviction, rapidly warming into
fanaticism, strengthened it; and very soon it was
reinforced by all the rancor of hatred and the zeal
of propagandism. For to such a height did this
opposition rise that the party which was inflamed
with it at length resolved to send out propagandists
to visit the Gentile churches one by one and, in contradiction
to the official apostolic rescript, warn them that
they were imperilling their souls by omitting circumcision,
and could not enjoy the privileges of true Christianity
unless they kept the Jewish law.
155. For years and years these
emissaries of a narrow-minded fanaticism, which believed
itself to be the only genuine Christianity, diffused
themselves over all the churches founded by Paul throughout
the Gentile world. Their work was not to found
churches of their own; they had none of the original
pioneer ability of their great rival. Their business
was to steal into the Christian communities he had
founded and win them to their own narrow views.
They haunted Paul’s footsteps wherever he went,
and for many years were a cause to him of unspeakable
pain. They whispered to his converts that his
version of the gospel was not the true one, and that
his authority was not to be trusted. Was he
one of the twelve apostles? Had he kept company
with Christ? They represented themselves as
having brought the true form of Christianity from
Jerusalem, the sacred headquarters; and they did not
scruple to profess that they had been sent from the
apostles there. They distorted the very noblest
parts of Paul’s conduct to their purpose.
For instance, his refusal to accept money for his
services they imputed to a sense of his own lack of
authority: the real apostles always received
pay. In the same way they misconstrued his abstinence
from marriage. They were men not without ability
for the work they had undertaken: they had smooth,
insinuating tongues, they could assume an air of dignity,
and they did not stick at trifles.
156. Unfortunately they were
by no means without success. They alarmed the
consciences of Paul’s converts and poisoned their
minds against him. The Galatian church especially
fell a prey to them; and the Corinthian church allowed
its mind to be turned against its founder. But,
indeed, the defection was more or less pronounced
everywhere. It seemed as if the whole structure
which Paul had reared with years of labor was to be
thrown to the ground. For this was what he believed
to be happening. Though these men called themselves
Christians, Paul utterly denied their Christianity.
Theirs was not another gospel; if his converts believed
it, he assured them they were fallen from grace; and
in the most solemn terms he pronounced a curse on
those who were thus destroying the temple of God which
he had built.
157. Paul Crushes the Judaizers.-He
was not, however, the man to allow such seduction
to go on among his converts without putting forth
the most strenuous efforts to counteract it.
He hurried, when he could, to see the churches which
were being tampered with; he sent messengers to bring
them back to their allegiance; above all, he wrote
letters to those in peril-letters in which
the extraordinary powers of his mind were exerted
to the utmost. He argued the subject out with
all the resources of logic and Scripture; he exposed
the seducers with a keenness which cut like steel
and overwhelmed them with sallies of sarcastic wit;
he flung himself at his converts’ feet and with
all the passion and tenderness of his mighty heart
implored them to be true to Christ and to himself.
We possess the records of these anxieties in our
New Testament; and it fills us with gratitude to God
and a strange tenderness to Paul himself to think
that out of his heart-breaking trial there has come
such a precious heritage to us.
158. It is comforting to know
that he was successful. Persevering as his enemies
were, he was more than a match for them. Hatred
is strong, but stronger still is love. In his
later writings the traces of his opposition are slender
or entirely absent. It had given way before the
crushing force of his polemic, and its traces had been
swept off the soil of the Church. Had the event
been otherwise, Christianity would have been a river
lost in the sands of prejudice near its very source;
it would have been at the present day a forgotten Jewish
sect instead of the religion of the world.
159. Christian Jews and the
Law.-Up to this point the course of this
ancient controversy can be clearly traced. But
there is another branch of it about the course of
which it is far from easy to arrive at with certainty.
What was the relation of the Christian Jews to the
law, according to the teaching and preaching of Paul?
Was it their duty to abandon the practices by which
they had been wont to regulate their lives and abstain
from circumcising their children or teaching them to
keep the law? This would appear to be implied
in Paul’s principles. If Gentiles could
enter the kingdom without keeping the law, it could
not be necessary for Jews to keep it. If the
law was a severe discipline intended to drive men
to Christ, its obligations fell away when this purpose
was fulfilled. The bondage of tutelage ceased
as soon as the son entered on the actual possession
of his inheritance.
160. It is certain, however,
that the other apostles and the mass of the Christians
of Jerusalem did not for many a day realize this.
The apostles had agreed not to demand from the Gentile
Christians circumcision and the keeping of the law.
But they kept it themselves and expected all Jews
to keep it. This involved a contradiction of
ideas, and it led to unhappy practical consequences.
If it had continued or been yielded to by Paul, it
would have split up the Church into two sections,
one of which would have looked down upon the other.
For it was part of the strict observance of the law
to refuse to eat with the uncircumcised; and the Jews
would have refused to sit at the same table with those
whom they acknowledged to be their Christian brethren.
This unseemly contradiction actually came to pass
in a prominent instance. The Apostle Peter,
chancing on one occasion to be in the heathen city
of Antioch, at first mingled freely in social intercourse
with the Gentile Christians. But some of the
stricter sort, coming thither from Jerusalem, so cowed
him that he withdrew from the Gentile table and held
aloof from his fellow-Christians. Even Barnabas
was carried away by the same tyranny of bigotry.
Paul alone was true to the principles of gospel freedom,
withstanding Peter to the face and exposing the inconsistency
of his conduct.
161. Paul never, indeed, carried
on a polemic against circumcision and the keeping
of the law among born Jews. This was reported
of him by his enemies; but it was a false report.
When he arrived in Jerusalem at the close of his
third missionary journey, the Apostle James and the
elders informed him of the damage which this representation
was doing to his good name and advised him publicly
to disprove it. The words in which they made
this appeal to him are very remarkable. “Thou
seest, brother,” they said, “how many
thousands of Jews there are who believe; and they
are all zealous of the law; and they are informed of
thee that thou teachest all the Jews who are among
the Gentiles to forsake Moses, saying that they ought
not to circumcise their children, neither to walk
after the customs. Do therefore this that we
say to thee: We have four men who have a vow
on them. Take them and purify thyself with them,
and be at charges with them, that they may shave their
heads; and all may know that those things whereof
they were informed concerning thee are nothing, but
thou thyself also walkest orderly and keepest the
law.”
Paul complied with this appeal and
went through the rite which James recommended.
This clearly proves that he never regarded it as part
of his work to dissuade born Jews from living as Jews.
It may be thought that he ought to have done so-that
his principles required a stern opposition to everything
associated with the dispensation which had passed
away. He understood them differently, however,
and had a good reason to render for the line he pursued.
We find him advising those who were
called into the kingdom of Christ being circumcised
not to become uncircumcised, and those called in uncircumcision
not to submit to circumcision; and the reason he gives
is that circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision
is nothing. The distinction was nothing more
to him, in a religious point of view, than the distinction
of sex or the distinction of slave and master.
In short, it had no religious significance at all.
If, however, a man professed Jewish modes of life
as a mark of his nationality, Paul had no quarrel
with him; indeed, in some degree he preferred them
himself. He stickled as little against mere forms
as for them; only, if they stood between the soul
and Christ or between a Christian and his brethren,
then he was their uncompromising opponent. But
he knew that liberty may be made an instrument of
oppression as well as bondage, and, therefore, in
regard to meats, for instance, he penned those noble
recommendations of self-denial for the sake of weak
and scrupulous consciences which are among the most
touching testimonies to his utter unselfishness.
162. Indeed, we have here a
man of such heroic size that it is no easy matter
to define him. Along with the clearest vision
of the lines of demarcation between the old and the
new in the greatest crisis of human history and an
unfaltering championship of principle when real issues
were involved, we see in him the most genial superiority
to mere formal rules and the utmost consideration
for the feelings of those who did not see as he saw.
By one huge blow he had cut himself free from the
bigotry of bondage; but he never fell into the bigotry
of liberty, and had always far loftier aims in view
than the mere logic of his own position.