Columbia ©nibersitp 
 intbeCitpofiaetDgorfe 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIVEN BY 
 
 Jeffereon 3. Fletcher 
 

THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN CRITICISM 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF 
 MODERN CRITICISM 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES HARDY ROPES 
 
 BUSSEY PROFESSOR OP NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 INTERPRETATION IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1906 
 

 Copyright, 1906, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published, April, 1906 
 
 Gift 
 
 Ci 
 
 
TO MY FATHER 
 WILLIAM LADD ROPES 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following essay, substantially in its present 
 form, was prepared for a course of Lowell Insti- 
 tute lectures, given in March, 1904. The pur- 
 pose for which it was originally written has con- 
 siderably affected the arrangement and the mode 
 of presenting the subject. The writer's aim was 
 not to offer a critical examination of the innumer- 
 able questions which arise in the study of the 
 Apostolic Age, nor to cover the ground with en- 
 cyclopedic completeness, but rather to outline a 
 sketch from which a popular audience might 
 gain a stronger sense of the human historical 
 reality which modern critical study finds in the 
 men and events of this stirring period of the 
 world's history. In so rapid a view it was in- 
 evitable that many matters, even of some impor- 
 tance, should be inadequately treated or left alto- 
 gether unmentioned, and any thorough student 
 of these themes will frequently observe such 
 gaps. It is believed, however, that there is value, 
 even to the scholar, in this kind of a brief survey, 
 provided the salient points of reasonable cer- 
 vii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 tainty are clearly brought out, and a proper pro- 
 portion in the whole is observed. 
 
 Those who are familiar with the literature of 
 the subject will recognize the various sources 
 from which suggestion and guidance have been de- 
 rived; it has not seemed desirable to make ac- 
 knowledgments in detail. 
 
 It is assumed that the reader will be familiar 
 with the narrative of the Book of Acts, and the 
 repetition of what can be read there has been 
 deliberately avoided. References to the New 
 Testament have been given only when they seemed 
 for one or another reason to have special in- 
 terest. J. H. R. 
 
 vni 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Criticism and the Apostolic Age . . 1 
 
 II. The Earliest Christian Missions . . 37 
 
 III. Jewish Christianity and Its Fate . . 65 
 
 IV. The Apostle Paul . 99 
 
 V. Paul's Theology 134 
 
 VI. Life in an Apostolic Church .... 169 
 
 VII. The Apostles and the Gospels . . . 207 
 
 VIII. The Preparation for Catholic Chris- 
 tianity 247 
 
 IX. Ancient and Modern Study of the 
 
 Apostolic Age 289 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 In the body of intellectual work performed by 
 the nineteenth century no mean place has been 
 occupied by the critical study of ancient history. 
 Greece, Rome, Egypt, the far East have oc- 
 cupied the attention and inspired the research 
 of some of the best minds of our time. Not only 
 have the discoveries of excavators and explorers 
 brought new material to be studied, but new 
 points of view, a more thorough and systematic 
 method of investigation, a vastly increased corps 
 of trained students have given new interest to 
 the pursuit of the knowledge of antiquity, and 
 have led to great achievements in positive and 
 assured results. In every part of the field the 
 tendency to broaden the range and improve the 
 method of investigation can be observed. The 
 study is made to cover all possible sources of 
 knowledge, written, monumental, institutional, 
 which can contribute to the complete picture, and 
 it is attempted to take account of all the relations 
 
 1 
 
2 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 in which the subject studied stands to its sur- 
 roundings, to the past, and to the future. And, 
 likewise, the aim is to see things as they are,— not 
 accepting untrustworthy statements, not failing 
 to scrutinize the sources as to their character and 
 competence, not reading into the period under con- 
 sideration the conditions, aspirations and ideas of 
 later times, but striving after the reality of truth, 
 and endeavoring to interpret men and events by 
 their own nature and circumstance. 
 
 This kind of thorough study is what is meant 
 by the ** critical" study of history. It follows 
 many of the same principles which have been 
 wrought out in the practice of the Law, where by 
 long experiment lawyers have learned how to de- 
 termine the value of human testimony and of cir- 
 cumstantial evidence; and in fact the trial of a 
 case in court is an example of one kind of his- 
 torical investigation. It follows in part the 
 method of the natural sciences, where the existing 
 facts, capable at the present time of examination 
 by the instruments of the laboratory, are studied, 
 and from them is elicited not only the composition 
 of the substance, or the function and mode of 
 activity of the organism, but also its history and 
 origin, its relation to its environment, and even 
 some knowledge of that environment itself. These 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 3 
 
 are, however, resemblances and not identities. In 
 studying history, while some of the same prin- 
 ciples, as well as the same ultimate aim of firmly 
 established knowledge, hold good, the method of 
 applying the principles necessarily depends on the 
 nature of the subject studied. And within the 
 field of history critical study will vary its method 
 with the varying nature of the sources which are 
 the material of its research. It will approach 
 with one inquiry an ancient letter, an inscription 
 with another, with still others a poem or an his- 
 torical narrative. 
 
 Historical study is not critical by reason of 
 any mysterious and magical power which it pos- 
 sesses, still less because of the character of the 
 conclusions it reaches, whether confirmatory of 
 tradition or revolutionary. Critical study of the 
 past is characterized by one presupposition, 
 namely, that the past can be understood, and by 
 one rule, namely, to be thorough. This presup- 
 position and this rule together confer upon it its 
 right to be called critical. 
 
 First, as to the presupposition. A form of 
 study which denies that the analogies of human 
 life as we know it can be applied to the inter- 
 pretation of the past, and refuses to permit an 
 understanding of past thinkers through the forms 
 
4 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 of our own consciousness, which limits knowledge 
 to the chronicle of facts and discards the idea 
 of tracing the connection and development of 
 those facts,— such a study of the past may be 
 productive of much learning, but it is not, and 
 would not desire to be called, critical. A clear un- 
 derstanding of this distinction is chiefly important 
 with regard to what is commonly called sacred 
 history. There, it has often been held, the 
 governing hand of God has exercised a unique 
 control over the events, so that the actors in the 
 history, and especially the prophets, whose domi- 
 nation of the history gives chief occasion for our 
 interest in it, did not receive their ideas and ideals 
 by a process of psychological mediation which the 
 facts of our own consciousness and the conscious- 
 ness of other ancient and modern men enable us 
 to understand. This history then becomes not 
 a chain of causes and effects, in which immanent 
 divine forces have wrought out the purposes of 
 God, but an inscrutable series of divine acts, which 
 we may observe, but the processes of which we 
 cannot expect to understand except as God may 
 directly reveal knowledge of them to us. We can 
 chronicle the external facts, but we may not pre- 
 sume to go behind them. We can trace the prog- 
 ress, we must not call it a development. We can 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 5 
 
 register the thought of Isaiah or of Paul ; but we 
 must not try to explain it, except by declaring it 
 to have come by direct inspiration from on high. 
 It will be observed that the distinction here drawn 
 is not between a study of sacred history which ad- 
 mits and one which denies the possibility or the 
 occurrence of miracles. A critical historian can 
 hold a philosophy which enables him to accept 
 miracles; he will treat them as ultimate facts, 
 like any other ultimate facts with which he 
 has to deal. To the thorough-going "non-criti- 
 cal" historian, however, everything is a miracle; 
 all his facts are ultimate. Such a mode of con- 
 ceiving history as this is, of course, at the pres- 
 ent day seldom or never carried out to its logical 
 conclusion. But the principles here indicated 
 underlie, consciously or unconsciously, most of 
 the sweeping attacks that are sometimes made 
 on modern historical criticism as applied to the 
 Biblical history. The critical method, however, 
 has now gained such momentum that it has im- 
 pressed itself even on those who oppose it, and it 
 would hardly be possible today to make a con- 
 structive presentation of any portion even of 
 sacred history which did not rest in part on the 
 presuppositions of historical criticism. 
 
 Secondly, as to the ideal of thoroughness. By 
 
6 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 this is meant the aim to use all sources of informa- 
 tion, to test fearlessly their value without pre- 
 possession in favor of or against them, and to 
 explore fully their significance for the history. 
 To exhaust the sources is, happily, impossible. 
 They will ever furnish new light, as the suc- 
 cessive generations, with new points of view, 
 know how to put new questions and so gain new 
 and better answers. If critical study neglects 
 any part of the evidence, whether archaeological 
 or literary, it thereby just so far becomes un- 
 critical. If it shows a prejudice against the 
 traditional view, it is untrue to its own princi- 
 ples. There can be no difference of opinion 
 about the immediate aim of historical research. 
 It is the knowledge of the truth. The conclu- 
 sions will show differences, but these, except in 
 so far as they depend on the fundamental dif- 
 ference of presupposition already discussed, will 
 be mainly due to the meagreness of the evidence, 
 to different judgments about the weight of this 
 or that portion of it, to the varying estimate put 
 by different minds on one or another process of 
 delicate inference. Moreover, in the interpretation 
 and grouping of the facts subjective points of 
 view will always, and properly, find their place. 
 In the supremely important fields of the his- 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 7 
 
 tory of Israel and of the origin of Christianity the 
 critical study of history has been pursued with 
 noteworthy success. In the Old Testament the 
 traditional representation of the course of Israel- 
 ite history from Moses to the Exile has been 
 shown to rest on a misapprehension, due to 
 the transference of later conditions to the picture 
 of an earlier age. Yet even from the legends 
 of early times in Genesis much of authentic 
 history preserved in strange forms has been res- 
 cued, while in the later period such records 
 have been identified and such literary monuments 
 of prophetic words preserved that a clear notion 
 of the gradual and continuous development of 
 Hebrew religious thought can be formed. The 
 main results of Old Testament investigation are 
 now assured, and, although countless minor points 
 await determination, the history of Israel, as now 
 understood by critical scholarship, can claim ac- 
 ceptance as tested and known. It is received not 
 only by believers in the Bible but by all serious 
 students of history as deserving the same kind 
 of credence as the history of Athens or of Eng- 
 land. 
 
 In the New Testament the present situation 
 of critical study is in one respect different. Here, 
 as in the kindred subject of early Church his- 
 
8 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tory, which relates to the period immediately 
 succeeding New Testament times, good progress 
 has, indeed, been made. The secular historian no 
 longer finds himself in a strange world when he 
 ventures across the line into the domain of sacred 
 history. His own tests can be and have been ap- 
 plied. He sees the regular use of the same canons 
 of criticism which he himself wields, to deter- 
 mine the age and genuineness of documents and to 
 estimate the worth of historical statements. And 
 by the use of these critical methods many fixed 
 points have been established; in many questions 
 the student finds firm ground under his feet. But 
 in the New Testament we are dealing with a very 
 brief period of time, in which very exact deter- 
 mination of dates and authors is demanded, and 
 very detailed statements of the course of events 
 need to be made. In the nature of the case it is 
 harder to arrive at these with certainty than it is 
 to see and portray the broad sweep of centuries. 
 In all ancient history many matters have to be 
 left with a question mark. In New Testament his- 
 tory the completeness and minuteness desired in 
 our knowledge often tends to give a false impres- 
 sion that an unduly large proportion of the his- 
 tory is still in doubt. This impression is perhaps 
 the more wide-spread because of the full blaze of 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 9 
 
 publicity in which critical study of the New Testa- 
 ment has to be pursued. In the history of Greece, 
 or of the origins of Buddhism, only the final re- 
 sults, not the critical processes, are brought be- 
 fore the general reader. 
 
 The task before the New Testament scholar is 
 to learn, first, what is certain, then what are the 
 divergent possibilities and how great the margin 
 of doubt with regard to the uncertain. Progress 
 is surely before us, to be attained by the appli- 
 cation to the evidence of more thorough criti- 
 cism, by greater ingenuity in detecting the mean- 
 ing of the phenomena, and especially by draw- 
 ing upon a wider knowledge and experience. The 
 better knowledge now becoming available of the 
 background of late Jewish thought which lies 
 behind the ideas of Jesus Christ and the theology 
 of the Apostle Paul is one means of bringing new 
 light to bear on New Testament problems. A 
 deeper knowledge of the Greek world into which 
 Christianity came, its language, its religion, its 
 life, is another. Palestinian customs, Jewish 
 apocalypses, Philo, the Septuagint, Greek religion 
 and philosophy, the freshly examined and tested 
 utterances of the Church Fathers, and truer no- 
 tions of religious psychology, modern as well as 
 ancient, all these can contribute to that body of 
 
10 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 learning from which will come new points of 
 view and better answers to our questions about 
 the New Testament history. 
 
 In all historical work there are two processes, 
 the determination of the facts and the interpreta- 
 tion of those facts in their relation to one -an- 
 other and in their inner meaning. The results 
 which have already been reached lead to the 
 hope that in the determination of the facts a 
 good amount of ultimate agreement among 
 scholars may be attained. The situation in this 
 respect is already far different from what it was 
 one hundred years or seventy-five years ago. But 
 in the interpretation of the facts there must al- 
 ways be differences, corresponding to the different 
 philosophical, religious, or historical modes of 
 thought of different students. Such differences 
 in any branch of history are only the sign of 
 healthy life, and are sure to continue as current 
 experience leads men to dwell now more on this 
 and now on that side of the life of past ages. 
 
 The history of the New Testament period falls 
 into two sections, the Life of Christ, and the 
 Apostolic Age. In the former of these divisions, 
 the work of scholars has led to a measure of 
 solid result. The relations of the sources and 
 their limits of possible date are now well made out. 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 11 
 
 The historical existence of Jesus Christ, and many- 
 facts concerning his life and teachings are firmly 
 held by all sane critics. In understanding the 
 meaning and purpose of his sayings and espe- 
 cially of his parables great progress has been 
 made. That he wrought cures upon sick persons 
 and those who were believed to be possessed by 
 demons is generally believed. All this is the re- 
 sult of modern criticism. It must, however, be 
 admitted that with regard to the life of Christ 
 there is still great diversity of opinion. Are 
 the narratives of the birth of Jesus legendary? 
 What were the actual events and experiences 
 which gave his disciples their conviction of his 
 resurrection? What did Jesus do on the occa- 
 sion when the storm on the Lake abated as sud- 
 denly as it had arisen? Such questions are still 
 warmly disputed. And more general problems 
 are yet unsolved. Did Jesus himself claim to be 
 the Messiah of Israel ? What did he mean by the 
 Kingdom of God, that phrase so often on his lips ? 
 Did he really call himself the Son of Man, and 
 what did he mean by the title? And the great 
 questions, was his thought mainly ethical or 
 mainly apocalyptic? or was it an attempt to set 
 forth ethical and religious principles in apocalyp- 
 tic terms? Was he an enthusiast or a plain and 
 
12 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 rational teacher of sober truth? How shall we 
 think of his self-consciousness? What did he 
 aim to do? All these questions obviously relate 
 not at all to the theological interpretation of 
 Jesus' life and death and person, but solely to 
 the historical apprehension of them. They are 
 matters which we should have known about if we 
 had been present, or about which we could have 
 asked the Master if we had been among the com- 
 pany of his disciples. Whether our inquiries on 
 these points would have been comprehensible is 
 another question, for the difficulty of answering 
 some of these questions springs from the modern- 
 ness of the presuppositions by the aid of which 
 they are framed. The progress of knowledge here 
 will come largely through greater skill in put- 
 ting questions such that the sources will enable 
 us to answer them. 
 
 In regard to some of these matters there has, 
 to be sure, been progress in knowledge. But in 
 these questions, primarily historical as they are 
 in their motive and form, ultimate agreement 
 is sure to be checked by the interplay of differ- 
 ences of personal belief concerning Jesus Christ. 
 In many of these things demonstration is, and 
 probably always will be, out of the question, and 
 while the literary questions of the date, nature. 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 13 
 
 and purpose of the Gospels may be settled within 
 generally acknowledged limits, such an agreement 
 will not settle the further and more vital ques- 
 tions of historical criticism. In the criticism of 
 the historical statements the fact that the main 
 sources all go back to the common tradition of 
 the earliest Church, so that wholly independent 
 testimony from two sides to the same events is 
 seldom to be had, will for long, if not always, 
 cause the final decision to be partly on sub- 
 jective grounds. That is to say, if we ask what 
 facts of the life of Christ are fully demonstrable 
 by the methods of historical criticism and are 
 therefore entirely sure to become accepted by all, 
 we shall have to answer that such facts, while they 
 exist and are supremely important, are but mod- 
 erate in number, and that they are capable of 
 supporting various interpretations of our Lord's 
 person. The interpretations will differ Avith dif- 
 fering philosophies of human nature and of the 
 universe, with differing attitudes toward the con- 
 ceptions of ancient tradition, and with differing 
 impressions made upon the individual soul by the 
 general outlines of the character and teachings of 
 Jesus Christ. And the varying interpretations of 
 these known and accepted facts will in return, so 
 far as we can see, necessarily control the judg- 
 
14 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ment of different students with regard to the 
 other, undemonstrable, statements of the Gos- 
 pels. Such of those statements will be accepted 
 as a basis for historical construction as correspond 
 to the general notion the mind has formed of what 
 sort of a being Jesus of Nazareth was. Those will 
 be rejected which are out of accord with the in- 
 dividual student's general conception. Learning 
 and historical criticism can do much, and will 
 do more and more, to prepare the way, by widen- 
 ing the range of the probable, or, on the other 
 hand, reducing the number of open possibilities, 
 and by illuminating the background, but in the 
 final conclusion personal conviction will throw 
 its weight into the delicately-balanced scales. 
 
 There is another reason why differences of 
 opinion with regard to the life of Christ are 
 likely to continue, namely the impossibility of 
 fully fathoming the great and divine nature which 
 spake as never man spake, and whose power and 
 characteristics can be fully known only by the 
 observation of its effect on this world. Our 
 psychology fails before the task, and yet it must 
 ever anew be attempted. 
 
 When we turn from the problems of the Life 
 of Christ to the Apostolic Age we find a different 
 situation. Our sources are indeed meagre, but 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 15 
 
 at least some of them are certainly of first-hand 
 quality, and the thorough investigations of 
 modern criticism have made it possible to use 
 these with confidence and fruitfulness. Cautious 
 inference from later conditions, new insight given 
 by slight but important hints, a deeper and 
 broader knowledge in many fields have added to 
 our resources. Moreover we are dealing with a 
 world many parts of which we well understand, 
 with the actions and thoughts of men whom we 
 may expect to comprehend through the analogy 
 of our own and others' minds, men who were 
 engaged in work for which analogies exist in 
 the history of other times. For all these reasons 
 a solid body of critically ascertained knowledge 
 would be expected in the history of the apos- 
 tolic age. And it is becoming increasingly ap- 
 parent that such is to be had. The process by 
 which this result has been and is being reached 
 will be a subject of our inquiry. The progress 
 in historical criticism over the situation seventy- 
 five years ago is enormous, not so much in the 
 bare facts affirmed as rather in the solid critical 
 foundations of the affirmations, in the better ap- 
 prehension of the significance and mutual rela- 
 tion of the facts, and in the filling in of many 
 details through patient and critical study of the 
 
16 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 sources. The gain from this to the student of 
 later periods of early Church history can hardly 
 be overestimated. 
 
 But the importance of the apostolic age has 
 not been due to its significance for the mere stu- 
 dent of history. The apostolic age has always 
 been held to have a significance for the Christian 
 Church; a narrative of the events of apostolic 
 history stands beside the Gospels in the canon; 
 the letters of an apostle to his friends constitute 
 a quarter of the New Testament. What is this 
 significance ? 
 
 The answer to this question will depend on 
 our conception of authority and of development. 
 If Christianity presents itself to us as an author- 
 itative religion, to which we as loyal Christians 
 must subject ourselves, we shall have to inquire, 
 What is this religion, in its teaching, worship, 
 organization ? We would practise it ; where shall 
 we find it in its purity and perfection? The 
 obvious answer is, in the apostolic age, when 
 little time had elapsed for external influences to 
 introduce elements foreign to the Christian spirit, 
 or for inner seeds of corruption to produce de- 
 generacy. In that age, still fresh with the recol- 
 lection of the Founder's life and under the direct 
 impression of his spirit, we should expect to 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 17 
 
 find pure and essential Christianity. Such was 
 the view of the Puritans, and in accordance with 
 this theory they attempted to reproduce the 
 theology, the forms of worship, the church-organ- 
 ization of the apostolic age and honestly to fol- 
 low it wherever it should lead. In spite of the 
 impossibility which will always meet such an 
 attempt to restore a past phase of life the Puri- 
 tans' strenuous endeavor was in many individual 
 points crowned with success. Their common- 
 wealth was not the apostolic age over again, 
 but it was much more like the apostolic age 
 than was the mediaeval Church against which they 
 protested. 
 
 On the other side, however, a more than plausi- 
 ble defense was set up by the aid of the principle 
 of development. Christianity, it was said, may have 
 existed in purity in the first age, but its perfec- 
 tion was not presented in the world until the 
 forces innate within it had had an opportunity to 
 work themselves out, and fulfil their promise and 
 potency. This development is to be seen fully 
 accomplished by the third and fourth centuries, 
 when organization, liturgy, and doctrine were 
 complete, and the demoralization of the middle 
 ages had not yet supervened. The church of Cyp- 
 rian in the third century, and the theology of 
 
18 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Nic^a in the fourth, present,— said the Angli- 
 can,— better models than the meagre and unde- 
 veloped type of the days of Peter and Paul. 
 
 The Puritan had the best of this argument, for 
 what was not present in the apostolic age can- 
 not be essential to the Christianity of any age, 
 and further the study of history has made it 
 more and more plain that the Christianity of the 
 third and fourth centuries was not solely the nat- 
 ural flowering of the inner spirit of Christianity 
 itself. In fact, however, both Puritan and church- 
 man followed much the same method. Each— 
 if we take each party at its best— was aiming to 
 secure the interests of true religion, not to estab- 
 lish a museum of antiquities. Each seized upon 
 that type of thought and expression which for 
 him most contributed to the ideal. The Puritan 
 was hindered by the forms and customs and by 
 some parts of the theology of the Church. The 
 churchman's sincere pursuit of spiritual religion 
 was aided by them. Each found means to justify 
 from history the type of church which he knew 
 to be in harmony with his own inner needs. Both 
 Puritan and churchman held to authority. Their 
 choice of what authority to follow in order to 
 promote the ideal which both cherished was deter- 
 mined by their differing types of mind. 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 19 
 
 For us to-day it has become apparent that the 
 Puritan's argument against the churchman cuts 
 deeper than he knew. If it holds against the 
 authority of the third and fourth centuries, it 
 holds likewise against the authority of the apos- 
 tolic age itself. The more we learn, the more we 
 see that the apostolic age cannot be reproduced to- 
 day, for the reason that, like every other Chris- 
 tian age, it too presents Christianity in a form 
 governed by conditions of place and time which 
 are extraneous to the essence. There is in fact no 
 such thing in the world as essence alone without 
 form. We can make the abstraction in thought, 
 but in a living world it has never been seen and 
 never will be. The ' ' co-efficients, ' ' as Harnack has 
 called them, are always present, and serve to give 
 body to the form to which they are attached. His- 
 tory is a continuous, although progressive, unity. 
 Christianity itself is incomprehensible apart from 
 the earlier revelation of God. Even the ideas of 
 Jesus Christ must be studied in the light of 
 the forms of Jewish thought with which they 
 are intertwined. Extraneous influences, Jewish, 
 Greek, Teutonic, oriental are shown by all his- 
 torical inquiry to have been at work moulding 
 the expression of Christianity in life and thought, 
 
20 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and some of them have been active from the very- 
 earliest days of Christian history. 
 
 The pursuit of the Puritan's interpretation of 
 Protestantism will inevitably bring men to the 
 rejection of the Puritan's own theory. Indeed, 
 if God had intended men to follow as an author- 
 ity any type of church thought or life or organi- 
 zation in the past, he would surely have provided 
 them with a clear and complete account of that 
 normative period. Such an account of the apos- 
 tolic age we do not have. The instinct of the 
 Catholic, working under the principle of author- 
 ity, was right, although his argument was weak. 
 He chose for his model not that period in which 
 the details are hardest to determine, but one that 
 presented in clear and mature shape a workable 
 pattern to be copied, and then he defended it as 
 well as he could. In fact, we must abandon the 
 idea of authority in these matters. Neither the 
 apostolic age nor any other period is a model. 
 Christianity is not an archaeological puzzle. The 
 Christian life carries authority only as it offers 
 a supreme and critical opportunity, and its ex- 
 pression in every age has to be different in order 
 that Christianity may do its work in enlightening 
 this dark world. For Wisdom is justified of all 
 her children. 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 21 
 
 If, then, ^Ye do not look to the apostolic age 
 any more than to any other period of Christian 
 history to furnish a working model and an au- 
 thoritative standard of theology, liturgy, polity, 
 what is its significance? why our eager interest 
 in it ? Three reasons can be named. 
 
 First, only through understanding the apostolic 
 age can the succeeding ages be understood. Its 
 contribution to these made them largely what they 
 were. The apostolic age was, and will ever be, 
 the key of Christian history. 
 
 Secondly, the records of the origin of Chris- 
 tianity have come to us from the apostolic age, 
 and can be understood only through a critical 
 knowledge of the apostolic age. 
 
 Thirdly, in the apostolic age itself not only do 
 we have an heroic age of the Christian Church, 
 when great issues were at stake and great per- 
 sonalities in the field; we have exhibited there 
 the first impression which Christianity left on 
 the world, in thought and life. Even though it 
 be not normative, it yet presents Christianity in 
 relative purity, and for that reason possesses an 
 undying significance for the Church. We do not 
 find there essence without form, but we do find 
 Christianity in its first estate before, for instance, 
 it had used for its expression the full subtlety of 
 
22 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Greek philosophy; we see it before the masses 
 of the pagan world had been converted and with 
 all their peasants' conservatism had brought into 
 the Church the pagan myths and pagan rites in 
 which they had been reared. We know in Paul 
 Christian thought before the savor of Judaism 
 had evaporated, we see in the simple life of 
 Christian Jerusalem and Christian Corinth how 
 Christianity expressed itself before complexity of 
 life called for elaborate organization, and before 
 the Church began to think of ancient precedents 
 as well as of current needs. 
 
 A word is needed about the limits which sepa- 
 rate this period from previous and from later his- 
 tory. Its beginning was definite. When the body 
 of disciples gathered itself together in Jerusalem 
 after the Resurrection, the new epoch was there, 
 the apostolic age had begun. Its close is not so 
 distinctly marked. It must be held to continue 
 through the life-time of the apostles, and to in- 
 clude the activity of the longest-lived among 
 them, who probably lingered until near the 
 turn of the century. Since the second century 
 introduces us to a new spirit, which developed 
 rapidly into the well-formed organism of the Old 
 Catholic Church, perfect before the year 200, the 
 dividing line would seem to fall about the year 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 23 
 
 100. But this is no absolute division. Something 
 of the spirit of the later period is found before 
 that date; many typical archaisms survived into 
 the succeeding time. The apostolic age may be 
 defined as the period in which the apostles lived 
 and worked, beginning with the Resurrection, and 
 continuing until men everywhere realized that the 
 early enthusiastic days of origins were past, and 
 that they were living permanently established as 
 one (albeit the most important) element in the 
 great world of civilization. The apostolic age is 
 not so much a definite period of years as it is 
 a type of Christian experience, to make clear the 
 nature of which will be the purpose of our 
 study. 
 
 Our knowledge of this period and the type of 
 Christian experience which gave it its unity comes 
 from a variety of sources. The only narrative 
 account is the Book of Acts. This book, form- 
 ing the sequel to the Gospel of Luke, with which it 
 makes a single piece of historical literature, nar- 
 rates some parts of the early history from about 
 the year 30 down to the arrival of Paul in Rome 
 about the year 60. Within the limited period 
 covered the writer has evidently devoted much 
 labor to the accumulation of his materials— how 
 great the task must have been we shall not easily 
 
24 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 over-estimate— and has presented them with great 
 skill; but much that we should like to know is 
 omitted and much that is less important is told 
 with needless detail or with great diffuseness. 
 The presentation is governed partly by the writ- 
 er's interest in picturesque and heroic incidents, 
 but still more by his understanding that the great 
 fact in the history of Christianity has been its 
 territorial expansion and its transference from 
 the Jewish to the Greek world. 
 
 How trustworthy the tradition is, of which the 
 earliest record comes from the last quarter of the 
 second century, that the Book of Acts was written 
 by Luke, a gentile travelling-companion and 
 the beloved physician of Paul, can be determined 
 only by the internal evidence of the book itself, 
 and hence this tradition cannot be used to give 
 credit to the statements of the book. The book 
 was plainly written by a gentile, as every page 
 testifies. Of the events which took place at Jeru- 
 salem and in Syria in the earliest years (approxi- 
 mately chapters i-xii with chapter xv) he knew 
 only by information derived from others. That 
 any part of his material here came to him 
 in written form does not seem to me to have 
 been as yet demonstrated, although it is by no 
 means impossible. If the writer was Luke, he 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 25 
 
 went with Paul to Jerusalem and Csesarea some 
 twenty-five or thirty years after the death of 
 Jesus, and would then have had good opportunity 
 to gather information. In the later portions 
 (chapters xiii and xiv and chapters xvi-xxviii) 
 the occasional use of the first person ("we") 
 shows either that the writer was present, and is 
 drawing on his own recollection or journal, or 
 else, what is perhaps less likely, that he has in- 
 corporated the memoirs of an eye-witness other 
 than himself. In either case these portions pre- 
 sent on their face a claim to be immediately de- 
 rived from a participator in the events, and this 
 claim is for the most part amply supported by 
 the character of the narratives contained in these 
 portions of the book. The final decision as to the 
 Lucan authorship of Acts as a whole will turn 
 largely on the question whether the book contains 
 anywhere statements which a personal companion 
 of Paul could not have written. 
 
 But already the larger question confronts us as 
 to what confidence we may have that the pleasant 
 narrative of Acts is true. The writer, as we have 
 said, does not appear to have been present at Jeru- 
 salem with the earliest Christians; even in the 
 latter half of the book only a small part is accred- 
 ited by the presence of the person (whether the 
 
26 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 author or another) whose own recollections are 
 embodied in our book. Before many decades had 
 passed after the probable date of Acts men wrote 
 romances about the apostles ; may not Acts be but 
 the first of that unsatisfactory series ? 
 
 These questions criticism has to face and an- 
 swer. The application of the tests which are used 
 in that process cannot here be illustrated in any 
 detail. It belongs in the historical workshop, not 
 to the finished product. In this essay the tests can 
 only be described, but the use of them should un- 
 derlie all that is said. 
 
 First of all it must be observed that the most 
 satisfactory proof in such an inquiry is the agree- 
 ment of two independent witnesses of whom at 
 least one is already known to be competent. That 
 will in most cases give practical certainty. In the 
 Book of Acts something of this is secured through 
 the statements and implications of the epistles of 
 Paul. AVhen one has satisfied himself that an 
 epistle of Paul— as for instance that to the Gala- 
 tians — is genuine, the statements which that epis- 
 tle makes about matters of fact within Paul's per- 
 sonal knowledge will have to be accepted as true. 
 The Book of Acts has plainly not used those epis- 
 tles as the source of its statements. Accordingly 
 we have here a test from a relatively independent 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 27 
 
 source of the accuracy of some statements in Acts. 
 The most important point at which this test has to 
 be applied in the criticism of Acts is at the ac- 
 count of the Conference, or Council, at Jerusalem 
 described in the fifteenth chapter, and referred to 
 at some length in the second chapter of Galatians. 
 This comparison is one of the battle-grounds of 
 New Testament criticism. The question has to be 
 asked whether the account in Acts shows irrec- 
 oncilable differences from the statements of Paul ; 
 and even if it does not, whether its obvious dif- 
 ferences and omissions compel the conclusion that 
 Acts was written with a partisan bias or tendency 
 such as would lead to distortion of the truth 
 of history. If such a bias can be proved here, 
 the trustworthiness and credibility of Acts else- 
 where will be seriously discredited. PauPs con- 
 version is another matter of great importance 
 where light is thrown on Acts by incidental refer- 
 ences in the epistles. 
 
 Another test is secured by observing those 
 statements or allusions in Acts which relate to 
 facts of the Jewish or gentile world otherwise 
 known to us. Both the presence or absence of 
 positive errors and also the mode and frequency 
 of allusion are here significant ; for the well-bred 
 guest in a strange house will be recognizable by 
 
28 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 the difference between his correct but slightly 
 constrained manner and the perfect freedom of 
 the ordinary members of the household. Now 
 Acts speaks of localities in Palestine, of the Temple 
 at Jerusalem, of Jewish parties and government 
 officers. It also refers with great abundance of 
 detail to places and circumstances in Asia Minor, 
 Greece, and even Italy. All these can be tested 
 by the resources of Palestinian and classical arch- 
 geology. If the author of Acts is found re- 
 ferring to all these things, which are widely scat- 
 tered in the world and represent different civiliza- 
 tions, and if he can be shown to have made no mis- 
 takes, it will appear that he had good information 
 at his command and used it faithfully. It may 
 even seem probable that he was a contemporary 
 and saw these things himself. It is evident that 
 this is a general, not a complete, test. A writer's 
 knowledge of Ephesus or Athens and the events of 
 Paul's stay there does not give us an assurance 
 that he is perfectly accurate in everything he 
 says about the death of Ananias and Sapphira, 
 but it will go far to determine our general atti- 
 tude toward the writer or his sources. In point 
 of fact this kind of study shows that for Palestine 
 the writer of Acts had good but not perfectly ac- 
 curate information about places and things. He 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 29 
 
 writes like a man who had perhaps visited that 
 country once, as a foreigner, some years after the 
 events he is describing. He is cautions in his al- 
 lusions, and even so makes a few trifling mis- 
 takes. The frequent fulness of his narrative often 
 suggests the labor of the literary artist rather 
 than the detail of the eye-witness 's photograph. 
 On the other hand, of matters in the gentile 
 world,— places, things, customs, institutions,— he 
 writes with entire freedom of allusion and as one 
 who knows of his own knowledge a world in which 
 he is perfectly at home. Whether it is Lystra 
 in Lycaonia or Ephesus or Philippi or Athens 
 or Corinth or ]\Ialta or on board ship, he makes 
 correct reference to the hundreds of facts in- 
 volved with a sure touch and hardly a single mis- 
 take. And his references are found correct, not 
 merely for the conditions which persisted to a 
 later age, but for the special and rapidly chang- 
 ing conditions of the precise time in which Paul 
 worked. 
 
 Besides these methods of testing general trust- 
 worthiness, direct tests have to be applied to the 
 narrative as a whole and to its details. Does the 
 whole course of the history hang together well and 
 commend itself as a consistent and natural de- 
 velopment from elements and forces which we can 
 
30 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 suppose to have existed at the outset? Again, in 
 detail, of each section similar questions must be 
 asked. Is the incident self-consistent, appropriate 
 in its place, free from incredible features? Does 
 it contain what would elsewhere be set down as 
 legendary embellishment, and, if so, are the pecul- 
 iar conditions of this history sufficient to account 
 for that? Likewise with regard both to the gen- 
 eral portrayal of the period and to each individual 
 section it must be asked whether the scene or the 
 circumstance is one which a later age is likely to 
 have read back into the history from its own con- 
 ditions and ideals, or whether (in view of the 
 changes which went on) it is such that it could not 
 have occurred to the imagination of a later age to 
 invent it. In a word, the ultimate task of histor- 
 ical criticism, in Acts as in any other book, is to 
 show the extent to which it can be said that unless 
 these facts had been actually remembered from 
 the time when they occurred, these statements 
 about them could not possibly have been made. 
 
 This last test is the most difficult to apply satis- 
 factorily, for it is evident that the general prepos- 
 sessions of the critic will necessarily give to his 
 results a partly subjective character. In Acts 
 it may be said that by its inner consistency, 
 naturalness of development, and correspondence 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 31 
 
 with the whole situation, the general course of 
 events narrated commends itself as probable, and 
 that the individual incidents do not seem to be 
 fictitious. In some instances, however, we find 
 ourselves suspecting that incidents may be dupli- 
 cated, or have received a wrong significance ; and 
 sometimes it may be that a growth of legend has 
 attached itself to a real incident, for neither by 
 the probable date of the book and the writer's 
 sources of information, nor by any other available 
 guarantee of accuracy is the possibility of some 
 legendary growth excluded. 
 
 On the ultimate question of the trustworthiness 
 of the Book of Acts opinions have varied from the 
 extreme of skepticism, which has refused to use 
 the book as a witness for anything except the state 
 of mind of the author and his contemporaries, to 
 a perfect trust in the infallibility of the letter. At 
 present the tendency is to greater confidence in 
 most of its statements. It approves itself not as 
 infallible nor as equally trustworthy in all its 
 parts, but yet as so good history that a discrim- 
 inating use of it yields a solid body of critically 
 sifted knowledge. 
 
 Fortunately, however, we are not restricted for 
 our information to the Book of Acts. There are 
 other sources which, when critically used, are 
 
32 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 available for extending our view, so that we can 
 have some considerable knowledge of matters of 
 which Acts does not treat at all; and the history 
 of the apostolic age nowadays includes many topics 
 of large historical moment not brought to our at- 
 tention by the author of Acts. From various scat- 
 tered writers a very few historical statements have 
 come down to us; but besides these we have the 
 epistles of one of the great actors in the events, 
 the Apostle Paul. The most important of these 
 are beyond question genuine, and give vivid pic- 
 tures of life and thought in the Christian churches 
 of Paul's day. The other New Testament epistles 
 are as yet less easy to date and to use. From the 
 Gospels, which were written in our period and 
 unconsciously reflect something of its problems 
 and circumstances, not a little can be learned 
 about it; the Gospel of John contains not only 
 tradition of Jesus' life, but much of apostolic 
 thought. 
 
 These are the direct sources. But upon this, 
 as upon every other field of history, however 
 small, light falls from many sides. From the 
 thought and writings of the next following period 
 of the Church many inferences may be drawn. 
 Especially those Jewish and Greek worlds of 
 thought and of outward affairs into which Chris- 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 33 
 
 tianity pushed itself, must be known, if we would 
 understand the apostolic age. The increase in 
 such knowledge is daily bringing better compre- 
 hension of facts and words. Almost every branch 
 of knowledge, — ^philology, geography, even astron- 
 omy, — has its contribution to make to the problems 
 of the subject. In detail they are endless, and 
 sometimes seem hopeless. Yet, even now, if we do 
 not make inordinate demands with reference to 
 unimportant details, a fair general picture is 
 attainable, in which as much confidence can be 
 placed as would be justified in any other depart- 
 ment of ancient history. 
 
 We shall need at every stage of our study to 
 remember that a phenomenon like the Christian 
 Church must be looked at in two ways, first, to 
 see its external form, as it would have appeared 
 to an observant outsider who might have had 
 occasion to study it ; secondly, to discover its char- 
 acter as seen from within, its fundamental mo- 
 tives, convictions, and aspirations. We do not 
 fully understand that period unless we have ad- 
 equate knowledge on both these sides. And again, 
 from another point of view, we have to examine 
 two aspects of the period and of each stage in it. 
 We have to ask not only about its own individual- 
 ity and how it differed from other periods, but 
 
34 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 equally what it contributed to the next following 
 stage. 
 
 I shall try so to sketch the apostolic age that it 
 may be understood in these several respects. 
 These men and women were like ourselves of flesh 
 and blood. We must try to think of them as real, 
 governed by human motives, thinking and acting 
 like the human beings around us. They are not 
 shadowy, though heroic, figures moving in a silent 
 procession through a dimly-lighted scene. And 
 yet they are not wholly like us. They had a back- 
 ground of ideas most of which we lack. They 
 lacked many of the ruling conceptions of our 
 thought. It is our task to reproduce this life as 
 that of real men and at the same time to refrain 
 from attributing to these our brethren that which 
 belongs only to us late-comers in the human fam- 
 ily. To withdraw ourselves from our modern 
 ideas without transporting ourselves to an un- 
 earthly land of romance is difficult, but it must be 
 attempted. 
 
 The general conception of the apostolic age 
 from which the following chapters are written will 
 become plain as we proceed. To the writer of the 
 Book of Acts the essential fact in the apostolic age 
 was that Christianity from being a Jewish sect 
 had become a world-religion. He describes the life 
 
CRITICISM AND THE APOSTOLIC AGE 35 
 
 of the Jewish sect, he shows the process of transi- 
 tion, he tells the story of repeated attempts to 
 check the advance, and he lets us see the new 
 religion at last established in the capital of the 
 world. Now to us, as to this acute observer of the 
 first century after Christ, this transition which he 
 so emphasizes is still the most significant aspect 
 of the period. But we can also observe that to the 
 apostolic age belong two other transitions, which 
 require to be recognized and understood, one at 
 its beginning, the other marking its close. When 
 the Jewish type of Christianity came into being, 
 it was through a great initial transition, that, 
 namely, from the life of immediate human inter- 
 course with Jesus of Nazareth to that of member- 
 ship in the Church of Christ, the Lord in heaven. 
 And so likewise the conclusion of the age is 
 marked by a third transition, that from the primi- 
 tive and apostolic to the permanent, and what 
 finally became the Catholic, form of Christian life. 
 These three transitions make the scaffolding of 
 our history. 
 
 We shall look first at the process by which Chris- 
 tianity spread, and at Jewish Christianity, with 
 which our period begins. Thence we pass on to 
 speak of the Apostle Paul, the eminent personality 
 of the age, whose thought can be known directly 
 
36 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 from his own writings. "With Paul are naturally 
 associated the gentile Christian churches, at once 
 the medium in which he worked and the result of 
 his life-work. They illustrate the prevailing 
 character of Christianity in the apostolic age 
 through the larger part of the world, and give 
 us the stage which followed in direct succession 
 upon Jewish Christianity. Besides Paul, however, 
 there were other leaders at work in the apostolic 
 age, notably Peter, and besides Paul's epistles 
 other writings were produced, notably the Gospels. 
 Further, in the various aspects of thought and 
 life in the apostolic age we shall see the elements 
 and tendencies forming from which grew the 
 marked characteristics of the Catholic Christianity 
 which is found essentially complete about one 
 hundred years later, just before the end of the 
 second century. Finally, no view of the apostolic 
 age is complete which does not take some notice of 
 the history of modern critical investigation. 
 
n 
 
 THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 
 
 The first missionary preaching of Christianity 
 was that of Jesus himself, who came into Galilee, 
 as is described in the Gospel of Mark, announcing 
 that the kingdom of God was nigh at hand, and 
 calling upon men to repent in preparation for it. 
 The method of his earlier ministry was to sound 
 this cry as widely as possible. He refused to stay 
 in Capernaum, where the exorcism of a demon had 
 stirred popular interest, but went about to the 
 other towns and villages of Galilee, that he might 
 "preach there also." Before long we find him 
 sending out his Twelve Disciples in pairs preach- 
 ing "that men should repent." The latter part of 
 his ministry was less occupied with this missionary 
 activity, and more with the preparation of his 
 disciples for their difficult task of maintaining 
 his cause after his death. It may well be that 
 many of the sayings of the Master inciting to 
 missionary preaching or giving directions as to 
 the method of the work come from this later 
 37 
 
38 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 period of Jesus' ministry. "There is nothing 
 covered that shall not be revealed; and hid that 
 shall not be known. What I tell you in the dark- 
 ness, speak ye in the light; and what ye hear in 
 the ear, proclaim upon the housetops.'' *'Ye are 
 the light of the world. . . . Neither do men 
 light a lamp and put it under the bushel, but 
 on the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in 
 the house. Even so let your light shine before 
 men." Sayings like these, re-enforced as they 
 were, by the parables in which the gradual growth 
 of the Kingdom of Heaven was set forth under 
 the figure of mustard-seed or leaven or a field of 
 grain, and supported by the whole impression of 
 the activity of Jesus Christ himself, were enough 
 to make the Christian Church into a missionary 
 body. But these positive influences from the Mas- 
 ter were also sustained by other motives. Deep 
 in human nature lies the impulse from which the 
 missionary enterprises of all the great religions 
 have proceeded. With the Jews of the first cen- 
 tury in particular this passion for proselytizing 
 was conspicuous. And the Christians had a still 
 stronger motive in their sincere national loyalty. 
 Their heart's desire and supplication was for 
 their kinsmen, who were Israelites, to whom God 
 had given adoption, glory, covenants, law, ritual, 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 39 
 
 promises, the traditions of the patriarchs, the hope 
 of a Messiah.^ These must be won to accept the 
 divinely offered salvation before the rapidly ap- 
 proaching end of all things should close in on the 
 world and leave unsaved those who had rejected 
 the Christ of God. Every spark of Jewish patriot- 
 ism must have united with the other motives to 
 make the first Christians into missionaries. 
 
 The missionary work of the Church began at 
 Jerusalem, where were gathered those disciples 
 whom the experiences of the Resurrection had 
 recovered to a new faith. There is every reason to 
 accept the representation of the Book of Acts that 
 they occupied themselves from the first not only 
 with their own pious exercises, but with attempts 
 to gain recruits to their number from the Jews 
 of the city. Their earliest missionary activity 
 may well have been less public than the narrative 
 of Acts conceived it. We can hardly think that 
 the police authorities would have allowed the 
 movement started by a leader now executed as a 
 revolutionary criminal to put itself forward at 
 once in full publicity, and to stir with great 
 assemblies the life of the town. Yet, even though 
 in quieter and, as it were, subterranean fashion, 
 the missionary work proceeded, and the body of 
 
 iRom. X. 1; ix. 3-5. 
 
40 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Christians grew. The figures given by Acts repre- 
 sent the impression of a later time, but are not 
 impossible, and they testify at any rate to the 
 recollection of a steady and large increase, suf- 
 ficient to account for the great numbers of Chris- 
 tians who twenty-five or thirty years later lived 
 at Jerusalem.^ 
 
 The first step of importance outside Jerusalem 
 was made, we are told, in consequence of a per- 
 secution which compelled the Christians to leave 
 the city. Scattering into the country districts of 
 Palestine, they everywhere carried with them the 
 Gospel. Doubtless this spread of Christian faith 
 through Judaea and Galilee and Samaria would 
 in any case have come about with time; it was 
 hastened by necessity, and Saul of Tarsus, the 
 leader of the persecution, even while harrying the 
 Church, rendered it his first service. 
 
 Of the character of Christian life at this time 
 we can learn something from the collections of 
 sayings of Jesus which, whatever their original 
 purpose and occasion, were evidently compiled in 
 order to furnish a kind of handbook of missionary 
 practice for those times. 
 
 These twelve Jesus sent fortli, and charged 
 them, saying, Go not into any way of the gentiles, 
 * Acts xxl. 20. 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 41 
 
 and enter not into any city of the Samaritans: but 
 go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 
 And as ye go, preach, saying. The Kingdom of 
 Heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, 
 cleanse the lepers, cast out demons: freely ye re- 
 ceived, freely give. Get you no gold, nor silver, 
 nor brass in your purses; no wallet for your jour- 
 ney, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staff: for 
 the laborer is worthy of his food. And into 
 whatsoever city or village ye shall enter, search 
 out who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye 
 go forth. And as ye enter into the house, salute 
 it. And if the house be worthy, let your peace 
 come unto it: but if it be not worthy, let your 
 peace return to you. And whosoever shall not 
 receive you, nor hear your words, as ye go forth 
 out of that house or that city, shake off the dust 
 of your feet. Verily I say unto you. It shall be 
 more tolerable for the land of Sodom and 
 Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that 
 city. 
 
 Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst 
 of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and 
 harmless as doves. But beware of men: for they 
 will deliver you up to councils, and in their syna- 
 gogues they will scourge you; yea and before 
 governors and kings shall ye be brought for my 
 
42 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 sake, for a testimony to them and to the gentiles. 
 But when they deliver you up, he not anxious 
 how or what ye shall speak: for it shall he given 
 you in that hour what ye shall speak. For it is 
 not ye that speak, hut the Spirit of your Father 
 that speaketh in you. And brother shall deliver 
 up brother to death, and the father his child: and 
 children shall rise up against parents, and cause 
 them to he put to death. And ye shall be hated 
 of all men for my name's sake: but he that en- 
 dureth to the end, the same shall be saved. But 
 when they persecute you in this city, flee into the 
 next: for verily I say unto you. Ye shall not have 
 gone through the cities of Israel, till the Son of 
 Man be come. 
 
 And be not afraid of them that kill the body, 
 but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear 
 him who is able to destroy both soul and body 
 in hell.^ 
 The picture needs no explanation or comment. 
 The work has been well compared with the silent, 
 rapid, pervasive spread of the Franciscan move- 
 ment in its earlier years, when friend told friend 
 and humble preachers set the good news forth 
 to eager villagers, until the land was filled with 
 men and women touched by the new spirit. Of 
 
 1 Matthew x. 5-23, 28. 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 43 
 
 the same sort, and fed by even more intense ear- 
 nestness and devoted concentration, we are to 
 imagine the missionary work of the first Chris- 
 tians in Palestine. 
 
 Of the details of the outward course of this 
 work we know comparatively little. The choice 
 of recollections to be preserved in the Book of 
 Acts is governed partly by the writer's purpose of 
 showing the progress of the Christian religion 
 into Samaritan territory, partly by the desire to 
 record certain striking incidents and miracles. 
 Besides the work in Samaria w^e hear of Christians 
 and Christian work at Joppa and Lydda and else- 
 w^here in the coast-plain, or ' * Sharon. ' ' The move- 
 ment extended itself to CoBsarea, and to Galilee. 
 It was so important at Damascus that Saul made 
 a special journey thither to suppress it. Across 
 the sea at Cyprus, north to Phoenicia, and even to 
 the distant city of Antioch, the Corinth of the 
 East, the missionaries went. How firmly Chris- 
 tianity was planted in these districts w^e cannot 
 say. There must have been many scattered Chris- 
 tians, and there were some churches, but the main 
 body of the Jewish population remained un- 
 touched. It was the great sorrow of early Chris- 
 tianity that the Jews as a whole found in the 
 Cross a stumbling-block. We can still read the 
 
44 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 pathetic disappointment in Paul's words/ and 
 between the lines of the Gospels. The situation in 
 later times seems to show that although Christians 
 were scattered throughout Palestine, they were 
 not numerous in the larger towns, and were still 
 fewer in the country. Here and there was a 
 Christian or a Christian family, but the main 
 body of the new faith had its seat in Jerusalem, 
 whither the scattered Christians had returned 
 after the persecution. This was the result of the 
 first fifteen years of Christian missions. 
 
 All this w^ork was the natural extension of the 
 religion with the same methods and led by the 
 same motives which had governed the believers 
 from the start. At Antioch in Syria there came a 
 change, which the writer of Acts ^ with perfectly 
 correct judgment perceives to have marked a great 
 moment in the history of the Christian Church. 
 Hitherto faith in Jesus as the Messiah had been 
 propagated among Jews, with but rare excep- 
 tions. At Antioch gentiles were attracted by 
 the new religion and became converts. In this 
 event Christianity stepped forth at the third city 
 of the world into the world's life. The occasion was 
 accompanied by the creation of a new name, Chris- 
 
 1 Rom. ix-xi. ; II Cor. iii. 14, 15. 
 
 2 Acts xi. 19-26. 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 45 
 
 tians, which their heathen neighbors now began to 
 apply to the disciples. Already before this time 
 the great persecutor of the churches had been con- 
 verted to the faith of which he once made havoc, 
 and now Paul became a leader in the Christian 
 church which had just established itself at An- 
 tioch, while Antioch instead of Jerusalem became 
 the starting-point of Christian missionary enter- 
 prise. 
 
 The change in the position of Christianity in- 
 volved in the existence of a partly gentile church 
 at Antioch, conscious of having an independent 
 right beside the mother-church at Jerusalem, 
 caused a great change in Christian missions. In 
 what year this change took place we cannot tell, 
 but the date must have been not far from 45 a. d. 
 While the first fifteen years had been occupied 
 mainly with quiet work in Palestine, the following 
 ten or fifteen, from the beginning of Paul's mis- 
 sionary journeys to the time of his arrest at Jeru- 
 salem, were to see the establishment of Chris- 
 tianity at great centres of Asia Minor and Europe. 
 It is hardly an exaggeration to say that we have 
 here for the first time the Christian Church, as we 
 have received it and know it. 
 
 With Paul at Antioch was Barnabas, like him 
 a Jew. He had come from the island of Cyprus 
 
46 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and after spending some time at Jerusalem, where, 
 doubtless, he became a Christian, was led to enter 
 into the growing work in Antioch, and seems to 
 have been the recognized leader there. These two, 
 with John Mark, another Jew from Jerusalem, 
 set out under the commission, and perhaps sup- 
 ported by the contributions, of the Christians in 
 Antioch. The story of their journey is told with 
 many picturesque incidents, and a lifelike freedom 
 and accuracy of detail that can only come from 
 direct and trustworthy information, in the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Acts. The 
 missionaries proceeded through Cyprus from east 
 to west, with what success we do not know. Then 
 they turned to the mainland of Asia Minor and 
 (Mark having for some cause left them) visited a 
 series of towns in Phrygia and Lycaonia, — Anti- 
 och, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe,— in which they found 
 it possible to gather Christian churches. At Derbe 
 they turned back, retraced their steps in Asia 
 Minor, and so returned to the Syrian Antioch. 
 How much time the journey occupied we are not 
 told. If we may judge by the reasonable proba- 
 bilities of the case, it cannot have been less than 
 a year and a half, two summers and the interven- 
 ing winter; it might well have been even longer. 
 The chief importance of this journey lay not 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 47 
 
 merely in the fact that several churches had been 
 founded in territory hitherto unoccupied, from 
 which Christianity might spread still farther. It 
 was contained in the vast promise for the wider 
 future given by this practical demonstration that 
 the Gospel could find a ready hearing in the active 
 commercial towns of the west and that the Greek 
 world contained thousands of persons ready and 
 eager for what Christianity had to offer. It has 
 often been said, and truly, that Jesus Christ was 
 born into the world only when the fulness of 
 time had come. One element of the fulness of 
 time lay in the development of ancient Hebrew 
 and later Jewish religious thought, in which God 
 had revealed himself to men and in consequence of 
 which the life and teachings of Jesus Christ were 
 possible. The other element was the condition of 
 the Grgeco-Roman world, in which, and, so far as 
 we can see, in it alone, the progress of the Gospel 
 was possible. All the most important charac- 
 teristics of the civilized world which conduced 
 to the spread of Christianity are illustrated in this 
 first journey of the apostles Barnabas and Paul. 
 They used the opportunity afforded by Jewish 
 synagogues, they found everywhere audiences who 
 could be addressed in the Greek language, they 
 enjoyed the protection of the Roman civil order 
 
48 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and profited by the ease and freedom of travel, 
 and they found men eager to hear religious teach- 
 ing. Let us glance at these aspects of the world. 
 
 In the first place the dispersion of the Jews 
 throughout civilized countries had prepared the 
 way. It is a mistake to think of the Babylonian 
 captivity and other forcible deportations as the 
 cause of this dispersion. Partly through such 
 causes but largely by impulses acting within a 
 prolific and enterprising race the world had be- 
 come full of Jews. They had followed the lines 
 of trade and settled at the main seats of industry ; 
 in some cases large migrations to newly founded 
 cities had taken place on the special invitation of 
 rulers who prized the Jewish traits of orderliness 
 and thrift. Everywhere they had carried the Law 
 and the Synagogue, so that, as the Book of Acts 
 says, Moses from generations of old had in every 
 city them that preached him, being read in the 
 synagogues every Sabbath. And not only did the 
 Jews in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Africa, 
 maintain on the whole their corporate individu- 
 ality in the several towns, but they everywhere 
 made successful attempts to win new adherents, 
 proselytes, from the surrounding gentile popula- 
 tion. To their synagogues Greek men, and espe- 
 cially Greek women, were attracted. The lofty 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 49 
 
 and rigorous moral precepts, the noble monothe- 
 ism, the observance of the Sabbath, and the dis- 
 tinctions between clean and unclean food won 
 large numbers of persons to adopt something of 
 the Jewish religion. Some subjected themselves 
 wholly to Jewish requirements, including circum- 
 cision, and so gained the advantage of the exemp- 
 tions and political privileges of the Jews. Most, 
 however, did not go so far, but remained in the 
 class of half -conforming attendants at the Jewish 
 services; "devout persons," "ones that wor- 
 shipped God," these are called in the Book of 
 Acts. Such persons Paul finds in every Jewish 
 synagogue that he addresses, and their numbers 
 are attested by the references of the Roman satir- 
 ists. In this class, touched already by the ideas of 
 Judaism, with which Christianity could make con- 
 nection, but not bred to its exclusiveness nor 
 finally and fully drawn into its circle, Christianity 
 found at first its best field. It is going too far to 
 say that in this early period no one, so far as we 
 know, came into the Christian Church except by 
 this door, but it is yet only an exaggeration of the 
 facts. 
 
 The significance of this Jewish preparation of 
 the Greek world to receive Christianity was greatly 
 increased by the existence and wide circulation of 
 
50 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the 
 Septuagint. From the Bible of the Jews, already 
 in the hands even of many gentiles whom they ad- 
 dressed, the Christian preachers could show that 
 the Scriptures testified of him whom they served. 
 And in it they not only pointed to prophecy, now 
 at last fulfilled, but they could use precious doc- 
 trine and moral precept. The existence of the Old 
 Testament in Greek was a factor second to none in 
 the preparation of the world for Christianity, and 
 we are subject to-day to the consequences of it. 
 But this already brings us to a second element in 
 Greek civilization which made the progress of 
 Christianity possible, namely the Greek language. 
 Those in every way most likely to become obedient 
 to the Gospel lived in the towns, and there men 
 spoke Greek. Now this tongue was not only by its 
 origin fitted to express the ideas of Greeks, as 
 was requisite for the language of Christianity ; it 
 had also been adapted, as we have seen, through 
 the translation of the Old Testament and through 
 several centuries of use by Jews to be the vehicle 
 of Jewish thought. It thus contained in itself all 
 that Christianity needed. Moreover, for Chris- 
 tian use, the language was at a fortunate stage 
 in its history. It had become far simpler than 
 ever before and easier for plain men, not highly 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 51 
 
 educated, to employ for literary purposes ; and it 
 was a language flexible and adaptable to the uses 
 of new thought. In it Christianity could make it- 
 self comprehensible ; for in it had been expressed 
 all the past upon which Christianity stood, and 
 yet as a living tongue it was capable of respond- 
 ing instantly and fully to the living spirit of the 
 new faith. Without the Greek language it is hard 
 to imagine the spread of Christianity through the 
 world. 
 
 A third circumstance which assisted the rapid 
 growth of Christianity was the existence of 
 the Roman world. In it life and property 
 were generally safe. Paul testifies in the Epistle 
 to the Romans that the magistrate is a minister of 
 God for good, and he repeatedly found this true 
 in his own experience. The Roman Law, which 
 has made the world one, was a protection to 
 righteousness. Likewise the frequency of com- 
 munication and the ease and comparative safety 
 of travel were an indispensable gift to Christian- 
 ity. There was no regular postal service and no 
 railroad, but nevertheless it was easier then to 
 cross Asia Minor or to go from Smyrna to ]\Iar- 
 seilles than it has been in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Paul travelled almost incessantly, although 
 not without some hardship and danger, for ten 
 
52 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 years. Aquila and Priscilla came from Pontus 
 on the Black Sea, went to Rome, then to Corinth, 
 then to Ephesns, then probably back to Rome, 
 where they seem to have resided when Paul wrote 
 the sixteenth chapter of Romans. An ancient 
 merchant from Hierapolis in Phrygia has perpet- 
 uated by his epitaph, which is still preserved,'^ the 
 fact that he had made the long journey from his 
 home to Rome seventy-two times. Not only did 
 the good roads, the inns, the public conveyances, 
 the police protection, make it possible for the great 
 missionaries themselves to travel, and so to carry 
 the Gospel throughout the world; but, by reason 
 of the public habit of travelling, any large town 
 like Ephesus or Corinth gave the missionary op- 
 portunity for contact with persons from neighbor- 
 ing as well as more distant places, and from such 
 centres the Gospel spread, so to speak by its own 
 expansive force, into the whole surrounding 
 territory of Asia or Achaia. 
 
 But not only by its material provisions and on 
 the external side did the Roman world contribute 
 to the missionary work of Christianity. Equally 
 through the spirit of cosmopolitanism which had 
 been created and fostered in men's minds was the 
 fundamental conception of a world religion, which 
 
 iC. 7. 0. 3920. 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 53 
 
 is a condition of great missionary activities, made 
 possible. The sense of belonging to one great com- 
 munity had been aroused by the development first 
 of a world-wide Hellenic civilization in the Greek 
 empire of Alexander, then by the establishment of 
 the Roman Empire, in which the Stoic ideal of a 
 universal commonwealth, with all the wise as citi- 
 zens, found its visible counterpart and expression. 
 In this world it was easy to frame the grand con- 
 ception of Christianity as the religion for the 
 world. Even the short vista of future history 
 which the theology of the earliest Christians per- 
 mitted to open itself before them was long enough 
 to allow a man like Paul to think of the unity of 
 humanity in Jesus Christ its head, in whose name 
 every knee should bow, of things in heaven and 
 things on earth and things under the earth. 
 
 But the fourth and greatest advantage which 
 the state of the civilized world gave to Christian 
 missions, in fact the essential condition on which 
 depended the spread of Christianity in the world, 
 was the general and wide-spread sense of religious 
 need. Christianity came into a world hungering 
 and thirsting for spiritual religion. The mythol- 
 ogies were the play of men of letters, not the naive 
 faith of worshippers. The official religion of the 
 Roman world was the worship of the Emperor, 
 
54 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and that was a purely secular function of the citi- 
 zen. Popular superstition and magic, the votive 
 offerings and crowded rites of the great temples 
 were deep-rooted in the lives of the multitude ; but 
 side by side with this, philosophy had made moral 
 teaching popular, the mysteries had directed men's 
 thoughts to the immortality of the soul, oriental 
 religions of Isis and Mithras and the rest had 
 stimulated the taste for novelty and the desire for 
 a spiritual union with God. The world was in a 
 ferment, men knew that they were sinners, they 
 had come to distrust ritual and sacrifice, they 
 were looking within and upward, and what Juda- 
 ism had partly given them Christianity offered 
 with completeness. We are not to think of these 
 Christian teachers as bringing religion to a world 
 devoid of it. Without Christianity there would 
 have been a powerful development of spiritual 
 religion. Christianity took, moulded, guided, and 
 was itself affected by the forces which it found 
 already working in human life. 
 
 Into this world came the Christian missionaries. 
 In Palestine, where we know but little of the de- 
 tails of the work, we are led to think of evangeli- 
 zation by quiet talk in homes and villages. In the 
 outside world the method was different, at least in 
 part. There the work was carried on partly by 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 55 
 
 men who gave up their whole lives to the calling, 
 and were known as apostles, partly by persons not 
 so called. Of the apostles we know most about 
 Paul, but side by side with him were others bear- 
 ing the same title, Peter, Barnabas, and many more, 
 for the original use of the term did not limit it, as 
 did later usage, to the twelve immediate disciples 
 of Jesus Christ. These apostles and their fellow- 
 workers laid the foundation. The most successful 
 mode of missionary work seems to have been that 
 systematically followed by Paul. He went uni- 
 formly to the important centres of commercial 
 life, generally places where there were Jews. In 
 such a place he would use the opportunity afforded 
 by the synagogue to address the congregation of 
 Jews and half-judaized gentiles there gathered. 
 Out of that congregation a group of persons, at- 
 tracted, held, and established in faith in Christ, 
 formed the beginning of a church. They were 
 from the gentile side, but here and there among 
 them a Jew appeared. It speedily became necessary 
 for them to separate themselves from their syna- 
 gogue, and a Christian conventicle provided a cen- 
 tre of the new life, and a place for mutual edifica- 
 tion and for influence on the people of the town. 
 The active life of a Greek city brought many into 
 contact with such an enterprise. From the pro- 
 
56 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 vincial capital or the busy market-town the re- 
 ligion spread to the surrounding villages and 
 province, and the method was plainly justified by 
 its results. 
 
 What was the message which these apostles 
 brought, which was repeated by those who heard 
 and which found so surprising response in the 
 hearts of thousands ? Three speeches in the Book 
 of Acts tell what a writer toward the end of the 
 first century believed to be the appropriate mode 
 of address to three varying types of audience at 
 Antioch of Pisidia, at Lystra, at Athens. These 
 speeches attributed to Paul are carefully adapted 
 to the needs of these several occasions, and are 
 highly instructive, whether they came from Paul 
 or not. To the Jews the fulfilment of prophecy 
 in Christ had been from the first the most effective 
 approach, and likewise for those gentiles v^^hom the 
 preacher met in the synagogue the argument that 
 in Christianity is to be found the flowering of Ju- 
 daism must have had weight. But for gentiles the 
 chief means of persuasion must always have been 
 the positive contents of Christianity; and such 
 speeches as those of Paul at Lystra and Athens 
 and in particular a verse from I Thessalonians 
 give us a trustworthy notion of what were the 
 aspects of Christian truth that Paul emphasized 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 57 
 
 in a Greek city. ''They themselves," he says, 
 ''report concerning us what manner of entering 
 in we had unto you ; and how ye turned unto God 
 from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to 
 wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised 
 from the dead, even Jesus, who delivereth us from 
 the wrath to come. ' ' ^ Monotheism, the service of 
 the living and true God instead of idols ; the Judg- 
 ment, with the whole system of moral require- 
 ments which it implied; Jesus Christ raised from 
 the dead to be the Lord in heaven, through faith in 
 whom sin is forgiven and punishment averted;— 
 these are the ideas which the Christian apostles 
 found effective. 
 
 But how were these assertions proved ? Not by 
 arguments of philosophy, nor by a logic building 
 laboriously on accepted premises ; that would have 
 been, as Paul says, to rely on persuasive words of 
 v/isdom. A strong impression was doubtless made 
 by the report of the Resurrection appearances, 
 given by men who had themselves been vouchsafed 
 those strange experiences, but the main process of 
 conviction and conversion was not one of argu- 
 ment and proof to the intellect, but "in demon- 
 stration of the Spirit and of power." That is to 
 say, Christianity did not present itself primarily 
 
 » I Thess. I. 9. 
 
58 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 as a system of thought, but as a new, free life. 
 Those to whom the privilege was offered could not, 
 did not wish to, disprove the ideas on which this 
 life rested. They were attracted by them; and 
 they accepted the help which these ideas and this 
 life gave. Many influences must have combined to 
 touch one and another,— the admirable traits of 
 character of the missionaries, the evidences, 
 partly, as we shall see, physical, of what was be- 
 lieved to be divine power present with the Chris- 
 tians, the apparent fulfilment of prophecy, the 
 interest and compelling power of the Gospel story 
 of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Nearly 
 all the elements of missionary success which we 
 find later must have been present from the first. 
 That the arguments should all seem to our critical 
 view to be sound was not necessary. Arguments 
 are always to a greater or less degree ad hominem, 
 and have their effect precisely through partaking 
 in the limitations of time and place. That the 
 fundamental truth presented was true, that the 
 life offered to eager men was real, that the argu- 
 ments and commendations were honest, was all 
 that was essential. If they still appeal to us, so 
 much the better. 
 
 Once established by the missionaries, the work 
 was carried on by the young churches themselves, 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 59 
 
 standing ''as lights in the world, holding forth 
 the word of life. ' ' Every body of Christians was 
 a missionary church. Every assembly should ex- 
 pect and hope to be visited by the unbelieving out- 
 sider, who, when he hears the inspired Christian 
 prophets ''is judged, . . the secrets of his 
 heart are made manifest ; and so he will fall down 
 on his face and worship God, declaring that God 
 is among you indeed. ' ' ^ See how anxiously Paul 
 is concerned for just those qualities in his 
 churches which are of critical importance to their 
 missionary work. He exhorts not only to purity 
 of life but also to those virtues of unity in thought 
 and feeling, the lack of which has always, as in 
 our own time, grievously hindered the progress of 
 the Gospel. Be, he says, "of one accord, of one 
 mind, doing nothing through faction"; "He that 
 herein serveth Christ is well-pleasing to God, and 
 approved of men. So then let us follow after 
 things which make for peace." 
 
 Some of the aspects of a Christian church in the 
 first century which made it a starting point of fur- 
 ther missionary influence will come before us in a 
 later chapter. The motives to missionary activity 
 among these new gentile converts remained per- 
 manently strong. The commands of the Lord 
 
 1 1 Cor. xiv. 23ff. 
 
60 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 were still repeated from mouth to mouth, the sense 
 of high privilege and the desire to bring that 
 privilege to friends and neighbors continued, the 
 competition of religions in the seething human 
 life of the first century was ever stimulating. 
 And in the place of the Jew's loyal and passionate 
 hope for the salvation of his nation, now entered 
 the no less inspiring ideal of a world-embracing 
 religion, matching the world-wide imperial civili- 
 zation in which the men of that day were proud to 
 have a share. 
 
 Of the first missionary journey outside of Syria 
 I have spoken above. The further progress of 
 Christian missions in the Roman Empire can be 
 read in the ever fascinating pages of the Book of 
 Acts. Beyond what is there communicated we 
 know but little, and the story need not here be 
 repeated. It is, however, instructive to ask what 
 were the results of the missionary operations of 
 the Christian Church for the two generations end- 
 ing with the year 100? Of the geographical ex- 
 tension of Christianity we have considerable, 
 though incomplete, knowledge. In Palestine there 
 were in the year 100 many Christians, although 
 the number was perhaps not rapidly increasing. 
 East of the Jordan, the Christians of Jerusalem, 
 who had fled before the capture of the city by 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 61 
 
 Titus in 70 a. d., had taken up their abode at 
 Pella; there had been, and doubtless were still, 
 Christians at Damascus, and we may assume that 
 there were other groups of Christians in that 
 region. Of the farthest East we know nothing. In 
 northern Syria Antioch was a great centre of 
 Christian activity and other churches existed. 
 Phoenicia had churches. So had Cilicia, which 
 belongs with Syria. In most of the provinces of 
 Asia Minor there were flourishing churches. 
 About fifteen of the chief towns are known to us 
 by name as containing Christians, and these are 
 evidently but a small part of the total. Macedonia 
 and Achaia, as far as Corinth, contained impor- 
 tant churches. Probably Crete and Epirus should 
 be added to the list. In Italy there had long been 
 Christians at Puteoli, while at Rome the move- 
 ment was strong. There may have been believers 
 in Spain, there must have been such, although we 
 have scarcely any direct knowledge, in Alex- 
 andria. A look at the map will show how wide 
 this distribution is in all the lands bordering the 
 Mediterranean Sea. 
 
 About the actual numbers of Christians we can 
 say less. We have but few figures of any sort, 
 and ancient statistics in general are reputed of 
 but little value. According to the Book of Acts 
 
62 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 there were about the year 60 many tens of thou- 
 sands of Christians among the Jews of Palestine. 
 In Rome Tacitus says that a vast multitude, multi- 
 tudo ingens, of Christians were apprehended and 
 punished under Nero. The situation depicted by 
 Pliny in his letter to Trajan from Bithjniia about 
 the year 112, is near enough to our period for us 
 to refer to its impressive picture of the influence 
 of Christianity not only in towns but in villages 
 and in the country. The people had turned to 
 the new faith to such a degree that the temples 
 were almost deserted, in many cases the sacred 
 rites had for a long time been interrupted, and so 
 few purchasers of animals for sacrifice appeared 
 that the grazing industry, which provided these 
 victims, was in distress. 
 
 If a comparison is desired, it is not unfair to 
 compare the Christian world in the year 100 with 
 the state of Japan, China, and India to-day. The 
 period of missionary work had been not far from 
 the same, and there was a permeation of the 
 various provinces, here more, there less, not unlike 
 in its various degrees to the various degrees in 
 which at present Christianity has established itself 
 in those countries of the Par East. The compari- 
 son is but a rough one, but it may be helpful. It 
 should be said, however, that to an impartial ob- 
 
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 63 
 
 server of the year 100 the prospects of Christian- 
 ity would probably have seemed distinctly less 
 good than they do to-day in Japan or even in 
 China or India. 
 
 Let us turn again to the starting-point. One 
 hundred and twenty persons, we are told, assem- 
 bled themselves in Jerusalem to wait there for the 
 coming of the Lord in glory,— faithful Jews who 
 believed that the promise of God to their nation 
 was now at last in promise of fulfilment. Seventy 
 years later perhaps every one of those earliest 
 disciples is dead; but the Jewish sect which they 
 then formed has become a brotherhood of men of 
 all classes spread through the world. Out of a 
 simple addition to Jewish doctrine and the im- 
 pulse of a new kind of life has grown the begin- 
 ning of a system of theology. There have been 
 great leaders, hard problems, acute situations, 
 earnest thought, divergent views. The problems 
 have not all appeared, much less been solved. The 
 development does not begin to be complete or even 
 mature in any direction. But good work has been 
 done, and the first century and the apostolic age 
 come to a close with their task completed. It was 
 required of this age that it should by missions 
 carry Christianity out into the great world, and 
 that it should so conceive and hold and develop 
 
64 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Christian truth that this should be possible. To 
 the changes which befell Christianity, and how 
 they occurred, to the story of its leaders and its 
 inner strains, its thought and its outer form, we 
 must now turn. 
 
Ill 
 
 JEWISH CHRISTIANITY AND ITS FATE 
 
 When we pass from the first three Gospels to 
 the speeches of the Book of Acts or the epistles of 
 Paul, we feel at once a great change. And the 
 change is not due to the fact that the writer of 
 Acts was a gentile or that Paul presents a compar- 
 atively late stage in the rapid development of the 
 apostolic church. If we had literature from the 
 earliest J3wish Christians it would stand with 
 Paul, not with the Gospels. The contrast, which is 
 so familiar that it does not need to be illustrated, 
 fairly exemplifies in its general impression, though 
 it does not in detail, the first great transition of 
 which I have already spoken, the transition which 
 created Jewish Christianity. 
 
 For three years the Twelve and the other con- 
 stant companions of Jesus of Nazareth had lived 
 in familiar, though reverent, daily intercourse 
 with their Teacher. They had joined themselves 
 to him like the pupils of a rabbi, they had grad- 
 ually come to think that he was the promised 
 
 65 
 
66 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Messiah. They had heard from him and treasured 
 in their memory countless sayings concerning the 
 Kingdom of God, spoken both for encouragement 
 to steadfastness and incitement to effort. They 
 had been taught wherein lay the essence of the 
 Law, and how to aim at a righteousness exceeding 
 that of the Scribes and Pharisees. They had heard 
 with wondering and timid incredulity the an- 
 nouncement that the Son of Man, the Christ, must 
 die in order to fulfill the Messiah 's work, and that 
 only by his death could the triumph of his cause 
 and God's kingdom come. The substance of the 
 message which they were commissioned to pro- 
 claim was, Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at 
 hand. How God would bring it in, or when, they 
 knew not. More than all else they had observed 
 the emphasis which Jesus put on the conception 
 of God as his and all men's Father; and they had 
 seen with their own eyes a life in which that con- 
 ception had its perfect embodiment and realiza- 
 tion. 
 
 There was here no new system of theological 
 thought, but only the sowing of many pregnant 
 seeds. There was no creation of a formal and in- 
 clusive society to carry on the same work, but only 
 the transformation of the lives of a few men and 
 women, to whom it could be left to work out any 
 
JEAVISH CHRISTIANITY 67 
 
 organization and theology to which their trans- 
 formed lives might lead. The supreme and dar- 
 ing trust of Jesus Christ in God is nowhere better 
 seen than in the complete absence of any careful 
 programme by which his followers could be guided 
 in the outward forms of their common life. His 
 trust has given his Church toil and care, but also 
 freedom; it has saved it blood, misery, and per- 
 manent tyranny. 
 
 To this group of persons, loosely organized, ex- 
 ternally unprepared to be a Church, but inwardly 
 profoundly stirred, came the great catastrophe. 
 In one exciting week almost every circumstance of 
 their life was altered. They found themselves 
 fugitives, their own lives perhaps in danger, their 
 Messiah dead. Instead of the firm Will and clear 
 Vision on which they had relied, trusting him to 
 see the path before them, they had but a memory 
 of his sayings. 
 
 The recovery from the shock came through the 
 resurrection appearances of Christ. The mystery 
 of these experiences historical criticism is not 
 likely ever to penetrate fully. There can, how- 
 ever, be no doubt that the first disciples passed 
 through real experiences which they believed to be 
 the appearance to them of the crucified and risen 
 Christ. This is demonstrated by the statement of 
 
68 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Paul, who included his own vision with these ap- 
 pearances, and by the unbroken agreement of the 
 earliest Christians in this faith. There were real 
 events, and their effect was momentous. It is not 
 at all surprising, in view of the demoralized ex- 
 citement of all the disciples in those days and of 
 the mysterious nature of the experiences them- 
 selves, that the accounts, even the oldest, should 
 vary widely from one another, and that it should 
 be impossible for us to frame a complete or satis- 
 factory narrative from the several statements of 
 the evangelists and of Paul. 
 
 There is reason to believe that the disciples re- 
 turned to Galilee immediately after the Crucifix- 
 ion. Three courses were there open to them. They 
 could give up their common undertaking, return 
 to work at their homes as fishermen, live as well as 
 they could in the spirit of Jesus' teaching about 
 love and righteousness, and remember as a past 
 dream their old hope that this "was he who should 
 redeem Israel." From any such purpose as this, 
 which would have brought some good men into 
 several villages of Galilee, but would have put an 
 end to the work of Jesus Christ on earth, they 
 were deterred by the call of the appearances, 
 which convinced them that Jesus had risen to 
 heaven and should come again. The presupposi- 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 69 
 
 tions necessary for this faith lay in one of the 
 previously existing Jewish conceptions of the 
 Messiah. He had sometimes been pictured not as 
 an earthly king but as a being coming with the 
 clouds of heaven, in form like unto a Son of Man 
 but destined to share in God's judgment of the 
 world. Even with this conviction, however, which 
 thus attached itself to those deeply-rooted ideas, 
 two courses were still open to them. They might 
 retire together to some sheltered spot, there culti- 
 vate the religious life apart from the dangers and 
 temptations of the world, and so wait, determined 
 that somewhere the Son of Man at his coming 
 should find faith on the earth. On the other hand, 
 a bolder course was still possible. They could 
 return to Jerusalem, and, in full light of day, at 
 that centre of Jewish hopes, where must ever be 
 the capital of God's kingdom on earth, work to 
 prepare for the return of the Lord in glory. The 
 idea was not unknown among the Jews that the 
 final resurrection would take place at Jerusalem, 
 the souls of the faithful being transported thither 
 from the ends of the earth. To Jerusalem w-ere 
 continually coming numbers of devout Jews from 
 the Dispersion to end their days in the Holy City. 
 The precise form which the impulse took and the 
 particular shade of motive which led Peter and 
 
70 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 the rest to return to Jerusalem we do not know. 
 The general cause we can see, and it may even be 
 that the desire as it lay in their own minds was 
 inarticulate though compelling. 
 
 It is already apparent that in this whole step the 
 passage is already made from the evangelical to 
 the apostolic period. The step itself implies, it 
 should be noted, as already in existence the firm 
 belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. 
 Without that it would have been meaningless and, 
 indeed, impossible. But that belief had been 
 reached even during the Galilean ministry. The 
 difference now lay in the conviction that these 
 followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who was the Christ, 
 could look to a Lord Jesus Christ in heaven. In 
 that perception all material and temporal limita- 
 tions Avere removed. This faith with all its priv- 
 ileges was possible at all times, in all places, for 
 any man. It gave a new central object to reli- 
 gious thought, and it offered the possibility of the 
 whole development of Christian theology. It has 
 often been attempted to show that the Christian 
 Church gradually deified its human founder and 
 teacher after analogies to be found in many re- 
 ligions. That statement gives no true notion of 
 the real process of the birth of Christian theology. 
 It was in the sudden agitation of those few days 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 71 
 
 in Galilee, and apparently under the lead of 
 Simon Peter that the decisive step was taken. 
 Without that step the whole would have become 
 but the happy dream of a few months, now ended 
 by a rude awakening to the light of day. But the 
 momentous step once taken, Jesus the Messiah 
 once believed on as Lord in heaven, and the 
 Church could not stop. AVhat followed was not 
 the gradual elevation of Jesus from humanity to 
 deity ; it was the gradual analysis of the problem 
 set once for all at the outset, the slow definition 
 of what was involved in this indefinite exaltation 
 of the Messiah. The so-called logos-christology 
 gave its aid, and at last the acute Greek mind 
 wrought out to a logical issue the implication 
 of each element in the apostolic conception. The 
 battle was fought in the controversies of the 
 fourth century, and reached its ecclesiastical set- 
 tlement in the Nicene Creed, but the problem was 
 fully set by the fishermen apostles when they 
 turned their faces again toward Jerusalem. The 
 next three centuries were only the application of 
 philosophy and criticism to its solution. The 
 writers of the earliest Christian histories fol- 
 lowed a true instinct when they represented the 
 Church as receiving its commission from the risen 
 Christ. AYhether or not any words were then 
 
72 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 actually heard, Avhatever the real character of 
 the appearances, it was in truth by these appear- 
 ances that the body of disciples became in any 
 proper sense a Church, a body conscious of its 
 own independence because possessed of a faith 
 whereby it was to conquer the world. 
 
 We have to think of the disciples returning 
 to Jerusalem as mainly occupied with the expecta- 
 tion of the speedy coming back to earth of their 
 Lord. Of that day and hour no man knew, nor 
 angel, neither the Son; but that it should be 
 within their own life-time, of that there was no 
 doubt. They had been told with insistent repeti- 
 tion to watch and be alert for the coming of 
 the Master. They were the Messiah's People, 
 they must be ready to take their rightful place, 
 the Twelve judging the twelve tribes of Israel, 
 and each in his lot, when the great and notable 
 Day of the Lord should come. 
 
 We shall not err in picturing to ourselves the 
 thought of these disciples as perfectly naive and 
 realistic. This is the impression carefully in- 
 stilled by the Gospels and the Book of Acts, and 
 it is wholly in accord with all that we know or 
 can suppose. Their intellectual horizon Avas 
 limited, their modes and instruments of thought 
 crude, but they carried in these earthen vessels 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 73 
 
 a precious treasure, and were worthy to be the 
 founders of the Christian Church. For they pos- 
 sessed two things that the world did not have: 
 first, the new spiritual life, led in humble depend- 
 ence on God as Father, into which Jesus had 
 brought them, and which they had seen in him 
 and received from him ; and secondly, the sublime 
 and inspiring faith in Jesus Christ by which they 
 lived, and by which they knew themselves to 
 be the heirs of the ages. Herein they held the 
 power to perpetuate Christianity so long as faith 
 and hope should abide; herein was capacity for 
 an endless continuity through all the changing 
 forms which the unfolding course of Christian 
 history was destined to produce. 
 
 The greatest crisis of all Christian history had 
 now been passed, and the outcome was a small 
 body of Jewish separatists, at first hardly over one 
 hundred in number, dwelling as a sort of 
 community in Jerusalem. Such sects were not 
 unkno^^Ti in Judaism. The Essenes were such 
 a one, although not at Jerusalem. The Pharisees, 
 too, were just such a sect within Judaism. These 
 last were, indeed, in public influence and im- 
 portance utterly unlike the weak and humble 
 Christian Church, but in the Christians' claim 
 that they alone truly represented the Israel of 
 
74 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 God we have something much like the attitude 
 of the powerful Pharisaic sect. From the point 
 of view of the Jewish civil authorities there was 
 doubtless reason enough to deem this new sect dan- 
 gerous, but in the \dew of the Christians them- 
 selves they were full members of the common- 
 wealth of Israel, rightfully present in their own 
 Holy City, and naturally observing aU the cus- 
 toms of pious Israelites. Yet even as a sect within 
 Judaism they had a firm and sufficient principle 
 of independent organic life, and their conscious- 
 ness of their own permanent distinction from the 
 unbelieving Jews must have grown with every de- 
 velopment of their circumstances. 
 
 Our knowledge of the life and thought of these 
 primitive Christians — primitive we may well think 
 in more than one sense— is very limited. What 
 we have comes partly from inferences as to what 
 must have been the case in the given circum- 
 stances; partly from the traditions recorded in 
 Acts, which are useful but less ample than they 
 might at first appear; partly from hints in the 
 epistles of Paul and in the Gospels. The evi- 
 dence contained in the Gospels, although difficult 
 to elicit, is important. It is to be found by ob- 
 serving what subjects most interested the Chris- 
 tians among whom these memories of the life 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 75 
 
 and teachings of Jesus were preserved and first 
 formulated. An example of this method has al- 
 ready been given in the use of the Missionary 
 Discourse as recorded by Matthew. Another exam- 
 ple is the marked emphasis seen in the Gospels on 
 the idea of the speedy Second Coming of Christ. 
 This was evidently a main subject of reflec- 
 tion in the minds of those to whom we owe the 
 tradition. And so in general by the choice they 
 made of sayings to remember and transmit they 
 put of necessity their own stamp on the Gospel 
 tradition. And so in general by the choice they 
 of themselves and their own thinking. 
 
 With regard to the historical value of the 
 earlier chapters of Acts we must recognize that, 
 as we have seen, these do not come to us directly 
 from a member of the primitive Jewish com- 
 mxunity. The result of criticism, the methods of 
 which have been somewhat described in a pre- 
 vious chapter, is to give a fair degree of con- 
 fidence in the picture of the general development 
 of events, while the detail seems in many cases 
 to be merely a part of the telling of the story. 
 The speeches of Peter which constitute a large 
 part of these chapters would be a great aid in our 
 task if we could be sure that they are more than 
 the free composition of the writer of the book. 
 
76 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Unfortunately their style, their lack of the in- 
 imitable elements which could not have been the 
 free invention of the author, their apparent pur- 
 pose to present to the readers an agreeably varied 
 (although curiously uniform) account of early 
 Christian ideas, their close resemblance to the 
 speech of Stephen and the first and longest speech 
 of Paul (that at Antioch)— all these considera- 
 tions make it more probable that the writer is here 
 only following the general custom of ancient 
 historians, made most famous by Thucydides, and 
 giving us as a literary decoration of his narra- 
 tive what Peter might naturally be supposed to 
 have said. They cannot be used with any con- 
 fidence as presenting distinctive ideas of Peter. 
 And yet the author has shown great skill and, 
 dramatic sympathy in their composition, and in 
 view of what we otherwise know, we may believe 
 that these speeches give us in the main a not un- 
 fair notion of what Jewish Christians thought and 
 preached. For the view that the speech of Stephen 
 is based upon actual recollection communicated 
 to our author, more can be said. But it shows 
 throughout our author's literary style, and its 
 present form is his. For a striking contrast to 
 this whole type of speeches we have but to turn 
 to the twentieth chapter of Acts and read the 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 77 
 
 speech of Paul to the elders at Miletus. By many 
 marks of individuality and originality it arrests 
 attention as the record of what someone, per- 
 haps our author himself, actually heard on that 
 occasion. 
 
 Upon the questions which arise about the de- 
 tails of the events with which the story in Acts 
 begins we shall not linger. That a choice was 
 made to fill the place of the traitor Judas in 
 the board of twelve apostolic dignitaries is con- 
 firmed both by the fact that the names mentioned 
 are otherwise unknown to us, and by Paul 's refer- 
 ences to ''the Twelve" a few years later. More 
 important than this event is the day of Pentecost. 
 Exactly what took place on that day we cannot 
 know, for the account as given us in Acts is 
 probably an embellished form of the recollec- 
 tion of the Church. This account, however, could 
 hardly have arisen at all unless there had been a 
 momentous occasion, when under great spiritual 
 excitement the Christians at Jerusalem became 
 convinced that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit 
 foretold by Joel and perhaps by John the Baptist, 
 the mark of the new era, had come to pass. 
 Through the experiences of that day the great 
 change wrought by the resurrection appearances 
 seems to have been confirmed, and from that day 
 
78 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 onward the Church was able to stand forth with 
 the bold confidence of an independent body. It 
 has been suggested by some, and not without 
 plausibility, that these experiences of the Day 
 of Pentecost were the same which the Gospel 
 of John has connected with the appearance of 
 the risen Lord to the disciples on the very Sun- 
 day of the Resurrection. 
 
 When therefore it was evening, on that day, the 
 first day of the week, and when the doors were 
 shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, 
 Jesus came and stood in the midst and saith unto 
 them, Peace be unto you. And when he had said 
 this, he showed unto them his hands and his side. 
 The disciples therefore were glad, when they saw 
 the Lord. Jesus therefore said to them again. 
 Peace he unto you: as the Father hath sent me, 
 even so send I you. And when he had said this, 
 he breathed on them, and saith unto them. Re- 
 ceive ye the Holy Spirit: whose soever sins ye 
 forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever 
 sins ye retain, they are retained.^ 
 In this symbolic account, as in Acts, the dis- 
 ciples are endued with the Holy Spirit, and so 
 empowered are sent forth into the world. 
 
 Of the life of these earliest Christians after 
 
 iJohn XX. 19-23. 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 79 
 
 the Day of Pentecost the Book of Acts gives 
 us the following description, a text to which the 
 well-known incidents appended in Acts provide 
 striking and instructive illustrations. 
 
 And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' 
 teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread 
 and the prayers. 
 
 And fear came upon every soul: and many won- 
 ders and signs were done through the apostles. 
 And all that believed were together, and had all 
 things common; and they sold their possessions 
 and goods, and parted them to all, according as 
 any man had need. And day by day, continuing 
 stedfastly with one accord in the temple, and 
 breaking bread at home, they took their food 
 with gladness and singleness of heart, praising 
 God, and having favor with all the people. And 
 the Lord added to them day by day those that 
 were saved.^ 
 
 This description is confirmed by all that we 
 know and by what we can infer or suppose. The 
 Christians had come to Jerusalem to wait for 
 the coming of the Lord from heaven. Hence they 
 mainly devoted themselves not to the ordinary 
 occupations of life, buying and selling, marrying 
 
 1 Acts ii. 42-47. 
 
80 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and giving in marriage, but, as was natural, to 
 practices of the religious life, prayer, common 
 meals, reflection, conference, discussion, and, we 
 may add, the study of the Scriptures, for which 
 a new Christian interpretation was speedily found. 
 All these were the works of Jewish piety, and 
 that these Christians were faithful and conscien- 
 tious observers of the Jewish Law is attested by 
 all our sources. In short, they lived as pious 
 separatists of every age have done. The more 
 well-to-do contributed constantly for the needs 
 of the poorer, but there is abundant reason to 
 believe that that was due to a generous and en- 
 thusiastic charity, and not to any fundamental 
 principle of communistic organization. Works of 
 healing, performed in the name of Jesus of Naza- 
 reth and thus carrying on his ministry of heal- 
 ing, are reported to us, and we need not doubt 
 that then, as at other times since in the world's 
 history, such cures took place. That the mem- 
 bers of the earliest Church included some only 
 half-worthy persons is expressly stated. In one 
 such case, whatever we may think of possible 
 legendary growth in details, the startling death 
 of the person or persons involved was believed 
 to be God's direct punishment for signal mean- 
 ness, and the incident was long remembered. It 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 81 
 
 is full of instruction for us to know that besides 
 a Barnabas and a Stephen the earliest Church had 
 its Ananias and Sapphira. 
 
 In their ideas these good people were funda- 
 mentally Jews, and Jews of a popular, semi-phar- 
 isaic, messianistic t}^e. They had been trained, 
 however, by Jesus Christ to emphasize the reali- 
 ties of Jewish thought and practice, and they 
 preserved in memory some sayings of their Mas- 
 ter which had a notably free tendency with re- 
 gard to Jewish legal prescriptions. But we have 
 no reason to think that they had at all changed 
 their own personal habits from Jewish customary 
 usage. To Jewish theology, as we have seen, 
 they must, from the first, have added the belief 
 that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, that he 
 had ascended to heaven, and would come again 
 in glory. Beyond this their reflection had at 
 least occupied itself with the prophecies of the 
 Old Testament, and with what was ever to the 
 Jews a stumbling-block, the pressing problem 
 given by the crucifixion. Paul says in I Corin- 
 thians, "I delivered unto you first of all that 
 which also I received: that Christ died for our 
 siiis according to the Scriptures."^ It is evi- 
 dent that these earliest believers quickly came 
 
 1 1 Cor. XV. 3. 
 
82 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 to recognize that the amazing and disconcerting 
 fact of the Messiah's death could be adequately- 
 accounted for only by understanding it as the 
 very means whereby his ministry was performed 
 and the ransom for many paid. The Jewish 
 Christians apparently conceived of the Cross as 
 providing a means of salvation supplementary 
 to the Law, the works of which, although required 
 of all, were inadequate to secure the desired end. 
 As to the other subjects of their thought besides 
 the messiahship of Jesus, the fulfilment of proph- 
 ecy, and the meaning of the crucifixion, it was 
 doubtless largely occupied with the precepts and 
 parables preserved for us in the first three Gos- 
 pels and with the questions raised in apologetic 
 discussion with their Jewish neighbors. They 
 used the Aramaic language which Jesus himself 
 employed. Unfortunately no literature (except 
 the material of the Gospels) which comes with 
 any certainty from these Jewish Christians has 
 been handed down to us, and our own knowledge 
 of the development of their thought must always 
 remain imperfect and conjectural. They seem 
 to have produced no great thinker, for Peter 
 was gifted with flashes of inspired insight rather 
 than with the power of creative thought. 
 
 The organization of the Jewish Christians was 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 83 
 
 doubtless such as suited the needs of the simple 
 sect which I have described. The leader was 
 Peter, whose native force of character and true 
 devotion had regained for him the position from 
 which his denial of his Lord might have been 
 expected permanently to exclude him. His restor- 
 ation to the confidence of the disciples is shadowed 
 forth in the affecting and mysterious narrative 
 appended as a twenty-first chapter to the Gos- 
 pel of John. With him stood the rest of the 
 Twelve. For certain special services in the ad- 
 ministration of charity seven men were appointed. 
 A little later we hear of presbyters, or elders. 
 The Seven are probably not to be identified with 
 the deacons of the gentile churches, and what 
 relation they sustained to the elders is uncer- 
 tain. That the hierarchical organization of the 
 Catholic Church was due to the Jewish element 
 in Christianity there is no reason to suppose ; all 
 that we hear of Jewish Christianity implies a loose 
 and free organization. 
 
 The Christian Church is said to have been 
 looked on with favor by the Jewish community 
 around it by reason of the piety of the believ- 
 ers and the evidences of divine power among 
 them. With the authorities from time to time 
 there came difficulties. The leaders of the Church 
 
84 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 were arrested and imprisoned, but were released. 
 The grounds of the arrest seem to have been 
 a charge of revolutionary and seditious utter- 
 ance. This may have happened more than once. 
 At last Stephen, a man of prominence among the 
 Christians, was brought before the Sanhedrim, 
 and in defiance of the limitations put by the 
 Romans on the administration of criminal law 
 in capital cases, at what must have been a moment 
 of great weakness in the procurator's government, 
 he was murdered. The touching simplicity of 
 the narrative of his bloody end yields only to 
 the story of the crucifixion in its moving power. 
 His death was the signal for the general persecu- 
 tion led by Saul, then a young fanatic from among 
 the Jews of the Dispersion. 
 
 Of Stephen's ideas we know only from the 
 speech in the seventh chapter of Acts, which 
 may possibly contain something remembered from 
 the occasion and transmitted to the author from 
 whose hand the speech in its present form comes 
 to "US. It has often been held that in this speech 
 Stephen shows himself to have made progress 
 away from Judaism toward such freedom from 
 the Jewish Law as Paul afterward taught. * ' The 
 Most High," he says, ''dwelleth not in houses 
 made with hands;" and he retorts upon his ac- 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 85 
 
 cusers, ^'Ye stiff necked and uncirciimcised in 
 heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy 
 Spirit; as your fathers did, so do ye." But the 
 former words are themselves taken in part from 
 the Old Testament, and go no further than all 
 Jews would have gone in the affirmation of spirit- 
 ual monotheism; while in the attack on the Jews, 
 who "received the law as it was ordained by an- 
 gels and kept it not," he seems, as in the rest of 
 his speech, merely to rest on the common position 
 of early Christianity that not the unbelieving 
 but only the believing and Christian Jews are 
 the true people of God and the faithful and 
 deserving heirs of the promises. The question 
 of the abrogation of the Jewish law could hardly, 
 it seems, arise, so long as all Christians were Jews 
 and proud of their race and lineage. 
 
 The persecution, however, which began with 
 the death of Stephen did have momentous con- 
 sequences for the Christian Church. In the first 
 place it increased the breach between this new 
 sect of the Jews and the orthodox Jewish body, 
 and showed that permanent harmony was not 
 likely to ensue; and in the second place, as we 
 have seen in the last chapter, it drove Chris- 
 tianity to wider fields of missionary activity, and 
 at Antioeh even beyond the bounds of the Jew- 
 
S6 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ish nation. From this moment there came a new 
 and impelling passion to the Christian Church 
 further to extend its field. The Acts has pre- 
 served a few incidents, notable for one reason or 
 another, and therefore remembered. They include 
 accounts of the conversion to Christ of an Ethio- 
 pian high official, and a Roman centurion at Cass- 
 area named Cornelius, doubtless exceptional cases 
 of the conversion of persons of gentile birth al- 
 ready more or less addicted to the Jewish religion. 
 Objection has been taken to the stories, but hardly 
 with reason, so far as the main fact in each case is 
 concerned. These were isolated heralds of the 
 great next stage, — gentile Christianity and the 
 work of Paul, Antioch, Asia Minor, Greece, Rome. 
 At the same time with these beginnings of 
 foreign extension Jewish Christianity in Pales- 
 tine continued in its own course. After the con- 
 version to Christ of the fire-eating Saul of Tarsus 
 the persecution abated, and the disciples returned 
 to Jerusalem. About the year 44 a brief time of 
 sharp persecution is reported in which James the 
 son of Zebedee, one of the Twelve, lost his life. 
 At this time Peter — and perhaps others of the 
 Twelve— undertook missionary work away from 
 Jerusalem, and Peter's place as acknowledged 
 leader was taken by James, the Lord's brother. 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 87 
 
 It may well be that with the springing up of 
 gentile churches the conservative Christians who 
 continued to breathe the somewhat stagnant reli- 
 gious air of the Jewish capital turned from these 
 unforeseen innovations more and more tenaciously 
 to the solid foundation of the Jewish Law. We 
 are also told that the new-comers into the Church, 
 who in any case had lacked the influence of Jesus 
 Christ's free thought, were from the PharLsees. It 
 is not improbable that the departure of Peter and 
 Barnabas, and later Mark and Silas, from Jerusa- 
 lem was partly occasioned by a growing closeness 
 of atmosphere felt by the more liberal minds. 
 At any rate the only glimpses we have of Chris- 
 tian life at Jerusalem after the persecution show 
 an insistent party Avho maintained that the whole 
 gentile Christian development was contrary to 
 the truth. No man, they said, can belong to the 
 people of God and expect to share in the salva- 
 tion to be brought by God's Messiah, who does 
 not conform to God's law, undergo circumcision, 
 and live as a Jew. The Law, while not ade- 
 quate to give salvation, is indispensable to salva- 
 tion. 
 
 Of the earlier growth of this attitude we only 
 know that, according to the Book of Acts, Peter 
 once came under its censure, but that it did not 
 
88 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 control the opinion of the majority of the Church 
 at Jerusalem. Before long, however, somewhat 
 after the establishment of gentile churches in 
 Asia Minor, those who held this view took meas- 
 ures to put their conviction into effect at Antioch, 
 the church where the liberal spirit was most con- 
 spicuous. Of the result we learn both from Acts 
 and from the epistle of Paul to the Galatians.^ 
 It was a great crisis for the apostolic age and for 
 Christian history. Fortunately for all after 
 time the Judaizing emissaries encountered at An- 
 tioch an able, resolute, and clear-sighted opponent 
 in the Apostle Paul. He fully recognized that 
 such progress of Christianity in the world as he 
 had already conceived,— extending through gen- 
 tile countries, but yet not cut loose from the 
 original city where centred the precious tradi- 
 tions of the life and death and resurrection of 
 its Lord,— would be impossible if the narrower 
 spirits won the day. In consequence of PauPs 
 firm stand the conference of which we read in 
 the fifteenth chapter of Acts took place at Jeru- 
 salem. The fate of Christianity hung on the 
 result. If the leaders— James, Peter, and John— 
 and the greater part of the church of Jeru- 
 salem had refused to countenance Paul's Gos- 
 
 1 Acts XV. 1-35 ; Gal. ii. 1-10. 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 89 
 
 pel with its freedom from the Law for gentiles, 
 we cannot suppose that Paul would have sub- 
 mitted to their wishes and preached circumcision 
 and the Law. Nor can we suppose that he, upon 
 whom a necessity was laid that he should preach 
 the Gospel, would have spent the rest of his life 
 making tents. But the unity of the Church 
 would have been broken, the dangers of irrespon- 
 sible speculation in distant lands without restraint 
 from the traditions of the life and teachings of 
 Jesus Christ the Head, would have been enor- 
 mously increased, the fear which Paul expresses 
 of practical shipwreck of his work would prob- 
 ably have been fulfilled. A Christian church 
 excommunicated by the mother-church, knowing 
 itself to be but a step-child, unable to make good 
 its claim to continuity with the past, would prob- 
 ably have been a failure. What form the presenta- 
 tion to the world of pure spiritual religion would 
 have taken we cannot know, but Christianity as we 
 know it would never have come into being. For- 
 tunately the balance turned the other way; the 
 pillars of the church at Jerusalem recognized 
 the gentile Christians as Christians indeed, and 
 the day was saved, for Paul and for us. It is 
 not likely, however, that any one of the three 
 leaders on the Jewish side saw that the ulti- 
 
90 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 mate abrogation of the Law for Jews as well as 
 gentiles would be the outcome of the recognition 
 then given to a manifest work of God. 
 
 From this time on, however, the Christians 
 at Jerusalem seem to have grown more and more 
 devoted to the observances of the Jewish reli- 
 gion. Before Paul went to Jerusalem for the 
 last time he expressed, in writing to Kome, his 
 appre?iension as to the reception he might re- 
 ceive from his countrymen,^ and we read in Acts 
 that at that time the Christians of Judasa were 
 many thousands in number and all zealous for 
 the Law. James, their leader, is described by 
 an early writer as a man of singular holiness after 
 the Jewish pattern, a thorough Jewish ascetic, 
 spending his life in prayer in the Temple. He 
 himself recognized the legitimacy of Paul's work, 
 and, so far as we know, always continued faith- 
 ful to the attitude of approval of Paul which 
 he shared with Peter and John at Jerusalem; 
 but there were irreconcilables in his church, and 
 of them we have to hear altogether too often in 
 the epistles of Paul. At Antioch, in the churches 
 of Galatia, at Corinth we find Judaizing emis- 
 saries, evidently bringing letters of recommenda- 
 tion from the church at Jerusalem and appeal- 
 
 iRom. XV. 30-32. 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 91 
 
 ing to its authority, who try to undermine Paul's 
 work by opposing his doctrine and attacking his 
 person. 
 
 During Paul's lifetime these disturbers of the 
 peace were not able to break the connection be- 
 tween the two branches of the Church, nor, so far 
 as we know, permanently to withdraw any of 
 Paul's churches from their loyal allegiance to 
 him as their founder and father. Their purpose 
 was doubtless entirely honest, they heartily be- 
 lieved that salvation could come only to those 
 who obeyed the Law. The contest is highly in- 
 teresting in two aspects. On the one hand it is 
 the first of the long series of controversies be- 
 tween that type of Christianity which relies on 
 external observances and sacraments as in them- 
 selves, so to speak physically, valid, and the inner 
 and spiritual ideal of the higher forms of Chris- 
 tianity. This was the way in which Paul ap- 
 prehended the struggle; and the same conflict 
 is present with us in our own day. To the 
 Judaizers, on the other hand, the significance of 
 the conflict doubtless lay quite elsewhere. Their 
 contentions were due to a sincere wish to main- 
 tain proper respect for the past and especially 
 due regard for morals. They believed them- 
 selves to be fighting against an unregulated re- 
 
92 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ligiousness, bearing the name of freedom and 
 liable to ethical laxity and perversion. At the 
 present day many Protestants, at least, have 
 learned to believe that Paul was right, with refer- 
 ence to each of these two aspects of the conflict. 
 He was right, not only because he was defending 
 the spiritual character of true religion as against 
 religious materialism, but also because he was in- 
 sisting on, and trusting, the living freedom of 
 faith as against the strait- jacket of a code of 
 morality. 
 
 But if these Judaizers were honest, they were 
 none the less hateful. Paul's fierce irony and 
 invective in II Corinthians and Galatians let 
 us see how bitterly personal was their attack. 
 **For we are not bold to number or compare 
 ourselves with certain of them that commend 
 themselves ; but they themselves, measuring them- 
 selves by themselves, and comparing themselves 
 with themselves, are without understanding.*' 
 "I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent 
 beguiled Eve in his craftiness, your minds 
 should be corrupted from the simplicity and 
 the purity that is toward Christ.'* "Such men 
 are false apostles, deceitful workers, fashioning 
 themselves into apostles of Christ." They are 
 Satan's ministers, *' whose end shall be accord- 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 93 
 
 ing to their works." And to the Galatians, "I 
 marvel/' says Paul, ''that ye are so quickly re- 
 moving from him [i.e. God] that called you 
 in the grace of Christ, unto a different Gospel." 
 *'0 foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you?" 
 *'They compel you to be circumcised, only that 
 they may not be persecuted for the cross of 
 Christ." ''They desire to have you circumcised, 
 that they may glory in your flesh." "I would 
 that they that unsettle you would even cut them- 
 selves off." 
 
 Besides the fierceness and sharpness of this con- 
 test which raged in the years of Paul's active 
 missionary life, two facts are noteworthy in this 
 connection. First, the reverence for the Church 
 at Jerusalem and the Twelve which made pos- 
 sible the efforts of these teachers who came with 
 letters of commendation from Jerusalem. The 
 danger of their succeeding, the existence at Cor- 
 inth of a party named after Peter, the concern 
 of Paul about his reception at Jerusalem, his 
 mode of referring to the Twelve both in I Cor- 
 inthians and in II Corinthians all testify to this. 
 And, secondly, still more significant is the fact 
 that in every case Paul seems to have succeeded 
 in checking these movements. With the prog- 
 ress of their enterprise, the Judaizers show less 
 
94 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 of insistence on circumcision and the precepts 
 of the Law, and devote themselves more exclu- 
 sively to their personal attack on Paul and the 
 effort to destroy his prestige and influence. The 
 contrast between Galatians and II Corinthians 
 is here striking and conclusive. Equally so is 
 the corresponding circumstance that in Paul's 
 later writings this controversy with Judaizing 
 emissaries from the church at Jerusalem disap- 
 pears. It was so by no means the controlling 
 characteristic of the apostolic age. It was not 
 even the exclusive occupation of Paul's own life 
 and thoughts. 
 
 Jewish Christianity failed to dominate the grow- 
 ing Church throughout the world, and coinci- 
 dently with this failure its importance in Chris- 
 tian history gradually diminished. For the gentile 
 churches the controversy was but the averting of a 
 dangerous but never victorious attack on their 
 liberties; for Jewish Christianity it was a life 
 and death struggle. When Jewish Christianity 
 once suffered the loss of its leadership and con- 
 trol, its case was hopeless. In the year 70 Jeru- 
 salem was taken by Titus, the Temple burned, 
 and the city, excepting a few towers and parts 
 of the walls, razed to the ground. Some years 
 before this James, the Christian leader, had been 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY 95 
 
 put to death, on charges which are obscure to 
 us, by the Sadducean authorities. Not long after 
 that, the usual conditions of turbulence in Pales- 
 tine were greatly aggravated; Jerusalem soon 
 became a horrible scene of bloody partisan strife 
 and mob violence; and at last the Christians — 
 how many in number we do not know— withdrew 
 from the Holy City, fled across the Jordan, and 
 took up their residence in the gentile town of 
 Pella. Without a centre, without any important 
 general organization, without any great leader, 
 Jewish Christianity as a distinctive power in 
 the Christian Church came to its end. There 
 continued to be Christians in Palestine. Some 
 of these, like Hegesippus in the second century, 
 entered wholly into sympathy with general 
 church thought. Others maintained their na- 
 tional characteristics, and, like the similar bodies 
 of Christian Jews in other parts of the world, were 
 more or less well known to Christian writers for 
 several centuries as Nazarene or Ebionite Chris- 
 tians. Cut off from the main Church, and treated 
 as heretics, they gradually disappear from view. 
 It seems almost like irony when about 150 a. d., 
 eighty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, 
 Justin Martyr^ actually apologizes for his own 
 
 1 Dial. 47. 
 
96 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 liberality in holding that some Christians who ob- 
 serve the institutions of Judaism can be saved. 
 It marks the complete reduction of specific Jewish 
 Christianity to the position of a half -tolerated 
 sect. 
 
 Once later this sect came forward with a great 
 literary product. Out of the Jewish Christian 
 sect known as Elxaites there proceeded, possibly 
 at the end of the second century, a religious 
 romance from which the long and tedious lit- 
 erature still extant and known as the Clemen- 
 tine Homilies and Recognitions has grown. It 
 is a glorification of Peter, in which Paul is per- 
 haps not attacked but only ignored. It was 
 widely read, but its theological importance and 
 influence have been greatly exaggerated in modern 
 times. These same Elxaites, however, have one 
 channel of influence which holds strong to-day. 
 In one of their communities dwelt for a time 
 in the sixth century Mohammed, the prophet of 
 Islam, and from this sect ]\Iohammedanism seems 
 to have derived its strange Christian and Jewish 
 elements. There could scarcely be a better illus- 
 tration of how Jewish Christianity, divorced from 
 the vigorous life of the active world, was tossed, 
 degenerate, into the mixed pot of oriental reli- 
 gious syncretism. 
 
JEWISH CHRISTIANITY. 97 
 
 Jewish Christianity was the first stage in the 
 history of the Christian Church, and as such it 
 completed its work and passed away. In its char- 
 acter of a Jewish sect of simple **poor men," 
 occupied in combining Jewish religious observ- 
 ances with the literal fulfilment of the precepts 
 of Jesus, it was the necessary passage from the 
 days of Jesus' ministry to the long years of work 
 in the world, of theological dispute, of public 
 influence, of fiery trial and final triumph. But 
 the Christians among the Jews tried to preserve 
 their character as Jewish Christians in opposi- 
 tion to the irrepressible inner impulse of Chris- 
 tianity to offer itself to the world and to ven- 
 ture into the surging sea of the world's life. 
 Therewith they became a body of reactionary con- 
 servatives within the Christian Church, instead 
 of being merely the advanced progressives of the 
 Jewish nation, and from that moment Jewish 
 Christianity was an anachronism, and its healthy 
 and vigorous life was past; the living organism 
 had become a fossil. 
 
 But although Jewish Christianity thus resigned 
 its place to a type of Christianity that knew bet- 
 ter how to apprehend the essential and neglect 
 the encumbering, it had yet made already its 
 own primary contribution to Christian history 
 
98 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and Christian thought. Many are the ways by 
 which Jewish influences came into Christian 
 thought,— through the Jew Paul, through Jews 
 converted in Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Alex- 
 andria, through Jewish ideas spread through the 
 world. But all these are far less significant than 
 those fundamental possessions which Christian- 
 ity had from the start, which gentile Christian- 
 ity derived from Jewish Christianity, and which 
 the Christian Church could not have had if the 
 life of Christ had been injected by itself into 
 the gentile world. We may mention some of these 
 things which we owe to Jewish Christianity. 
 First, we must name the tradition of the life 
 of Jesus contained in the Gospels; secondly, the 
 idea of the Messiah, and the whole theological 
 system which it implies, together with the notions 
 of faith, salvation, and vicarious suffering ; third, 
 the apocalyptic spirit, which is the spirit of as- 
 sured confidence in the triumph of God's cause, 
 and is indispensable; fourth, the Old Testament. 
 Christianity could have existed without some, pos- 
 sibly without any,' of these. It could not have 
 been what it is, it is hard to see how it could 
 have long survived, without all of them. 
 
IV 
 
 THE APOSTLE PAUL 
 
 Of one individual man in the apostolic age 
 we are able to have direct personal knowledge, 
 and it is by no accident that the Apostle Paul 
 looms up as the greatest single figure in the 
 records and traditions of Christianity in that 
 period. The opportunity we have of acquaintance 
 with him is, indeed, partly due to his rare power 
 of self-expression and delight in it. But it is 
 also, and in no less measure, due to the real 
 greatness of the man, without which the ex- 
 pressions of himself would not have been called 
 forth, would not have been interesting to his 
 contemporaries, and would not have been pre- 
 served for us. Of our only narrative of events 
 in the apostolic age, the Book of Acts, Paul is 
 the chief and undisputed hero ; of the impression 
 left by his personality on the generation immedi- 
 ately succeeding the apostolic age we have evi- 
 dence in the words of Ignatius and of Poly- 
 carp within fifty or sixty years of his death, as 
 
100 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 well as from Clement, who, waiting at Rome 
 about the year 95, speaks of Paul as one who 
 ** gained the noble renown which was the reward 
 of his faith, having taught righteousness unto the 
 whole world." 
 
 For Paul's continued influence we have but 
 to think of the inclusion of his writings in the 
 canon of Scripture, and of the early attribu- 
 tion to his words of the full inspiration of God 
 implied thereby. And if it be said that the 
 Catholic Church through the longer period of 
 its history has honored his name without appro- 
 priating the substance of his thought, we have 
 but to look at the great influences which have 
 formed the religion of northern Europe and to- 
 day rule there and on the continent of North 
 America and in the budding Christianity of 
 eastern Asia to see that from the time when 
 Martin Luther rediscovered— or, shall we say, first 
 fully apprehended— the meaning of Paul to the 
 present time, no interpretation of Jesus Christ 
 has approached in power over the hearts and 
 lives of men that which the epistles of Paul 
 the Apostle offer us. To-day in spite of the 
 remoteness of Paul's time, of his dependence 
 on a background of thought and a view of the 
 world which has disappeared, and of the repel- 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 101 
 
 lent strangeness of much of his method of thought 
 and argument, we yet find the learned and 
 critical scholar, the practical pastor, the simple 
 and uneducated Christian alike drawing from 
 this prismatic Paul, each in his own measure, 
 guidance and inspiration. 
 
 The Apostle Paul was the great leader in the 
 momentous transition which characterized the 
 apostolic age, the transition from a prevailingly 
 Jewish to a prevailingly gentile Christianity. Un- 
 der his guidance Christianity was saved from 
 atrophy and death, which threatened it if it 
 remained confined in Palestine. At the same 
 time, by reason of his insight into the truth of 
 the Gospel and fidelity to it, as well as by his 
 devotion to the Old Testament and loyalty to the 
 highest Jewish ideals in which he had been reared, 
 he saved Christianity from the moral and reli- 
 gious degeneracy to which it would surely have 
 been brought if it had broken with its past, and 
 had tried to stand alone and helpless amid the 
 whirl of Greek religious movements of the first 
 and second Christian centuries. In Paul a great 
 force of onward movement and a profound and 
 conscious radicalism were combined with funda- 
 mentally conservative principles. 
 
 Paul appears to have been born at not far 
 
102 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 from the same time as Jesus Christ. His parents 
 were residents of Tarsus in Cilicia, to which 
 city there is reason to think that they had re- 
 moved from the town of Gischala in northern 
 Galilee. The father, like many Jews, had the 
 privilege of Roman citizenship. This passed by 
 inheritance to the son, and made him a free- 
 man, with all the rights thereto appertaining, 
 throughout the Roman empire. The parents were, 
 however, not hellenized Jews who had abandoned 
 the Aramaic language, and opened themselves to 
 the influences and conformed in a measure to 
 the customs of the Hellenic world in which they 
 lived. They had retained the language and cus- 
 toms of Hebrews, and were Pharisees, as perhaps 
 had been also Paul's grandfather. To their 
 son they gave the name Saul, a name not uncom- 
 mon among Jews of this period and recalling the 
 great king of the tribe of Benjamin to which 
 the family belonged. He must also as a Roman 
 citizen have had a complete Roman name, with 
 nomen, cognomen and praenomen ; but of this only 
 what appears to be the cognomen Paulus has come 
 down to us. They also sent him to Jerusalem to 
 be educated. The connection of the family with 
 Jerusalem is further shown by the fact that Paul 
 seems later to have had a sister married there, 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 103 
 
 whose son by his timely warning once saved the 
 Apostle's life. 
 
 In Jerusalem the boy will have become ac- 
 quainted with the Jewish common law by which 
 the rabbis, like judicial authorities in all times, 
 supplemented the ancient statutes. He will also 
 have learned the rabbinical logic and dialectics, of 
 which his epistles show him a master, and have 
 addressed himself profoundly to the study of 
 what we may call the theological system of his 
 famous teacher, Gamaliel the elder. And he will 
 doubtless have greatly deepened his knowledge of 
 the Hebrew language and of the original text of 
 the Hebrew Bible. 
 
 This Hebrew and rabbinical discipline appears 
 to have combined with something of Greek edu- 
 cation. Tarsus in the first century was an im- 
 portant university town, and it is especially 
 noted concerning it that the men of learning 
 were not imported from other places, but were 
 natives of the city. The influence of Greek 
 learning on Paul is not easy to measure. There 
 is barely a quotation from any Greek writer in 
 Paul's writings, and but little of the technical 
 phrases or ideas of the Greek philosophy of his 
 time. Of all this his epistles show no more than 
 might have come to any intelligent man who 
 
104 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 mingled in serious intercourse with men of the 
 Greek world. In Paul's use of the Greek lan- 
 guage, however, we seem to have clear evidence 
 of early education. He uses Greek not like a 
 foreigner who has acquired it in mature years, 
 but with the ease and freedom of one born to 
 its use. He does not indeed show literary and 
 rhetorical training, but rather the power of 
 a bright mind accustomed to elevated conversa- 
 tion and address, and filled with the language 
 and ideas of the Greek translation of the Old 
 Testament. For in this use of the Septuagint, 
 including the Greek book of the Wisdom of 
 Solomon, Paul seems again to betray an early 
 acquaintance with Greek. He does not appear 
 merely to be adapting himself here to the needs 
 of his readers, but plainly is at home in the 
 translation, preferring to use it rather than to 
 make an independent translation for himself, and 
 even following it in errors and obscurities. He 
 frequently shows by his allusions that he has not 
 only the quotation itself but the larger context in 
 mind, while words and phrases and figures from 
 the Greek Old Testament are woven into the very 
 fabric of his sentences. 
 
 We may describe Paul, then, as an able and 
 thoroughly trained Jew, who had gained from 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 105 
 
 his residence in a Greek city that degree of Greek 
 education which complete familiarity with the 
 Greek language and the habitual use of the Greek 
 translation of the Scriptures could bring. At 
 bottom he ever remained the Jew, in his feel- 
 ings, his background of ideas, and his mode of 
 thought, but he knew how to make tolerably in- 
 telligible to Greek readers the truths in which, 
 as he came to believe, lay the satisfaction of their 
 deepest needs. 
 
 At Jerusalem Paul entered ardently into the 
 pursuit of the Pharisaic ideal of complete con- 
 formity in every particular to the Law. He was, 
 he tells us, ''found blameless" (to every eye 
 but that of his own conscience), and, he says, "I 
 advanced in the Jews* religion beyond many of 
 mine own age among my countrymen, being more 
 exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my 
 fathers." With fiery passion he entered into the 
 persecution of the Christian sect, was present and 
 took a kind of part at the murder of Stephen, and 
 undertook to carry on the work of suppression 
 outside of Palestine at Damascus, whither he jour- 
 neyed for this purpose with letters of introduction 
 from the authorities at Jerusalem. 
 
 At this time took place his conversion. That 
 he was converted, and at or near Damascus, his 
 
106 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 own words leave no doubt. ''I persecuted," he 
 says in writing to the Galati^ns, "the Church 
 of God. . . . But when it was the good pleas- 
 ure of God, who separated me, even from my 
 mother's womb, and called me through his grace, 
 to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach 
 him among the gentiles ; straightway I conferred 
 not with flesh and blood: neither went I up 
 to Jerusalem to them which were apostles be- 
 fore me : but I went away into Arabia ; and again 
 I returned unto Damascus. "^ The change evi- 
 dently presented itself to Paul's mind as a direct 
 divine interposition in his life. It came to him 
 in a revelation of Jesus Christ, whereby (and 
 through no human intermediary) he received 
 the Gospel which he preached, and the com- 
 mission to be an apostle. He refers to it as to 
 a single event and an absolute change of direc- 
 tion, not a gradual process and development; 
 the two parts of his life stood sharply contrasted, 
 he did not conceive that he had slid by imper- 
 ceptible stages from one to the other. ''What 
 things [i.e. his advantages of birth and Jewish 
 attainment] were gain to me, these have I counted 
 loss for Christ ... for whom I suffered" — 
 as if in a single moment— "the loss of all things. "^ 
 
 iGal. i. 13-17. 
 2 Phil. iii. 7. 8. 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 107 
 
 Moreover Paul connects his own experience, ap- 
 parently at his conversion, with the appearances 
 of the risen Lord which had converted the ter- 
 rified disciples to a belief that their Master lived 
 as Lord and Christ in heaven. In recounting the 
 appearances he mentions that to himself as the 
 latest in time but as entirely on a level with the 
 others.^ And in another place he affirms that he 
 like other apostles has ''seen Jesus our Lord."^ 
 From Paul's own words, then, we know that he 
 was converted from a persecutor to a Christian, 
 at a definite time and at or near Damascus, by 
 what he considered to be the direct interposi- 
 tion of God; and it seems to be this experience 
 of which he thought as a vision of the risen 
 Christ. 
 
 The Book of Acts supplies us with three ac- 
 counts of the conversion of Paul, thus testifying 
 to the enormous importance which the author 
 ascribed to this event. They differ slightly, but 
 not enough to prove that they come from dif- 
 ferent written sources, nor on the other hand to 
 throw any discredit on the writer's trustworthi- 
 ness in reproducing what he had received. Paul, 
 the fiery persecutor, approaching Damascus, sud- 
 
 II Cor. XV. 4-8. 
 «I Cor. ix. 1. 
 
108 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 denly sees in broad daylight a light from heaven 
 of intolerable brightness, and hears a voice in 
 the Aramaic language, ''Saul, Saul, why per- 
 secutest thou me." In answer to his question 
 the supernatural being from whom the voice 
 comes announces himself, "I am Jesus whom 
 thou persecutest, " and bids Paul complete his 
 journey to Damascus, where he shall find Chris- 
 tian succor and counsel. The men with Paul 
 were aware of a sudden and extraordinary hap- 
 pening of some sort, but, as we are expressly 
 told, received nothing of the real meaning of 
 the occurrence, not hearing the words. In brief, 
 the account is that of a manifestation to Paul's 
 inner sense, given in a flood of light and by 
 the hearing of words, whereby Paul became sat- 
 isfied that he had had intercourse with Jesus 
 of Nazareth, the crucified malefactor. Paul was 
 thereby convinced that Jesus had risen from the 
 dead and was living in heavenly glory. This 
 conviction was the same as that which, we have 
 seen, brought about the regathering of the ear- 
 liest disciples, and it would obviously be suffi- 
 cient in itself to transform Paul from a perse- 
 cutor to a believing disciple. 
 
 The account of Paul's conversion given in 
 Acts with so much circumstantiality and em- 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 109 
 
 phasis has often been declared to be incredible. 
 Those who are unwilling to see here a real mani- 
 festation of a divine being in visible form have 
 commonly said that the narrative is merely the 
 fanciful objective form given by the operation 
 of later imagination to the fact that within Paul's 
 soul, by a process of rational conviction, light 
 dawned upon darkness. This explanation has 
 never proved entirely satisfactory. The com- 
 plete invention of nearly every element of the 
 story, which it supposes, seems highly improbable, 
 and to assume any degree of invention less than 
 that affords no assistance, because the essence 
 of the story lies in precisely those parts to which 
 most exception is taken. But a broader knowl- 
 edge of the facts of religious psychology shows 
 that the account given in Acts is not without 
 analogies in perfectly attested human experience. 
 The vision of light, the belief that a voice of 
 some kind has been heard, and the accompany- 
 ing radical change in the man's soul, — of these 
 we may read over and over again in the trans- 
 parently honest statements of good men about 
 their own experiences. In view of the testi- 
 monies which can be read in the books on con- 
 version and on the description of religious ex- 
 perience the a priori objections of Biblical critics 
 
no THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 of the last century lose their weight, and I 
 can see no reason for denying that the narratives 
 of Acts give the story of PauPs conversion sub- 
 stantially as he himself was conscious of hav- 
 ing undergone it, and was in the habit of tell- 
 ing it. If that is true, perhaps the greatest his- 
 torical difficulty in the Pauline half of the Book 
 of Acts is removed. 
 
 It must, of course, be admitted, if this ap- 
 peal is made to the analogy of other conversions, 
 that the non-natural, or anti-natural, character 
 of the conversion of Paul is abandoned. But 
 that is by no means to deny the divine character 
 of this great event. Alike in the unusual and 
 unique, and in the usual and regular, and in all 
 the grades between, the hand of God is to be 
 seen by those who believe in God. And on the 
 other hand, the mere fact of uniqueness is in 
 no sense a guarantee that God has wrought the 
 event. The evidence of that is to be found solely 
 in the nature of the result produced. No Chris- 
 tian can doubt that in the conversion of Paul 
 the cause of the Kingdom of God in this world 
 passed a great crisis and received a vast incre- 
 ment of power. 
 
 Of the inner process which preceded and ac- 
 companied Paul's conversion we have what seems 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 111 
 
 to be an account in the seventh chapter of Ro- 
 mans, the famous chapter where Paul depicts the 
 struggle of the higher and lower natures to pos- 
 sess the human soul, and with a truthfulness that 
 appeals pathetically to the human nature of every 
 age exposes the impotence of the unaided human 
 will. Upon that wretched state of unfulfilled 
 longing after righteousness he looked back as 
 characterizing his life before conversion. And 
 the main significance of the conversion itself 
 appeared to him to have been the release from 
 that state. We need however to remember that 
 that was his later interpretation, and not to sup- 
 pose that at the moment of his conversion he 
 would have described it in precisely that way. 
 Yet the chapter does surely reveal to us a man 
 unhappy with the sense of sin from which no 
 power that he knows can release him. Another 
 hint is often thought to be given in the obscure 
 words of a Greek proverb found in one account 
 of the conversion, *'It is hard for thee to kick 
 against the goad." It may be that here, too, we 
 see reflected some brooding and profound dis- 
 satisfaction which is hard to define more closely. 
 But the essential change lay in the new belief 
 that Jesus of Nazareth was the IMessiah. Some- 
 how, the difficulties of Paul's whole religious and 
 
112 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 moral position gained such accumulation of force 
 that by what seemed to him a miracle they were 
 enabled to overpower and sweep away the sane 
 barrier of his fundamental Jewish conviction, and 
 so that view about Jesus established itself as true 
 which had hitherto seemed to him equally impos- 
 sible and startling. Out of the wreck of thought 
 which this revolution caused, there emerged a last- 
 ing relief from the pricking spur and from the 
 inner conflict; but it is important to distinguish 
 the actual nature of the central change itself 
 both from the dissatisfaction which may have 
 been one of its causes, and from the unexpected 
 blessings which issued from it. 
 
 After Paul's conversion, which took place in 
 the latter part of the reign of Tiberius (14-37 
 A. D.), about fifteen years passed before the mis- 
 sionary career began of which we have knowl- 
 edge from Acts and from Paul's own epistles. 
 During this time Paul was first in Arabia, that 
 is in some part of the empire of which Damascus 
 w^as the most famous city, then in Damascus, and 
 later, after a brief visit to Jerusalem, in Cilicia, 
 doubtless at his old home Tarsus. In this period 
 we may suppose that he was adjusting his whole 
 system of thought to the new centre which had es- 
 tablished itself in his mind, the Messiahship of 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 113 
 
 Jesus. With the new basis in mind every part 
 of his intellectual world must have been thought 
 through. Especially, we may believe, will he 
 have studied the relation of Christian faith to 
 the old dispensation and to the ideas of the 
 prophets. The fruit of these years we have in 
 the matured thought of the epistles. They show 
 a steadiness of view and a readiness of resource 
 in the use of the Old Testament, which testify 
 to thorough work in the time of preparation. 
 Epistles written years apart, like Galatians, Ro- 
 mans and Philippians, surprise us by their uni- 
 formity of thought and unstrained similarity 
 of language, in spite of the richness and vivacity 
 of Paul's thought and style. So, for the most 
 part, the characteristic ideas even of Ephesians 
 and Colossians are found suggested in germ in 
 Corinthians and the earlier epistles. Paul's 
 epistles represent the literary flowering of a 
 mind prepared by years of study and reflec- 
 tion. 
 
 At Paul's first missionary journey and the 
 beginning then made of churches in Asia Minor 
 we have already looked in a previous chapter. 
 After his return to Antioch followed that great 
 and pivotal occasion of early Christian history, 
 the so-called Council, or Conference, at Jeru- 
 
114 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 salem, described in the fifteenth chapter of Acts 
 and by Paul in the second chapter of Galatians. 
 At that time Paul established his right to carry- 
 on the work of Christian missions in accord- 
 ance with his own principles and his own under- 
 standing of the Christian religion. His relation 
 with the Twelve Apostles seems then and at all 
 times to have been cordial. His difficulties came 
 from others in the Jewish Church. To this we 
 know of only one exception, apparently some- 
 what later than the Conference, the occasion at 
 Antioch when Peter under pressure from Jeru- 
 salem withdrew from fellowship with the gen- 
 tile brethren, and called out from Paul the severe 
 rebuke of which we read in Galatians. There 
 is reason to believe that the rebuke accomplished 
 its purpose. At any rate, at a later time there is 
 no evidence of a continued breach. 
 
 The idea of missionary travel had evidently 
 taken possession of Paul, for after returning 
 from Jerusalem to Antioch he soon started out 
 again, and was incessantly occupied with mis- 
 sionary work from now until the moment of 
 his arrest at Jerusalem. Leaving Antioch on his 
 second journey he and his companions hurried 
 across Asia Minor, stopping only, it would appear, 
 to revisit and inspect churches previously estab- 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 115 
 
 lished. They were led by the Holy Spirit, as the 
 writer of Acts believed, to direct their course west- 
 ward as rapidly as possible to Greece, which was 
 to be the next stage in the path to the capital 
 of the world. In Macedonia and Achaia Paul 
 and his companions worked with varying success 
 at Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea, Athens, 
 Corinth. At Corinth, the chief commercial city 
 of Greece, the Christians arrived in the late 
 autumn. The work opened well, and Paul re- 
 mained at that important centre until a year 
 from the following spring. The date of his ar- 
 rival cannot be exactly determined, but is prob- 
 ably one of the five years between 49 and 53 
 A. D. While at Corinth he wrote the First and (if 
 it is genuine) the Second Epistle to the Thessa- 
 lonians. Somewhere about this time, perhaps be- 
 fore leaving Antioch for this journey, the Epistle 
 to the Galatians was written. The churches of 
 Galatia, to which it is addressed, were prob- 
 ably the churches known to us in Acts as Pisi- 
 dian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. 
 
 After a flying trip to Syria and perhaps to 
 Jerusalem Paul returned to Ephesus in Asia 
 Minor, where he settled down for a stay of three 
 years. A few incidents of this period have been 
 recorded in the Book of Acts, and are among 
 
116 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 the most striking and realistic that we have. 
 They include a remarkable number of points of 
 contact with facts known to us from archaeological 
 discoveries, and in no chapters of Acts is our 
 confidence more fully reassured in the contempo- 
 rary knowledge and the trustworthiness of the 
 writer of the book. 
 
 While at Ephesus Paul had much communi- 
 cation with Corinth, and wrote I Corinthians, 
 which had clearly been preceded by another let- 
 ter. There are indications in II Corinthians that 
 after this he found the difficulties in the church 
 at Corinth such that he wrote them at least one 
 letter which has been lost, and made a short, 
 and in its outcome exceedingly painful, trip to 
 Corinth and back to Ephesus. Finally he was 
 impelled by danger to his life to leave Ephesus, 
 and went through Macedonia to Corinth. On the 
 way he wrote, to prepare for his own presence, 
 the epistle we call II Corinthians. Arriving at 
 Corinth in the early winter he stayed until spring. 
 His literary impulse continued active, and to this 
 winter we owe the Epistle to the Romans. Earlier 
 letters had been called out by special need in 
 one or another church; in Romans Paul comes 
 nearer to a systematic exposition of his theology 
 than in any of his earlier writings. He knew 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 117 
 
 the importance that would surely belong to the 
 Christian church of Rome. He had made up 
 his mind to go there. But first he must go to 
 Jerusalem, and there were dangers both from 
 the risks of travel and from hostile men. Of 
 each kind his life had had many examples. Ac- 
 cordingly he provided for the Roman Christians 
 a clear statement of his main position, together 
 with a reply to several of the chief objections 
 brought against it, notably the allegations that 
 his presentation of Christianity involve the abro- 
 gation of God's promises to his chosen people, 
 and that it opened the way to moral laxity. 
 
 This letter Paul sent as an earnest of his own 
 visit to Rome. He had been for a year or more 
 supervising the collection by the churches of Asia 
 Minor and Europe of a contribution for the poor 
 Christians at Jerusalem; the gentile churches 
 should thus make a repayment in carnal things 
 to those who had made them to be partakers of 
 their spiritual things. This contribution was now 
 ready, and Paul himself with a group of repre- 
 sentatives of the chief churches took ship at 
 Philippi and Troas for Jerusalem. The voyage 
 is narrated in detail in Acts, evidently by one 
 who was a member of the company. At last 
 Paul reached Jerusalem, and was well received 
 
118 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 by the church; but, followed as he was by the 
 hatred of Jews from the Dispersion who had 
 recognized the menace to the Jewish religion 
 proceeding from the new sect, he was set upon 
 by a mob, rescued only by being taken in custody 
 by the Roman authorities, and after a series of 
 exciting adventures which will be found admir- 
 ably told in the Book of Acts, was brought to 
 Csesarea. There he stayed a prisoner for two 
 years and more until on the occasion of a change 
 of Roman Governor his case was brought up 
 for trial, when he exercised the right of a Roman 
 citizen to appeal from the jurisdiction of the 
 Governor to that of the imperial court at Rome. 
 It was late autumn, but he was despatched 
 with a companion whom we may well believe to 
 be Luke the beloved physician, and from whom 
 our account certainly comes. The narrative of 
 Paul's voyage and shipwreck, of the winter on the 
 island of Malta, and the final arrival at Rome 
 early in one of the years between 58 and 62 a. d. is 
 familiar. It is the most important document that 
 antiquity has left us for an understanding of 
 the mode of working an ancient ship, while the 
 picture which it gives of Paul as a practical man 
 is a delightful supplement to our other knowledge 
 of him. 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 119 
 
 In Rome, while under guard awaiting trial, 
 Paul probably wrote Philippians, Colossians, 
 Philemon, and the circular letter, seemingly in- 
 tended for churches in Asia Minor, known to 
 us as Ephesians. They show some new develop- 
 ment of ideas long present with him, and some 
 new thoughts to which his other writings give 
 no parallel, and the style of some of them has 
 changed a bit from the freshness of Galatians 
 and Romans; but these are not sufficient rea- 
 sons for denying that Paul wrote the letters. 
 They are, indeed, as it seems to me, beyond rea- 
 sonable doubt genuine. 
 
 The Book of Acts ends with the words, *'And 
 he [Paul] abode two whole years in his own hired 
 dwelling, and received all that went in unto 
 him, preaching the Kingdom of God, and teach- 
 ing the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ 
 with all boldness, none forbidding him." This 
 period of two years is sufficient to include the 
 composition of the four epistles to which refer- 
 ence has just been made, Philippians, Colossians, 
 Philemon, and Ephesians, the so-called Epistles 
 of the Captivity. What happened at the ex- 
 piration of the period? Apparently PauPs case, 
 long postponed, then came to trial. Did it re- 
 sult in his release or his execution? The evi- 
 
120 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 dence is meagre and conflicting, and opinions 
 differ. It is perhaps a little more likely that 
 he was released, and entered on further mission- 
 ary work, probably carrying out his original pur- 
 pose of pushing on with the proclamation of his 
 Gospel to the west, and establishing it in Spain. 
 But of this period we have no narrative. 
 
 From such a time would have to proceed, if 
 they were genuine, the two epistles to Timothy 
 and that to Titus, making up the group known 
 as the Pastoral Epistles. But many reasons 
 combine to show that these documents are not 
 genuine letters of Paul. The language and style 
 as well as the main ideas, the impossible rela- 
 tion to Timothy and Titus (Paul's attitude and 
 relations to whom we know from several of his 
 earlier letters), all of this combines with the gen- 
 eral situation which the letters presuppose, to 
 show that we have here little treatises on ele- 
 mentar^' church-law, or primitive church-manuals, 
 from the end of the apostolic age or later. That 
 certain genuine Pauline fragments have been 
 built into these manuals (particularly in the case 
 of II Timothy), and show in occasional charac- 
 teristic phrases and in greetings to particular 
 persons the hand of Paul himself, is wholly in 
 accord with the spirit of the earliest framers 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 121 
 
 of such literature as it is elsewhere known to us. 
 There are abundant documents of this kind from 
 the early centuries, many of which show this 
 same tendency to ascribe the origin of the rules 
 and counsels to apostles, and scarcely one has 
 come down to us in its original form. The in- 
 clination is everywhere seen, just as in the treat- 
 ment which has been systematically accorded to 
 modern hymns, to adapt for this purpose an 
 earlier document to current needs. The analogy 
 of all this early literature goes far to confirm 
 the results of critical investigation of the genuine- 
 ness of the Pastoral Epistles. 
 
 If after two years Paul 's imprisonment at Rome 
 ended with his release, as the absence of well- 
 founded charges against him would lead us to 
 expect, he must have been later again appre- 
 hended, probably in connection with the persecu- 
 tion artfully turned against the Christians at 
 the time of Nero's fire in July of the year 64. 
 It is probable that he was beheaded, to which 
 privilege his Roman citizenship entitled him, and 
 that he was ultimately buried on the Ostian "Way 
 at the spot where now stands the splendid basil- 
 ica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. The day 
 on which the Church commemorates at once the 
 martyrdom of Peter and Paul (June 29) is not 
 
122 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 the day on which either of them died, but is 
 perhaps the day on which at a later time Paul's 
 body was removed from a temporary resting place 
 in the Catacombs near S. Sebastiano on the Ap- 
 pian Way, where it had lain side by side with 
 that of Peter, to the church on the Ostian Way. 
 There is no sufficient reason for believing that 
 Peter and Paul died on the same day. 
 
 We have traced the course of Paul's life, so 
 far as it is known to us, from his birth, about 
 the beginning of the Christian era, to his martyr- 
 dom, probably in the year 64. We must now 
 try to describe the characteristics of this man. 
 A knowledge of his temperament, character, and 
 traits of mind is essential to a just understand- 
 ing of his life and thought. 
 
 We have already seen how the Greek and the 
 Hebrew were mingled in his birth and educa- 
 tion. A correct discrimination of these elements 
 will show, I believe, that Paul was always funda- 
 mentally the Jew, with whom what he knew of 
 Greek ideas and habits of thought rested for 
 the most part as a veneer on the surface or 
 offered itself merely as a convenient tool. The 
 witness of the Law and the Prophets was an in- 
 tegral part of his thought; in the wisdom of 
 men he refused to partake. And yet Paul could 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 123 
 
 not possibly withdraw himself from the Greek 
 world in which he lived. His epistles corre- 
 spond curiously in structure to the private let- 
 ters which every year brings us from their long 
 burial in the sand of Egypt. He describes his 
 Christian life in the language of the Greek games, 
 with a course, an umpire, a contest, and a crown. 
 Greek law, Greek household life, Greek religion, 
 the citizens and the resident strangers of a city, 
 the last will, the tutor, the sacrificial feast, all 
 serve to illustrate the truths of Paul's doctrine. 
 He draws a figure from the armor of the Roman 
 soldier. Such ideas as conscience, nature, the 
 mind, the body as an organism, the physiological 
 relation of head to members as a metaphor for 
 the relation of Christ to his Church — these and 
 many other details which spring to Paul's eager 
 mind are Greek, and would not be in his writ- 
 ings if he had not lived in daily association with 
 Greeks. And in order to develop some of the 
 remoter and sublimer consequences of his own 
 thought of Christ, he was forced to use categories 
 which become clear to us only through a knowl- 
 edge of the Greek philosophy of Alexandria. His 
 vocabulary cannot easily be rendered into He- 
 brew. The story of his intercourse and cor- 
 respondence with Seneca is a fable, but the linea- 
 
124 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ments of the Stoic ideal wise man, earnestly prac- 
 tising himself in self-sufficiency, and the concep- 
 tion of an universal citizenship in a world-wide 
 commonwealth have surely aided Paul to frame 
 his expression of the very different ideal and 
 aspiration of the Christian. But a Greek at 
 heart he could never have become. The intel- 
 lectual and speculative interest was lacking in 
 him. He was no philosopher. He cared for life, 
 not for abstract thought; and truth was for him 
 valuable in proportion as it contributed to re- 
 deem man from captivity to sin and from im- 
 pending doom. 
 
 In his personal traits as a man Paul appears 
 as a warm and energetic, *' zealous," intense, 
 indeed passionate spirit. . Fervor marked him both 
 as a persecutor and a preacher of the Gospel. 
 The first two chapters of Galatians were written 
 in anger. *'I marvel that ye are so quickly re- 
 moving from him that called you in the grace 
 of Christ unto a different gospel; which is not 
 another, only there are some that trouble you. 
 . . . But if even we ourselves or an angel from 
 heaven preach unto you any gospel other than 
 that which we preached unto you, let him be 
 damned." Such phrases as *'the false brethren, 
 smuggled in to spy out our liberty," and, in- 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 125 
 
 deed, the whole of that familiar passage betray the 
 passion. A nature easily moved to intense feel- 
 ing- reveals itself throughout the epistles as he 
 threatens, denounces, appeals, entreats, with tones 
 that range from irony to the pathos of wounded 
 love. 
 
 Yet to this passionate nature belongs the tem- 
 pering force of excellent good sense. No one 
 can read the practical directions which make up 
 the greater part of I Corinthians and relate to 
 marriage, to speaking with tongues, to the eat- 
 ing of meat that had been offered to idols, with- 
 out observing how, in spite of certain mistaken 
 views, wise, sagacious common sense controls 
 Paul's judgment. The man who told the weary 
 and panic-stricken ship's company anchored on 
 a lee shore within sound of the breakers, that 
 they must eat a good breakfast if they wanted 
 to be saved, is the same man who could give 
 sound advice to masters and slaves and who 
 warned parents not to irritate their children for 
 fear of making them sullen. 
 
 Corresponding to the warmth and passion of 
 Paul's nature was his masterful spirit and his 
 aristocratic attitude toward the world. He in- 
 tends to control his churches. In Galatia, in Cor- 
 inth, he demands rather than invites their loyalty. 
 
126 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 He does not hesitate once and again to point them 
 to his own example. *'Be ye imitators of me." 
 *'The things which ye both learned and received 
 and heard and saw in me, these things do." 
 There might seem almost a touch of arrogance 
 here. And indeed Paul is no cringing Shylock, 
 but moves through the world a free citizen, look- 
 ing to the constituted authorities as his support 
 and protector, as existing in a measure for his 
 sake.^ Nay, he knows himself to belong to the 
 blood royal of the world. Is he not of the stock 
 of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of 
 Hebrews? and can he not proudly say of his peo- 
 ple, as of none other in God's world, ''Whose is 
 the adoption and the shekinah and the covenants, 
 and the legislation and the liturgy and the prom- 
 ises, to whom belong the patriarchs, and from 
 whom arises the Messiah?" ^ This aristocratic 
 trait in Paul is noteworthy, and its effect is to 
 be observed in many ways in his thought and 
 writings. 
 
 But as Paul's heat and passion were tempered 
 by rare good sense, so again his masterful and 
 aristocratic temper was matched by an admirable 
 tenderness and a considerate, regardful tact. He 
 
 iRom. xiii. 1-7. 
 2 Rom. Ix. 4, 5. 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 127 
 
 reminds the Galatians of their kindness in his 
 sickness, and proceeds, "My little children, of 
 whom I am again in travail until Christ be 
 formed in you." He says to the Corinthians, 
 "Whether we are afflicted, it is for your comfort 
 and salvation ; or whether we are comforted, it is 
 for your comfort;" and again, "Out of much af- 
 fliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you 
 with many tears ; not that ye should be made sorry, 
 but that ye might know the love which I have 
 more abundantly unto you." And to the Philip- 
 pians, "Wherefore, my brethren beloved and 
 longed for, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the 
 Lord, my beloved." These are but a few out of 
 many affectionate sentences in these letters. 
 
 With this tenderness belongs Paul's tact. It 
 was his principle so to adapt his conduct in non- 
 essentials as to give least offence to those for whom 
 he labored. * ' To the Jews I became as a Jew that 
 I might gain Jews. ... I am become all 
 things to all men, that I may by all means save 
 some. ' ' ^ Note the care with which in treating of 
 the abuses of party division in Corinth he draws 
 his illustration from the parties which had taken 
 his own name and that of his friend Apollos, that 
 he may not seem specially to criticise the less well- 
 
 II Cor. ix. 20-22. 
 
128 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 disposed.^ See how tact and self-denial run into 
 each other when he says, ''Even as I also please 
 all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, 
 but the profit of the many that they may be 
 saved. "2 And read the Epistle to Philemon, 
 where with supreme delicacy of feeling and much 
 lightness of literary touch the runaway but peni- 
 tent slave is commended to the Christian friend, 
 his owner. 
 
 Of the many qualities of temperament revealed 
 in Paul's letters which might be mentioned, these 
 seem to me the most significant and illuminative. 
 His was a temperament passionate but sensible, 
 masterful, almost haughty, but tender and gifted 
 with tact. 
 
 When we inquire into the main traits of Paul's 
 mind, as distinguished from his temperament and 
 character, I should name first of all his capacity 
 as an organizer and administrator. Paul had a 
 clear missionary policy. He aimed at large cities, 
 containing a Jewish synagogue. From these he 
 knew that the Gospel would make its way into the 
 smaller places and the outlying country. He be- 
 gan with Asia Minor, then planted his churches at 
 centres in Macedonia and Greece, then looked be- 
 yond to Rome, and conceived the hope of reaching 
 
 1 I Cor. iii. 4-6; iv. 6. 
 
 2 I Cor. X. 33. 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 129 
 
 the Pillars of Hercules. And he not only under- 
 stood method in evangelism, but he clearly appre- 
 hended the significance of unity. His earnest 
 efforts were given to maintaining the unity of the 
 faith, and securing that each several structure 
 fitly framed together with the rest should grow 
 into one holy temple. But we nowhere read of an 
 external unity of organization ; Paul fully under- 
 stood that the only valuable unity is unity in 
 Christ, a unity not of form but of feeling, whereby 
 the increase of the body is unto the building up of 
 itself in love. 
 
 On a different side one of the most marked 
 traits of PauPs mind was his interest and success 
 in observing the workings of the human soul. He 
 knew men, by a power of direct insight into 
 human character, using often as interpreter his 
 own consciousness. The arraignment of Jewish 
 insincerity in the second chapter of Komans, ''If 
 thou . . . art confident that thou thyself art 
 a guide of the blind, a light to them that are in 
 darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of 
 babes, . . . thou therefore that teachest an- 
 other, teachest thou not thyself?" or the famous 
 analysis of the never ending moral conflict where- 
 by for ever until help comes, ''not what I would 
 that do I practise, but what I hate, that I do," 
 
130 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 will illustrate this. But equally is it seen in his 
 practical advice and exhortation. Paul knew the 
 human heart, its tendencies and its possibilities. 
 He sees where the strain must be relieved, as in the 
 directions about marriage : he understands when 
 a motive— gratitude, or pride, or the sense of re- 
 sponsibility—can be evoked to do the work that 
 needs to be done in the man's moral progress. 
 
 And it is not out of accord with this quality if 
 the third characteristic of Paul 's mind to be men- 
 tioned is that of the poet. No formal verse, but a 
 noble rhetoric of nature makes a fit vehicle of 
 expression for Paul's higher flights. The hymn 
 to love in the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians 
 is a classic of literature, and it stands by no 
 means isolated in Paul's Epistles. Take the vast 
 sweep with which in the eighth chapter of Romans 
 his mind sees the whole creation sharing in the 
 fall and redemption of the world, groaning and 
 travailing, as it waits for the revelation of the 
 sons of God. The thought was not new, but where 
 is the picture of the whole process so vividly con- 
 ceived and so grandly and sonorously expressed? 
 Or the opening of the Epistle to the Ephesians, 
 with its refrain ''to the praise of his glory," and 
 its long vista of the purpose of Him who worketh 
 all things after the counsel of His will,— what is 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 131 
 
 this but a great and solemn poem which celebrates 
 the grace of God and the joy of those who know 
 themselves to belong to Him? At every moment 
 of exalted feeling Paul's vision is clarified and 
 his utterance becomes true poetry. Listen to his 
 triumphant cry, ''When this corruptible shall 
 have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall 
 have put on immortality, then shall come to pass 
 the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up 
 in victory. death, where is thy victory? 
 death, where is thy sting ? The sting of death is 
 sin ; and the power of sin is the Law ; but thanks 
 be to God, who giveth us the victory through our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. ' ' 
 
 For it is as the man of human insight, the mys- 
 tic, the poet, not as the theologian— which he was 
 not— that we must read and understand Paul. He 
 rose to visions, he had intuitions, he knew. If he 
 argued, it was not in order to arrive at the truth 
 but to persuade his reader of truth already ap- 
 prehended by other means than dialectics. Here 
 lay his genius, and the source of his power. Has 
 ever a man been so misunderstood and shame- 
 fully entreated as Paul, out of whose poetry men 
 have made the propositions of a logical system? 
 No theologian but everywhere a Christian was 
 Paul. His faith in Christ and sense of union with 
 
132 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Christ transformed his world. His hope is "that 
 I may know him, and the power of his resurrec- 
 tion, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becom- 
 ing conformed unto his death ; if by any means I 
 may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.*' 
 *'It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in 
 me." In these words the source of the poetical 
 inspiration is made clear. Without his Christian 
 faith we should have found Paul an interesting, 
 devoted, and conscientious Jew; his devotion to 
 Christ called forth his surpassing gifts and gave 
 his spirit wings. 
 
 We long to know something of the personal ap- 
 pearance and physical characteristics of this re- 
 markable man. The traditional type of his por- 
 trait, preserved for centuries in Christian art, has 
 unhappily no claim to be regarded as genuine. 
 His bodily presence, he himself says, was declared 
 by his enemies to be mean and contemptible. He 
 calls himself rude in speech, but probably refers 
 to the formal rules of Greek rhetoricians.^ Be- 
 yond that his hints hardly go. A distressing 
 bodily infirmity came to him, and persisted, a 
 minister of Satan to buffet him, a thorn— or, 
 rather, "sharp stake"— in the flesh, he calls it.^ 
 Some have thought it an infirmity of the eyes, 
 
 111 Cor. X. 10; xi. 5. 
 2 11 Cor. xii. 7. 
 
THE APOSTLE PAUL 133 
 
 others, with perhaps more reason, a susceptibility 
 to epilepsy. No one really knows. 
 
 In the second century, not more than about one 
 hundred years after Paul's death, some one wrote 
 a description of his person— with how much to 
 base it on we can not tell. It is found in the 
 romantic story called the ''Acts of Paul and 
 Thecla,'' originally part of a larger work, the 
 *'Acts of Paul,'' and probably written in Asia 
 Minor, where a recollection of Paul's appearance 
 may well have been preserved. The tale is relating 
 Paul's arrival at Lystra:— "And he saw Paul 
 coming, a man small in size, bald-headed, bandy- 
 legged, well built, with eyebrows meeting, rather 
 long-nosed, full of grace. For sometimes he looked 
 like a man, and sometimes he had the countenance 
 of an angel/' 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 
 
 A knowledge of Paul's life and some acquaint- 
 ance with the more striking traits of his mind 
 and character is essential to an understanding of 
 his thought. For Paul, as has been said, was no 
 systematic theologian. Speculative thought con- 
 stituted a large part of his occupation, but there 
 is no evidence that he himself combined it into a 
 system, or that he had the philosopher's joy in a 
 truth for its own sake, and in constructing a 
 rational and comprehensive explanation of the 
 universe. Not system but vividness and vitality 
 were the characteristics of his thought, and these 
 great qualities sprang from the fact that his con- 
 sistent and powerful intellect wrought in close 
 intimacy with emotion, an emotion always intense, 
 whether it were tumultuous or calm. This inter- 
 penetration of thought and feeling is made the 
 more prominent for us because we know Paul 
 
 solely through occasional writings. But the 
 134 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 135 
 
 fundamental cause lies deeper, in the nature of 
 the man himself. 
 
 The perception of this quality must govern 
 and guide any attempt to set forth Paul's 
 theology, as it should govern and guide the contin- 
 uous reading of his epistles. We have nowhere 
 the cold dry light of the intellect, but everywhere 
 the warm touch of a man. His ideas were not 
 developed by reason of an interest in solving 
 problems, but because these are the truths that 
 have mastered him and by which he lives, or else 
 such as he deems to be important for meeting the 
 special situation of his readers. His premises, as 
 we shall see, are not established by argument, but 
 by experience; and the particular subjects which 
 he chooses for his attention are mainly determined 
 by the practical need of the moment. 
 
 Beside the fact that, even more than most 
 men's, Paul's theological thought can only be 
 understood through a knowledge of the man him- 
 self, and in a way complementary to that fact, 
 stands a second important consideration. Paul's 
 theology is, to be sure, highly individual and per- 
 sonal, but at the same time much of it was not 
 at all new. Into a previously existing warp he 
 w^ove a Christian w^oof. He was in no sense the 
 medium of revelation of a completely new system 
 
136 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 of doctrine. There was indeed something new, 
 but it found in the old its chief means of expres- 
 sion; and throughout the whole the old con- 
 stantly reappears, and forms a permanent back- 
 ground without which the Christianity of Paul 
 as we know it could not have come into existence. 
 We may turn to almost any subject of Paul's 
 thought, whether it be the spiritual monotheism 
 on which the whole rests, the idea of the promised 
 Messiah, the notion of evil beings fighting against 
 God, of Adam as the source of sin and death in 
 the world, of the eternal judgment,— whether it 
 be his doctrine of righteousness, of justification, 
 of the principles of morality; we shall find our- 
 selves wholly at a loss to understand what he 
 means unless we recognize that in the substratum 
 of his ideas he merely repeats what was familiar to 
 all who knew the Old Testament and the Jewish 
 thought of the time. 
 
 Here lies in fact a large part of the difficulty 
 which the Church has always had in understand- 
 ing Paul's meaning. Even with all modern 
 research we know but imperfectly the background 
 which controlled his ideas and the form of 
 their expression. God did not see fit to reveal 
 to Paul a complete theology for all time, which 
 Paul might have embodied with pedagogical 
 
PAULAS THEOLOGY 137 
 
 purpose and skill in occasional epistles, and 
 which we by careful and protracted study could 
 then reconstruct in its divine originality as a 
 standard for ourselves and our successors. The 
 case is rather that a thoroughly trained Jew, who 
 had at his command both the theological re- 
 sources' of the rabbis of the first century and also 
 the treasures of the Old Testament, and who 
 knew something of the Greek world whose lan- 
 guage he spoke, was led by the Spirit of God to 
 believe that in Jesus Christ redemption had at last 
 been brought to the whole world, and that 
 through faith in Jesus Christ all men's cravings 
 could now be fully satisfied. In the light of that 
 fundamental conviction he gained new vision on 
 many topics, but the revelation that was made to 
 him was rather new insight and new life than a 
 new system. Whatever it touched it vitalized; 
 new proportion came in, and new emphasis, big 
 with meaning for the future, and a new element 
 through the belief in a fulfilment already realized, 
 but the framework of the old system chiefly re- 
 mained. 
 
 But, it will be asked, if this is the natural mode 
 of approach to Paul, how about the Gospels? Is 
 not Paul's thought merely a part of the second 
 chapter in the history of Christian thought? Is 
 
138 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 it not the duty of the student of Christian history 
 to form first a clear notion of the teaching— the 
 theology, if you please — of Jesus Christ, and then 
 to show how this earliest stage, through its own 
 inherent power of growth, and under the effect of 
 coincident external forces, led to the second 
 great stage, the thought of Paul? 
 
 Now the relation between the theology of Paul 
 and the teaching of Jesus presents a real problem, 
 to which various answers have been given. B}^ the 
 view which attributes equal divine inspiration to 
 all parts of the Bible it is held that the ideas of 
 Paul, in so far as they touch the same topics as 
 those of Jesus, are identical with them, and the 
 two sets of ideas are used together indiscrimi- 
 nately as bases for a system of Biblical or of New 
 Testament theology. On the other hand a modern 
 view has gone to the opposite extreme. Students 
 have been so impressed with the obvious differ- 
 ences in point of view, main subjects of attention, 
 and mode of conception that they have denied that 
 Paul's thought had anything to do with, or was at 
 all influenced by, the thought of Jesus. Both 
 views are wrong. The first certainly substitutes a 
 dry framework of propositions for the living or- 
 ganism of individual thought and interest. The 
 second view exaggerates the fact. It is true that 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 139 
 
 we have in Paul but little reference to the King- 
 dom of God, the main subjects of which he speaks 
 are often different from those of the Gospels, 
 there are strangely few sentences which can be 
 pointed out as clearly showing the influence of 
 Jesus' language. Yet, while all this is true, Paul 
 plainly shared the deepest thought of Jesus about 
 the nature of God, as gracious Father, about God's 
 attitude of love to the world, about man's oppor- 
 tunity to enter at once into the privilege of purely 
 spiritual religion, and man's duty to observe a 
 vigorous morality in which the demands of 
 Jewish law were summed up in and supplanted by 
 the comprehensive principle of love. How is this 
 to be explained ? 
 
 The problem is one of the hardest in all the 
 study of the New Testament. The secret would 
 seem to lie in the remarkable fact that Paul 
 did not come to his main ideas through hearing, 
 receiving, and meditating upon the precepts 
 and parables of the Gospels, but reached them 
 by a different path. Paul's thought is not a 
 continuous development from the thought of 
 Jesus, but is in a measure a new start, yet so con- 
 trolled by the supreme expression of Jesus' nature, 
 not in words but in his life and death, that it is 
 fully dependent upon Jesus and in fundamental 
 
140 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 harmony with him. By Paul's conversion he was 
 brought not to the Teacher of Galilee, but to 
 Jesus Christ the crucified, now risen from the 
 dead, and Lord in heavenly glory. This new rela- 
 tion led to surprising results, for to Paul's pene- 
 trating insight the relation was not one that could 
 be merely appended to the older system of his 
 thought; it asserted for itself dominance, and 
 required that in its light the whole of religious 
 thought should be reorganized. Out of it, and, 
 as it were, independently of the tradition of 
 Jesus' sayings, came the harmony with Jesus' 
 thought that we have recognized. In the very 
 name Jesus Christ, which Paul now accepted, lay 
 a paradox, for it meant that the Messiah of God 
 had suffered the death of a criminal; and in the 
 solution which Paul found for this paradox was 
 involved the great change in the deepest springs 
 of his thought. He came by his conversion to see 
 that the crucifixion was not, as the Jews thought, 
 and as he had once thought, a just expression of 
 God's wrath against an impostor, but contained 
 God's gift of salvation to the world. From that 
 perception he could proceed to the rest of his view 
 of God and of God's will for men. For this rea- 
 son, while knowledge and some use of the say- 
 ings of Jesus is not to be denied to him, the 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 141 
 
 great thoughts which filled his mind were not the 
 direct reproduction and following out of the most 
 prominent ideas of Jesus ; they were rather such 
 ideas as gratitude for redemption by his death, 
 absorption in his spiritually present person, 
 knowledge of God ''the Father of Jesus Christ," 
 vision of the possible relation of redemption to all 
 men, of its significance in history and in the very 
 framework of the universe, such a significance that 
 the bearer of redemption was the instrument of 
 creation and the goal of all human life. In much 
 of this speculative thought Paul certainly goes 
 beyond the field in which Jesus' thought moved, 
 and we see here the great transition to Christian 
 theology. In a word, Paul's theology was built 
 on the fact of Christ's death and resurrection and 
 on Christ's person, not on his teachings. That 
 when it is tested by a comparison with Jesus' say- 
 ings, it proves to be an adequate interpretation of 
 Jesus, may well illustrate the perfect correspond- 
 ence of the life of Jesus with those sayings. 
 
 "What has just been said will make clear the 
 relation between the ideas of Paul and those of the 
 earliest Jewish Christians, a relation both of con- 
 trast and of resemblance. As we have seen, the 
 leading ideas of the first Christians at Jerusalem 
 were continuous with the thought of the Gospels, 
 
142 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and they dwelt much on the same topics. Yet in 
 the nature of the case the conception of Jesus as 
 Christ and Lord in heaven, and the necessity of 
 explaining why God permitted him to be crucified 
 were to them, as well as to Paul, of far-reaching 
 consequence in bringing in new modes of thought. 
 Paul, notwithstanding his vehement disclaimers, 
 must have been influenced by the ideas of those 
 who were apostles before him, but the originality 
 and freshness of his mind, and the distinctness 
 and profoundness of his own experience gave his 
 thought peculiar elevation and permanent fruit- 
 fulness and influence. 
 
 Having thus taken note of the fact that the key 
 to an understanding of Paul's thought lies in the 
 combination of his own peculiar individuality with 
 a whole previous system of thought in which he 
 had been trained, and having remarked that 
 Paul's thought does not represent the direct 
 formal development in a straight line of the ideas 
 on which Jesus laid emphasis, but rather the ap- 
 proach to those ideas from a new angle, we are 
 ready to consider the substance of Paul's theo- 
 logical thought. Although Paul was no sys- 
 tematic theologian, he yet reflected and uttered 
 himself upon many of the topics with which sys- 
 tematic theologians have occupied themselves. Ac- 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 143 
 
 cordingly it would be possible to present his 
 thought by constructing a complete scheme of such 
 topics, and letting Paul answer formally on each 
 one. The result, however, would bear but a dis- 
 tant resemblance to Paul. The only right way is 
 to strike for the real centre and view the whole 
 in company with Paul from that post of ad- 
 vantage. That centre in Paul's thought is the 
 idea, nay not the idea but rather the fact, of Re- 
 demption. 
 
 Of how Paul reached the characteristic views 
 which we find existing in mature form in his 
 epistles he has left no account. This is to be re- 
 gretted, for it is just here that fuller knowledge 
 would most further our understanding of the 
 doctrines. We are left to inference and to the 
 nature of the case. As a Jew Paul had been zeal- 
 ous in all the niceties of the Pharisaic religion. 
 His ideal had been complete devotion to the will 
 of God in accordance with the demands of an ex- 
 acting conscience, and we are not to think of him 
 as merely cherishing a selfish wish to secure salva- 
 tion by conformity to an externally imposed au- 
 thority, but as having a real and enthusiastic de- 
 termination within him to conquer sin and to 
 achieve genuine righteousness of character. Then 
 came suddenly his conversion. This had been pri- 
 
144 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 marily the change to the belief that Jesus was the 
 Messiah. But we have seen how in looking back 
 on his life from a point twenty years or more af- 
 terward the emphasis had shifted, and how he saw 
 the main significance of his conversion to lie in the 
 deliverance then effected from the condemnation 
 Avhich God necessarily pronounced on his inade- 
 quate moral accomplishment;^ in his conversion 
 he gained not only a new view of Christ, but a 
 new idea of God. Thus from the conviction, 
 Jesus is the Messiah, which, we may suppose, 
 flashed upon him in his vision before the walls of 
 Damascus with self-evidencing certainty, Paul 
 was enabled by his own experience to proceed, 
 first, to the further proposition that through the 
 death of Jesus Christ the salvation of the world 
 is accomplished, and secondly, to the proposition 
 that if men believe that Jesus is Christ and Lord, 
 God forgives their sins and they are saved. 
 
 The former of these steps, from belief in the 
 messiahship of Jesus to belief in the vicarious ef- 
 fect of his death had, it appears, been already 
 taken before Paul by the original Christians. The 
 death of this alleged Messiah was from the first a 
 stumbling-block to the Jews which the Christians 
 also must have felt for themselves. They over- 
 
 1 Rom. vii. 7 — viii. 4. 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 145 
 
 came it, and transformed the stumbling-block into 
 a foundation stone, not only by declaring that 
 Jesus' death was, through the resurrection, the 
 portal to new and glorified life on the right hand 
 of God, but by presenting the death itself as a 
 direct means of accomplishing the Messiah's work 
 of bringing salvation to God's people. In doing 
 so they had the aid of certain sayings— impressive 
 though few— of the Lord himself; chiefly, "The 
 Son of Man also came not to be ministered unto, 
 but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for 
 many ; ' ' and the words of institution, ' ' This is my 
 blood of the covenant, which is poured out for 
 many." Moreover the view of Jesus' death taught 
 in these sayings was made easy and acceptable to 
 these men by the fact that the higher Jewish 
 thought had already perceived the great and true 
 principle that suffering may be vicarious, not 
 penal, and that it is the divinely ordained method 
 of service in this world. In the Book of Isaiah, 
 chapter liii, this perception had found classic 
 expression : ' ' He was ... a man of sorrows 
 and acquainted with grief. . . . Surely 
 he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. 
 . . . . He was wounded for our transgres- 
 sions, he was bruised for our iniquities. . . . 
 The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." 
 
146 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Here, centuries before Christ, the suffering of the 
 Servant of the Lord, in whom the prophet saw the 
 genius of the nation personified, is apprehended 
 as an expiation, or means of securing forgiveness, 
 for others' sins. In other Jewish writings the 
 thought of vicarious expiation is found. Thus 
 the treatise called the Fourth Book of Maccabees 
 says of the Maccabaean martyrs, ' ' They became as 
 it were a vicarious expiation for the sins of the 
 nation, and through the blood of those godly 
 men and their atoning death divine providence 
 saved afflicted Israel. " ^ So the rabbis illustrated 
 by the sufferings of Moses and Ezekiel the princi- 
 ple that the sufferings and death of the righteous 
 make atonement. It was believed that here is a 
 divine law of the universe, and by the application 
 of this explanation the cross of Jesus was made 
 not the refutation but the proof of his position 
 as Messiah. 
 
 To one who does not make his approach from 
 the side of Jewish ideas of expiation, a part of 
 this step which the early Christians and Paul took 
 is not altogether easy. The historical significance 
 of a vicarious act, or of vicarious suffering, in 
 that it secures results for the benefit of another, 
 is clear enough ; and the real efficacy of the death 
 
 1 IV Maccabees xvil. 22, cf . vi. 27-29. 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 147 
 
 of Jesus in the establishment of the Christian 
 religion, with all the spiritual and temporal 
 blessings that have flowed to us therefrom, is 
 easily comprehended as the supreme demonstra- 
 tion in history of the law of suffering and sacri- 
 fice. But Paul held that the death of Christ was 
 efficacious not merely in that way, as an agency 
 of redemption, but as the very presupposition and 
 condition of God's redemptive activity itself, and 
 as making possible any gracious response to man's 
 repentance; and how this can be is less easily 
 comprehended. An explanation or justification of 
 this connection, which he believes to exist between 
 the death of Christ and the possibility of God's 
 exercising his forgiving love, Paul nowhere under- 
 takes to give. Is it fair to see here the result 
 of the process by which through the thought of a 
 God needing to be appeased there came into the 
 faith of the world the conception of a God who 
 is love, the Father whom Jesus had known ? May 
 it be, as some one has put it, that Paul had 
 not fully thought through and clarified the funda- 
 mental idea of God at which, as a Christian, he 
 had now arrived? Did his idea of God contain 
 surviving elements of a lower stage of religion, 
 wliich he was able to overcome only by means of 
 conceptions that lose their validity when the pass- 
 
148 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ing away of that whicli tliey neutralized deprives 
 them of their function? 
 
 Paul's theology is certainly not susceptible of 
 rational demonstration to the modern mind. The 
 most that reason can do with his doctrine is to 
 show that it is not contrary to but is consonant 
 with rational principles. But to undergo a new 
 inner experience is the privilege of genius, or, if 
 you prefer (since genius is but the human organ 
 whereby divine revelation is received), it is the 
 gift of God. The experience is real, and when it 
 is once attained, and shown to be still not contrary 
 to reason, we for our part can, if we will, enter 
 into and reproduce it. It has been well observed, 
 however, that the particular form of experience 
 and of faith which Paul had is not for every man, 
 not even for every Christian; and that is one 
 lesson of the long history of the Christian religion. 
 
 That the death of Jesus Christ was not a 
 punishment from God but was a means of secur- 
 ing the salvation of men, in a word was vicarious, 
 must have been from the first an essential part of 
 Christian apologetics and missionary preaching. 
 As such Paul doubtless heard it; and, when he 
 became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, he 
 accepted it as a part of that belief. It is not 
 strange that this part of Christian faith gained 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 149 
 
 in his view of Christianity a towering and su- 
 preme importance. Paul knew Christ as the risen 
 Lord in heaven, and the one fact of his earthly 
 life so conspicuous as to outshadow all the rest was 
 his death. Paul staked his whole apprehension of 
 the meaning of Jesus Christ's person and work on 
 the representative significance of the death on the 
 cross as interpreted in the light of the resurrec- 
 tion. 
 
 By this method of approach his thought made 
 great leaps. He was not dependent on the toil- 
 some study of the implication of Jesus' words, 
 such as we undertake. He was not subject to the 
 doubtful issue of the earlier primitive Christian 
 method, which added observance of Christ's pre- 
 cepts and the hope of his second coming from 
 heaven as Messiah to the customary religion of 
 devout Jews. Paul found in the crucifixion of 
 Jesus Christ and the redemption through it which 
 to his mind, if Jesus was Christ, could alone 
 account for the crucifixion, the essence of his gos- 
 pel. This interpretation of Jesus Christ involved— 
 at any rate to the notions of our age, with our 
 habit of inductive reasoning — a tremendous risk, 
 the risk of a complete misapprehension and thus of 
 complete failure. Paul never recognized this risk, 
 because a doubt in the absolute truth of his gospel 
 
150 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 never entered his mind after that gospel had once 
 been formulated. Only by the essential truth of 
 Paul's gospel can I explain its power; but it was 
 not reached by proving or assuming premises and 
 following them with an impregnable logical con- 
 struction. In the hazardous venture of Paul's 
 faith lay the possibility of securing a central and 
 radical and therefore germinant principle. By 
 following his independent method he was able 
 freely to pursue wherever this principle led, and 
 wherever men's needs called. With all his neces- 
 sary subjection to ingrained Jewish habits of 
 thinking, which could not pass away, he yet by his 
 boldness made of the Gospel no longer the modifi- 
 cation of an old religion, but a new creation, able 
 to stand with its new principle and to conquer the 
 thought of the world. Paul did not found Chris- 
 tianity; the possibility of the new power was 
 given by Jesus Christ, and if Paul had not done 
 this work another would have done it in some 
 other way; but yet, as a fact of history, to Paul 
 belongs the lasting credit of establishing Chris- 
 tianity on an independent basis. He did this by 
 casting away everything else, and taking his stand 
 solely on the gospel of redemption by the blood of 
 Christ. The second step which Paul took, namely, 
 the advance from the view that Jesus' death was 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 151 
 
 a vicarious means of salvation to the further idea 
 that if men believe that Jesus is Christ they 
 secure this salvation, we shall consider later on. 
 
 The chief difficulty in understanding Paul's 
 thought is in understanding the point at which he 
 starts. AVhen the idea of redemption by the death 
 of Christ is once accepted, and its central posi- 
 tion and controlling influence recognized, the out- 
 lines of his theology become clear. His language 
 and the form taken by his thought are every- 
 where influenced by his study of the Old Testa- 
 ment and by the theology in which he had been 
 trained, and some knowledge of these things is 
 requisite for understanding Paul. As we come 
 to know more of these matters, uncertainties in our 
 knowledge of Paul are being gradually removed. 
 In Paul's doctrine itself it is worth while in par- 
 ticular to observe the inward, personal, intimate 
 nature of his conception of salvation. No external 
 application of welfare imposed from without, no 
 mere participation in a new epoch of comfort and 
 bliss, no mere membership in the body of the 
 Messiah's people to be attained when the day of 
 disclosures and of division shall come, would have 
 satisfied his needs. The longing of the Psalmist, 
 who confesses, *' Against thee, thee only have I 
 sinned and done that which is evil in thy sight," 
 
152 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 and entreats, ^'Cast me not away from thy pres- 
 ence; . , . restore unto me the joy of thy 
 salvation," is the longing of Panl. The salvation 
 he desires is a change in the innermost relation 
 between himself and God. In Paul, as to some 
 extent in the author of the nearly contemporary 
 Second Book of Esdras, thought has risen to a 
 plane,— of abstractness, if you will,— where spirit- 
 ual processes and spiritual relations alone are 
 important, and the concrete materialistic meta- 
 phors of popular imagery are in the main recog- 
 nized as purely figurative. We cannot affirm as 
 much for the thought of the main body of Jews 
 or of Jewish Christians, any more than we can 
 for the thought of vast masses of Christians 
 throughout the ages. 
 
 Paul's distinctive ideas about man, God, and 
 Christ appear, as has been already remarked, in 
 connection with his utterances about redemption. 
 He has a doctrine of man as the subject of re- 
 demption. His view of God is revealed by his 
 thought about redemption. His conception of 
 Christ starts from the idea of redemption. What 
 this redemption consists in we shall presently see 
 more clearly. 
 
 Apart from redemption man is under the power 
 of sin, whereby even when he would do good evil 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 153 
 
 is often present with him. Not total but universal 
 depravity is Paul's view of the present state of 
 the human race. That view was founded on the 
 reproaches of his own conscience ; and it w^as con- 
 firmed by observation of the Jewish as well as the 
 gentile world. The power of Sin over man is the 
 natural, though not necessary, result of the con- 
 stitutional weakness of human nature, and has 
 been established by the long series of generations 
 in which men, beginning with Adam, have sinned. 
 But sin itself is in Paul 's view the act of the indi- 
 vidual, and the individual is responsible for it. 
 The attitude of God toward sin is expressively, 
 but metaphorically, described by the Old Testa- 
 ment term ''wrath"; the punishment of sin is 
 physical death, which involves— except redemp- 
 tion and resurrection prevent— eternal abode in 
 Hades and exclusion from the light and joy of 
 God's presence. 
 
 Into the psychology by the aid of which— with 
 distinction of flesh and spirit— Paul expresses his 
 view we need not here enter, important as an un- 
 derstanding of it is for the understanding of 
 many passages of Paul's epistles. The relation, 
 however, of Sin to the Law is essential for our 
 purpose. The Jewish Law meant two burdens; 
 it meant the burden laid on a sensitive conscience 
 
154 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 by the requirements of morals, and it meant the 
 burden of the required Jewish observances of 
 washings and fastings and distinction of meats 
 and the rest. AYhen Paul speaks of the Law he 
 means both these. Now the whole energy of 
 PauPs life while a Pharisee had been thrown into 
 the attempt faithfully to observe this Law. His 
 fine moral sense told him that in that attempt he 
 had failed. He came later to see that in con- 
 centrating his whole being on observing the ordi- 
 nances of the Law he had missed the true service 
 of God. Hence Sin and Law seemed to him 
 inextricably united, and in his later discussion he 
 declares— strange as it appears to us— that slavery 
 to the Law is the same as slavery to Sin, The 
 attempt perfectly to obey the Law leads only to 
 despair. 
 
 Such, then, is the situation apart from redemp- 
 tion, even for the most favored man of all, the 
 Jew. He has a Law to observe, and knows that 
 the perfect observance of it will maintain his right 
 relation with God intact. But he is weak and 
 under the control of Sin, and the Law instead of 
 bringing him to salvation, simply reveals to him 
 by its clear light his own sinfulness, or even (for 
 so far does Paul go) by the reaction against its re- 
 quirements positively provokes him to its own 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 155 
 
 violation. Here comes in Redemption. Paul's 
 conviction, which we have already discussed, that 
 the death of Jesus Christ is the gift of God 
 wherehy men are saved, brought him to a new un- 
 derstanding of law. If salvation has thus been 
 given by God's grace, it is evident that God does 
 not expect men to earn it by fulfilling law. In- 
 deed he has not given the Law with that in view, 
 as results have shown. What God asks is only 
 that men will believe that Jesus is the j\Iessiah. 
 With that belief comes a new life in the soul, 
 which leads to complete redemption. Paul knows 
 all this, not because he can prove it by argument, 
 which he nowhere tries to do, but because, the 
 faith having been revealed to him with divine ac- 
 creditment, its power and results had proved 
 themselves true in his own experience of peace. 
 To this new life he will bring all men. The act of 
 Faith which initiates it is within man's power. 
 
 Here we have no structure of logic, but the 
 product of a combination of insight, inference, and 
 experience. By trusting to the full his gospel of 
 redemption through the death of Christ, Paul 
 has been able to develop in detail a view of Chris- 
 tianity externally very different from the teaching 
 of Jesus Christ, but in its inner essentials a faith- 
 ful interpretation of his teaching and his life. 
 
156 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 The redemption to which faith introduces man 
 is twofold, both from the so-called wrath of God 
 and from the power of sin which occasioned that 
 wrath ; or in other language, both from guilt and 
 from moral degradation and corruption. The 
 former redemption is forgiveness, the latter is re- 
 newal of the moral forces of man's nature. Both 
 are needs of sinful man; both are included in 
 Paul's thought. Paul's names for these two 
 aspects of redemption are sometimes strange. 
 Forgiveness he calls justification. It is the same 
 thing as atonement, or reconciliation, terms in 
 which somewhat different aspects of the same 
 process are emphasized. In this process we be- 
 come sons of God ; and since God 's attitude is now 
 one not of exaction, but of favor and grace, by- 
 God's act of receiving us our responsibility to 
 obey the Law as law is wholly done away. On 
 this side the redemption is complete here and 
 now. For anxiety or despair there is no longer 
 room. The problem which tormented the writer 
 of Second Esdras, as it had tormented Paul, is 
 solved through God's forgiveness, freely offered 
 to every man who will accept it. 
 
 But if we stopped here, we should merely de- 
 clare that in the case of believers God disregards 
 and forgives their sin, relieves them from the 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 157 
 
 burden of the Law, and opens to them complete 
 freedom from all restraint. This antinomianism 
 would in no sense satisfy the man whose severe 
 conscience made him originally feel the need of 
 redemption. It would be indeed a mere confession 
 on God's part of defeat by Sin. In fact, Paul 
 never thinks of stopping here. Parallel with these 
 objective results of faith of which we have spoken, 
 —justification, atonement, reconciliation, sonship, 
 is the subjective, inner change, not merely an 
 alteration of the soul's status and relation to God, 
 but the transformation of the believer's moral 
 nature. With the abolition of the Law the chains 
 of Sin are broken. In its place stands the Spirit 
 of God, which enters men's hearts with power to 
 produce new fruits of righteousness. With the 
 Spirit comes Christ, and in union with Christ the 
 believer is transformed so that he cries, ''It is no 
 longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me. ' ' 
 
 The double character of redemption which we 
 have been observing in the experiences of the be- 
 liever means, of course, a double character in the 
 work of Christ. That work both secures justifica- 
 tion (or forgiveness) for sinners, and imparts 
 new powers through the mystic union with the 
 Redeemer into which the believer enters. In the 
 former aspect it is expiatory, and this character 
 
158 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 of the death of Christ Paul expresses (as he does 
 the corresponding experience of the believer) in 
 many ways and by many figures. God has set forth 
 Christ Jesus as a propitiation ; ^ Christ became a 
 curse for us ; ^ God spared not his own Son but 
 delivered him up for us all ; ^ God blotted out by 
 the death of Christ the bond written in ordinances 
 that was against us.* Since Jewish sacrifices were 
 nearly always expiatory, atoning, that is secur- 
 ing forgiveness, for specific transgressions (usu- 
 ally unwitting breaches of external ritual), it was 
 natural for Paul also to use the figure of sacrifice 
 to set forth the expiatory quality of the death of 
 Christ. He does so, however, explicitly and un- 
 mistakably only twice,^ the more notable case be- 
 ing a verse from Ephesians, where he says that 
 Christ ''loved you and gave himself up for you, 
 an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor of 
 a sweet smell.'' No one of these figures,— the 
 sacrificial metaphor least of all— was fundamental. 
 Each was a mode, useful for the moment, of mak- 
 ing clear the meaning that through the death of 
 Christ the possibility of redemption had come 
 to men. A ''sacrificial theology" was very far 
 
 iRom. m. 25. 
 
 2 Gal. iii. 12. 
 
 3 Rom. viii. 32. 
 "Col. ii. 13-14. 
 
 = I Cor. V. 7 ; Eph. v. 2. 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 159 
 
 from Paul's thought, although such a one has 
 grown up and appeals to him for authority. A 
 theology of vicarious expiation was what Paul 
 held, but that can exist independently of the idea 
 of ritual sacrifice. 
 
 To Christ's death the believer owes this objective 
 redemption from wrath and guilt; to union with 
 the risen Christ and to the presence of the Holy 
 Spirit in his heart, he owes the inner renewal by 
 which alone his redemption is complete. The dis- 
 tinction between the Spirit of God and the spirit- 
 ual heavenly Christ is not clearly explained — nor 
 apparently made — by Paul. "We seem to have 
 two parallel lines of thought relating to two 
 aspects of one and the same inner change. In 
 spiritual union with Christ the believer, so it 
 seemed to Paul, shares in the experiences of his 
 Lord, is crucified with him and dies to sin, is 
 raised to new life, lives not in himself but in 
 Christ. This mystical theology evidently played 
 a great part in Paul's dearest thought, and it re- 
 appears over and over again in his epistles. It 
 all relates to this moral re-creation. This phase of 
 Paul's thought has only in part established itself 
 in popular Christianity, and some of the language 
 still sounds strange to most modern ears. It may 
 have its roots in conceptions unrelated to Juda- 
 
160 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ism, but current in the East and in Greece, to be 
 traced in their grosser form in various frenzied 
 rites, in which the worshipper identifies himself 
 with the person of the deity. Equally important 
 in Paul's doctrine was the parallel conception of 
 the work of the Holy Spirit, whereby, likewise, 
 the moral renovation is effected. This idea had 
 come by a purely Hebrew line of descent, and has 
 proved a natural and satisfactory mode of con- 
 ception to the Church in all ages, — and never 
 more so than to-day. 
 
 It was impossible, in Paul's view, that his gos- 
 pel of justification by faith should produce moral 
 laxity. A new moral power was a part of the 
 very process, and faith introduced as well to 
 righteousness as to justification. The summary 
 of the moral life was Love, The formula for the 
 relation of the various elements is "Faith, work- 
 ing [o?- made effective] through love. " Theoreti- 
 cally this would come about by the necessity of the 
 case; in practice, effort is required to make the 
 possibility real. Paul knew the need of motives to 
 stir men, and used them in great variety. His 
 greatest motive is gratitude and the response to 
 privilege. To this he believes the moral future of 
 mankind can be trusted. 
 
 In this double redemption through the death 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 161 
 
 and risen life of Jesus Christ, which formed 
 Paul 's Good News, lay, he held, the solution of all 
 problems. But it is evident that it is not primarily 
 a philosophy, an explanation of the universe, it 
 is primarily the recognition of the historical fact 
 that God has now intervened in the affairs of this 
 world. This fact attests itself by an inner ex- 
 perience, and from it we are able to understand 
 God and the world. Paul's thought of God and 
 Christ and the world is not as of an eternal, un- 
 changing organism, whether mechanical or biolog- 
 ical. It is rather always that of a moving pano- 
 rama. He views the universe not as static but as 
 dramatic. In history the infinite and the finite 
 meet. This is thoroughly Jewish, and for the 
 religious life thoroughly wholesome. Contrast it 
 with such a conception as that sublime system in 
 which Plato conceives of a universe of ideas 
 mounting up to the supreme Idea, which is God. 
 The difference is enormous, and the contrast re- 
 veals the peculiarly unhellenic character of Paul's 
 view. 
 
 One necessary and extremely important practi- 
 cal result of Paul's conception of freedom from 
 the Law was that the ceremonial part of the 
 Jewish law was once and for all abrogated; and, 
 obviously, under Paul's system there was no 
 
162 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 method of restoring it, as there was of restor- 
 ing the moral requirements, which were all carried 
 over, being contained in the principle of Love. 
 Hence the Christian religion was open to gentiles 
 on equal terms with Jews. If faith in Christ is 
 all that is needed, that is as easy for gentile as 
 for Jew. ''There cannot be Greek and Jew, cir- 
 cumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scyth- 
 ian, bondman, freeman, but Christ is all, and in 
 all." This observation, which, as we know, Paul 
 early made and acted on, caused violent attack 
 from the Jews. Both the Jews and the Jewish 
 Christians, when these formed themselves into a 
 distinct party within the Church, hated him. 
 Their attacks on his work called out his reply in 
 Galatians ; in Romans also he shows how his mind 
 continued to dwell on various aspects of the con- 
 troversies thus occasioned. For this reason we 
 have fuller knowledge of Paul's thought on these 
 fundamental subjects than on some others. In 
 Galatians he argues that the Law no longer holds 
 in any of its parts, and that this doctrine does not 
 in any way imply or encourage moral laxity. In 
 Romans he expounds consecutively his doctrine of 
 salvation, so as to show its adaptedness to human 
 needs and to cut under Jewish attack, buttressing 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 163 
 
 it positively and negatively on various sides by 
 analogies, demurrers, and denials. 
 
 In the earlier epistles Paul speaks of Christ 
 mainly with reference to the work of redemption. 
 There are certain indications of his general con- 
 ception of the nature and person of Christ, but 
 they are not full or elaborate. In later years con- 
 troversy led him to develop, or at any rate more 
 fully to set down, his views, and in Philippians, 
 Ephesians, and Colossians he has given us a toler- 
 ably complete statement. Jesus Christ, the Son of 
 God, being existent from eternity came to earth 
 from his heavenly abode, and after the experiences 
 of his earthly life returned to heavenly glory. He 
 was throughout one person. He was the agent in 
 the creation of the world as he has now become 
 the agent in the redemption of men. He stands 
 in the relation of reconciler and Lord to all Be- 
 ing. This last idea is developed in the course of 
 thinking out Christ's contrast and superiority to 
 all other superhuman beings (of whom Paul con- 
 ceived that there were many ) . In setting forth this 
 doctrine Paul shows the influence of Alexandrian 
 modes of expression; the shadow is contrasted 
 with the reality, the Son is called, as was the 
 Logos, the '"'image" of God. But Paul nowhere 
 dwells on these ideas. They are taken up and 
 
164 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 used, like so many others, without forming an 
 integral and necessary part of his system. It is 
 probable— though the translation of the passage 
 in question^ is somewhat doubtful— that Paul 
 does not use the word God to describe Jesus 
 Christ; but if he had done so, it would cause no 
 difficulty in the interpretation of his system. Any 
 slightest conflict with strict monotheism is far 
 from his thought, but Christ is a wholly super- 
 human being, even though he appeared on earth as 
 a complete man. Paul's doctrine led directly to 
 the reflection which produced the doctrine of the 
 Trinity, although that doctrine is not, in any 
 proper sense, itself found in Paul. 
 
 In the doctrine of Christ as thus developed we 
 have a pictorial statement of two ideas which can 
 be stated more abstractly : first, the idea that both 
 creation and history find their explanation in re- 
 demption ; secondly, the idea that the highest com- 
 munion man can have with God is through the 
 revelation which he has made of himself in his 
 Son. The pictorial form is a valuable and true 
 form ; perhaps it is not a necessary form for all. 
 
 The Holy Spirit is brought by Paul into rela- 
 tion with both God and Christ.- The conception 
 
 1 Rom. ix. 5, 
 
 2 For instance in II Cor. xiii. 14 ; Eph. iv. 4-6. 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 165 
 
 of the Spirit as given to Paul by the tradition of 
 Jewish thought was profoundly altered in his 
 hands, and became the rational notion of a divine 
 transforming power in the moral nature of men. 
 Of the work of the Spirit as understood by Paul 
 and the part which the idea played in the life of 
 his churches we shall hear more in the next 
 chapter. 
 
 Of the other topics of Paul's system I can 
 speak but briefly. Of the general nature of God 
 Paul thinks in the characteristic manner of Jewish 
 monotheism, but with the idea of fatherhood, 
 which was current among the Jews, interpreted in 
 the sense of Jesus and in the light of God's provi- 
 sion now made for the salvation of all men. God 
 is not only creator, king, and judge, but redeemer. 
 
 Eschatology, or an outlook to the future, is 
 necessary to any \dtal religion; and the Jewish 
 theology out of which Paul came was strongly 
 eschatological in cast. The Messiah is an essen- 
 tially eschatological figure. So Paul looked for 
 the reappearance of Jesus Christ, and, with that 
 event, for the general resurrection and judgment. 
 Here, as in the doctrine of redemption, Paul 
 thinks of God's universe not as static, but as 
 dramatic. His positive interest in eschatology is 
 mainly twofold : first, in the completion of redemp- 
 
166 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tion which the final stage of history will bring in, 
 with the transformation of external nature, the 
 beginning of permanent conditions, the inner 
 moral perfecting of believers; secondly, in the 
 sanctions of morality which the Last Judgment 
 provides. Even believers are subject to the Judg- 
 ment. Even justification by faith is not unquali- 
 fied, but depends for ratification on conduct. 
 
 As a practical worker Paul had a doctrine of 
 the Church. In the first place, the Church, which 
 is the body of believers, is one body, and in an al- 
 most physical sense the body of Christ who is its 
 head. Local congregations were wholly discon- 
 nected except by a common loyalty to an apostolic 
 founder and by fellowship and friendly Chris- 
 tian sympathy. For gentile and Jew the relation 
 to God is identical. But the unity is invisible. 
 In the second place, the Church is divine. It has 
 entered into the inheritance of the old Israel as 
 the Congregation of God. We owe our places in 
 it to divine ordinance, and this should stir our 
 enthusiastic gratitude. Here come in Paul's 
 strong expressions of foreordination, as in the first 
 chapter of Ephesians. Paul held, as did the 
 Pharisees before him, to the sovereignty of God in 
 the full sense, and referred everything to it. But 
 the emphasis in his thought is on the fact that 
 
PAUL'S THEOLOGY 167 
 
 God has now opened wide the opportunity of sal- 
 vation to others than Jews, not on the reproba- 
 tion of the rest. What Paul has in mind in his 
 statements about election, is the relation of be- 
 lievers to God, as seen from within. And the 
 divine sovereignty with Paul nowhere tends to 
 exclude man's responsibility. His explanation of 
 the difficulty therein contained he does not give. 
 
 I have laid stress on redemption, or salvation, 
 as the central point in Paul's theology. What, 
 in conclusion, is in a word the New Life to which 
 redemption leads ? What does it all mean ? What 
 makes the contents of salvation? How shall we 
 express it in plain language ? 
 
 Salvation, according to Paul, is possible for 
 man, in essence and principle, though not in com- 
 plete fulfilment, here and now. It consists in 
 two things, the assurance of forgiveness for sin- 
 ners (which is a very different thing from bald 
 justice), and the possession of new powers to 
 choose effectually the right. Paul holds that 
 neither of these two things can come to man so 
 long as he thinks of God mainly as the source of 
 moral law, which man must perfectly obey. They 
 do however come to the man who sees Jesus to be 
 the Christ, the Son of God, and so recognizes that 
 God is the source both of law and of forgiveness. 
 
168 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 This perception and recognition is faith. It is not 
 merely an act of the intellect, but is at the same 
 time a choice of the will, which puts the whole 
 man on the side of God; and it brings in response 
 to grateful love new and mysterious forces 
 to occupy the believer's soul. The believer 
 in Jesus Christ is, in Paul's view, sure that 
 forgiveness has taken the place of wrath; that 
 is what belief itself means, and it is confirmed by 
 the resulting peace and joy. He is also given 
 such inner aid that out of his faith flows love. 
 The result is a life of freedom in faith,— free- 
 dom from bondage to a law that was never ful- 
 filled, freedom from servitude to sin that sepa- 
 rates from God. In place of discouragement and 
 despair comes confidence ; in place of degradation 
 there is progress. 
 
 Paul is the apostle of freedom and optimism 
 for all time, because, not through logical inference 
 but by a revelation and by a fact of experience, 
 he came to know that in the cross of Jesus Christ 
 the gift of this salvation had been made to the 
 world. AYherever Paul is studied or loved, we 
 find freedom and hope, and so a power of moral 
 enthusiasm and an incentive to theological 
 progress. 
 
VI 
 
 LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 
 
 "We have already looked at the type of Chris- 
 tian life which formed itself and persisted for 
 some time in Palestine, and we have seen that it 
 did not form the basis for, nor exert a controlling 
 influence upon, the Christian life of the Church 
 throughout the world. The churches which con- 
 trolled early Christianity were not Jerusalem, 
 but Antioch, Asia Minor, Corinth, Eome, south- 
 ern Gaul. 
 
 We have also looked at the theology of the 
 great Apostle Paul. But his mighty genius al- 
 ways stood somewhat removed from the common 
 level even of Christians who reverenced his 
 name. He was at once too Jewish in his mode of 
 thought and form of expression to be fully un- 
 derstood by plain men trained in other schools, 
 and too daring in his flights of noble speculation 
 to be followed by lesser spirits. The common run 
 of gentile Christianity was not Jewish, and was 
 only in a limited degree Pauline. In the 
 169 
 
170 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 average Christianity, indeed, of the apostolic age 
 we shall not look for what can properly be called 
 a type of theology wrought out as a consistent 
 body of doctrine. What most interests us is rather 
 the conditions of its inner and outer life, its 
 forms of organization and worship, its dangerous 
 tendencies, its relation to the world outside. These 
 aspects of early Christianity we need to under- 
 stand, in order both to see the meaning of much 
 of the New Testament and to comprehend prop- 
 erly the later history of the Christian Church 
 and of Christian theology. In studying the life 
 of the gentile churches of this period we have to 
 look mainly at the churches founded by Paul, be- 
 cause our information necessarily comes mainly 
 from his letters to such churches ; we can believe, 
 however, that these churches fairly represent 
 those others in similar places which other apostles 
 had founded. 
 
 It is worth while in beginning our study to ob- 
 serve that the possibility of forming such a pic- 
 ture as that at which we aim is one of the most 
 important tests of the trustworthiness of our 
 knowledge of the apostolic age. If we can gain 
 from the indications of our sources an entirely 
 clear and consistent account of the life of the 
 period, we have in that fact one of the strongest 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 171 
 
 possible arguments against those who deny the 
 value of our sources for the history of the period 
 to which they purport to relate. 
 
 We may look first at the inner life of these 
 Christian churches in the gentile world. Apart 
 from the general influences which must at all 
 times affect any Christian church, because they 
 pertain to the nature of such an organization, 
 certain special circumstances combined to give 
 these churches a distinctive character. In the 
 first place they formed a very small body in the 
 midst of a large world. In the nature of the case 
 they were separatists. That they had the merits 
 and defects of such a group, thrown in on one 
 another, cut off from the world, is plain from 
 Paul's epistles and the practical directions with 
 which they were filled. It is the life of a great 
 family to which his instructions relate, with its 
 charm and its dangers. This same fact explains 
 the ideals of the Christians themselves. Not to 
 influence the world by pervading and transform- 
 ing its social order, but to form a group apart 
 where the virtues of individuals should be culti- 
 vated in the soil of religion, and which should 
 attract one and another from the evil world with- 
 out, was the aim which they set themselves. Hence 
 they did not, even when they were individually 
 
172 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 fitted to do so, enter into the world of literary 
 culture, of art, of public life. Many of these 
 pursuits were closed to them because of their 
 connection with heathen customs. But even had 
 this not been the case, the early Christians would 
 have withdrawn from them into the circle of 
 their own life and interests. The outside world 
 looked on the Christians as social and religious 
 anarchists; and the judgment was not altogether 
 unjust. The Christians had a new foundation 
 for their life, and did not need to share in the 
 world's society; and like other compact bodies 
 they had never a doubt that their own cause 
 was the cause of God and their own future 
 secure. 
 
 A second controlling influence for their thought 
 and life was the expectation, which was univer- 
 sally cherished, of a speedy end to the present 
 order of things, to be brought about by the end 
 of this world, the return of Jesus Christ, and the 
 Day of Judgment. In this group of ideas the 
 Jewish point of view which Christianity brought 
 into the minds of men is very apparent. The 
 Jews had conceived of all time, from the eternity 
 of the past to the eternity of the future, as 
 divided into two ages, *'the present age" and 
 "the coming age,'' separated by the Day of 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 173 
 
 Judgment and the coming of the Messiah and 
 the other connected events belonging to the en- 
 trance upon eternal life. This conception went 
 over into Christianity, with the difference that 
 the Christians knew the Messiah, in the person 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, and the consequent differ- 
 ence that his expected coming (or ''parousia'') 
 was not his first coming but would be his re- 
 turn to consummate his work. Jesus himself 
 had thus used the imagery of Jewish thought to 
 set forth his expectation of the future. Under 
 these figures he had seen the coming triumph 
 of God's cause, the establishment of God's rule 
 in the world, the goal of history. How far he 
 presented to himself this future as to come about 
 actually in the material forms of the imagery 
 which he used; how far he consciously recog- 
 nized that it was metaphor and trope we shall 
 never know. He was in the habit of transform- 
 ing the old terms and figures by his wider vision 
 and deeper insight and by his sure emphasis on 
 the real, the ethical, the eternal. We may well 
 believe that here, too, that was the case. Only 
 we must beware of stripping Jesus' thought of 
 that which gave it its distinction, and reducing 
 it to the empirical commonplace of our own 
 notions. 
 
174 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 It seems clear, moreover, that Jesus had taught 
 not only that he should return at the end of this 
 age, but also that the end of this age and his 
 return would come speedily, even within the life- 
 time of the present generation. In this expectation 
 the earliest Christians, strengthened by the resur- 
 rection appearances, had reorganized their life at 
 Jerusalem ; it was in this hope that Paul lived ; and 
 within the limits which it set his thought moved 
 and the life of the gentile churches was developed. 
 Paul himself expected to live on earth to see the 
 end of the world, and he had to explain to the 
 Thessalonians that not only those who should sur- 
 vive until that time but also those believers who 
 might die in the interval would all share in 
 the blessings of the great, but not at all far-off, 
 divine event to which the whole creation moves. 
 A touching evidence of the general expectation 
 is to be seen in the words of the unknown au- 
 thor of the Second Epistle of Peter, who speaks 
 of those who say, ''AYhere is the promise of his 
 coming? for, from the day that the fathers fell 
 asleep, all things continue as they were from the 
 beginning of the creation." 
 
 Now it is plain that if a body of men and 
 women live with so short a vista of the world's 
 future before them, that fact will profoundly 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 175 
 
 affect their whole life. If the time is so short, 
 it is not worth while to lay foundations for a 
 distant posterity, to rear a new Christian gen- 
 eration that shall regenerate the world by grow- 
 ing up into it, to provide for education, to es- 
 tablish institutions, to enter into the general 
 interests of the world's life, all which is des- 
 tined speedily to pass away. Only those con- 
 cerns that relate directly to the eternal life will 
 seem real; all else will be wholly subordinate, 
 or even seem to be a deterrent from the great 
 interests of the soul. Under such conditions what 
 we recognize as the healthy-minded Christian at- 
 titude toward human society, work, career, is im- 
 possible. No fundamental ascetic principle is 
 necessary in order to explain the ascetic precepts, 
 and the apparently ascetic omission of certain 
 interests, which we find in Paul and in early 
 Christian life. These things were inevitable so 
 long as the outlook into the future remained thus 
 contracted. 
 
 Yet it must not be said that this mistake, as 
 we must call it, was an evil. It concentrated 
 the minds of Christians on those things that are 
 eternal, and must have proved a moral motive 
 of great intensity. It gradually faded under the 
 teaching of history, and its modern counter- 
 
176 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 part has never controlled the thought and life 
 of any great body of Christians, nor led many 
 far astray. 
 
 A third inner characteristic, more important 
 than either of the other two that I have men- 
 tioned, was what is sometimes called the ''enthu- 
 siasm" of the early Christian churches. By this 
 is meant their sense of immediate divine in- 
 spiration; and this must lead us to consider the 
 ancient idea of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 The Spirit of God is a Hebrew idea w^hich had 
 had a long history and a wide range of applica- 
 tion. It meant ''God's power and agency mani- 
 fest," or "God exerting power," and the presence 
 of the Spirit was known by the possession of 
 power to do anything unusual, provided that 
 power were apparently derived from God. This 
 conception held of all sorts of unusual power. 
 The classical instance is that of Bezalel the son 
 of Uri, of whom the Lord said unto Moses, "I 
 have filled him with the Spirit of God, . . . 
 to devise skillful works, to work in gold and 
 in silver and in brass, and in cutting of 
 stones for setting, and in carving of wood, 
 to work in all manner of workmanship."^ 
 The superhuman energy of Othniel, of Jephthah, 
 
 1 Exodus xxxi. 2-5. 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 177 
 
 of Samson when he slew the lion, or the strange 
 religious frenzy of Saul prophesying and lying 
 naked a day and a night, are all ascribed to 
 the working of the Spirit. In the higher thought 
 the Spirit was active in the utterances of the 
 prophets, in the work of the king, in the equip- 
 ment of the Messiah. To these ideas the Chris- 
 tians fell heir. The Holy Spirit, or the Spirit 
 of God, was to them the source, not indeed, so 
 far as we know, of unusual powers of handicraft 
 or strength,— the time for that had passed,— but 
 of all unusual phenomena which could in any 
 way be connected with religion. The perception 
 of religious truth, and the power to heal the 
 sick, exaltation of mind bursting forth into psalm 
 or song or public address, the capacity to deal ef- 
 fectively with the business of the congregation, 
 ecstatic utterance in unintelligible sounds, and 
 prophecy and visions, all were alike believed to 
 show the presence of God's Spirit in the Church. 
 The Christians believed that a new outpouring 
 of the Spirit of God characterized their common 
 life, and they found in this baptism with the 
 Holy Spirit a chief difference between the move- 
 ment initiated by John the Baptist and Chris- 
 tianity. "I baptized you in water, but he shall 
 baptize you in the Holy Spirit.*' 
 
178 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 This exalting sense of the immediate inspira- 
 tion of God is a fundamental trait of the life of 
 the earliest Christians. It is referred to fre- 
 quently in the epistles of Paul. It carried them 
 on in the face of hardship and persecution, it 
 supported their confidence in the divine origin 
 of Christianity, to the preaching of which by 
 them that heard God himself had borne "wit- 
 ness with them both by signs and wonders, and 
 by manifold powers, and by gifts of the Holy 
 Spirit, according to his own will." It provided 
 a series of new Christian authorities, the proph- 
 ets who spoke and the teachers w^ho taught 
 in the Church. In one of the letters of Ignatius, 
 bishop of Antioch, written just after the open- 
 ing of the second century, we have a concrete 
 and vivid glimpse of the action of the Spirit 
 at a Christian meeting. He says ''The Spirit 
 . . . searcheth out the hidden things. I cried 
 out, when I was among you; I spake with a loud 
 voice, with God's own voice. Give ye heed to 
 the bishop and the presbytery and deacons. Now 
 there were those who suspected me of saying this 
 because I knew beforehand of the division of 
 certain persons. But he in whom I am bound is 
 my witness that I learned it not from flesh of 
 man ; it was the preaching of the Spirit." ^ 
 
 1 Ign. Phil. vii. 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 179 
 
 All this is distinctly characteristic of the apos- 
 tolic age, on the Jewish and gentile sides alike, 
 and the end of the period is marked by a change 
 of profound significance when books, officers, ex- 
 ternal authority, fixed forms, were substituted 
 for the Spirit working with visible power in 
 this material and physical sphere. Such scenes 
 as these which Paul and Ignatius portray grew 
 less and less frequent, as the distance from the 
 apostolic age increased. Out in the world, feel- 
 ing the necessity of firmer organization, and ex- 
 posed to the influence of Greek thought, the 
 Church had to lose its age of enthusiasm, as it 
 hardened and matured itself for the struggle 
 that lay before it. 
 
 Of the spiritual gifts of the apostolic church 
 we learn chiefly through Paul, and mainly be- 
 cause of occasions where this enthusiastic temper 
 revealed its shadier side. The exaltation of hu- 
 man faculties under religious excitement, and es- 
 pecially, as was here necessarily the case, of more 
 or less abnormal faculties, was attended with 
 disorders that required Paul's thought and care- 
 ful correction. He himself valued these spirit- 
 ual gifts. The ecstatic and unintelligible speech 
 which he calls "speaking with tongues" he him- 
 self practised, and likewise prophecy and heal- 
 
180 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ings and the rest. He, too, believed these phe- 
 nomena to be the exhibition of God's Spirit work- 
 ing in men. But he held the gifts to vary in 
 worth just in proportion as they were useful 
 to the Church; and he held another view which 
 has gradually made its way in the control of 
 Christian thought, and constitutes perhaps his 
 greatest single contribution to that thought. He 
 held, namely, that every believer without excep- 
 tion possesses the Spirit of God, whether that 
 Spirit manifests itself in physical phenomena, 
 and special powers of mind and body, or not. 
 His corollary to these two principles was that 
 the most significant manifestations of the Spirit 
 are the graces of character which Christian faith 
 is sure to engender in the Christian 's soul. * ' The 
 fruit of the Spirit," he says, "is love, joy, peace, 
 long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 
 meekness, self-control. ' ' 
 
 Of the evils which had to be corrected we read 
 in I Corinthians and I Thessalonians. Possessors 
 of the more conspicuous spiritual gifts set them- 
 selves up arrogantly as superior to their humble 
 brethren. The fault was all the worse because 
 these prominent and startling gifts were apt to 
 be the ones least valuable for the edification of the 
 Church, however useful they might be to the 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 181 
 
 private life of the bearers of them. But not 
 only arrogance, but also disorderliness in the 
 meetings grew out of these things, and Paul is 
 at pains to regulate the order of procedure, so 
 that the impetuous speakers may be restrained 
 from presenting their God in the aspect of a 
 God not of peace but of confusion. 
 
 One other interesting problem was raised by 
 the new "enthusiasm," that of the proper be- 
 havior of women. The Gospel knew neither male 
 nor female, as it recognized neither Jew nor 
 Greek, but only the new creature in Christ Jesus. 
 It is evident that under this new freedom and 
 in the excitement of religious emotion the women 
 of the Corinthian church had thrown aside some 
 of the customs of ordinary society, and had also 
 put themselves forward in the meetings of the 
 Christians. It was the immediate result of the 
 sense that every believer possesses directly the 
 Holy Spirit. Paul settles the question adversely 
 to the women, and this was doubtless the wise 
 course in the emergency, but he makes his con- 
 servative decision by the application of principles 
 which seem to us neither self-evident nor yet 
 drawn by necessary inference from the doctrines 
 of Christianity. And Paul himself, although sure 
 of his practical advice, seems not to be with- 
 
182 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 out some scruples in insisting on the order of 
 inferiority which he names: God, Christ, man, 
 woman; while he closes his argument with an 
 appeal to common custom.^ 
 
 These three circumstances, the smallness of 
 the churches in the midst of a great world, the 
 expectation of a speedy end, and the enthusiastic 
 sense of immediate and universal inspiration, had 
 thus a profound influence on the inner life of 
 the churches. The last of them was not without 
 its serious dangers. 
 
 But these difficulties at which we have glanced, 
 and which early called for Paul's attention, were 
 not the only dangers which beset the apostolic 
 age. The epistles of Paul are largely occupied 
 with guarding against evil tendencies arising 
 spontaneously from within the churches, or 
 brought to them from without. Of moral dangers 
 there were two, laxity and asceticism. These are 
 two faults which might seem to exclude each 
 other, but in practice often coexist side by side 
 in the same persons. Of the danger of moral 
 laxity we have appalling evidence in every one 
 of Paul's epistles. The grossest vices of the flesh 
 of nearly every kind were pressing temptations 
 to Christians whom Paul was able — and no doubt 
 
 1 I Cor. xl. 1-16. 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 183 
 
 with sincerity— to congratulate on their faith 
 and love, their enrichment in Christ and their 
 enlightenment. We must remember the standards 
 of the lower classes in a Greek city in the first 
 century, and we need not, alas, go far out of 
 our w^ay to find modern parallels to what was 
 prevalent in those corrupt seats of passion and 
 selfishness. There can be scarcely any stronger 
 exhibition of the morally regenerating power of 
 Christian faith than to observe how from the 
 end of the first century of our era the moral 
 purity not only of Christian ideals but of Chris- 
 tian accomplishment was a characteristic of the 
 Christian body pointed to by the apologists, and 
 recognized with admiration by the world and the 
 philosophers. 
 
 The danger of asceticism is met with in various 
 parts of the world. The Epistle to the Colossians 
 is largely occupied with argument against a cer- 
 tain type of thought then current in Phrygia. 
 It evidently included precepts about meat and 
 drink— ''Touch not, taste not, handle not" — 
 which were abhorrent to Paul's ideas, and seemed 
 to him to threaten a false view of the significance 
 of spiritual religion itself; and connected with 
 these w^as a basis of speculation, in his view more- 
 dangerous still, because it not only implied the 
 
184 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 essential evil of material things, but, by introduc- 
 ing other angelic objects of worship, deposed 
 Jesus Christ from his supreme position in the 
 universe. Asceticism is always the enemy of 
 faith in a good God who has created the world, 
 and these ideas became one of the great dangers 
 of Christianity in the following period. Like- 
 wise, almost at the opposite geographical extreme 
 from ColossEe, we find Christians at Eome who, 
 under the influence of some type of Greek ascetic 
 thought, had taken up total-abstinence from wine 
 and from animal food. 
 
 A different danger was that of the breaking 
 up of the Christian Church into sects. We have 
 seen how the danger of a schism between Jewish 
 and gentile Christianity was averted through 
 the breadth of view of the leading Jerusalem 
 apostles. This was but the first of many such 
 crises. In the plastic life of these newly-formed 
 and hence easily-dissolved churches, where ac- 
 tive thought led to quick movement, inner groups 
 and sects were constantly forming. The parties 
 at Corinth are known to us by name. The ad- 
 mirers of Paul, and Apollos, those who held to 
 the great name of Peter, perhaps also those who 
 maintained their own preeminent right to be- 
 long to Christ, were parties, the existence of which 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 185 
 
 brought danger to the peace of the church, and, 
 worse still, as all missionary work in modern 
 times shows, broke the solid front which Chris- 
 tianity, in order to conquer the world, needed to 
 present against the hosts of the world's dark- 
 ness. This motive, concern about the impediment 
 to the progress of Christian missions that lay 
 in partisan strife, is clearly at work in Paul's 
 repeated injunctions and entreaties to give 
 diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the 
 bond of peace. The tendency to sectarianism 
 went so far that the writer of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews has occasion to urge his readers not 
 to forsake assembling together, "as the custom 
 of some is. " ^ 
 
 In the earlier period of Paul's work there was 
 danger to the faith of his converts from Judaiz- 
 ers who denied the sufficiency of faith in Christ 
 for salvation, and tried to persuade gentile Chris- 
 tians to add to faith the fuller security of obe- 
 dience to the Jewish law. The growth of the 
 Christian Church in numbers and independent 
 life combined with Paul's arguments and with 
 the gradual diminution in influence of the Jewish 
 nation and religion to check this Judaizing propa- 
 
 i Heb. X. 25. 
 
186 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 ganda ; after Paul 's time the danger seems to have 
 been inconsiderable. 
 
 A more serious and growing danger was one 
 that came with entrance into the large world. A 
 tendency was widespread and inevitable to make 
 a combination with many types of thought so as 
 to produce a half-christian religion stuffed with 
 oriental speculation and Greek ideas and having 
 a strong dash of popular superstition. This syn- 
 cretism was perhaps the greatest danger to which 
 Christianity was exposed; the most interesting 
 example of it in the apostolic age is the system, 
 already mentioned, of the Colossian teachers. 
 In the second century it manifested itself in the 
 Gnostic schools of semichristian thought. 
 
 Of course at all times these young bodies of 
 Christians must have had to fight against the 
 indifference and apostasy of their own members. 
 The Christian life was hard for men and women 
 to whom its strict morals, though at first in- 
 spiring, involved unwonted discipline. Often un- 
 comfortable and sometimes distressing and dan- 
 gerous were the relations of a Christian with his 
 kindred and former friends. For many the goal 
 must have come to seem far-away and faint, the 
 path long and the power insufficient. AYe see 
 these sad stories behind the stirring passages in 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 187 
 
 which Paul appeals to his friends to quit them 
 like men in the proud recognition of their high 
 privilege, in that God hath chosen us in Christ 
 before the foundation of the world, and will per- 
 fect until the day of Jesus Christ the good work 
 which he hath begun in us. And less than a 
 generation later in the whole Epistle to the 
 Hebrews can be read a strenuous appeal called 
 out hy the danger of relapse in some important 
 church, not, as is often supposed, into Judaism, 
 but away from the service of the living God al- 
 together. 
 
 But it is time to turn from the inner char- 
 acteristics and dangers of the apostolic churches 
 to their outer form and condition. If we had 
 been at Corinth and had visited the meeting, 
 held to the great annoyance of the Jews in the 
 house of Titius Justus adjoining the Jews' own 
 synagogue, we should have found there gathered, 
 to use Paul's words, "not many wise after the 
 flesh, not many men of influence, not many gentle- 
 men,'' but rather representatives of the dull ele- 
 ments of the world and the weak and base ele- 
 ments and the elements that are commonly 
 despised. Small tradesmen, craftsmen, freedmen, 
 slaves would be there, both men and Avomen. 
 There would be some Jews; a large proportion 
 
188 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 would be persons who had once turned with in- 
 terest to Judaism but had now found in Jesus 
 Christ not only, as with the Jews, a pure moral- 
 ity and a lofty monotheism, but freedom, equal- 
 ity, and a new power unto salvation. Among 
 the women it is likely that some would be pres- 
 ent of higher wealth and social position. Such 
 was Phoebe of Cenchrese, near Corinth, for whom 
 Paul writes a note of introduction, ^ and who 
 had been a patroness of the Corinthian church. 
 We hear, too, at Corinth, of Erastus, the treas- 
 urer of the city, and of Stephanas, who seems 
 to have been a man of substance, as was Phile- 
 mon of Colossse; at Ephesus Paul had friends 
 among the Asiarchs, who were men of prominence 
 in society. In Rome there is reason to believe 
 that before the end of the first century several 
 persons of distinction, including a consul, T. Flav- 
 ins Clemens, and his wife Domitilla, near rela- 
 tives of the Emperor Domitian, became Chris- 
 tians. But these were isolated cases, and it re- 
 mained true throughout our period and for many 
 years thereafter that the Christian churches were 
 composed chiefly of persons of lowly position in 
 the community. 
 
 The original meetings of these primitive 
 
 » Eom. xvi. 1-2. 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 189 
 
 churches were the gatherings for instruction from 
 the missionary apostle whose word had brought 
 them together. For this purpose they assembled 
 in a private house as at Corinth, or in a public 
 lecture-room as at Ephesus— where we hear of 
 the School (or hall) of Tyrannus. As the churches 
 became independent, two kinds of meetings ap- 
 pear,— those for social worship and instruction 
 and those for common meals. Of the meetings 
 for worship and instruction we can gain a clear 
 notion from I Corinthians. The Christians come 
 together in a meeting substantially like a prayer- 
 meeting. Those whom the Spirit moves rise from 
 their seats and offer for the worship of God and 
 for the edification of the brethren their prayer, 
 their psalm, their teaching, their revelation, their 
 tongue, their interpretation of tongues. In a 
 well-ordered meeting those who feel the impulse 
 to speak will restrain themselves until others 
 have ceased. In practice, the disorderly and ex- 
 cited pressure to be heard brought about at 
 times an objectionable and even irreverent con- 
 fusion. Paul classifies the various contributions 
 that are thus made to the common life. Some 
 have the gift of teaching, and in the word of 
 knowledge and the word of wisdom (two types 
 between which we are unable to discriminate) 
 
190 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 bring the truth in its various aspects to men's 
 hearing. Others are prophets, and by revelation 
 speak that which a direct vision of God and his 
 truth has set in their hearts. 
 
 This prophecy must have dealt with many 
 themes. We read of a prophet who foretold a 
 famine and secured assistance for the stricken 
 Christians at Jerusalem; and again of warnings 
 to Paul in every city that bonds and imprison- 
 ment await him at Jerusalem. But we also see 
 that the stranger who comes by chance into the 
 meeting of Christians finds himself reproved 
 and judged by the prophets and the secrets of 
 his heart made manifest, so that *'he will fall 
 down on his face and worship God, declaring that 
 God is among you indeed." A whole book of 
 early Christian prophecy has been preserved to 
 us from the middle of the second century, the 
 "Shepherd", written by one Hermas, a Roman 
 Christian. We can there see how moral exhorta- 
 tion, allegorical pictures, apocalyptic vision and 
 foretelling of the future are all combined in one 
 prophet's utterances, and how the sense of imme- 
 diate inspiration was united with some measure 
 of literary art. In a very early Christian writ- 
 ing, the "Ascension of Isaiah," which may well 
 have been written before the year 150, we have 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 191 
 
 a contemporary description of such a prophetic 
 trance. ''As he was speaking in the Holy Spirit 
 in the hearing of all, he became silent and his 
 mind was taken up from him and he saw not the 
 men that stood before him, though his eyes indeed 
 were open. Moreover his lips were silent and the 
 mind in his body was taken up from him. But 
 his breath was in him, for he was seeing a vis- 
 ion."^ This doubtless corresponds to one type 
 of Christian prophecy, but we must suppose a 
 great variety of external forms. 
 
 The psalms and hymns of which Paul re- 
 peatedly speaks consisted doubtless both of ap- 
 propriate psalms from the Old Testament, as in 
 the Jewish synagogue, and of original composi- 
 tions of Christians, some notion of which we can 
 perhaps gain from the canticles of the early chap- 
 ters of Luke or the great choruses and doxologies 
 of the Book of Revelation. They were thought of 
 as at once addressed to God and useful for the 
 instruction and admonition of the brethren. 
 
 Besides the enlivenment of singing, the meetings 
 were from time to time diversified in a less or- 
 derly manner by the strange phenomenon of the 
 gift of tongues. The nature of this is made clear 
 by Paul's discussion in I Corinthians. As in all 
 
 1 Ascension of Isaiah vi. 10-12. 
 
192 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 times of greatly quickened religious fervor, so in 
 the apostolic age religious emotion found physi- 
 cal expression. In these churches this appeared 
 in the utterance at the church meeting of mean- 
 ingless combinations of sounds, poured forth with 
 the warmth of praise or prayer but without any 
 participation in the exercise by the speaker's 
 rational consciousness. It was, as Paul says, like 
 hearing a foreigner speak in an unknown tongue, 
 and could be made of value only if these strange 
 languages not of this earth were interpreted by 
 one divinely gifted to that service. Such inter- 
 preters were sometimes, but not always, present. 
 An occasional combination of sounds seems to have 
 been recognized by the hearers; and it is likely 
 that the Aramaic word ahha, father, was some- 
 times caught from the lips of these speakers with 
 tongues.^ We hear, too, of groanings and cries. 
 All these physical manifestations of religious ex- 
 citement have had parallels in later and in modern 
 times. Even among educated people in New Eng- 
 land convulsions, visions, and ecstacies have not 
 been unknown. The attitude of wise pastors 
 towards them finds a complete prototype and 
 analogy in the judicious directions which the 
 Apostle Paul offers to the Corinthians. 
 
 iRom. viii. 15, 26-27; Gal. iv. 6. 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 193 
 
 Of stated forms of worship at these meetings 
 we have no knowledge. Even the use of the 
 Lord's Prayer in worship is not attested. We do 
 know, however, that after the Jewish fashion the 
 congregation responded Amen to the prayer 
 spoken by one person. 
 
 That the Old Testament Scriptures in the Greek 
 translation were read at these services we may 
 assume, althou^ there is no express statement 
 to that effect. The example of the synagogue, 
 where reading of the scriptures formed the funda- 
 mental element of the meeting, would be likely to 
 be continued in the Christians' meetings. This is 
 confirmed by the familiarity with the Old Testa- 
 ment on the part of the whole church which Paul 
 everywhere assumes, for such acquaintance is 
 most likely to rest on regular public reading. 
 
 It is to be observed that these Old Testament 
 Scriptures were from the first the divinely-in- 
 spired and authoritative Bible of the Church. 
 The Church came into existence with a sacred 
 book already in its hand. From the outset among 
 both Jewish and gentile Christians it was the 
 source not only of life and inspiration but of the 
 knowledge of truth, and the final place of appeal 
 in discussion. In such a situation it is evident 
 that everything must turn on the method of in- 
 
194 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 terpreting this Bible. And all the more because 
 with Christianity a new mode of interpreting the 
 Old Testament had been introduced. ' ' Beginning 
 from Moses and from all the prophets, ' * says Luke 
 of Jesus with the disciples on the way to Emmaus, 
 **he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the 
 things concerning himself." This exactly de- 
 scribes the situation in the early Church. They 
 were prepared to find the events of Jesus' life and 
 the truths into which the Holy Spirit had led 
 them shadowed forth in their Bible, and therefore 
 they did find them there. The early Christian 
 interpretation of the Old Testament was not by 
 the methods of critical study. It was by all the 
 resources of allegory and by a process of forcing 
 into the Old Testament a meaning given by con- 
 temporary thought and in any way, even remotely, 
 akin to the Old Testament language. Such a use 
 will always accompany a doctrine of verbal in- 
 spiration and complete authority of the letter. At 
 the same time it is to be remarked that this use of 
 the Old Testament was not the only one practised. 
 Besides finding in it the reflection of their own 
 ideas, the early Church, like the Church in all 
 ages, felt the direct influence of the moral zeal 
 and spiritual elevation of the Old Testament 
 Scriptures. Paul not only found in the word of 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 195 
 
 Proverbs about muzzling the ox a warrant for the 
 support of the Christian missionary by those for 
 whom he labored, he also drew from a true under- 
 standing of Isaiah and the Psalms suggestions 
 that entered into the bone and sinew of his 
 noblest thought. 
 
 As to Christian writings we hear that letters 
 from honored teachers were read in the churches. 
 To this end the epistles of Paul were most of them 
 written. Thus he writes to the Colossians, "And 
 when this epistle hath been read among you, 
 cause that it be read also in the church of the 
 Laodiceans; and that ye also read the epistle 
 from Laodicea. ' ' In accordance with this custom 
 the Book of Revelation, which was probably from 
 the first intended to be read publicly in meeting, 
 is couched in the form of a letter, with a saluta- 
 tion and farewell in regular epistolary fashion. 
 Correspondence between friendly churches also 
 was doubtless read at the meetings. 
 
 After the composition of the Gospels these must 
 soon have come into use for edification in the 
 church services, but how soon we cannot tell. At 
 first the recollections of Jesus' life were preserved 
 orally, and seem to have been used for instruction 
 by teachers, and perhaps committed to memory 
 by the members of the church, but we do not gain 
 
196 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 the impression that the public worship of the 
 earliest Christians included anything correspond- 
 ing to the later reading of the Gospels. 
 
 On what day and how often in the week these 
 meetings were held we have but slight indica- 
 tions, but there is ground for thinking that from 
 an early time in the apostolic age they were held 
 on Sundaj^, as they certainly were in the period 
 next following. 
 
 Besides the meetings which I have been describ- 
 ing, intended for worship and instruction, which 
 an outsider in Corinth or Ephesus might have 
 himself attended, such a visitor w^ould have 
 learned of another form of assembly, to which he 
 probably would not have been invited. This 
 was the common meal of the church, with which 
 was joined the observance of the Lord's supper. 
 As in the earliest church at Jerusalem, so in 
 Paul's time, and in some places for generations 
 later, these common meals, or love-feasts, were 
 kept. They were in many ways like the common 
 meals, w^hether or not connected with sacrifices, 
 of gentile and Jewish clubs, and were an alto- 
 gether natural part of the life of such a society. 
 That a lack of good breeding and kindly spirit 
 betrayed itself in connection with these banquets 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 197 
 
 and had to be corrected by Paul is an instructive 
 circumstance. 
 
 But these disorderly exhibitions of selfishness 
 were of more serious import because these com- 
 mon meals were not only social occasions but also 
 included the solemn symbolic commemoration of 
 the death of the Lord. This observance of the 
 direction which, as Paul assures us, Jesus had 
 given for the regular repetition of the acted par- 
 able of the Last Supper, seems to have been gen- 
 eral throughout the Church, and Paul's language 
 and the Gospel narratives of the institution seem 
 to imply the use of a fixed, though simple, form of 
 words. It served to illustrate the central sig- 
 nificance both of Christ's death, in which the New 
 Covenant was ratified by the shedding of his 
 blood, and of his person, on which — in spiritual 
 communion— all might feed. It also gave the 
 Christian Church its own sacrificial meal, and 
 Paul sees a real relation established between the 
 soul and Christ, by the participation in his cup 
 and his bread, similar to that which the prev- 
 alent heathen theory of sacrificial meals saw 
 created between a worshipper and his divinity. 
 Then as now the parable of the eucharist had its 
 value in the very meagreness of the accompany- 
 ing language and the almost limitless freedom of 
 
198 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 individual interpretation, subject only to the 
 clear reference to the central fact. 
 
 With this simple rite should be mentioned the 
 other symbolic act by which entrance on the 
 privileges of the Church was marked— baptism, a 
 symbolic washing, suggested by the custom of 
 John the Baptist, not regularly practised by 
 Jesus in his ministry, but apparently taken up 
 from the first in the Church. That it was ordi- 
 narily performed in the form of a complete bath 
 is likely, but its essence, like that of the Jewish 
 lustrations called by the same name, plainly lay 
 in its symbolism, not in its form. It marked the 
 Christian's separation from the world and union 
 with Christ, whereby he was washed, and sancti- 
 fied, and justified. Of the baptism of infants in 
 the apostolic age we do not directly hear, but the 
 question of when entrance into the Christian 
 Church began must speedily have arisen. Ancient 
 thought had no such notion of full independence 
 of the individual soul that it could easily separate 
 the status of a child from that of its parents, and 
 the example of the Jewish custom of circumcision, 
 to which Christian baptism was early seen to form 
 the counterpart, cannot have been without its 
 effect. At any rate the children of believing 
 parents were deemed ''holy." 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 199 
 
 The general control of the affairs of the church 
 was in the hands of a committee of the older 
 members, called presbyters, or elders. They are 
 sometimes referred to as ''leaders," or as 
 ' ' rulers. ' ' This arrangement was similar to that of 
 a Jewish synagogue, and at a time when living 
 men still remembered the apostles it was believed 
 to have been instituted by them. That this is so 
 there is no good reason to doubt, but even if the 
 apostles had not effected this organization, some- 
 thing like it would have grown up, and in some 
 churches very likely did grow up, of itself. The 
 care of the services, provision of a place of meet- 
 ing, arrangement of the common meals, control of 
 the money, and attention to the business of the 
 society, would certainly have required such a 
 governing body of competent and trusty men. 
 Paul refers to these persons as possessing a gift 
 of the Spirit which fitted them for the work and 
 was wholly analogous to the gift of prophecy or of 
 healing; and it is likely that the influence of the 
 first elders at Corinth and elsewhere rested on the 
 recognized fitness of those who exercised these 
 functions, rather than on a formal election to 
 such an office. But a more formal organization 
 was sure to appear before long, and in any case 
 the line between personal influence and recog- 
 
200 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 nized official right in a new and plastic body is 
 hard to draw. 
 
 Another term, overseer, or bishop, was also used 
 to describe the chief authority in the churches. 
 Whether all the elders were also called bishops, 
 or whether some of the elders were specially 
 chosen to bear this title and perform special func- 
 tions has been disputed. The evidence is too 
 meagre to warrant an unqualified judgment, but 
 seems to point to an original usage which described 
 all the elders by the more expressive name of 
 overseers. The single bishop ruling the church 
 and superior to the body of presbyters does not 
 appear until after the apostolic age. 
 
 The bishops, or elders, were at least in some 
 cases aided in their duties by a board of minis- 
 trants, or deacons, who doubtless, as in later times, 
 helped in the eucharistic service and attended to 
 the care of the poor. Of deacons we hear less in 
 the apostolic age than of elders. In one case 
 a woman, Phoebe, is called a deaconess, but the 
 word can refer to any kind of serviceable minis- 
 try, and we cannot be sure that an office is here 
 meant. 
 
 In its relation to the outside world the Chris- 
 tian Church appears as a new religion like the 
 mysteries which flourished in the Roman Empire. 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 201 
 
 Having no sanction from the higher authorities 
 any church was liable to be suppressed by the 
 police under the law which made it their duty to 
 arrest and punish sacrilegious persons, thieves, 
 and other dangerous characters. It is possible 
 that the churches sheltered themselves to some ex- 
 tent under the general sanction offered to the 
 clubs organized for providing decent burial to 
 their members, and in the early days described in 
 Acts the apostles generally succeeded in proving 
 to the satisfaction of the Roman authorities that 
 they were not revolutionists. As time went on, 
 however, the separation of the Christians from the 
 usual customs of life, their refusal to share not 
 only in the vices of their former friends, but in 
 their worship and in every act which involved 
 worship, brought upon the believers the common 
 fate of all separatists, the hatred of the world. 
 Petty social persecution led on to denunciation be- 
 fore the government. The refusal of the Chris- 
 tians to offer sacrifice to the Emperor seemed to 
 the authorities not only lese-majeste but also an- 
 archy. At the same time the unpopularity of the 
 Christians, with their air of superior privilege 
 and virtue, and their exclusiveness, led to many 
 rumors of unnatural crimes and vices. 
 
 Down to the time of the great fire in Rome in 
 
202 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 64 A.D. we do not hear of any organized perse- 
 cution. At that time, however, the public detesta- 
 tion of the Christians as haters of the human race 
 made it possible to bring on them the charge of 
 setting fire to the city. In the persecution which 
 followed the fire *'a great multitude," which 
 must mean many hundreds, including, it is said, 
 Peter and Paul, perished. From that time it 
 seems to have been an established principle of 
 Roman administration that if the police chose to 
 act, membership in the Christian sect was in itself 
 a capital offense, somewhat as the mere profession 
 of anarchistic sentiments is nowadays often re- 
 garded as a crime. In practice the Christians 
 •were quiet and peaceable folk, the great aim of 
 the police authorities was to preserve order, and 
 only when popular passion was in some way 
 aroused was there grave danger for the Chris- 
 tians. For a long period it seems to have been on 
 the whole the policy of the magistrates to repress 
 the outbursts of popular hatred against the 
 Christians rather than to seek these out and pun- 
 ish them as criminals. In the Book of Revelation 
 we can see the reflection of a stage in the develop- 
 ment of events when the Church had clearly per- 
 ceived that the Roman State and civilization was 
 inherently heathen and fundamentally hostile. 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 203 
 
 but before Asia Minor at least had yet seen any 
 considerable number of martjni'doms. Only much 
 later, when Christianity showed itself powerful 
 and was undermining the religious bond which 
 was supposed to hold the Roman Empire to- 
 gether, did the Roman State proceed systemati- 
 cally against what it deemed the obstinate repre- 
 sentatives of a miserable and dangerous super- 
 stition. 
 
 Of the moral dangers to which the Christians 
 were exposed I have already spoken. We ought 
 not to lose sight of the brighter side of the pic- 
 ture. The Christian churches were the seat of 
 the highest moral ideal and standard the world 
 has ever known. In them the power of God 
 wrought with new forces and great motives to the 
 renewal of character. In the central principle of 
 Love morality found its inner fountain; in the 
 face of Jesus Christ it saw its model and ex- 
 emplar. If the epistles of Paul show us the moral 
 defects of his readers, they also show their moral 
 capacity. 
 
 One part of the brotherly duty of Christians 
 which must have occupied a great place in their 
 life appears less prominently in the epistles of 
 Paul than we might expect, aid to the poor. The 
 reason is doubtless that this was a part of Chris- 
 
204 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tian activity which required no regulation from 
 the apostle. He arranged, however, a contribu- 
 tion for the poor fellow-christians in Palestine, 
 and there are enough indications besides to show 
 that the natural expression of Christian brother- 
 hood was present in abundance. Before long the 
 care of the poor fell to the deacons. 
 
 Before leaving the consideration of the various 
 traits and points of view of these religious so- 
 cieties which became planted here and there in the 
 world of the first century and were destined to 
 exert so great an influence on human history, we 
 need to ask what were the special characteristics 
 of their inner principle of unity which gave them 
 cohesion and ensured their permanence. We may 
 answer, I think, that Christianity as held by the 
 gentile churches in the apostolic age was marked 
 by three supreme and essential attributes,— uni- 
 versality, adequacy, and the claim of finality. 
 
 It was universal because its fundamental doc- 
 trine, on which the whole rested, was a pure 
 spiritual monotheism, free from all national or 
 materialistic limitations. God was so conceived 
 that all men could understand his nature, and that 
 no peculiarity of race or defect of general educa- 
 tion need exclude men from belief in him and wor- 
 ship of him. Fatherhood is a universally compre- 
 
LIFE IN AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH 205 
 
 hensible idea. The Christian conception of God 
 was as the Father of all men, whose nature men 
 know through the revelation of his purpose and 
 character made in his Son Jesus Christ. 
 
 Again the Christianity of these people was an 
 adequate and satisfying religion. For it offered 
 to every soul spiritual union with God, the for- 
 giveness of sin, new powers of moral life. If it 
 really could give these, no religion could do more. 
 
 Finally, and not least of all, the religion in 
 which these churches found their needs satisfied 
 possessed in its own claim and in their conviction 
 the character not of being a religion but of being 
 the religion. This claim has been from time to 
 time expressed in many ways ; for the first Chris- 
 tians it was expressed in the belief that Jesus was 
 Messiah and Lord, and that he who was known to 
 men by his first coming in humility should 
 come again in glory to bring in the consummation 
 and completeness of God's deliverance of men. A 
 vague expectation that some deliverer should 
 come would have been insufficient. The thought 
 of Jesus as the pious and heroic teacher of Gali- 
 lee whose work was ended by his death, would 
 likewise have been powerless to conquer the world. 
 It was the thought that this Jesus was God 's vice- 
 gerent in the universe that enabled the Christians 
 
206 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 to hold fast to the new religion as absolutely 
 worth all that life itself could offer. 
 
 It is a measure of the power and significance of 
 Christianity itself when we think of the impres- 
 sion which the outward life and ways of these 
 unsatisfactory, crude, sinning, superstitious 
 groups of Christians would have made on one of 
 us, and then remember that in truth 
 
 "The hopes and fears of all the years" 
 hung on their persistence in faith and hope and 
 love. 
 
VII 
 
 THE APOSTLES AND THE GOSPELS 
 
 The Apostle Paul is the most distinct figure in 
 our view of the apostolic age. His course of life 
 and his thought, his relations with his converts, 
 the characteristics of Christian life in the churches 
 he founded, are presented to us in our sources 
 with great vividness and with sufficient complete- 
 ness. But beside Paul there were many other 
 missionaries of whose careers we can take Paul's 
 as representative. Tliey, too, travelled both in 
 the larger world of gentile life and among the 
 Jews, preached, and established churches; and the 
 conditions of life in their churches, the dangers 
 and the victories, the persecutions and the ideals, 
 were doubtless of the same general kind as those 
 which Paul's epistles show us in Corinth, Thessa- 
 lonica, or Colosste. The glimpses which the second 
 century furnishes of a widespread Christianity 
 give hints of the broad basis that must have been 
 laid in the first century by a host of apostles al- 
 most entirely unknown to us even by name. Of 
 207 
 
208 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 some of these we hear as companions of Paul at 
 one time or another. We know at least the names 
 of Barnabas, John Mark, Titus, w^ho w-as the 
 trusted representative of Paul in the delicate nego- 
 tiations with the Corinthians, Erastus, Androni- 
 cus and Junias, Apollos the Alexandrian, Tychi- 
 cus the beloved brother and faithful minister, 
 Aristarchus and Jesus Justus, Silas or Silvanus, 
 Demas, Luke the beloved physician, Philemon of 
 ColossEe, Archippus, wdio was perhaps the son of 
 Philemon and had received from the Lord a min- 
 istry, apparently at Laodicea, and, in a position 
 above all the rest, Timothy, whom Paul had taken 
 from his home in Asia Minor near the outset of 
 his missionary journeying and of whom he writes 
 at Rome near the end of his life, "I have no 
 man like-minded; ... as a child serveth a 
 father, so he served with me in furtherance of the 
 Gospel." All these must have received some 
 direct or indirect training from Paul, and have 
 worked in his spirit and by his methods. But 
 besides these and independent of Paul there 
 must have been others. Irenseus, who came 
 from Asia Minor and was bishop of Lyons toward 
 the end of the second century, had knowledge 
 of a considerable number of men whom he calls 
 Elders, or, as w^e might say. Fathers of the Church, 
 
THE APOSTLES 209 
 
 men who lived into the second century but whose 
 roots go back into the apostolic age. They seem 
 to have been the old men to whom the Chris- 
 tians of Asia Minor in the boyhood of Irenseus 
 reverently looked up, or at any rate looked back, 
 and who seemed to bind them to the days of the 
 Lord and his twelve apostles. The names of two 
 of these, John the Presbyter and Aristion, have 
 been preserved for us, and Irenasus is still able 
 to quote some things— including some of much im- 
 portance—which these old men had handed down. 
 Of the original twelve apostles we have but 
 unsatisfactory and meagre knowledge. The later 
 church believed that they had spent their lives in 
 preaching Christ throughout the world and that 
 many of them had died as martyrs. Of each one 
 a field of activity is reported, but the traditions 
 are late and conflicting, and it is not now possible 
 to winnow out the grain of truth that may lurk 
 in the heap of historically worthless chaff. Thus 
 we hear of Philip working in Scythia to the north, 
 Thomas in Parthia to the far east, Bartholomew in 
 Arabia and Armenia, Matthew in Ethiopia, Simon 
 the Zealot in Egypt, Cyrene, Libya, Mauretania 
 and the British Isles, — but most of these stories 
 can in no sense be accounted history. It would 
 be natural to suppose that the Twelve worked, at 
 
210 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 any rate at first, mainly among Jews; that we 
 know so little of them leads to the suspicion that 
 most of them proved not to be men of great mark 
 or originality. 
 
 Of two of the Twelve, however, more is re- 
 ported, Peter and John. With them should be in- 
 cluded James, the Lord's brother, who remained 
 at Jerusalem, and of whom I have already spoken 
 in connection with the history of Jewish Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 In the earliest days of the Church at Jerusalem 
 Peter appears to have been the recognized leader. 
 Before many years, however, he left Jerusalem, 
 and we hear of him there but once again, on the 
 occasion of the Conference at which Paul's gospel 
 for the gentiles was admitted as legitimate by 
 the pillars of the mother church. At that time 
 Peter recognized Paul and his work as approved 
 by God. Shortly afterward he was at Antioch 
 with Paul, and adopted the mode of life of the 
 Christians there, abandoning Jewish customs so 
 far as to take part wdth the gentile believers in 
 the common meals of the church. But this ex- 
 hibition of generous large-heartedness was checked 
 by pressure from Jerusalem. He with others 
 withdrew from the common life, and in conse- 
 quence received a reprimand from Paul, who 
 
PETER 211 
 
 in the second chapter of Galatians has recorded 
 the chief outlines of his indignant attack. '*If 
 thou, being a Jew," cried Paul, appearing at the 
 meeting of these Jewish separatists, — "If thou, 
 being a Jew, livest as do the gentiles, and not as 
 do the Jews, how compellest thou the gentiles to 
 live as do the Jews? We, although Jews by 
 nature, .... believed on Christ Jesus that 
 we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not 
 
 by works of the Law I do not make 
 
 void the grace of God; for if justification is 
 through the Law, then Christ died for nought." 
 
 Of the immediate effect of this ringing attack 
 we hear nothing; from the New Testament we 
 learn only that some years later a party of Chris- 
 tians at Corinth attached itself to the name of 
 Peter, and that Paul refers to him at that time as 
 married and as travelling. Whether he had been 
 in Corinth we cannot infer from Paul 's allusions ; 
 that he was occupied with preaching the Gospel 
 we must believe, but of where he spent these 
 years we have no knowledge. 
 
 Every incident from Peter's life that has been 
 preserved reveals an interesting and vigorous 
 personality. The hearty and impulsive readi- 
 ness to promise more than he could perform, 
 and to take more steps with the radicals than 
 
212 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 he could defend to the satisfaction of his con- 
 servative associates, are attractive traits, and 
 although Peter seems to have had no great in- 
 tellectual originality and to have left no individ- 
 ual and lasting mark on the thought of the 
 Church, yet a record of his life drawn with the 
 same insight into the deeper movements of his- 
 tory and the same turn for picturesque incident 
 which in the Book of Acts illuminate for us 
 the career of Paul, would surely have given us 
 stirring narratives and revelations of noble Chris- 
 tian character. His work covered more than 
 thirty years of mature life, and must have 
 brought him into contact with men of very various 
 types. 
 
 Two epistles bearing Peter's name are con- 
 tained in the New Testament. Of these the sec- 
 ond and shorter epistle is written in a wholly 
 different style from the first, appears to be made 
 in part by taking over the whole Epistle of Jude 
 with but slight alterations, and for the rest is 
 probably largely borrowed from other sources. 
 It contains some beautiful passages, but is a late 
 production of the second century, in which Peter 
 is merely impersonated as the author. The recog- 
 nition of this pseudonymous character is a critical 
 conclusion now beyond reasonable question, but 
 
PETER 212 
 
 the precise circumstances of origin and the date 
 of the epistle remain obscure. 
 
 The First Epistle of Peter is a writing of 
 wholly different nature. The acceptance of it as 
 by the Apostle Peter, whose name is attached to 
 it, is not free from grave difficulties, but it seems 
 to me on the whole more likely that he wrote it. 
 It bears all the marks of intimate relation to a 
 real situation, and is well suited to give encour- 
 agement and counsel to the Christians of the 
 provinces of Asia Minor to whom it is addressed. 
 Its most noteworthy characteristics are a freshness 
 and directness which make it attractive to read 
 and easy to quote, combined with an extraordi- 
 nary degree of dependence on the epistles of Paul, 
 especially those to the Romans and the Ephesians. 
 The system of thought underlying the epistle, to 
 which it gives pithy expression in vigorous max- 
 ims, is that which Paul had wrought out in the 
 labor of years, and the resemblances in language 
 are no less striking. First Peter stands far closer 
 to Paul's thought than do some of the epistles 
 which bear Paul's own name, and if Peter wrote 
 this letter, his attitude to Paul in the later years 
 of his life must have been one of agreement and 
 admiration. Yet in this epistle, which is written 
 not to Jews but to gentile Christians living in 
 
214 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 districts in some of which Paul himself had been 
 the chief missionary, Paul is nowhere alluded to 
 with a single syllable. Even if he had already 
 died, this is hard to explain. 
 
 This epistle was written, apparently, from 
 Rome, which the writer significantly calls Baby- 
 lon. The Church tradition has made Peter bishop 
 both of Antioch and of Rome. His greatness 
 in the history of the whole Church comes from 
 two causes ; first, because he was the unquestioned 
 leader among the immediate disciples of Jesus 
 Christ in Galilee and Jerusalem, and secondly, 
 because he became the patron saint and martyr 
 of that powerful church which at first obtained 
 in fact, and then came by formal constitutional 
 claim to hold, the primacy among all its peers. 
 
 At least since the end of the fourth century it 
 has been the common view of Catholic Christians 
 that Peter spent twenty-five years of his life at 
 Rome, and that he was bishop of Rome. The story 
 of his episcopate is for two reasons not likely to 
 be true; first, because an older tradition takes a 
 different view and names a certain Linus as the 
 first bishop, and secondly, because it is probable 
 that there was at Rome at that early date no single 
 bishop at all but a board, or committee, of bishops. 
 The period of twenty-five years, also, is certamly 
 
PETER 215 
 
 an error, doubtless due to the later ignorance of 
 Peter's place of residence after leaving Jerusa- 
 lem. When Paul wrote to the Romans about the 
 year 60, and when he wrote from Rome to the 
 Philippians several years later, it is plain that 
 Peter was not yet at Rome. 
 
 The tradition, however, that Peter came to 
 Rome, and suffered martyrdom under Nero 
 (54-68 A. D.) either in the great persecution which 
 followed the burning of the city or somewhat 
 later, rests on a different and firmer basis. Many 
 Protestant scholars have, indeed, thought other- 
 wise. At the time of the Reformation, when 
 criticism was systematically applied to the tradi- 
 tions of the Roman church and church history 
 was rewritten from the Protestant point of view, 
 the searching and successful criticism of the state- 
 ments about Peter carried away not only the 
 legend but also a part of the historic fact. Of 
 later years continued re-examination of the evi- 
 dence has led many, without distinction of 
 ecclesiastical connection or doctrinal bias, to be- 
 lieve that Peter's death actually took place at 
 Rome. The evidence is less full than could be 
 wished, but is on the whole sufficient. It is un- 
 questioned that one hundred and fifty years after 
 Peter's death it was the common belief at Rome 
 
216 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 that he had died there, as had Paul. The "tro- 
 phies" of the two great apostles could be seen on 
 the Vatican hill and by the Ostian Way. Whether 
 these trophies were the scenes of death or the 
 places of burial is immaterial; a firm local tra- 
 dition of the death at Rome of both apostles is at- 
 tested for a time not too far distant from the 
 event. Earlier than this date the allusions to 
 the place where the prince of the apostles suffered 
 martyrdom are indeterminate, although the re- 
 peated combination of Peter and Paul in the same 
 statements suggests that they met their death in 
 the same city, even if not at the same time. 
 Against this very respectable body of evidence 
 is to be set only the neglect of some early writers 
 to refer, or to refer definitely enough, to the place 
 of Peter's death, an argument from silence 
 which in view of the character of the docu- 
 ments in question cannot be taken as conclusive. 
 The connection of Peter's death with Nero's 
 persecution would further be confirmed by the 
 fact that the traditional place of his martyrdom 
 and the site of St. Peter's Church is the Vatican 
 hill, where Nero's gardens lay, and where accord- 
 ing to Tacitus the Christians were put to death 
 with indescribable tortures. The story that Peter 
 w^as crucified with his head down— by his own re- 
 
PETER 217 
 
 quest because he was unworthy to meet the same 
 punishment as his Master— is late, but it may pre- 
 serve a recollection of the unusual horrors which 
 Nero added to increase his sport. As to the date 
 of Peter's death, it may be added that if I Peter 
 is genuine, Peter would seem to have survived 
 Paul, and to have written, after the latter 's death, 
 a letter to gentile Christians in the provinces of 
 Asia Minor. 
 
 Besides the so-called Second Epistle of Peter 
 there grew up in the second and later centuries a 
 considerable mass of apocryphal literature con- 
 nected wdth Peter. A "Gospel according to 
 Peter" was still used here and there in out-of-the- 
 Tvay places even in the last quarter of the second 
 century. A portion of it has recently been found 
 in a grave in Egypt, and we are able by our own 
 inspection to confirm an ancient bishop's opinion 
 that it was comparatively harmless but obviously 
 not by Peter. Other writings of which w^e have 
 more or less knowledge are the "Preaching of 
 Peter" and various books of "Acts of Peter," in 
 which the early Christians, both orthodox and 
 heretical, found at once entertainment and 
 spiritual profit. Later, in the great series of 
 romances called the "Homilies" and "Recog- 
 nitions" of Clement, Peter's travels are elabo- 
 
218 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 rately told and his ever victorious encounters with 
 that t}^e of all error, Simon Magus. The lesson 
 of this great development of apocr^-phal writing 
 and legend concerning Peter seems to be that the 
 Church, while it profoundly reverenced him as 
 first of the apostles, yet received from him little 
 of distinctive influence, and knew but little of his 
 history except what Luke was able to collect at 
 Jerusalem. This would precisely accord with 
 what seems to be the fact, that his stay in Rome 
 was short, but was ended by a glorious martyr- 
 dom. 
 
 It was doubtless for the reason just alluded to 
 that the Church so greatly emphasized the rela- 
 tion to Peter of the Gospel of ]\Iark, The earliest 
 statement in regard to this relation, and a state- 
 ment which is very likely trustworthy, is that of 
 Papias, a Christian writer in Asia ]\Iinor in the 
 first half of the second century. The great work 
 of Papias, in which he gave interpretations of the 
 sayings contained in the already written Gospels, 
 has not come down to us, but a few of his remarks 
 interested one writer or another, and have been 
 preserved as fragments. AAliat he said about 
 Peter is this, "And the Elder [i.e. the person 
 from whom Papias derived his information] said 
 this also : ]\rark, having become the interpreter of 
 
THE GOSPELS 219 
 
 Peter, wrote down accurately everything that he 
 remembered, without however recording in order 
 what was either said or done by Christ. For 
 neither did he hear the Lord, nor did he follow 
 him; but afterwards, as I said, [attended] Peter, 
 who adapted his instructions to the needs [of his 
 hearers] , but had no design of giving a connected 
 account of the Lord's oracles. So then Mark made 
 no mistake, while he thus wrote down some things 
 as he remembered them; for he made it his one 
 care not to omit anything that he had heard or to 
 set down any false statement therein." This 
 quaint statement, thus torn from its context, 
 where it evidently presented a defence of the Gos- 
 pel of Mark against some early objection, is the 
 foundation, so far as external evidence is con- 
 cerned, of the critical study of the Gospels, and 
 with its statement that the great literary monu- 
 ment of the Apostle Peter was the Gospel of 
 Mark, we may well turn to look at the notable 
 branch of activity in the apostolic age from which 
 the Gospels proceeded. We shall consider at first 
 only the first three Gospels, sometimes called the 
 ''Synoptic" Gospels, so designated because they 
 can be arranged in the parallel columns of a 
 synopsis, or harmony. 
 
 Of the interest and work of the earliest Chris- 
 
220 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tians in collecting and committing to written form 
 the traditions of Jesus' life and teachings we 
 know almost nothing except what can be inferred 
 from the Gospels themselves. Papias seems to be 
 the only writer who concerned himself with re- 
 cording such knowledge as was to be had in the 
 period next following the apostolic age. If the 
 whole of his book might be discovered in some 
 monastery on a Greek island or in the sand of 
 some Egyptian grave, it would be a priceless 
 treasure, for it would go far toward solving many 
 a problem of New Testament criticism. 
 
 From what has been said of the character of 
 early Christian life and thought it will not seem 
 strange that the first generation of Christians did 
 not have a strong interest in the mere history of 
 the life of Christ. Their faith was in a Lord in 
 heaven, their hope was in his return to earth, 
 they possessed by their union with him in the 
 Holy Spirit present guidance and constant power 
 of progress. Life in Christ, and faith manifested 
 in love, not mere recollections,— the present and 
 future, not the past,— filled their thought. The 
 events of Jesus' life to which thought especially 
 turned were of three kinds: those in which it was 
 believed that his messianic dignity and power 
 were shadowed forth (especially the miracles) ; 
 
THE GOSPELS 221 
 
 those which seemed to be the fulfilment of Old 
 Testament prophecy; and the circumstances of 
 his death, with the resurrection. In other words, it 
 was those incidents of Jesus' life that lent them- 
 selves to apologetic use as evidence in missionary 
 preaching, together with that one supreme event 
 of the Cross which, remaining to the Jews a 
 stumbling-block, forced the Christians to see inter- 
 preted in it the power of God and the wisdom of 
 God. To these should be added those incidents 
 which were intimately bound up with striking 
 sayings of the Lord and necessary to the under- 
 standing of such sayings. 
 
 In the case of the sayings a wider range of in- 
 terests controlled the selection, and perhaps a more 
 systematic use of the precepts and parables may 
 be detected. The sayings which were kept in 
 mind were especially such as related to the 
 problems of the early Church. These included 
 the relation of Christianity to the Jews, the right- 
 fulness of Christian freedom, the meaning of 
 Jesus* death as a ransom; but on these various 
 topics the sayings, although striking and precious, 
 are comparatively speaking not very numerous. 
 The two main bodies of sayings which the early 
 Christians desired, and were able, to collect were 
 rules of conduct and assurances as to the future 
 
222 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 by which believers might stay and comfort 
 their hearts. The ethical and the apocalyptic 
 words constitute the great bulk of the sayings of 
 our Synoptic Gospels. Under the ethical should 
 be included all the rules of conduct, whether for 
 personal morality, life in the church, or mission- 
 ary work; the apocalyptic include the parables of 
 the Kingdom. Here, as in the events, we must not 
 expect to find what we need for a biography, but 
 rather a selection of instances significant for the 
 present thought and practice of those who gath- 
 ered them. We may be thankful that the singular 
 unity and transparent sincerity of our Lord's 
 thought enable us to gain from even such one- 
 sided collections of his deeds and words a true 
 knowledge of those things which he chiefly strove 
 to impress on men. We may be still more thank- 
 ful that, as Phillips Brooks used to say, Jesus 
 Christ was not essentially a deed-doer, nor a word- 
 sayer, but a life-giver; and no observation could 
 be more true than that to the fundamental atti- 
 tude of Christians in the apostolic age. 
 
 We are to think of the apostolic age, then, as 
 holding in its memory the traditions of the life of 
 Jesus and governed in its recollection by such 
 interests as we have described,— for the events, 
 mainly an apologetic interest, for the sayings, 
 
THE GOSPELS 223 
 
 mainly a practical one. These traditions were at 
 first cherished by the Jewish Christians at Jeru- 
 salem. It would seem that while still held in 
 Palestine they reached some degree of fixed oral 
 or written form. From Palestine by various 
 channels they came to the Great Church of the 
 gentile world, which has transmitted them writ- 
 ten to us. 
 
 Since the memories of Jesus' life and teach- 
 ings were at first not written, they can hardly 
 have formed any regular part of the weekly serv- 
 ices for worship, as the reading of the Gospels 
 did later. Whether the collections of sayings 
 were systematically committed to memory in a 
 kind of catechetical class we do not know. In the 
 addresses and teaching both to outsiders and to 
 believers the stories and sayings were evidently 
 used for argument, for the enforcement of moral 
 instruction, and for encouragement. The occa- 
 sional, though sparing, use which Paul makes of 
 Jesus' sayings, and the use in the earliest wait- 
 ings like the Epistle of Clement of Rome (about 
 95 A.D.), is of this character. 
 
 The history of these traditions in their oral 
 stage before they were given permanent written 
 form would be of the greatest importance for the 
 historical criticism which seeks to see Jesus Christ 
 
224 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 exactly as he was. Unfortunately it is possible 
 to know but little about that period of Gospel 
 tradition. Our first clear knowledge comes with 
 the time when literary activity arose in the com- 
 position of written Gospels. The subject has 
 been chiefly investigated in connection with what 
 is called the Synoptic Problem. The first three 
 Gospels, that is to say, are closely like each other 
 in many respects and differ widely in many re- 
 spects. Out of the vast number of incidents and 
 sayings which might have been remembered from 
 the years of Jesus' life and ministry, a compara- 
 tively small collection has been preserved, and 
 two-thirds of those are found in more than one of 
 these three short Gospels. Nearly half of the say- 
 ings are found in all three. Moreover in the 
 method of presentation, by brief detached sec- 
 tions, the three Gospels agree. Again the order in 
 which these sections follow one another is in many 
 cases not merely the chronological order in which 
 independent reporters would necessarily coin- 
 cide, but is determined in some other way, as 
 when a group of conflicts about Sabbath observ- 
 ance is found together; nevertheless the order in 
 the three Gospels is largely the same. Finally, the 
 details of language and expression in the sections 
 often agree in such a way as to leave no doubt 
 
THE GOSPELS 225 
 
 that there is here not coincidence but real liter- 
 ary connection. At the same time the three Gos- 
 pels are far from being identical in any of these 
 respects. As for contents more than half of 
 Matthew and nearly half of Luke has no parallel. 
 It is significant that in the case of Mark, on the 
 other hand, but a very few verses are not found 
 repeated more or less closely in either Matthew or 
 Luke or both. Further, the order of incidents, 
 though often the same, yet often varies; and the 
 details of expression exhibit conspicuous varia- 
 tion. 
 
 These facts constitute the problem. Many 
 theories have been suggested in the earnest study 
 with sound method which for now a hundred 
 years or more has been given to the subject. Out 
 of much confusion certain main conclusions have 
 at last emerged which seem likely to stand. The 
 view now commonly held is that the Gospel of 
 Mark was written first, or at any rate has been 
 not much modified from the Gospel which was 
 written first. The writer must have been ac- 
 quainted with the body of tradition of Jesus' say- 
 ings which the Church possessed, but his object is 
 mainly to record events of Jesus' life, and he 
 leaves on one side most of the sayings, or at best 
 gives abbreviated summaries of the larger collec-. 
 
226 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tions. Mark's Gospel is specially adapted for gen- 
 tile Christians, but it was written by some one 
 thoroughly familiar with Palestine and Jewish 
 life. The author is at home in the geography, 
 the social customs, the political and religious 
 institutions of the Holy Land. And he writes, 
 not indeed with any literary pretensions what- 
 ever, but with a freshness and picturesque vivid- 
 ness, and with a color and a fulness of significant 
 and accurate detail, that show him to stand very 
 close to some one who was an eye-witness, although 
 he nowhere implies that he was himself present. 
 These characteristics of the Gospel correspond 
 well with the story of Papias that Mark's infor- 
 mation came largely from Peter. It need not be 
 supposed that Peter's personal recollections were 
 Mark's only source, and in any case we seem to 
 have in Mark not a private memoir but the record 
 of the public tradition of the Church about the 
 life of the Master. The material had already 
 passed through a considerable history, including 
 perhaps translation from Aramaic, before the 
 final composition of our Gospel. The main literary 
 question which is now much discussed is whether 
 our Gospel of Mark is substantially the original 
 writing or whether it is an enlargement by an- 
 other hand of an earlier and shorter document 
 
THE GOSPELS 227 
 
 written by Mark. For this latter theory there is 
 no conclusive evidence, and it is now widely held 
 that we have in our possession substantially the 
 book which ]\Iark wrote. He would seem to have 
 written it some time after the death of Peter, and 
 perhaps at Rome. This would put the date of 
 composition somewhere after the year 64. 
 
 Besides the Gospel of Mark the Church had 
 the Sajdngs. These, as we have seen, had been 
 early collected in Palestine, and as we have them 
 they plainly reflect in many interesting ways the 
 conditions of Palestinian life at an early time. It 
 seems likely that the Apostle ]\Iatthew, one of the 
 Twelve, wrote down many of the sayings in the 
 Aramaic tongue in which they were spoken. Of 
 this document, however, we know next to nothing, 
 for our first Gospel, which in its title has perpetu- 
 ated the memory of Matthew's work, is not a 
 direct translation of that Aramaic writing, and 
 was surely not written by Matthew. Collections 
 of the sayings in Greek, probably in written form, 
 were, however, extant at an early time in the chief 
 Greek-speaking churches, and these may well have 
 been founded on this Aramaic work of Matthew. 
 
 We are able to detect the existence of these col- 
 lections, of which no external tradition has come 
 down to us, by observing the common character- 
 
228 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 istics of the Gospels bearing the names Matthew 
 and Luke. They have been constructed, as criti- 
 cal comparison and analysis show, by taking the 
 Gospel of Mark as a foundation, and working into 
 it a large body of other material, consisting 
 mostly of sayings and parables. The method has 
 been different in the two cases. The author, or 
 rather editor, of the first Gospel, perhaps guided 
 by an arrangement of the sayings which he found 
 already made, has combined much of his new ma- 
 terial in a series of long discourses,— the Sermon 
 on the Mount, the mission discourse, the sayings 
 about John the Baptist, the attack on the Phari- 
 sees, and has inserted these at appropriate places 
 in the narrative. He has also the practice of 
 expanding Mark's little collection of sayings and 
 parables by the addition of other cognate matter. 
 He has dealt with Mark's order with a good deal 
 of freedom, though preserving much of the 
 sequence; and he has altered the phraseology to 
 some extent, especially in shortening the narra- 
 tives of events. 
 
 Luke on the other hand has preserved Mark's 
 order more closely. As for the sayings, he has 
 not followed Matthew's method of massing them 
 in long discourses, but preserves the form of 
 distinct sections in which they had come to him. 
 
THE GOSPELS 229 
 
 While he follows the order of Mark more closely 
 than does Matthew, he UYice breaks it— by an 
 insertion of over a chapter and a half (vi. 20-viii. 
 3) and again of over eight chapters (ix. 51-xviii. 
 14). Apart from the chapters describing the 
 birth of John the Baptist and Jesus with which 
 he prefaces Mark's narrative, the greater part of 
 Luke's new material is contained in these two 
 insertions. 
 
 The comparison of the additions made by 
 Matthew and Luke to Mark's narrative show an 
 unmistakable literary connection between the 
 two later Gospels, which is not sufficiently 
 accounted for by supposing that both drew on a 
 common oral tradition. At the same time the 
 differences in their common material are such 
 that we must suppose the common document to 
 have lain before them not in two copies having 
 exactly the same form, but in two copies which 
 had come to vary considerably. If this was the 
 case it is possible to account pretty satisfactorily 
 for both resemblances and differences. Some 
 further knowledge with regard to this "second 
 source," often called the "Logia" (a poor name 
 which begs the question at issue) is likely to be 
 gained by future investigation of the relation 
 of Matthew and Luke. It ought to be possible to 
 
230 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 determine in some degree its limits and the 
 arrangement of its contents. 
 
 The theory of the composition of Matthew and 
 Mark is known as the theory of Two Sources, and 
 is now widely held to be the solution of the 
 Synoptic Problem. It is satisfactory as far as it 
 goes, but there is a considerable amount of matter 
 in both Matthew and Luke which those evangelists 
 must have obtained from other quarters than this 
 second source. We must conceive the process of 
 transmitting the sayings of Jesus as an extremely 
 complicated one, with continual action and re- 
 action of oral and written tradition. All the steps 
 and links we shall never know. 
 
 The two Gospels of Matthew and Luke, then, as 
 known to us, owe their origin to the desire aris- 
 ing at two places to combine into a single book the 
 narratives of Mark and the traditions of Jesus' 
 sayings. This impulse doubtless testifies to a 
 growing historical interest. Not only were these 
 recollections interesting because of their bearing 
 on current apologetic discussion and for their 
 practical use, but the facts themselves of the life 
 of the Lord had by that time become an object of 
 devout concern. At the same time the other in- 
 terests had not disappeared, especially in 
 Matthew. Both Matthew and Luke arose in the 
 
THE GOSPELS 231 
 
 gentile world, as can easily be shown by abundant 
 evidence from general attitude and turn of 
 phrase. That they were written at different 
 places is shown by the fact that there are two 
 such parallel books, and that they do not show 
 traces of acquaintance on the part of either with 
 the other. The differences between them are in- 
 teresting. 
 
 Of Matthew's Gospel we do not know the au- 
 thor. All that we know is that he was not the 
 Apostle Matthew, to whom an early tradition, for 
 causes which can easily be understood, assigned 
 the Gospel. The writer seems to have been a Jew, 
 to judge by his interest in the relation of Jesus 
 to the Jewish nation, by his large use of Jew- 
 ish terms, and by his knowledge of the original 
 text (or at any rate of the Aramaic version used 
 in the sjmagogue) of the Old Testament. This 
 circumstance is perhaps the cause of one charac- 
 teristic which is of inestimable value to us, the 
 preservation, namely, of Jesus' sayings in their 
 original adaptation to the circumstances of Jesus' 
 own place and time. In the sayings of IMatthew 
 we often (though not always) come far nearer to 
 Jesus' own words than in the parallels in Luke. 
 And, although written outside of Palestine, this 
 Gospel seems to contemplate Jewish readers. But 
 
232 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 yet the writer stands firmly on the ground of the 
 Universal Church, and of Christian inclusiveness. 
 He ends his Gospel with the great commission, 
 "Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the 
 nations"; he repeats with entire heartiness the 
 anti-pharisaic saying, **To eat with unwashen 
 hands defileth not the man"; and he represents 
 Jesus as declaring, with unmistakable meaning, 
 that the Lord of the Vineyard will miserably de- 
 stroy the unworthy tenants, "and will let out the 
 vineyard unto other husbandmen, who shall 
 render him the fruits in their seasons. " Dawning 
 Catholic Christianity is the environment from 
 which the author of Matthew wrote, and because 
 he shared in this spirit, his Gospel became the 
 most influential of the three, and the favorite with 
 the Church. Renan once said that the Gospel of 
 Matthew is the most important book that ever 
 was written. 
 
 Matthew's Gospel has a definite argumentative 
 purpose which binds it to the early attitude 
 toward the evangelical history. It aims to prove 
 that Jesus fulfilled in the details of his career 
 the prophecies of the Old Testament, and there- 
 fore is the Messiah. No Gospel gives so large a 
 place to formal quotations of prophecy. It also 
 aims to show— and this aim seems never lost from 
 
THE GOSPELS 233 
 
 view— that the Messiah's salvation was first of- 
 fered to the Jews and was by them deliberately 
 and finally rejected. This explained how the 
 Messiah of the Jews had become the Lord of a 
 Church in which Jews constituted so small an 
 element. 
 
 In what part of the gentile world Matthew 
 was written we do not know. As to its date, it 
 was probably written after the destruction of 
 Jerusalem in the year 70, for that seems clearly 
 alluded to. Most scholars think that the refer- 
 ences of later writers and the probable use by the 
 Gospel of John make a date not later than 100 
 necessary. A few hold that the years down to 
 130 or even 140 must be kept open. We shall be 
 safe in assigning it to the later part of the apos- 
 tolic age, between 70 and 100. 
 
 In the Gospel of Luke we see a work which 
 shows more of the purely historical interest 
 than the Gospel of Matthew. It is in fact 
 the first part of a large historical undertaking, 
 of which the second part is the Book of Acts. 
 It may even have been the writer's intention to 
 bring his history in a third volume down to a later 
 date. In this Gospel is to be seen much more of 
 literary form and care in composition than in 
 either of the other Gospels. The author opens his 
 
234 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 work with a dedicatory preface ; he knows how to 
 write not only the simple and solemn Biblical 
 style which he prefers for his main narrative, but 
 also on occasion something more resembling the pe- 
 riods of the Greek literature of his day. He 
 avoids the barbarisms and solecisms which are 
 found in Mark, and not all of which even Matthew 
 (whose style has in general a singular evenness and 
 smoothness) has discarded. The Gospel of Luke, 
 unlike Matthew, is written by a gentile and with 
 gentile Christians in view. That is clear on every 
 page. But the author does not write from out of 
 any Jewish-gentile controversy; his point of view 
 is much like Matthew's. He, too, sees in Jesus 
 the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Messiah; 
 and he, too, holds that the great fact of Christian 
 history has been the transfer of the centre from 
 the Jews to the gentiles. But he is less concerned 
 with pointing out how fully and exclusively the 
 Gospel was originally offered to the Jews. He is 
 more interested in showing that from the first this 
 universal destiny was present and in calling 
 attention to the events of the Gospel history and 
 the sayings of the Lord in which the universality 
 of Christianity was prefigured. His is the story 
 of the grateful Samaritan leper, and the parable 
 of the Good Samaritan ; he reports that Jesus was 
 
THE GOSPELS 235 
 
 rejected at Nazareth because lie called to the peo- 
 ple's attention the generous extension of sym- 
 pathy on the part of Elijah and Elisha; he con- 
 tinually emphasizes the devotion of Jesus to the 
 outcast people of the Land of Israel itself. The 
 point of view which is thus manifested in the Gos- 
 pel also underlies, as we have already seen, the 
 method of composition in the Book of Acts. 
 
 About the place of composition,— somewhere in 
 the cosmopolitan world, where one city showed 
 much the same traits with another,— we can make 
 but unsatisfactory guesses. The date would seem 
 to lie within the same period as that of Matthew, 
 after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, 
 and probably before the year 100, although here 
 again some scholars would put it a little later. 
 
 The author is held by the tradition to have been 
 "Luke the beloved physician," the companion of 
 Paul to whom the apostle refers in Colossians. 
 The question turns on whether the author of the 
 Book of Acts has embodied someone else's journal 
 in narrating the later journeys of Paul or is giv- 
 ing his own recollections. It is the fashion at 
 present to think that the Book of Acts, like the 
 Pentateuch, is made up as a composite out of 
 earlier documents. In that case we have no knowl- 
 edge of who wrote the Gospel of Luke. For myself 
 
236 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 I must confess to being so old-fashioned as to 
 believe that the writer of Acts was himself with 
 Paul in his shipwreck, and that both the Gospel 
 and the Acts are the work of a man named Luke. 
 In the Synoptic Gospels we thus see the tra- 
 ditions of the earthly life of the Lord in their 
 passage from the original seat in Palestine to 
 become the possession of the world. Peter and 
 Matthew, Galilean disciples, with Mark from 
 Jerusalem, represent the source. Luke the gen- 
 tile suggests the body of persons for whose needs 
 the evangelists had now mainly to provide. This 
 situation has left its traces in our Gospels. They 
 are not mere private memoirs, but public docu- 
 ments in which the public tradition of the Church 
 has found its record. That is attested by the fact 
 that almost nothing of value relating to the life 
 and teachings of Christ has come down to us out- 
 side of these Gospels and the Gospel of John. We 
 can see the current interests of the early Church 
 reflected in the selection of material in these Gos- 
 pels. We can also see some modification of the 
 tradition, and in particular a certain adaptation 
 in the form of the teaching to make it clear, or to 
 make the underlying principle applicable in 
 changed circumstances. This has made necessary 
 the historical criticism of the Gospels, but upon 
 
THE GOSPELS 237 
 
 this engrossing subject we may not enter, farther 
 than to say that, as we can all observe, the picture 
 of the life and character of Jesus as given in the 
 Synoptic Gospels shows on the whole remarkable 
 and convincing consistency and credibility. In 
 that picture a certain mystery is an integral and 
 essential element, and cannot be separated out as 
 having been added by a legendary accretion, al- 
 though the determination of the exact fact with 
 regard to the forms in which that mysteriousness 
 of Jesus' person expressed itself is not always 
 easy or perhaps possible. 
 
 Our task in the critical study of the Gospel 
 tradition must be to observe what is certain, or 
 at any rate highly probable, and to build our view 
 on that. There is sure to be a significant and 
 suggestive penumbra of the uncertain; and we 
 shall have to recognize the inadequacy of every 
 attempt to secure a historical view of the life 
 of Christ. The notions of men will vary with 
 their intellectual temper and with their thought 
 of God, with their view of the world and with 
 the degree of their satisfaction in that view. 
 Happily the kind of life into which Jesus 
 tried to lead men, the life of loving dependence 
 on God conceived as Father, and of strenuous and 
 loyal devotion to him, is clear, independently of 
 
238 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 puzzling questions of historical criticism. If, be- 
 yond that, what seems to us certain is to others 
 matter of doubt, we must recognize that there are 
 many modes of approach to the Saviour of the 
 world and to his truth, and that he did not re- 
 quire of men an adequate doctrine of his person 
 (important though that has often been in con- 
 tributing to obedience) but an imitation of his 
 example. And from this, we may believe, knowl- 
 edge itself shall spring. 
 
 What other attempts there were to record the 
 traditions and bridge over the strange chasm 
 which separated the origins of Christianity from 
 the Great Church, we cannot fully know. Luke's 
 preface speaks of ''many" such, among which our 
 Gospel of ]\Iark was plainly one. Papias refers 
 to the various translations of IMatthew's writing. 
 We have fragments of the ''Gospel according to 
 the Hebrews," which was used for centuries by 
 an out-of-the-way Jewish community in Pales- 
 tine. Another, the "Gospel according to the 
 Egyptians," may be the form in which the Gos- 
 pel story was first read in Egypt, and the frag- 
 ments found in Egypt in 1897 and 1903 may 
 possibly come from this Gospel. Apart from these 
 two the gospels outside the canon are all of later 
 origin, and are either dependent on our canonical 
 
JOHN 239 
 
 Gospels or else purely romantic products of pious 
 imagination. So far as we can see, the canonical 
 Gospels were from the time of their composition 
 recognized as superior to all other accounts in 
 fulness and in fidelity to the public tradition of 
 the Church. The widely spread idea that the 
 Church selected our Gospels on arbitrary prin- 
 ciples or by accident out from a mass of others 
 equally trustworthy or even better, is an idle tale. 
 
 At one great figure of the apostolic age, and at 
 a great body of literature which stands as a third, 
 distinct in its own character, beside the Epistles 
 of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels, we have not 
 yet looked. I refer of course to the Apostle John 
 and the Gospel and three epistles which bear his 
 name. 
 
 Over the later life of the Apostle John and over 
 the origin of those writings zealous controversy 
 has been rife for a century, and there still rests 
 upon these questions a considerable degree of 
 mystery. This is due to the lateness of the attest- 
 ation of the tradition, to the surprising failure 
 of several early writers to give any sufficient 
 confirmation of the later tradition, and to our 
 ignorance of the movements and issues of the 
 years just preceding the end of the first century, 
 a period to which the writings relate and which 
 
240 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 need to be understood in order to the adequate 
 interpretation of them. 
 
 The Apostle John was in Jerusalem at the time 
 of the Conference, shortly before 50 a.d. He 
 is said later to have gone to Ephesus, and there to 
 have lived, the leader of that church and in par- 
 ticular the defender of the faith against Gnostic 
 heretics, until after the accession of Trajan in 
 the year 98, then to have died full of years in the 
 love of his fellow teachers and apostles and of the 
 whole church. At Ephesus, we are told, he wrote 
 the Gospel and the epistles, and at Patmos, while 
 in exile, the Eevelation. This account is given by 
 Irenseus, bishop of Lyons but native of Asia 
 Minor, who wrote about 185 and appears to have 
 known these facts ever since his youth. He and 
 other writers have preserved a few incidents from 
 John's life at Ephesus. On one occasion, as he 
 went to bathe, he found Cerinthus (his heretical 
 opponent) in the bath-house, and ran out without 
 taking his bath, crying, ''Let us flee, lest the bath 
 fall because Cerinthus the enemy of truth is with- 
 in." Another beautiful and touching story, too 
 long to quote, tells how John discovered that a 
 young man in whose welfare he had taken an in- 
 terest had through bad company turned to evil 
 ways and had taken up the life of a bandit-chief. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 241 
 
 He sought out the robber, let himself be taken 
 prisoner by the bandits' picket, and did not stop 
 until by his words he had brought the rough fellow 
 to sorrow and confession, ''a great example," as 
 the ancient writer says, "of true repentance and 
 a great proof of regeneration, a trophy of a vis- 
 ible resurrection." ^ Of John's life we thus know 
 but little. But the silence of many witnesses who 
 must have known more than we do is not in this 
 case sufficient ground for maintaining, as do some, 
 that the tradition even of John's residence at 
 Ephesus has no foundation in fact. 
 
 The problem of the authorship of the Gospel 
 and epistles is highly complicated, and we cannot 
 here undertake to discuss it with any fulness. It 
 cannot be said that there is agreement, although 
 concessions have been made on both sides. Per- 
 haps the most gratifying circumstance in a de- 
 bate which has been at times acrimonious is that 
 the lines between the parties are not now drawn 
 on dogmatic grounds. Thus a recent, sweeping, 
 and, one may even say, jubilant denial of the 
 Johannine authorship has come from an orthodox 
 professor ; while the most recent and elaborate de- 
 fense is from a member of an avowedly unor- 
 thodox communion. There are four current 
 
 iClem. Alex. Quis dives, quoted In Eus. H. E. ill. 23. 
 
242 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 views about the Gospel and First Epistle :— that 
 they were written by John, the Apostle ; that they 
 were written by disciples of John and embody 
 his teaching ; that their author is wholly unknown ; 
 and that they were written by another John, the 
 Presbyter, who may also have lived at Ephesus. 
 The study of the external evidence seems now 
 to have about exhausted itself, and to have reached 
 a relative termination with no conclusive result. 
 To separate the literature wholly from the name 
 of John involves so violent a rupture with an al- 
 most unbroken and very ancient tradition that 
 many scholars feel that it would require more 
 convincing evidence than has yet been produced. 
 On the other hand it must be admitted that there 
 are some obscurities in the external tradition it- 
 self, notably that caused by the fact that a small 
 sect in the second century, nicknamed "Alogi," 
 rejected this Gospel. The internal evidence seems 
 on the one hand to many to point to authorship 
 by a Palestinian Jew who commanded resources 
 of independent traditions of the life of Jesus such 
 as only an apostle could well have had; on the 
 other hand the differences from what may be 
 called the official record in the Synoptic Gospels, 
 both as to events and sayings, seem to others 
 hardly compatible with direct authorship by an 
 
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 243 
 
 apostle. How far the mind of a personal fol- 
 lower of Jesus could have gone in the process of 
 working over the Master's thought into an ad- 
 vanced, though sympathetic, form under the 
 pressure of new problems and by aid of the light 
 of a strange philosophy, is the question upon 
 which most turns, and it is one upon which opin- 
 ions are sure to differ. More light on the problem 
 of the authorship of the Johannine literature is 
 to be expected from a better understanding of the 
 three epistles in relation to the contemporary 
 conditions of the Church, and from fuller recog- 
 nition of the immediate purpose and direct bear- 
 ings of the discussions contained in the Gospel 
 itself. 
 
 More important than the inquiry into the au- 
 thorship of the Gospel, and more fruitful in re- 
 sult, is the investigation of the character and 
 nature of the Gospel, and of its date. 
 
 For the date we are left in somewhat the same 
 situation as in the case of the other Gospels. To 
 most scholars the evidence seems to make any 
 date later than 110 impossible, and a date some 
 years earlier rather more likely. There remain, 
 however, some who deny the validity of the evi- 
 dence on which this judgment rests, and bring the 
 Gospel down as late as 140. A final decision on 
 
244 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 this matter can be reached, if ever, only by the 
 discovery of new evidence, or by a better under- 
 standing of the general tides of thought in that 
 period. 
 
 For the great question after all is, What is this 
 Gospel? It is not to be classed with the Synoptic 
 Gospels; it is no simple record of the tradition 
 of the Church or the memory of a disciple. It is 
 rather a work of theological reflection, which pre- 
 supposes an adequate knowledge of the main facts 
 of Jesus' life, and presents, attached to a scant 
 framework of the course of his life, an interpreta- 
 tion of what he was and what he said. 
 
 It will be remembered that we said that the 
 precise contents of the Synoptic Gospels have been 
 largely determined by the particular interests of 
 the church at the time when these recollections 
 were living and abundant. The Gospel of John 
 shows the working of this same tendency ; only it 
 has gone very much farther. The prologue with 
 which the Gospel opens sets forth the point of 
 view: Jesus is the Word of God and, conversely, 
 the Word is not unknowable but has become flesh 
 in Jesus Christ. This two-sided view, of which 
 there will be more to say in the next chapter, is 
 the writer's fundamental contention. What fol- 
 lows, especially in the discourses, is written with 
 
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 245 
 
 constant reference to the problems and issues of 
 the writer's own time. The grounds of the au- 
 thority of the Son— what bears witness to him 
 and how ; the relation of the Son to the Father — 
 their oneness in a unity of love; the significance 
 of the eucharist— in reply to various objections; 
 the meaning of his death; these and many other 
 topics of contemporary practical interest are here 
 discussed. The singular beauty and elusive depth 
 of these chapters have ever been the joy and con- 
 solation of readers. It is Jesus' thought univer- 
 salized and applied, its abstract truths brought 
 to the fore; we move in a world above space and 
 time and the human relations of this earth, of 
 which the Synoptic Gospels are so full. As a 
 great scholar has said, it is the sayings of Jesus 
 '' transfused into infinite renderings." But it 
 is in the main not a record at all, but an inter- 
 pretation, in which a mind of rare spiritual in- 
 sight has set forth what the life and person of 
 Jesus Christ, the Son of God, meant to him. It 
 has the quality which has been said to belong to 
 every great portrait, that it contains something 
 of the personality not only of the subject, but 
 also of the painter. But in this case the painter 
 is one w^hose thought and character have been 
 formed by him whom he portrays. 
 
246 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 How far we may rely on the Fourth Gospel for 
 statements of historic fact is the most difficult 
 question of all. Its chief value lies perhaps rather 
 in the realm of truth than of fact. The impres- 
 sion which Jesus Christ made on the men around 
 him is to be learned from the Synoptic Gospels. 
 In the Fourth Gospel, whether or not it was writ- 
 ten by John, we read the product of meditation 
 in the light of profound spiritual experience. 
 The problems of theology have come upon men. 
 In John, as in the intellectually kindred Ignatius, 
 bishop of Antioch and martyr a few years later, 
 we have an indication of the turn men's thoughts 
 were taking, and can see one of the bases of the 
 Christian life and thought of the following period. 
 Because the Gospel of John was taken into the 
 embryo New Testament,— and, it would appear, 
 immediately on its publication,— it has been able 
 to exert on Christian history ever since an influ- 
 ence commensurate with its greatness as a product 
 of human thought. In it we are taught to recog- 
 nize in Jesus the features of the eternal Son of 
 God; and then the problems of speculative re- 
 ligious thought are taken up one by one and 
 solved in the life and the death on Calvary of the 
 incarnate Word, who was in the beginning, and 
 through whom in Jesus Christ came to us grace 
 and truth. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE PREPARATION FOR CATHOLIC 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 We have now looked at the most characteristic 
 aspects of Christian life and thought in the 
 apostolic age,— at the spread of Christianity, its 
 heroes, its churches, the beginnings of its litera- 
 ture. This study has brought before us the great 
 transition from the Christianity of the first 
 Christians at Jerusalem to the Christianity which, 
 by the time the century ended, was planted over 
 much of the civilized world. It is now in order 
 to glance at the transition with which our period 
 closes, or at any rate to see how even within the 
 apostolic age the changes were already preparing 
 and the tendencies showing themselves which 
 were destined in the following century to trans- 
 form primitive into Catholic Christianity. We 
 might call it a study of the materials present in 
 the first century out of which Catholic Chris- 
 tianity with its established forms of thought and 
 modes of church life was ultimately constructed. 
 247 
 
248 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Between the apostolic age, with its definite char- 
 acter, primitive and enthusiastic, and the compar- 
 atively settled Old Catholic Church of Irenaeus, 
 TertuUian, and Clement of Alexandria, lay the 
 second century, but the second century must be 
 regarded as the transitional stage between two 
 strongly marked periods, itself a time of consoli- 
 dation and preparation. A clear notion of the 
 relation of primitive to Catholic Christianity is 
 essential to an understanding of the facts and 
 forces of the apostolic age itself. 
 
 That aspect of the transformation which has to 
 do with the dropping away of primitive character- 
 istics that did not last on into the Catholic period 
 need not detain us long. Such was, for instance, 
 the fresh enthusiasm and sense of immediate 
 divine inspiration in which the apostolic Church 
 lived. Certain bodies of Christians in the second 
 century tried to preserve something of this at a 
 time when the main Church was concerned with 
 the building up of scriptural and official authori- 
 ties; and in punishment these honest revivers of 
 archaic conditions were called Montanists, and 
 outlawed as heretics. Or, to take another illus- 
 tration, as Christianity became naturalized in the 
 Greek world, some of those original elements of 
 Jewish thought which had been present from 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 249 
 
 the start grew unattractive and incomprehen- 
 sible, and tended to drop from men's minds or 
 to be greatly modified. Such were some of the ma- 
 terialistic and apocalyptic forms of the expecta- 
 tion of the future, and also the earlier confidence 
 in the nearness of the final catastrophe. As time 
 passes we have to look more and more to the ideas 
 which Greek philosophy brought to Christian 
 thinkers, and less and less to the Jewish rabbis and 
 apocalyptists for explanation of the dark places of 
 Christian writing. This is true, as we shall pres- 
 ently see, with respect not only to the positive 
 Jewish ideas carried over into Christianity, but 
 also to those conflicts with Jewish affirmations 
 w^hich had by reaction profoundly influenced the 
 direction of Christian thought. 
 
 Of greater importance for our present purpose 
 is the other process of change, by which elements, 
 at first less conspicuous and by no means charac- 
 teristic or dominant, but yet already present and 
 full of germinal power, were persistently growing 
 into readiness to become marked characteristics of 
 the following ages. This latter change was not, 
 any more than the former one, a mere fall in 
 men's character and ideals from the purity of 
 primitive Christianity. Nor was it a mere substi- 
 tution of the more complete and highly organized 
 
250 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 for the primitive and simple. It was such a 
 growth as all human life shows, wherever life 
 exists,— the change, accompanied by some gains 
 and some losses, by which the various needs and 
 impulses of the human spirit receive in successive 
 ages their satisfaction, and which at the same time 
 reflects the changing environment. The great and 
 necessary tasks were accomplished, but by the 
 two processes already mentioned, — together with 
 others, such as the acceptance of wholly new influ- 
 ences from w^ithout,— the peculiar character of the 
 apostolic age was lost and the Church acquired 
 new distinctive traits. The changes which took 
 place both affected thought and altered outer 
 circumstances and arrangements. 
 
 It is in connection with this inquiry that we can 
 best consider the several important types of 
 thought which appear in literary form near the 
 close of the apostolic age and in some measure 
 supplement the thought of Paul. That these 
 heralds of the coming time do not necessarily rep- 
 resent any loss in the firmness and power of men's 
 grasp upon Christianity itself may be seen by the 
 fact that the documents to be discussed include 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Gospel of 
 John. Whether, indeed, this latter writing is 
 most appropriately included here is a fair ques- 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 251 
 
 tion; in reality it is so many-sided, and sums up 
 in itself so much of the thought and experience 
 which lay behind it, that it altogether defies classi- 
 fication. These later types of New Testament 
 thought all show the influence of Paul, but repre- 
 sent neither direct development of his main ideas 
 nor flat departure from them. Before proceeding 
 to them we must first inquire as to the immediate 
 relation of Paul himself to the period subsequent 
 to the apostolic age. 
 
 The positive contribution of Paul to the Chris- 
 tianity of the following century can be clearly 
 traced; or at any rate we can see how under his 
 influence together with other favoring influences 
 there was a development such as he would have 
 rejoiced to see. Certain things for which he de- 
 liberately contended became part of the estab- 
 lished common stock of later Christianity. Many 
 forces and conditions doubtless co-operated, but 
 in the form in which the results stand we appear 
 to owe them to Paul. 
 
 In the first place his belief in the universality 
 of Christianity became the unqualified and funda- 
 mental conviction of the whole Church. There 
 seems to have been no time after the repulse of 
 the Judaizers in Galatia when the danger was 
 acute that the Christians in any large numbers 
 
252 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 would subject themselves to the Jewish law. 
 Every year of missionary advance made Paul's 
 victory more secure, and, except for the sectarian 
 separatists in Palestine, Jew and gentile alike are 
 found standing on the great principle that the 
 Gospel may be preached to every creature in all 
 the nations. 
 
 Again, secondly, the conception of Jesus Christ 
 which Paul had worked out and presented, and 
 which he had used in the later controversies of his 
 life, was the foundation of the view which became 
 established in the Church. A real human being, 
 born of a woman, born under the Law, of the seed 
 of David according to the flesh, he was yet in un- 
 divided identity the unique Son of God, existing 
 in the form of God, the image of the invisible God, 
 one in whom all the fulness dwells, set apart the 
 Son of God in power according to the Spirit of 
 holiness. The Church could not spare either side 
 of this double conception, and as one side or the 
 other was challenged, the essential elements in 
 Paul's thought of Christ carried Christianity 
 through more than one crisis of controversy. 
 
 A third development in the direction set by 
 Paul was the growing consciousness of the unity 
 of the Church. He had been at pains to secure 
 that unity by arranging practical succor to the 
 
ev:e of the catholic period 253 
 
 poor at Jerusalem, and by urging the common 
 relation to one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one 
 God and Father of all. It had lain near his heart, 
 and had seemed to him a condition of healthy 
 progress. In the development of the Catholic 
 Church no tendency was stronger, until we see at 
 last the great, though loosely knit, organism strong 
 enough to exclude heretics from its body and to 
 establish itself as an object of faith, an article of 
 the Creed itself. 
 
 Fourthly, that great and most salutary advance 
 which Paul made in the mode of conceiving the 
 Holy Spirit became a permanent possession of the 
 Church. He had brought this fundamental ele- 
 ment in Jewish and Christian religious thought 
 up from the plane of physical action where it 
 stood in the minds of many, and transformed it 
 into a conception of God's activity conformable 
 in character and emphasis to the moral and spirit- 
 ual thought of God to which the religion had at- 
 tained. Instead of a drawback and hindrance to 
 what we have come to call "spiritual" religion, 
 the idea of the Holy Spirit became an elevating 
 and ennobling force. We owe this great service 
 to Paul. It alone would be enough to justify his 
 claim to eminence in Christian history. 
 
 Fifthly, we can see progress following the di- 
 
254 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 rection of Paul's own efforts in the moral gain 
 that we find in the half -century after Paul's 
 death. Not in vain was every one of Paul's epis- 
 tles so largely occupied with moral precepts. He 
 —and the others like him who taught the genera- 
 tions—succeeded in fixing in the Christian con- 
 sciousness the idea that a Christian was bound 
 by his profession to be better than other men. 
 The result was not only a noble moral ideal but a 
 degree of actual moral achievement to which the 
 Christian defenders of the faith in the second 
 century could point with well justified pride. 
 Their claims are substantiated by the testimonies 
 of heathen writers, so soon as these begin. From 
 Pliny at the opening of the century on we can see 
 that the Christian churches made upon the outside 
 world the impression of superior virtue. The dark 
 rumors of unnatural vices practised in secret 
 were invariably seen by those who made investi- 
 gation to be without the least shadow of founda- 
 tion in fact; and we may, indeed, suspect that 
 those slanderous tales were but the expression of 
 the cynical judgment that somewhere in this fair- 
 seeming Christian society there must lurk a root 
 of peculiarly horrible secret evil. Even the 
 'hostility and contempt of Celsus, in the second 
 half of the second century, could not deny the 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 255 
 
 earnest morality of the Christians; and the ob- 
 servant and wholly unpartisan physician Galen, 
 writing at about the same time, gives striking tes- 
 timony to the general high level of Christian 
 morality, saying that some of them have advanced 
 so far in self-control and the keen pursuit of 
 virtue that they stand no whit behind the 
 philosophers themselves. The patronizing tone of 
 this remark does not detract from, but rather en- 
 hances, its value as testimony. 
 
 In these five notable respects, then, Paul's ef- 
 forts were crowned with success,— in the estab- 
 lishment of the freedom of Christianity from the 
 Jewish religion ; in the maintenance of the essen- 
 tial elements of his conception of Christ; in the 
 preservation of the unity of the Church; in the 
 purification of the conception of the Holy Spirit ; 
 in the steady improvement of Christian morals. 
 They cover a wide field, for they relate to the 
 essential nature of God, of Christ, and of the 
 Holy Ghost, to the nature of the Church, and to 
 the practical moral welfare of its members. All 
 these results were present in ordinary Christian- 
 ity when toward the end of the second century the 
 Church found itself well established, with Chris- 
 tian sacred books, distinct ritual, sacraments, 
 creed, and episcopal organization. The contribu- 
 
256 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tion of Paul was not the only factor in the his- 
 torical development, even in those directions which 
 I have mentioned, and its exact weight is hard to 
 determine, but it was certainly a factor of power- 
 ful influence. 
 
 This contribution, however, does not cover the 
 whole, nor include some of the most distinctive 
 parts, of Paul's thought, and it does not at all 
 account for most of the traits which specially 
 characterized the following period. In view of the 
 eminence of Paul in the apostolic age and of the 
 reverent honor which the Church paid to his 
 name, we should have expected to find that the 
 next ages built on him as the Latin church built 
 on Augustine or as the German church has built 
 on Luther, so that what separated Paul from other 
 Christians would have appeared in the type of a 
 Pauline Christianity. But this was not the case. 
 The second century and the Old Catholic Church 
 are by no means distinctively Pauline. 
 
 Thus, to take one striking instance, his doctrine 
 of justification by faith was lost. Men did not 
 see that it meant forgiveness in contradistinction 
 to desert; and only about thirty years after 
 Paul's death Clement of Rome, evidently with en- 
 tire unconsciousness that he is not true to the 
 apostle's doctrine, talks of salvation as gained 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 257 
 
 "by faith and hospitality." Again, Paul declared 
 that the whole legal system was done away in 
 Christ, and that we are not under any kind of 
 law, but stand in the freedom of faith; but the 
 Church presently transformed the Gospel itself 
 into a New Law. Paul's high thought of the im- 
 mediacy of contact with God opened to men 
 through Christ was followed in the Church by a 
 sacerdotal system, with priests to mediate the 
 grace of God. And so on; it has been well said 
 by Hamack that the Apostle Paul became to the 
 second century "not a basis but a ferment." 
 
 This failure to preserve the distinctive Pauline 
 doctrine came about partly because the Greek, 
 like the modern, mind found difficulty in under- 
 standing Paul's fundamentally Jewish mode of 
 thought and expression, partly because in solving 
 the new problems of new circumstances men of 
 earnest purpose but inferior devotion to a purely 
 spiritual and ethical religion failed to apply 
 Paul's governing principles, and substituted other 
 guiding thoughts for Paul's. For this Paul 
 himself is not wholly free from responsibility. 
 His writings themselves contain what may be 
 called Pauline germs of unpauline thought, points 
 of contact with dangerous tendencies of the 
 church at large, all of them, however, elements 
 
258 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 which he himself always kept subordinate to his 
 central thought of redemption through faith. 
 
 Such being in brief outline the relation, both 
 positive and negative, of Paul to the thought of 
 the succeeding age of the Church, we turn to look 
 at the starting points in the apostolic age, both in 
 and apart from Paul, of certain lines of progress 
 by which grew up some of the controlling forces 
 in the Catholic Church. In so doing we shall 
 naturally pass over those advances which were 
 merely the consolidation and perfection of traits 
 already dominant, and shall try to look at those 
 less characteristic elements of early apostolic 
 thought and life which later became strong and 
 prominent in Catholic Christianity. AVe are seek- 
 ing, that is to say, for the explanation in the apos- 
 tolic age of those things which differentiated the 
 second century and the Old Catholic Church from 
 it. These tendencies to difference had in some 
 cases had a considerable scope before our period 
 ended; they were partly for good and partly for 
 evil, but the discrimination between their good 
 and their evil has proved possible only with the 
 aid of a long perspective. No one of the changes 
 was due to wilfulness. They rather represent the 
 honest efforts of devout men to understand and 
 apply the religion in which they lived. 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 259 
 
 Perhaps the most conspicuous and important 
 of these tendencies which, while clearly present in 
 the apostolic age, are more characteristic of the 
 succeeding time, is what may be called the ten- 
 dency to intellectualism in Christian thought, out 
 of which grew the dogmatic Christianity of later 
 ages. Christianity was at first a certain kind of 
 life, led in and ruled by a certain thought of God, 
 namely as gracious Father. To Paul this was still 
 the essence of Christianity, although, as we have 
 seen, he held fast to this thought not because Jesus 
 had said so and had illustrated the possibility of 
 this life in his own personal character, but because 
 this thought of God seemed to Paul the necessary 
 inference from the death of Jesus Christ. But 
 various forces were at work to cause men to make 
 the Christian facts the basis of an intellectual 
 system. Whereas Paul said ''faith" and meant an 
 act of the soul, men came soon to say ''the faith" 
 and to mean a body of doctrine. It is evident that 
 the transmission of Christianity in missionary 
 work required, and must ever more and more 
 have stimulated, the formulation by believers of 
 Christian doctrine, which could be apprehended 
 and appropriated by new converts. Life to be 
 conveyed requires those who would transmit it to 
 give it form in intelligible ideas ; the necessity and 
 
260 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 the danger of this are both apparent. Again 
 the secular education of some Christians and the 
 inevitable and legitimate disposition of men to 
 philosophize would in any case have sooner or 
 later led to an increasingly intellectual apprehen- 
 sion of Christianity. 
 
 Now these and other causes found their special 
 occasion in a definite intellectual problem which 
 was present. There were in existence two modes 
 of vital approach to Jesus Christ, the one con- 
 ceiving him to be by his teaching the expounder 
 to men of God the universal Father, the other to 
 be in his death the conveyer to men of God's 
 saving grace. These two tendencies, which could 
 naively coexist, and which may be conveniently, 
 though inadequately, described as the tendencies 
 of the Synoptic Gospels and of Paul, demanded 
 to be brought into a stable reasoned relation to 
 one another. Such a reasoned relation is not at 
 all wrought out by Paul. Still less is it indicated 
 in the Synoptic Gospels. Who was this being who 
 combined these two aspects ? How give due weight 
 to both sides? How explain the identity of the 
 Jesus of history and the Christ of faith ? By the 
 close of the apostolic age these questions must have 
 been pressing on many Christian thinkers. 
 
 The Gospel of John offered itself as the solution 
 
FOURTH GOSPEL THEOLOGY 261 
 
 for the problem set by these two tendencies, and 
 the answer which it gave worked in favor of the 
 tendency which we have called intellectualism. 
 It is likely that the thought of John is dependent 
 upon the ideas spread far and wide by Paul's 
 preaching. The universalism and unity of the 
 Church are found fully assumed and enforced 
 in John, and so is the conception of Jesus 
 Christ as thoroughly human and yet unique 
 in his nature as the Son of God, as having 
 come from an existence in the form of God and 
 taken on himself human life and died and 
 risen again to glorified life with God. Through 
 faith in him, according to John, men are 
 saved both from the guilt and from the power of 
 sin, gaining both forgiveness and moral renewal. 
 Many of the specific forms of Paul's thought, 
 such as the term justification and the contrast of 
 faith and works, John does not have, but in these 
 cases the underlying idea is nevertheless ade- 
 quately represented. On the other hand John 
 writes wdth full knowledge of and plain regard 
 for the traditions of Jesus' life current in the 
 Church. He takes something from their supply, 
 adds something of his own, and shows his attitude 
 toward that mode of approach to the Saviour by 
 throwing his whole book, which is, as we have 
 
262 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 seen, in primary intention not so mucli a narra- 
 tive as a theological treatise, into the form of a 
 Gospel. 
 
 The means by which John makes this combina- 
 tion, and likewise the point in which he illus- 
 trates a theological advance upon Paul of enor- 
 mous significance, is the introduction of the idea 
 of Revelation as the central pivot of his thought. 
 "What redemption was in Paul 's system, revelation 
 is in John's. Not that the less prominent idea 
 was wholly absent in the case of either, but on 
 each side one idea is prominent and central, the 
 other secondary. Paul knew that in Christ there 
 came to men the revelation of eternal truth which 
 had been hidden from the past ages, but his 
 thought clung to the dramatic and historical, and 
 centered about the grace of God not only made 
 known, but made real in the cross of Calvary. So, 
 likewise, John is not forgetful that God at a defi- 
 nite moment sent his Son, and that the blood of 
 Jesus cleanseth us from all sin, but in his funda- 
 mental thought he dwells far more than does Paul 
 on the idea of a world of spiritual things in which 
 permanent relations eternally obtain, relations 
 a knowledge of which has now been brought to 
 men. His universe is less like the moving pano- 
 
FOURTH GOSPEL THEOLOGY 263 
 
 rama of history and more like an organism of mu- 
 tually related elements. 
 
 This central idea of Eevelation John expresses 
 by the use of the term Logos, and thus brings 
 Christianity into closer contact with secular 
 thought about metaphysics and the philosophy 
 of religion. Paul had occasionally found help in 
 expressions drawn from the Stoic and Alexandrian 
 philosophy, to which this idea pertained, but he 
 had never given it the prominence that John does, 
 nor had he found in it, and in the idea of revela- 
 tion which corresponds to one side of it, the su- 
 preme explanation of the life and person of Jesus 
 Christ. Greek philosophy had thought of God as 
 the Absolute and Unconditioned, transcendent 
 and remote, unapproachable in his perfect holi- 
 ness. But at the same time the requirements of 
 thought no less than those of religion demanded 
 that God be conceived as creator and rational 
 ground of the world, as sustaining it and active 
 in it. To bridge over the chasm between God and 
 the world, impassable for the mere Absolute, phi- 
 losophers began to ascribe to the ideas of God crea- 
 tive power and a kind of substance of their own. 
 These ideas are all summed up in the Reason of 
 God, in which these thinkers, aided by the 
 ambiguity of the Greek term logos as meaning 
 
264 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 both reason and word, found included both the 
 reason of God and the expression of God. Thus 
 the thought of the abstract Absolute became sup- 
 plemented in the interest of the practical needs 
 of thought. The Logos was a conception capable of 
 combining many apparently inconsistent aspects. 
 It was at once God and not God. It was at once 
 immanent in God as his reason, and flowed forth 
 from him as his expression. It possessed a 
 shadow of independent existence, but was capable 
 of complete absorption in the idea of God. 
 
 The purpose of this conception is plain. It was 
 merely a mode of so analyzing the thought of God 
 that both sides, his high transcendence in the 
 heavens and his' immanence in the world for pur- 
 poses of creation and government and religion, 
 might have justice done them. The mode of 
 thought known as the Logos-philosophy was wide- 
 spread in various schools of Greek philosophy, and 
 in the first century had evidently filtered down 
 into popular speech. It had also points of contact 
 with older Hebrew ideas which must have made it 
 all the more welcome to a Jew, such as was beyond 
 question the author of the Fourth Gospel. We 
 need only to recall the first chapter of Genesis, in 
 which, when God created the heavens and the 
 earth, he "spake" and it was done. 
 
FOURTH GOSPEL THEOLOGY 265 
 
 Now the Gospel of John has a two-fold pur- 
 pose. First, the author wishes to call attention 
 to the human characteristics of Jesus Christ. He 
 is loyal to the tradition of the Church and the 
 Gospels. There have arisen teachers who deny 
 that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, and so con- 
 fess not Jesus. ^ They were evidently incipient 
 Gnostics. The efforts of these thinkers were di- 
 rected to removing Christianity from its base and 
 roots in the real personality of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 They were transforming it into a speculative 
 system like one of those in which in the second 
 century oriental and Greek philosophy combined 
 to enter into competition with the religion 
 of Jesus Christ for the faith of the world. John 
 writes his Gospel in large measure to declare 
 unto men that which we men have heard, that 
 which we have seen with our eyes, that which 
 we beheld, and our hands handled, the life which 
 was manifested unto us.- And he does so by 
 writing a Gospel in which he will not merely 
 record the common public tradition of the 
 Church, but will set forth the significance of 
 the incarnation, and by constant reference to 
 the human traits of the picture will impress on 
 
 ^ I John iv. 2 f., li. 22. 
 3 1 John i. 1 f. 
 
266 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 men that the fundamental idea of the Christian 
 religion is not the Word of God eternally exist- 
 ing invisible, the object of thought and meta- 
 physical speculation, but is Jesus Christ, known 
 to us in his personal human character by ac- 
 quaintance on this earth, an acquaintance which 
 has been preserved in trustworthy tradition to 
 our own time. In this fundamental insistence 
 that not the Logos but the incarnate Logos is 
 essential to Christianity, the Fourth Gospel has 
 probably rendered its greatest service. For 
 whatever may be said of idealizing tendencies and 
 a veil of later abstract thought, yet the picture 
 which we gain of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of 
 John is the same in its most important elements 
 as that which we have from Matthew, Mark and 
 Luke. The loving, sympathizing Jesus, dying to 
 save the world, and his teaching of the Father in 
 heaven and the duty of man, has always been 
 recognized by the Church as the same, through 
 whichever of the four mediums he De seen. 
 
 At the same time the other side of the author's 
 purpose in his Gospel must not be overlooked or 
 minimized. The writer wishes to interpret Jesus 
 Christ and to give a philosophy of Christianity. 
 Only so can he fully confute the opposing thinkers 
 of whom I have spoken, and otherwise he need 
 
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 267 
 
 hardly have added another to the already exist- 
 ing Gospels. Jesus Christ, the mysterious but 
 real human person, whom men have known in the 
 flesh, is, he says, the eternal Word of God, the 
 Logos whose existence philosophy has already by 
 its own methods come to postulate. In Jesus 
 Christ the Word became flesh and dwelt among 
 us. The divine agent in creation was at the same 
 time the divine medium of revelation. The con- 
 summation of aU his revelation of God was 
 reached when he himself appeared in human 
 form. He was the Light of the World, and in 
 him as Light the Truth is brought to men. 
 
 We see here a long step taken toward the in- 
 tellectual apprehension of Christianity as new 
 knowledge. The tendency is in itself good, for 
 only in intelligible form can religion live in a 
 world of educated life or be transmitted from one 
 generation to another. And the Gospel of John 
 does not limit its view to this conception. The 
 incarnate Word has brought not only light but 
 life. **And this is life eternal, that they should 
 know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou 
 didst send, even Christ Jesus." Life comes from 
 light ; for it rests on the knowledge of God. Both 
 grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 
 John does not by any means transform Chris- 
 
268 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tianity into a mere system of knowledge. He is as 
 well aware as Paul that salvation primarily con- 
 sists in forgiveness and moral renewal. His 
 knowledge itself is not mere knowledge of facts, 
 but is a noble personal acquaintance with the 
 character of God ; but for that very reason he 
 gives to the term knowledge a place in his thought 
 which it did not hold with Paul. And thus he 
 joined in the inevitable progress toward a stage 
 where acceptance of or submission to a body of 
 doctrine, and not merely personal faith in Christ 
 and loving devotion to him, was to be demanded 
 of everyone who would gain entrance to the Chris- 
 tian Church. 
 
 Paul pursued theology and used philosophical 
 terms in order to deal with practical problems in 
 his own life and that of those who were spiritually 
 dependent on him. John seems to enter on 
 philosophical inquiries not only for practical rea- 
 sons, but also that he may gain a clear intellectual 
 view of the meaning of Christianity and its 
 place in the divine universe and in history. In 
 consequence, while Paul touches the depths of the 
 sinner's soul, and kindles the moral sentiments, 
 and makes the heart beat quicker with the inspir- 
 ing rush of his Christian enthusiasm, John has 
 
FOURTH GOSPEL THEOLOGY 269 
 
 been on the whole more permanently satisfying 
 to the philosophical theologian. 
 
 Somewhat earlier than the Gospel of John was 
 probably written the Epistle to the Hebrews. It, 
 too, uses the conception of the Logos, and it, too, 
 marks a step toward intellectualism and dogmatic 
 Christianity. Much more clearly than John, has 
 the author of Hebrews been influenced by Paul. 
 So much is this the case that it was for long be- 
 lieved that Paul was the author of the anonymous 
 epistle, and that is still the authoritative judg- 
 ment of the Roman Catholic church. Who ac- 
 tually wrote it is no matter. As Origen, in the 
 third century, said, after discussing the question 
 at length, it is something which God alone knows. 
 It was probably written after the year 90, not to 
 Hebrews but to gentile Christians, perhaps in 
 Italy. 
 
 The author's purpose of writing is purely 
 practical, and the plan and method of the whole 
 can only be understood when that is recognized. 
 It is a tract, designed to confirm and revive the 
 enthusiasm for the Christian religion of persons 
 who, partly under the stress of persecution, partly 
 through general lack of zeal, are in danger of 
 lapsing into religious indifference and worldly 
 life. This is a practical purpose, but the writer 
 
270 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 betrays throughout not merely a practical but an 
 intellectual, philosophizing, interest in his re- 
 ligion. He is a man (very probably a Jew) who 
 has had good literary training in the Alexandrian 
 philosophy, with which he shows himself well ac- 
 quainted. That he writes as a literary man is 
 one of the reasons why his epistle is far less in- 
 teresting than those of the less trained and more 
 human Paul. He must have worked out his views 
 of theology with much the same interest in un- 
 derstanding his own life and the world in which 
 he found himself that a modern student of the 
 philosophy of Christianity would show. He has 
 the idea of revelation, just as John has, and he 
 begins with it,— "God, having of old time spoken 
 unto the fathers in the prophets by divers por- 
 tions and in divers manners, hath at the end of 
 these days spoken unto us in his Son.'' He has 
 a]so the clear notion of redemption as the cleans- 
 ing of the conscience from guilt and as the bring- 
 ing to naught of the power of sin. His great con- 
 tribution consists in his presentation of Christian- 
 ity as the final and absolute religion, the sphere 
 both of revelation and of redemption. This is im- 
 plicit in Paul and in John ; the author of Hebrews 
 has made it explicitly the key to the whole prob- 
 lem. All that went before was the shadow and 
 
FOURTH GOSPEL THEOLOGY 271 
 
 type; Christianity is the reality, the heavenly 
 "idea" of religion, in which all phenomena of true 
 religion have imperfectly shared, and which has 
 now been revealed to men in its completeness by 
 the Son of God. The writer works out this concep- 
 tion with a marvelous affluence of illustration, and 
 unless the central thought be firmly held in mind, 
 the reader is in danger of finding himself over- 
 whelmed by the variety of ways in which this 
 Alexandrian form of Plato's doctrine of ideas is 
 applied to the various aspects of the Redeemer 
 and his work. Underlying it all is the determi- 
 nation that the loyalty and enthusiasm of the 
 readers shall be stirred by the sense of privilege 
 and responsibility which the situation imposes. 
 ** Therefore we ought to give the more earnest 
 heed to the things that were heard ; . . . for 
 how shall we escape, if we neglect so great 
 salvation ? ' ' 
 
 The Epistle to the Hebrews, then, signifies the 
 formal entrance of the Greek spirit and method 
 into Christianity. Something of academic finish 
 is here seen, and some loss of the earlier sugges- 
 tiveness and eager outreach beyond the power of 
 expression. The idea of faith has become more 
 abstract and intellectual. ''Faith is assurance 
 of things hoped for, conviction of things not 
 
272 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 seen/' The very existence here of a grave defi- 
 nition of faith stands in a certain contrast to 
 the personal, emotional, naive faith of Paul. In 
 general we find ourselves in an intellectual and 
 almost dogmatic atmosphere. The thought of the 
 work and sacrifice of Christ is developed in that 
 same spirit, and in consequence Hebrews has in 
 some respects influenced the form of Christian 
 theology more than Paul has done. We can see 
 this in the Church doctrines of the person of 
 Christ and the sacrifice of Christ, which are full 
 of the language and thought of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews. In this epistle we can trace the tend- 
 ency which came to its completion in Thomas 
 Aquinas; the author of Hebrews is the school- 
 man of the New Testament. 
 
 A third example of this same tendency, besides 
 the Gospel of John and the Epistle to the He- 
 brews, brings us still nearer to Paul. The three 
 so-called Pastoral Epistles, bearing Paul's name 
 and addressed to Timothy and to Titus, may have 
 been written shortly after the year 100, but they 
 are naturally included within the apostolic age 
 because they present themselves in the name of an 
 apostle, and seem in spirit to belong rather to the 
 end of the earlier than to the beginning of the 
 new period. The characteristic representatives of 
 
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 273 
 
 the new period wrote in their own names. Such 
 were Ignatius, Polycarp, Papias, Justin; in the 
 Pastorals we have at least the name of Paul. 
 
 Out of the turn toward intellectualism has 
 come in the Pastoral Epistles something not un- 
 like the later conception of authoritative dogma. 
 We do not find here, indeed, the lofty intellectual 
 apprehension of Christianity which John or He- 
 brews offers us, but the same tendency is seen in 
 the reliance which is put upon transmitted and 
 traditional doctrine as a safeguard against error. 
 ''The sound doctrine" is a phrase unknown to 
 Paul but here often repeated. It is the body of 
 Christian teaching which the elders have received 
 and must transmit unchanged, the deposit of the 
 faith. In that very term ' ' the faith ' ' we see the 
 changed point of view. The Christian "holds the 
 mystery of the faith, "^ the apostate rejects "the 
 faith." We note that it is not Paul's "faith," an 
 act, the most intimate and personal, of the soul, 
 but the Faith as an object of intellectual belief. 
 To see the whole contrast one has but to think of 
 Paul's deep-rooted sense of the immediate spirit- 
 ual control under which he himself and all the 
 members of his churches stood. They all speak 
 not by book nor by tradition but by original 
 
 II Tim. ill. 9. 
 
274 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 knowledge and vision. The Epistle to the Colos- 
 sians furnishes a good means of comparing Paul's 
 method with that of the Pastoral Epistles. At 
 Colossae he was giving' warnings against danger- 
 ous teachers who, like those later ones against 
 whom the Pastorals direct their polemics, com- 
 bined practical asceticism with dangerous specu- 
 lation. But in Colossians the appeal is nowhere 
 to any authority excepting the authority of Christ 
 and of a divine truth to be directly apprehended 
 by the original powers of every man. It is 
 through preserving the union of every member 
 with Christ the head, that there will come sound 
 life and the establishment in faith, ''even as they 
 had been taught." Paul appeals not to ''the 
 form of sound words" but to the fundamental 
 principles of the Gospel. 
 
 The Christian religion never can be and never 
 has been without a basis of intelligible ideas ; but 
 periods of Christian history differ in the varying 
 degree to which a body of ideas, or religious 
 emotion, or conduct, or the fundamental attitude 
 and choice of the will, is made prominent in 
 Christian life and aspiration. It was necessary 
 and fortunate that Christianity early gained a 
 form which made it possible for it to be intellectu- 
 ally grasped. It could not otherwise have taken 
 
THE PASTORAL EPISTLES 275 
 
 its place in the life of a world of active thought, 
 and we ought not unduly to disparage the 
 service of dogmatic Christianity. The harm was 
 done only when those dogmas were erected 
 into a means for the exclusion of true believers 
 from the Church of Christ, or when the other 
 elements of Christianity were crowded into the 
 background. The intellectual tendency has al- 
 ways to be jealously watched, lest it come to 
 supplant the true religion which it ought by 
 rights to serve. 
 
 A second tendency of which we see the germs 
 already in the apostolic age, and which became 
 later a controlling characteristic of Christian life 
 and thought is the tendency to sacramentarianism. 
 More and more in the early centuries rites and 
 external acts, baptism, the Lord's supper, the 
 laying on of hands, anointing, and the rest, to- 
 gether with the elements used in these sacred 
 rites, the bread and wine, the water, the oil, the 
 salt, and even objects in Christian history, like 
 the name of Jesus or the cross, gained a sacra- 
 mental character. They became esteemed not 
 merely as symbols of an inner grace but as effec- 
 tive mediums whereby, apart from rational mental 
 action whether of knowledge or of faith, ipso 
 facto, by the very operation of the sacred act 
 
276 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 itself, spiritual results are brought about. This 
 tendency corresponded to the demand of that age 
 for mysteries, and doubtless if the Christian 
 Church had been unable to satisfy this universal 
 desire for physical processes which are believed 
 in full realism to carry spiritual powers, Chris- 
 tianity would have been limited in its field and its 
 accomplishment. That the interest in mysteries 
 and real sacraments lies deep in human nature 
 and in the power of the human imagination we 
 can see in modern as well as ancient times. In 
 its worst form it leads to magic, in its higher 
 forms it has entered into the living interest of 
 some of the most spiritually-minded of intelligent 
 Christians. 
 
 Now in the apostolic age we see the preparation 
 for this development. Paul sees in the eucharistic 
 cup not only a symbol but the real communion of 
 the blood of Christ, and in the bread a real and 
 not merely figurative participation in the body of 
 Christ. And Paul seems to find likewise in the 
 sacrifices of Jews and heathen a real communion 
 with the altar, whether it be God's or demons'. 
 *' Behold Israel after the flesh: have not they 
 that eat the sacrifices communion with the altar? 
 . . . . The things which the gentiles sacri- 
 fice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God : and 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 277 
 
 I would not that ye should have communion with 
 demons. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord 
 and the cup of demons: ye cannot partake of 
 the table of the Lord and of the table of de- 
 mons."^ This passage does not stand alone. Others 
 breathe the same kind of thought, as when Paul 
 attributes sickness in the church at Corinth to 
 irreverence at the Lord's supper,- and in the 
 mysterious reference to those "that are baptized 
 for the dead."^ Also the mystical efficacy ascribed 
 to baptism as a burial with Christ into his death, 
 while it does not go beyond the idea of a symbol, 
 yet leans in the direction of a physical mystery. 
 
 So we find in the Gospel and epistles of John 
 references to the water of baptism and to the flesh 
 and blood of the Son of Man which, to say the 
 least, were easily capable of lending themselves to 
 sacramentarian use. In the New Testament, how- 
 ever, all this is kept wholly subordinate to pure 
 and free religion, is held with thoroughly ethical 
 and spiritual understanding. Our access to the 
 grace wherein we stand is by faith and faith 
 alone, not by any required physical processes or 
 by the application of material elements. Eternal 
 life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom he 
 
 1 1 Cor. X. 18 ff. 
 2 1 Cor. xi. 30. 
 ' I Cor. XV. L'9. 
 
278 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 hath sent. This proportion was later lost; the 
 spirit of the age took these tendencies and used 
 them to make unethical and unspiritual substi- 
 tutes for pure religion. 
 
 A third pregnant idea which was present in 
 Paul and the apostolic age, but which gained in 
 later Christianity a larger influence, was the con- 
 ception of the exclusive Church, and of divine 
 election to membership in it. With Paul the 
 Church is the body of Christ, bound to him by 
 faith, which has found expression in a common 
 religious life. It is pervaded by spiritual en- 
 thusiasm and is a light in the darkness of a lost 
 world because it comprises those who have re- 
 ceived new life in Christ. Paul assumes that those 
 who have this new life of faiith will have as one 
 element in it courage to unite with their brethren 
 and stand forth publicly as Christ's followers. 
 "When they do that they become members of 
 the Church. Paul insists that everyone who can 
 say Jesus is Lord is thereby shown to be in pos- 
 session of the Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee 
 of God's acceptance.^ In the primitive conditions 
 of Paul's time inward attitude and outward con- 
 nection could be assumed to be always present 
 together, could be practically treated as merely 
 
 1 1 Cor. xii. 3. 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 279 
 
 two phases of one state. Through faith and 
 therefore through the Church came salvation. 
 
 Now with the stiffening and hardening neces- 
 sarily attendant upon life and struggle in the 
 world and upon the development of intellectualism 
 or dogma came controversies over the doctrines of 
 the faith. Under the stress of controversy grew 
 up, as is always the case in such circumstances, 
 tests for excluding and including. The notion 
 came in that salvation is actually mediated not 
 only by faith and the Spirit, but also by outward 
 connection with the Church, which thus became 
 not only a means of edification and a duty owed to 
 the whole Christian community, but itself a kind 
 of sacrament. The change is wholly parallel to 
 that which gave spiritual efScacy to physical 
 processes. "No salvation outside the Church" 
 became a maxim. We can see the germ of this in 
 Paul or in John, but how different in its real 
 meaning and tendency was their doctrine ! 
 
 So also with the counterpart to the doctrine of 
 the Church, the doctrine of election. To Paul the 
 thought that God before the foundation of the 
 world chose us in Christ to be his sons by his 
 grace through faith, was the warrant of Chris- 
 tian hope and enthusiasm. Election was not a 
 theory about God's relation to the world, but a 
 
280 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 fact of experience. This loyal cry of the grateful 
 soul, when taken as the basis of a theology, its 
 logical consequences regardlessly drawn out, and 
 the whole hardened into a system, produced ulti- 
 mately Calvinism with the complete theology of 
 election and reprobation. Calvinism was an em- 
 pirical theology. It accounted admirably for the 
 actual facts of the observed world by attributing 
 the source of them all to God ; but it neglected the 
 fundamental truth, which Paul did not forget, 
 that the Gospel is offered to a whole world of sin. 
 A fourth illustration has already been touched 
 upon in a previous chapter. Asceticism finds in 
 Paul's writings and practice many supports. But 
 this tendency, which the later church so strongly 
 emphasized, is with Paul only an exaggeration of 
 self-control, stimulated by the fore-shortened out- 
 look into the future of this world; it is never 
 found as a thorough-going theory, nor is it based 
 on a philosophy of the evil of this world or of 
 matter. Asceticism in any proper sense of the 
 word is wholly foreign to the teaching of Jesus, 
 and came into Christianity not from Paul but 
 from the Greek world into which Christianity was 
 thrown. Nothing could be more contrary to the 
 facts than to represent the Jewish element in 
 Christianity as the source of Catholic asceticism. 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 281 
 
 These four illustrations are drawn from various 
 departments of Christian thought, and may serve 
 to make clear the way in which many of the dis- 
 tinctive characteristics of the period succeeding 
 the apostolic age arose. The influences which 
 produced such vast results as we later see were 
 not generally foreign to primitive Christianity 
 any more than they were characteristic of it. 
 They were present in it because the primitive 
 Christians were men, and men of their own time. 
 The possibility of a religious system full of 
 dogma, of sacraments, of ecclesiasticism or ex- 
 clusivism, of asceticism, was all present, and 
 needed only favoring circumstances to become 
 complete reality. These circumstances, however, 
 did not always present themselves. Other oppos- 
 ing forces sometimes appeared, and dangers 
 which seemed grave were averted. 
 
 It would be instructive, but would lead us too 
 far from our present purpose, to examine how 
 some tendencies which were not adopted by the 
 Catholic Church were present and might have lent 
 themselves to a wholly parallel development. 
 Especially by the case of Marcion, the second cen- 
 tury theologian who isolated and exaggerated 
 Paul's idea of the opposition of Jewish Law and 
 Christian Gospel and who, if he had had his way, 
 
282 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 would have deprived the Church of its Old Testa- 
 ment, is valuable light thrown on the forces at 
 work and the inevitable changes which they 
 wrought. 
 
 For it must not be supposed that the changes 
 of which we have been speaking, and the outcome 
 of which from the point of view of the religion of 
 the Spirit we must in many ways regret, were due 
 to the arbitrary interference of misguided men, 
 or could have been avoided. A religion makes men 
 over, and in turn is made over in the hands of its 
 adherents. The Christianity of the year 200 was 
 such as those generations with their special de- 
 mands and limitations were able to use. It had 
 taken on a body, as it must in any case have done ; 
 and it had built up within itself into strength 
 those previously subordinate elements which cor- 
 responded to the special needs of men trained by 
 centuries of paganism and philosophy. Many of 
 these needs were permanent human needs, — of the 
 intellect, the imagination, the discipline of char- 
 acter,— and something corresponding to them will 
 always find its place in the full development of 
 any religion that long ministers to great masses 
 of men. But the power and divineness of Chris- 
 tianity is to be seen in the fact that in spite of 
 these changes the forces of pure morality and 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 283 
 
 spiritual religion have continued in it. Noble 
 character, trust in God as loving Father, grateful 
 devotion to Jesus Christ, the fruits of the Spirit, 
 the joy of salvation, have shone forth in every 
 age. And the inherent power of spiritual religion 
 to assert itself and to conquer ecclesiasticism and 
 religious materialism, to triumph over asceticism 
 and dogmatism, has been shown over and over 
 again in Christian history. This is the value, the 
 priceless value and inspiration to us of the apos- 
 tolic age, that we find there Christianity, not in- 
 deed in formless essence, but at a stage when spir- 
 itual religion, as the personal inner relation of 
 the human soul to God, had not yet found it neces- 
 sary to harden itself into a system, and when its 
 dominance had not yet had time to be overshad- 
 owed by subsidiary things. 
 
 We have considered thus far the preparation 
 for Catholic Christianity on the side of thought. 
 To a contemporary observer perhaps the more 
 evident marks of the progress of events toward 
 the close of the apostolic period would have been 
 certain changes in the outer conditions and rela- 
 tions of the Church which must already have be- 
 gun to show themselves. 
 
 Of the progress in organization which must have 
 been made before the close of the first century we 
 
284 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 know but little, as in general we know but little 
 of the outer conditions of Christianity in those 
 years. The Pastoral Epistles, though impossible 
 to date exactly, at any rate show that considerable 
 progress toward ecclesiastical order was early 
 made. In Paul's day, as we have seen, spiritually 
 endowed functionaries were the leaders of the 
 churches. These were already transformed into 
 regular officers before the time of the Pastorals, 
 and we find there directions for the personal char- 
 acter and for the duties of persons who should be 
 admitted to the office of presbyter or deacon. The 
 term bishop, or overseer, appears there to be used 
 as an appellation descriptive of the functions of 
 those who were presbyters by office. Of the rise 
 of the single bishop, presiding over a body of 
 presbyters, and distinctly belonging to a third 
 order of the ministry, we have no special warning 
 before Ignatius. 
 
 At the same time with these changes the 
 travelling preachers— apostles and evangelists 
 without settled homes— were having to yield 
 their irresponsible dignity before the growing 
 authority of the local officials. It is not im- 
 probable that the Third Epistle of John, which 
 clearly sprang, whoever may have written it, from 
 some real, concrete situation, reflects the condi- 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 285 
 
 tions at a time when a travelling apostle is in 
 danger of meeting but a cold reception from a 
 local official ''who loveth to have the preemi- 
 nence." This state of things can be seen still more 
 clearly in the later "Teaching of the Twelve Apos- 
 tles" where directions about the proper reception 
 to be accorded to apostles and prophets and 
 teachers, and the proper tests to be applied, are 
 followed by the significant remark that bishops 
 and deacons *'also perform the service of the 
 prophets and teachers." Through these changes 
 the profession of the ministry as we know it, of 
 which we do not learn from Paul, came into being. 
 In general, the development of organization, which 
 took place with varying rapidity in different 
 places at and just after the close of the apostolic 
 age was the substitution of a settled state of life 
 for the condition of a group of camps installed 
 for a short campaign in the enemy's country. The 
 Christian religious community had the name of 
 parish (parochia), or "group of sojourners," 
 but it w^as compelled to take on the character 
 of a permanent institution in the world. 
 
 Another kind of change was that in the rela- 
 tion of Christians to the outside world, and in the 
 growth of hostility and persecution, of which I 
 have already spoken in an earlier chapter. 
 
286 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 In concluding our study, let us try in a few 
 words to review this period. The immediate 
 goal, or manifest destiny, of the Christian 
 Church, was to spread through the civilized 
 world, permeate all classes of society, and estab- 
 lish that great and powerful brotherhood, which, 
 having made its way against the will of the 
 Roman state, finally proved to be the one unifying 
 force capable of holding the Eoman Empire to- 
 gether. Only so could the realities of Christianity 
 be preserved, for in the Great World only the 
 Great Church could permanently survive. The 
 apostolic age had had its own type, primitive, en- 
 thusiastic, unformed and free. This character 
 Christianity gradually lost and never can regain ; 
 for us it can be recovered only as a refreshing and 
 inspiring picture from the past. But in this 
 period a certain work was done, a certain part of 
 the Church's task accomplished, something added 
 to what had before existed. In answering the 
 question what this contribution was which the 
 apostolic age made to its successor we need to re- 
 member that it handed on to the following period 
 not what it had itself been, but what it had gained 
 and what it was becoming. 
 
 Of the achievements of the apostolic age two 
 were recoo-nized at the time to be of fundamental 
 
EVE OF THE CATHOLIC PERIOD 287 
 
 importance, as the Book of Acts testifies, namely 
 the successful advance into the gentile world and 
 the liberty with respect to the Jewish law which 
 made this advance fruitful. Besides these two 
 the lapse of time since that age enables us to see 
 others. Let us briefly recount them, beginning 
 with the most external. The churches had already 
 begun to have regular and permanent local or- 
 ganization. Some of the lasting forms of common 
 life and worship were firmly established. The 
 meetings, the rites, the charitable aid to poorer 
 members were in practice, and we live to-day un- 
 der a system which in many respects goes back to 
 that far-off time. A standard of Christian morals 
 had been formulated and accepted. A classical 
 Christian literature had been created and to some 
 extent recognized for its true value. The unity 
 of the Church, which includes the churches, had 
 become a conviction, and one fraught with mo- 
 mentous consequences. And, finally, the main 
 lines had been laid down which later theology 
 was to pursue. The Sermon on the Mount and the 
 Nicene Creed are often contrasted in modern dis- 
 cussions. As between the two there are many re- 
 spects in which the teaching of Paul and the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews and John must be held to 
 belong with the creed. At the end of the apos- 
 
288 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 tolic age the Church possessed what it had re- 
 ceived from Jewish Christianity, what it had been 
 taught by Paul and John and the other thinkers, 
 and what its humbler members had worked out 
 through active Christian life and their own 
 thought. With these possessions it was equipped 
 to press forward and conquer the world for 
 Christ. 
 
IX 
 
 ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY OF THE 
 APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Before we leave the apostolic age, the task still 
 remains of considering briefly the various views 
 about this period which earlier and later times, 
 and especially modern critical students, have 
 held. This inquiry is important both because it 
 ought to give us greater confidence in the results 
 that have been reached, as well as show us where 
 the present problems lie, and also because some of 
 the controversies which have centered about this 
 period have made much noise in the Church at 
 large, while their echoes still resound at the pres- 
 ent day. 
 
 First of all we have, of course, the view which 
 we have already found in our most ancient his- 
 tory of the Christian Church, the Book of Acts. 
 The Acts, probably written within forty years of 
 the latest events which it narrates, and itself a 
 product as well as a history of the apostolic age, 
 looks back on the earlier half of our period and 
 289 
 
290 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 sees there three main facts. For the author of 
 Acts the period of his book is distinguished, first 
 and foremost, as that in which took place the 
 great transfer of Christianity from Jerusalem to 
 the gentile world and Rome. Christianity began 
 as a Jewish sect; when he takes leave of his sub- 
 ject it has established itself at many points in the 
 civilized world and at Rome, the centre of that 
 world. The significance of this change he evi- 
 dently understands fully, and he brings it out in 
 his history with rare and telling skill. This tran- 
 sition was made possible by the second great fact 
 upon which he lays stress, namely the establish- 
 ment of freedom for the gentile churches. At a 
 time when Jerusalem was still the mother church 
 and carried controlling influence, certain Jewish 
 Christians of Pharisaic origin and Pharisaic 
 spirit tried to hold the whole Christian Church 
 within the limits of circumcision and the Jewish 
 law. If they had been successful, the world-wide 
 development and permanence of Christianity 
 would have been impossible. They were resisted 
 by Paul, and the rightful freedom of the gentile 
 churches then vindicated became acknowledged. 
 The significance of this controversy and its result 
 was apparent to the author of Acts, and he makes 
 it a central point in his narrative. The third fact 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 291 
 
 which dominates the view of Luke is the supreme 
 significance and greatness of the Apostle Paul in 
 the early history of Christianity. Paul is the 
 central figure in the two great movements which 
 the book sketches, and in Luke's opinion his mis- 
 sionary work created the framework on which the 
 later Church was built. 
 
 These three great facts, the great transition, the 
 acknowledged Christian freedom on which it 
 rested, and the career of Paul, are not exaggerated 
 in importance by the significance assigned to them 
 by this writer. He had a keen and correct eye 
 for facts and for proportion, and these three facts 
 must always remain of the first significance in 
 any account of the period. Nevertheless, in the 
 presentation of the history which this writer of 
 Acts gives we can detect several limitations. In 
 the earlier part of the book there is evident limi- 
 tation of knowledge. He was not himself present 
 at Jerusalem, and he can give only such recollec- 
 tions of others as he has been able, many years 
 later, to gather. In the book as a whole, also, 
 there is an obvious limitation in the point where 
 the history ends. Our curiosity is stimulated as 
 we think of how he might have told us of the trial 
 and death of Paul, of the coming of Peter to 
 Rome, of the persecution after Nero's fire, of the 
 
292 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 progress of events in Asia Minor, of the effect on 
 Christianity of the destruction of Jerusalem, of 
 the later history of John. 
 
 But there are other limitations of a different 
 sort. Not to speak here of possible limitations of 
 accuracy, arising from the later writer's imperfect 
 power of understanding earlier conditions, there 
 are many matters about which we should like to 
 know, or to know more, and of which the author 
 must have had knowledge, yet to which he makes 
 but slight or no allusion. Some of these we 
 know to have occupied a prominent place in the 
 life of the age, for we can read references to them 
 in Paul, or can trace their working in the result- 
 ing conditions of a later time. Some are single 
 incidents, like the details of Paul's relations to 
 the Corinthians and Galatians, others are more 
 general matters. For instance, we do not detect 
 in Acts any development in Christian doctrine. 
 Freedom from the Law is indeed a mooted ques- 
 tion, but the writer does not conceive that there 
 was here any growth in thought. He holds that 
 freedom for the gentiles was implied from the 
 start in the nature of Christianity, and that then, 
 as circumstances arose, this inherent characteristic 
 became explicit so soon as the opposite was af- 
 firmed. Of other debate among Christians we do 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 293 
 
 not hear, of the persistency of doctrinal contro- 
 versy which Paul's epistles reveal we should not 
 know at all from the pages of Acts, and there is 
 scarcely a suggestion of the existence of those vari- 
 ous types of false teachers and speculative dan- 
 gers within the Church which greatly stimulated 
 Paul's thought by opposition. There is no at- 
 tempt to set forth and explain the origin of 
 church institutions,— the regular meetings, the 
 solemn rites, the ofScers. Likewise, and perhaps 
 at first sight most surprising of all, there is not 
 only no mention of the collection of the Gospel 
 tradition, or the composition of the Gospels, (al- 
 though Mark, who is repeatedly mentioned, was 
 probably the author of one of them), but there is 
 no hint that Paul ever wrote a single line. And 
 last of all, why did the author not tell us some- 
 thing more of the life of Peter and John and the 
 rest in the time preceding the moment when his 
 book closes ? 
 
 These limitations and omissions are to be ac- 
 counted for in various ways. Some are due to the 
 writer's intentional restriction of his scope. 
 Others come from the fact that his purpose is 
 primarily edifying, and that therefore such a dis- 
 agreeable incident as Paul's rebuke of Peter at 
 Antioch is naturally and properly omitted. Again, 
 
294 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 his mind is more interested in concrete things 
 than in abstract ideas. He tells his story by 
 means of picturesque incidents, not in the form 
 of large generalizations. And some of the most 
 important of his omissions occur because he him- 
 self stood in the midst of this life of the apos- 
 tolic age, and took for granted as matters of 
 course countless circumstances which it would be 
 of consequence to us to be told. 
 
 These limitations make it all the more fortu- 
 nate that we are able to supplement the Book of 
 Acts from the abundant evidence as to some sides 
 of the history which the epistles of Paul present. 
 The use of these and of the Gospels we have al- 
 ready observed and the construction of a general 
 sketch of the apostolic age by the critical use of 
 all this material has been the aim of the present 
 essay. 
 
 After the author of Acts the first great Chris- 
 tian historian was Eusebius, "the Herodotus of 
 the Christian Church," who lived in the early 
 part of the fourth century. Inasmuch as he still 
 had access to early literature which has since 
 been lost, it would be natural to expect that he 
 would supply a large amount of information about 
 the apostolic age. He does, to be sure, tell us some 
 things that are valuable, but in general he held 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 295 
 
 that the Book of Acts sufficiently covered this 
 period, and so refrained from giving any continu- 
 ous account of it. He plainly did not have the ma- 
 terials for a continuous history of that early time, 
 except in so far as he found them in Acts. What he 
 contributes in addition is mainly illustrative and 
 supplementary. Thus he is interested, as was the 
 writer of Acts, in the geographical spread of 
 Christianity, but his knowledge is limited and he 
 is able to add little except some statements of very 
 doubtful trustworthiness about the field of work 
 of the several apostles. He is further interested, as 
 was natural for a courtier of the Emperor Con- 
 stantine, in the connection of sacred with secular 
 history, and especially in the disasters that befell 
 the Jewish nation. Much of this information, how- 
 ever, is known to us from the same sources from 
 which Eusebius derived it, and only occasionally 
 can he offer a new fact. In the inner life of the 
 church it is instructive to see how the points to 
 which his attention directs itself are those which 
 correspond to his own historical position. He 
 stands at the beginning of the era of religious 
 freedom, and so he is interested to preserve every 
 account of martyrdom. He is a bishop of the 
 Catholic Church, and as such he is concerned with 
 three of the great characteristic interests of the 
 
296 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Old Catholic Cliurch,— the opposition of heretics 
 to the true doctrine, the origin of the books of the 
 New Testament, which by his time had become 
 sacred authority, and, especially, the direct and 
 continuous succession of apostles, bishops, and 
 deacons. From what he has recorded on these 
 points something of value may be learned, but 
 unfortunately it appears even here that he had 
 but few sources of which the original is not ac- 
 cessible to us. Thus the history of Eusebius, 
 while it is indispensable for the later periods, is 
 of but moderate value for ours, and furnishes in 
 no sense a history of the apostolic age. 
 
 Except by way of a mere paraphrase of the 
 Book of Acts there seems never to have been any 
 serious attempt to write a history of the apostolic 
 age until the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 Critical investigations of one point and another 
 had been made in increasing number ever since 
 the Reformation, but it remained for the German 
 scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century 
 to conceive and carry through the fruitful idea of 
 presenting a general historical account of the apos- 
 tolic age in an independent view, founded on a 
 fresh examination of the sources in the light of 
 critical study. There was at this time an intellec- 
 tual awakening in Germany to which the names, 
 
AXCIEXT AXD MODERN STUDY 297 
 
 among others, of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, and 
 Hegel, bear witness. At the same time there was 
 a strong religions interest in the whole nation; 
 and, further, more than one gronp of Protestant 
 theologians had largely or wholly emancipated 
 themselves from traditional and dogmatic controL 
 Moreover new and powerfnl methods in historical 
 investigation had been wrought out and applied 
 in various fields of study. The great name of 
 Xiebuhr still abides to-day even in popular 
 thought as representative of this work. These in- 
 fluences combined to provide the stimulus for a 
 new period of Biblical study. Both in the Old 
 Testament and the New able men addressed them- 
 selves to the problems in a new spirit and with 
 fresh energy. The result deeply stirred the Prot- 
 estant world, as the works and ideas of these new 
 writers gradually disseminated themselves in 
 Holland, England, and America, and even in 
 France and Italy. 
 
 In 1835 appeared the ''Life of Jesus'' by 
 David Strauss, a brilliant youth of twenty-seven. 
 In this book the Gospels were explained through- 
 out as the record of myths, by which Strauss 
 meant that the narratives are the symbolical ex- 
 pression of abstract moral and religious ideas, the 
 pictorial form being largely built up by the aid 
 
298 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 of details drawn from the Old Testament. 
 Strauss 's book was one of those inconclusive but 
 startling works which precipitate discussion, help 
 thought that has long been fluttering in solution 
 to crystallize, and lead investigation into un- 
 worked and fruitful fields where, and where alone, 
 the novel propositions can be tested. There had 
 been many scattering discussions of the origin of 
 the books of the New Testament and of topics in 
 the history of the apostolic age and of the imme- 
 diately succeeding period. It now became evi- 
 dent that any adequate investigation of the ques- 
 tions which Strauss had brought to the front of 
 popular interest must proceed by thorough study 
 of the nature of the literary sources comprising 
 the New Testament. And as these writings pur- 
 ported to be the product of the apostolic age, 
 every question connected with that period at once 
 became of new and vital concern. Furthermore, 
 since the early history of all the documents which 
 make up the New Testament is to be learned, if at 
 all, from the earliest Christian writers who use 
 them, the Christian literature of the next follow- 
 ing period, forming the so-called Apostolic 
 Fathers, as well as the other writers of the second 
 century and the heretical movements of the same 
 time, acquired new importance and began to be 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 299 
 
 studied with ever increasing zeal. The whole 
 manifestation of interest in these studies ought 
 not to be ascribed to Strauss, for the elements were 
 already present and would have combined in any 
 case. Yet the publication of his book in 1835 was 
 the occasion of much that followed. 
 
 Considerably older than Strauss, and at one 
 time his teacher, like him a native of the kingdom 
 of Wiirtemberg in southern Germany, was Fer- 
 dinand Christian Baur. He had been for nearly 
 ten years professor at Tiibingen, the university 
 belonging to the king of Wiirtemberg, when 
 Strauss 's book was published. A man possessed 
 of far greater learning, historical breadth, philo- 
 sophical insight, and, above all, religious depth, 
 than Strauss, he will be longer remembered, his 
 books longer read, and his direct influence longer 
 and more widely felt. Baur's main subject of 
 study, to which his life was devoted, and in which 
 his contributions to theological learning are of 
 permanent value, was the history of Christian doc- 
 trine. As a part of this extended and systematic 
 inquiry his thought was naturally turned to the 
 beginnings of Christian theology in the thought 
 of the apostolic age, and he applied himself dili- 
 gently to all the fundamental literary, histori- 
 cal, and theological questions which there arise. 
 
300 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 His first comprehensive book on the apostolic age 
 was entitled "Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ," 
 and was published in 1845. It contained a full 
 and very able discussion of the life, writings and 
 theology of Paul. Of the Pauline epistles Baur 
 was willing to accept as genuine only the four to 
 the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians. The 
 statements of the Book of Acts he found to be in 
 part in conflict with the historical indications 
 found in those epistles, but in part to be con- 
 firmed by them. Eight years later in 1853 
 Baur published a more inclusive work, "The 
 Christianity of the First Three Centuries," in 
 which his whole conception of the apostolic age 
 and its relation to later Christianity was fully 
 set forth. He died in 1860. The whole number 
 of his published articles and books on theological 
 subjects was very large. 
 
 Baur approached the earliest history of Chris- 
 tianity from the point of view of theology and 
 philosophy, not of history proper. His first con- 
 cern was not with the incidents, but with the un- 
 derlying idea which he saw revealed in the prog- 
 ress of events and the development of thought. 
 At the outset of his career he said, "Apart 
 from philosophy, history seems to me eternally 
 dead and dumb," by which he meant that 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 301 
 
 whatever interest lie had in history sprang from 
 his belief that it is the expression of the mind of 
 God. Only as it is seen to be through and through 
 rational, to be everywhere the unfolding and de- 
 velopment of the Idea, is it understood. To trace 
 God's thoughts after him was to his mind the 
 task not only of the astronomer but of the his- 
 torian. 
 
 From this fundamental point of view and mode 
 of approach Baur worked with admirable con- 
 sistency. He was himself the very tyi^e of the 
 learned professor abiding in the realm of abstract 
 thought, and both the noble elevation of his 
 thought and the immediate and far-reaching in- 
 fluence of his conclusions sprang from this lofty 
 aim. But it was also a source of weakness, for it 
 led him to make theory supreme, and dulled his 
 perception of reality in concrete phenomena. 
 The man who holds the Epistle to Philemon to be 
 fictitious allegory has lived too much in the ab- 
 stractions of eternity and not enough in the world 
 of men to be a perfectly trustworthy critic or a 
 historian of the very first rank. 
 
 The view of the apostolic age held by Baur and 
 by certain of his pupils and friends, who with 
 him formed what is called the Tiibingen school 
 of critics, stirred Christian thought as much as 
 
302 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 had the "Life of Jesus" of David Strauss. The 
 Tubingen view had two sides, or rather combined 
 two parallel and interrelated lines of thought. 
 On the one hand it was a critical investigation of 
 the genuineness, date, and significance of the vari- 
 ous books of the New Testament. But on the 
 other hand the results here reached had to be 
 tested by Baur's general view of the rational 
 meaning of the apostolic age, which was his 
 primary interest in the whole study. If the gen- 
 eral view and philosophical understanding of the 
 course of the history were true, it and the results 
 of a critical literary investigation of the docu- 
 ments would agree with one another. The results 
 which Baur and his friends reached on these 
 two sides did agree. 
 
 The general view can be briefly stated. The 
 philosopher Hegel, of whom these scholars were 
 devoted followers, had established the formula 
 for historical, as for other, truth, that progress 
 is made by the compromise and reconciling of op- 
 posites. It has been said that in this view all 
 history can be summed up in the three mono- 
 syllables. Yes, No, But. The more serious terms 
 were thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Starting from 
 this view Baur approached the apostolic age. The 
 great conflict which unlocked the secret of that 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 303 
 
 period showed itself, he believed, in the four 
 genuine epistles of Paul, notably in Galatians and 
 II Corinthians. It was nothing else than the con- 
 flict with the Jewish Christians in which Paul was 
 engaged, and which Baur made to be the one 
 dominant issue of apostolic Christianity. The 
 rational basis of the apostolic age was clear in all 
 its impressive simplicity. In the thought of 
 Jesus Christ lay two elements, a Jewish limited 
 and temporary form and, carried along with that, 
 a universally valuable and permanent substance. 
 The limited and Jewish became the basis of the 
 Jewish Christian party, and this was what the 
 philosophers would call the thesis. The universal 
 and permanent was that upon which Paul seized, 
 and was the antithesis. Peter and James and the 
 original apostles stood on one side, Paul and his 
 friends on the other. Out of the clash 
 of these tw^o parties grew a reconcilement 
 and union, in which certain elements of Paul- 
 inism— notably the universal applicability of 
 the Gospel — were preserved, but the Jewish 
 Christian influence was predominant. Out 
 of this type of Christian thought, termed the 
 "Union Christianity" of the second century, 
 grew the well-known Christian thought and life 
 of the Old Catholic Church at the end of the 
 
304 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 second century. Baur and his friends, as German 
 Lutherans, sincerely reverenced the Apostle Paul 
 and his thought; the result of the weakening of 
 that thought to the level of a judaized Union 
 Christianity was, to their minds, to destroy the 
 purity and diminish the power of spiritual Chris- 
 tianity, and to build up that Catholic Church 
 from which only by a Reformation the world was 
 to gain freedom. 
 
 Now this imposing construction, while it seemed 
 at first sight to suit well the facts of the four 
 leading epistles of Paul, does not well suit any of 
 the other books of the New Testament. Baur tried 
 indeed, but without lasting success, to show that 
 the same three types of Christian thought are rep- 
 resented by the three Synoptic Gospels,— Matthew 
 being the Jewish writer, Luke the Pauline, and 
 Mark the unionistic follower and epitomator of 
 both. But when this view of the Gospels was 
 tested it broke down at every point. Those are 
 not the true characteristics of the several Gospels, 
 nor does the particular literary connection now 
 shown on independent critical grounds to exist 
 between the Gospels permit this view of their re- 
 lation. In the other books of the New Testament 
 there appears even less of this controversy of 
 Jewish and Pauline Christianity. Many of the 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 305 
 
 epistles ascribed to Paul say nothing at all about 
 the controversy with the Judaizers or even about 
 the contrast of faith and works. The Book of Acts 
 presents a picture of harmonious relations be- 
 tween Paul and the original Twelve. The Gospel 
 and epistles of John seem to come from a thinker 
 with whom all attempt to restrict Christianity to 
 Jewish limits is wholly below the horizon. Only 
 the Book of Revelation, the most Jewish book in 
 the sacred collection, contains some expressions 
 which can be referred (although it is at present 
 thought not with justice) to a strained relation 
 between the writer and Paul. 
 
 For all these facts an easy explanation lay 
 ready at hand. The genuineness of some of these 
 writings had already been doubted on other 
 grounds. Baur himself had written elaborately 
 to prove the Pastoral Epistles to be the product 
 of the Gnostic controversies of the second cen- 
 tury. It became evident to him that all these 
 writings proceeded not from the period of Paul's 
 life and the earlier apostolic age, but from the 
 later time of Union Christianity, when the Church 
 had forgotten, or wanted to forget, the old dis- 
 putes and was eager to advance upon the new 
 foundation that had been laid. These books were 
 to be assiojned to dates well down in the second 
 
306 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 century, the Gospels being set between 130 and 
 170. The Book of Acts gave, he held, a view of 
 the history wholly distorted by its partisan 
 tendency or bias, and had as its main purpose to 
 recommend Paul— thus falsely presented in Jew- 
 ish colors — to Jewish Christians, and to show that 
 he and Peter together, and not either one alone, 
 were the proper heroes of Christian history. The 
 epistles of Paul (except the great four) were in- 
 tended to secure the great advantage of Paul's 
 name and authority for doctrines of later growth. 
 This entire reconstruction of early Christian 
 history sounds incredible when it is baldly stated 
 in a brief review. "When presented at length in 
 detail, buttressed at every point by able arguments 
 of literary and historical criticism, it is a daz- 
 zling and a fascinating picture; and it made a 
 powerful impression on many who read the suc- 
 cessive books in which it was gradually wrought 
 out. To many it seemed at last to have brought 
 the recalcitrant period of the founding of Chris- 
 tianity into relation with the general history of 
 the world and of human thought and with rational 
 philosophy. From this side it was greeted as pro- 
 viding the permanent basis for all future work, 
 a construction of the history founded not on the 
 shifting sands of tradition, but on the solid rock 
 
ANXIEXT AND MODERN STUDY 307 
 
 of critically ascertained fact. By those, however, 
 who occupied the point of view of traditional 
 Christianity the revolutionary significance of 
 these ideas was instantly seen. The greater part 
 of the New Testament was to be deemed a mass of 
 deliberate forgeries ; the Book of Acts was utterly 
 untrustworthy; the Gospels so late that there 
 seemed abundant room for the growth of every 
 sort of error, legend, and myth. Learned scholars 
 could perhaps rebuild their religion by a recon- 
 dite method of speculative philosophy ; but popu- 
 lar Christianity was then, even more than to-day, 
 held to depend for its proof mainly on the narra- 
 tives of miraculous events contained in the Gos- 
 pels. Necessarily these new views stimulated to 
 fresh and thorough investigation by those whose 
 fundamental principles made them sure that the 
 Tiibingen views were wrong. 
 
 The Tiibingen work had been philosophical in 
 its motive; its method of proof was historical. 
 This compelled the opponents of Baur, as well as 
 his later successors, to follow a rigidly historical 
 method, and the result has been of enormous ad- 
 vantage to the study of Christian history. In- 
 cidentally the Tiibingen view has been shown to 
 be wi'ong, and to-day is perhaps held by no 
 scholar of note, although some aged men still hold 
 
308 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 views approximating to it. If it is the custom to- 
 day to laud the Tiibingen scholars and to reject 
 their teaching, the reason is that that teaching 
 was the product of the imperfect application un- 
 der strong but honest prejudice of sound critical 
 methods. Hence it w^as a fruitful failure. 
 
 Before we turn to the later critical study it 
 may be interesting to delay for a moment to note 
 the situation in this immediate community of 
 New England at the time when these books were 
 stirring thought in Germany. The rapidity of 
 the development of these studies in the last half- 
 century is one of the interesting aspects of the 
 subject. Persons are still living who well remem- 
 ber the year 1835, in which appeared Strauss *s 
 Life of Jesus. The period from 1835 to 1850 
 represents the height of the controversy between 
 Unitarians and Orthodox Congregationalists in 
 Massachusetts, and the revival of religious zeal in 
 the orthodox behalf to which that controversy 
 gave rise. It was the time in which within the 
 Unitarian body the division into the camps of 
 Theodore Parker and of Channing was taking 
 place. In 1838 Emerson delivered his Divinity 
 School Address ; in 1841 Parker preached the ser- 
 mon on **The Transient and the Permanent in 
 Christianity" which stirred so deeply the opposi- 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 309 
 
 tion of his less radical brethren. Questions equally 
 far-reaching in their bearings with the German 
 ones were thus being raised among us, but they 
 were not yet made the subject of so thorough or so 
 learned discussions and their character was not 
 such as greatly to stimulate historical scholarship. 
 At about the same time Horace Bushnell was 
 beginning in Connecticut his productive career. 
 His book ''God in Christ" was published in 1849. 
 In general the investigation of New Testament 
 history in a purely scientific spirit apart from its 
 direct practical bearings upon other theological 
 controversy was not at that period much pursued 
 in this country. 
 
 The same may be said of England. At that 
 moment nearly all vital religious thought in Eng- 
 land was occupied with the questions arising out 
 of the Tractarian movement and the Catholic 
 revival. The famous "Tract No. XC" was pub- 
 lished in 1841, and all England was occupied in 
 an intense study of the Church Fathers, which was 
 not as a rule pushed back with vigor to the early 
 second century, still less to the apostolic age and 
 the New Testament. In a few years this state of 
 things was profoundly changed both in England 
 and in America. 
 
 At first, however, it was in Germany that the 
 
310 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 debate over the new and, as they assumed to be 
 called, critical views of early Christian history 
 was undertaken. Only a wholly new defence 
 of traditional ideas could meet this attack, so that 
 the older men who attempted the task made little 
 impression on the discussion. The real reply, 
 which inflicted a mortal wound, came from a man 
 of the younger generation, Albrecht Ritschl, him- 
 self a pupil of Baur who had learned the lesson 
 of his master's method. He died in 1889, and is 
 more famous at present as the founder of a school 
 of devout liberal theologians than for his con- 
 tributions to history. Whether his permanent 
 fame may not rather depend upon the latter may 
 well be doubted. Kitschl published in 1857, 
 twelve years after Baur's "Paul," a small book 
 entitled "The Rise of the Old Catholic Church," 
 in which he discussed and portrayed on a broad 
 canvas the principles and tendencies of early 
 Christian history. It w-as a stroke which pierced 
 the armor of Tiibingen, and gave a deathblow 
 because it smote a vital part. 
 
 Ritschl pointed out that Baur's fundamental 
 notion of two parties which divided the apostolic 
 age between them was disproved by the particular 
 documents on which Baur himself relied. The 
 historical basis necessary for the support of the 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 311 
 
 speculative edifice vras lacking. Not the Twelve 
 Apostles but other Jewish (,'hristians were Paul's 
 opponents; the Twelve, although they did not 
 hold all of Paul's views, were nevertheless his 
 friends; and, moreover, Paul's side was not 
 homogeneous, for there were hundreds, and later 
 thousands, of gentile Christians who but imper- 
 fectly understood his views. The complication 
 introduced into the picture by these discoveries 
 was in marked contrast to the simplicity of the 
 Yes, No, But of Tiibingen; it was no longer 
 possible to say that the apostolic age offered 
 no room for the situations presupposed in the 
 later epistles of Paul and in the Acts, and that 
 therefore these books must be products of a late 
 date in the second century. The vigor of Baur's 
 logic was destroyed by cutting away one of its 
 premises. It was possible for Ritschl to show that 
 the general account of the apostolic age given in 
 the Book of Acts, although, as we have seen, it 
 omits much that we otherwise know or can infer, 
 is yet in substantial agreement with Paul and 
 not in contradiction to him. Moreover he argued 
 with convincing force that if the documents are 
 taken at their face value, the picture of the apos- 
 tolic age given by the New Testament is a self- 
 consistent one, and that this picture is of such a 
 
312 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 nature that it could not possibly have been 
 invented at a much later time, when conditions 
 had greatly changed. 
 
 The precise views of the several books of the 
 New Testament which Ritschl held have not in all 
 cases been sustained by later dispassionate criti- 
 cism, and, indeed, Ritschl made in this book but 
 small contribution to those detailed questions of 
 date and authorship. But the general tradition 
 of the Church which he, rather uncritically, 
 followed, has in so many cases proved to be right 
 that it was on the whole a safer guide than the 
 Hegelian philosophy. The main outlines, though 
 not the details, of Ritschl's view, as sketched 
 above, have been confirmed by nearly all the 
 special work which countless scholars since his 
 time have bestowed on single problems. 
 
 In England the views of the Tiibingen school 
 met with rather slow response. Between 1865 and 
 1875, however, some comprehensive works were 
 published in which the Tiibingen view was re- 
 produced with little originality of treatment. 
 The most important of these was the work entitled 
 *' Supernatural Religion," published anonymously 
 in 1874, which made an enormous sensation, and 
 rapidly proceeded to seven editions. This book 
 undertook to show that Christianity was not true, 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 313 
 
 because the real occurrence of miracles could not 
 be proved; and to this end the origin and trust- 
 worthiness of the Gospels and Acts were elabo- 
 rately discussed. The book is not worthy of its 
 subject either in scholarship or honesty. Its main 
 interest at the present day is in showing how lit- 
 tle trained for thorough-going discussions of these 
 themes was the British theological public of 1874, 
 and thus as furnishing a measure of the progress 
 made since that time ; it is also important because 
 it called out one of the works of the greatest of 
 English scholars in these fields, Bishop Light- 
 foot. 
 
 Bishop Lightfoot's massive volumes on the 
 chief Apostolic Fathers and his commentaries on 
 four of the Pauline epistles, while not including 
 any general view of the apostolic age, were con- 
 tributions of great importance to our subject, not 
 only because to the mind of an increasing number 
 of scholars they have seemed to prove their con- 
 tentions on the important disputed themes of 
 which they treat, but also because they pro- 
 ceeded from a learned, comprehensive and mature 
 historical grasp of the whole period. With the 
 name of Lightfoot must always be mentioned his 
 two friends and fellow-workers Bishop Westcott 
 and Professor Hort. Of their work and that of a 
 
314 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 large number of other scholars who have touched, 
 usually directly but seldom comprehensively, on 
 the subject we cannot here speak. Likewise in 
 America the important independent contributions 
 to New Testament learning have until recently 
 either related to single topics or been concerned 
 with the fundamental philological sciences on 
 which the whole structure must ultimately rest. 
 In such studies the names of Robinson, Hackett, 
 Ezra Abbot, and Thayer deserve special mention. 
 An important contribution to the history of the 
 apostolic age was made in France in 1866 and the 
 following years by Ernest Kenan's "History of 
 the Origins of Christianity." This great work 
 stands in many ways apart from both German 
 and English books, and is built on an independent 
 study of the sources, although the author knew 
 and freely used German investigations. Mommsen 
 once said of him that he was a great historian in 
 spite of his charming style. Kenan's ''Origins of 
 Christianity" is planned on a broad scale and 
 uses material from every source to construct as 
 complete an historical picture as possible. Herein 
 lies its great advantage over nearly all similar 
 books. It includes the history of the second 
 century, and so finds natural place not only for 
 all the books of the New Testament but for the 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 315 
 
 next succeeding literature as well. Its critical 
 positions are often surprisingly conservative, for 
 Renan was restrained by his exquisite literary 
 perception and artistic taste from some of the 
 extravagances of German criticism. But it is an 
 unsatisfactory book, for it is the work of a skeptic. 
 Il lacks seriousness, and its sentimental prettiness 
 grows tiresome. It is often suggestive and in- 
 forming, but its author was a great literary artist, 
 not a profound historical thinker. Upon the 
 serious problems which concerned Baur, and have 
 concerned most students since, Renan often hardly 
 touches, because to his philosophy history is after 
 all a chain of phenomena, not the expression of 
 the Eternal Reason. 
 
 In Germany in the last half-century the sev- 
 eral departments of New Testament study have 
 all been represented by competent and devoted 
 investigators, and these scholars have all con- 
 tributed in their measure to the completeness of 
 critical knowledge of the apostolic age. Profound 
 and massive erudition like that of Theodor Zahn 
 brought to bear on single points of lesser and 
 larger importance, broad grasp and suggestive in- 
 sight like that of Harnack, detailed study of the 
 texts like that of Bernhard Weiss, skillful criti- 
 cism and encyclopedic learning like that of Ilein- 
 
316 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 rich Holtzmann, are some of the various types 
 of theology and scholarship that have had their 
 distinguished followers. From the ranks of these 
 numerous scholars several histories of the apos- 
 tolic age have proceeded. The most important 
 of these, and at the same time the most important 
 modern book on the general subject, is Weiz- 
 sacker's *' Apostolic Age," first published in 
 1886. Later investigation and continued dis- 
 cussion have now led many to different conclu- 
 sions from those of Weizsacker in numerous 
 points of detail, and his work will be supple- 
 mented and superseded; but the self-consistency 
 which he has succeeded in giving to his portrayal 
 of the conditions of the period and the develop- 
 ment of thought within it, and the sober and 
 thorough criticism on which the whole rests render 
 his general position one which it will be difficult 
 for any attack to overthrow. "Weizsacker may be 
 said to have completed the work of Ritschl, great 
 as are the differences between them both in 
 method and results. 
 
 For English readers a similar service is ren- 
 dered by Professor McGiffert's ^'Apostolic Age," 
 (1897), a useful book written in the same can- 
 did spirit and presenting much the same gen- 
 eral picture, but reaching by independent scholar- 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 317 
 
 ship its own conclusions. Very recent noteworthy 
 German studies are, among others, the suggestive 
 and valuable books of von Dobschiitz, the second 
 edition of Pfleiderer's "Primitive Christianity," 
 and the ''Beginnings of Our Religion" by Wernle. 
 Among these Pfleiderer's view is the most dis- 
 tinctive, for he is a philosopher as well as an 
 historian. He especially emphasizes the original 
 Hellenic element in Paul, and conceives that the 
 natural development of Paul's system in the 
 hands of his followers led to the sloughing off 
 of the Pharisaic elements which had at first been 
 carried along with the rest, so that there was 
 left a "Christian Hellenism, which issued on 
 the side of speculative thought in the Johannine 
 theology of Asia Minor, on that of practical af- 
 fairs in the church life of Rome. ' ' 
 
 The conception of the apostolic age presented 
 by Baur and his school was founded on a clearly 
 defined theory of the whole history which was 
 itself revolutionary of traditional views. Later 
 conceptions of the history have not usually rested 
 on any similar fundamental theory. Scholars 
 have applied to tradition and to the literary re- 
 mains of the period their critical tests, and then by 
 a simple inductive process have constructed their 
 picture. As one or another element of the tra- 
 
318 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 dition had to be dropped or was deemed estab- 
 lished, as to one or another condition revealed in 
 the epistles of Paul or elsewhere was ascribed a 
 leading significance, the picture has varied. The 
 unity which historians have been able to find in 
 the period has generally been conceived as due to 
 the working of simple forces in a small number of 
 elements. In recent years, however, one radical 
 school of students has arisen, having its centre in 
 Holland, which resembles the Tiibingen critics 
 in using a comprehensive theory as a guide to 
 the development of events in the apostolic and 
 post-apostolic ages. This group has exercised 
 but a narrow influence on New Testament schol- 
 ars, but since it is represented by a fair num- 
 ber of men of great learning and much produc- 
 tive activity, it is worth while to speak briefly 
 of their views. The leading exponent of these 
 views is the late Professor van Manen of the 
 University of Leyden, from whose articles in the 
 "Encyclopaedia Biblica" English-speaking read- 
 ers can gain knowledge of his and his friends' 
 work. 
 
 In exact contradiction to the Tiibingen view 
 these Dutch critics hold that not the reconciling of 
 opposites but a continuous, regular, and gradual 
 evolution is the law of history. Thus, although it 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 319 
 
 is admitted that there existed in the apostolic 
 age a Christian disciple named Paul, his ideas 
 were not especially original or novel. He did 
 not separate himself from Jewish modes of life 
 and the Jewish law. There was no marked dif- 
 ference of thought between him and other dis- 
 ciples. That none of the epistles now called by 
 the name of Paul were written by such a man 
 hardly needs to be said. Of his origin and char- 
 acter and his career as a wandering preacher 
 we gain some notion from the Book of Acts, but 
 we have no instruments of criticism which en- 
 able us to determine how much of the account 
 in Acts is true and how much fiction. Of 
 the development of events in the history of 
 Paul and the other Jews and of the Gentiles 
 whom they converted we know scarcely anything, 
 for the Epistle of Clement of Rome is an un- 
 genuine product of about the year 140 (a date 
 nearly fifty years later than the one usually 
 given), while the epistles of Ignatius are pseudony- 
 mous writings concocted at Rome about the year 
 150. Our main fixed point is a circle of "pro- 
 gressive believers" in the first half of the sec- 
 ond century who adopted as their hero the Apos- 
 tle Paul, dead nearly a century before, grouped 
 themselves around his memory and name, and 
 
320 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 presented their own ideas by the aid of his falsely 
 assumed authority. These Christians issued suc- 
 cessively in Paul's name the various pseudony- 
 mous epistles which constitute our Pauline col- 
 lection. The slight differences in theological con- 
 ception and emphasis to be found in these epistles 
 betray the diversity of the authors who con- 
 tributed to the series, the general unity of 
 thought testifies to the compactness of the group. 
 In another fifty years, by the end of the century, 
 the "Paul" who had thus been invented, and who 
 was in reality but the embodiment of a school of 
 thought, had become 'Hhe Apostle" throughout 
 the whole Catholic Church. 
 
 At the serious detailed labor which has been 
 spent in attempting to show that the documents 
 of the New Testament and early Christianity can 
 be explained only by this theory we cannot here 
 even glance. The Dutch scholars are perhaps 
 right in saying that the same arguments which 
 have long convinced many that Ephesians, Colos- 
 sians, and Philemon are not genuine writings of 
 Paul can be used against Romans, Corinthians, 
 and Galatians. But to many critical scholars 
 those arguments have proved unconvincing in 
 both cases alike. Without the unfavorable judg- 
 ment as to genuineness and date of documents 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 321 
 
 which belongs to this radical and revolu- 
 tionary view of early Christian history the view 
 itself is impossible; and to anyone who does not 
 hold the underlying "rectilinear" philosophy of 
 history, it is not attractive as solving the problem 
 of the period. But few scholars accept it, and it 
 does not seem to make headway in the world. 
 Perhaps the most interesting fact connected with 
 it is the contrast which is presented by the 
 slight sensation made when even eminent scholars 
 propounded this strange view and the enormous 
 stir when the Tiibingen theory became known to 
 the Christian world. The change is not due to 
 indifference to the study of the Bible. On the 
 contrary it signifies that at least the Protestant 
 world has now been trained to the idea and 
 method of historical study of Christian origins, 
 and thereby has gained a profounder confidence 
 in the Truth and in the power of honest critical 
 study to elicit Truth. 
 
 The view of the apostolic age and its contri- 
 bution to Christian history underlying the pres- 
 ent essay is substantially that maintained by 
 Ritschl. Instead of Baur's conception of a Jew- 
 ish Christianity fighting against Paul until it 
 conquered him, won predominance, and produced 
 Catholicism, we have seen Jewish Christianity 
 
322 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 dwindling to an -unimportant sect and disappear- 
 ing. Moreover Paul himself, though bolder in 
 spirit, and far abler and more original in intellec- 
 tual endowment, and broader in knowledge and 
 experience than the Twelve Apostles and earliest 
 Galilean disciples, was nevertheless not funda- 
 mentally at variance nor permanently in contro- 
 versy with them. His thought was richer and 
 freer than theirs, but, after all, he was like them 
 a Jew, with Jewish training and ideas, who had 
 been brought to believe that Jesus was Christ, 
 the risen Lord. Beside Paul in the gentile world 
 were other workers, not rivals with him, but 
 likewise loyally devoted to a common Master's 
 cause, apostles and evangelists who contributed 
 each as he could. Our knowledge of the earlier 
 stages of this work is mainly from its result, the 
 spread of Christianity, and from its literary 
 monument, the first three Gospels, which repre- 
 sent not controversy but evangelism. Later the 
 author of the Epistle to the Hebrews built on 
 Paul but made his own noble and permanently 
 effective contribution to Christian thought. So 
 also the author of the Gospel and epistles of 
 John, who was doubtless acquainted with some- 
 thing of Paul's theology and certainly rested on 
 the freedom that Paul had won, lived in a world 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN STUDY 323 
 
 of thought not specifically Pauline, and repre- 
 sents not a modified Paulinism but a parallel, 
 though not inharmonious, system of thought. AA^e 
 have further observed that the distinctive con- 
 trolling principles of Hebrews and John were 
 not absent from Paul, though with him they were 
 subordinate, and that the same is true of many 
 other tendencies, less valuable than these, of 
 which we find traces in Paul, but which were 
 evidently stronger in the average gentile Chris- 
 tianity of the churches. These elements, which 
 naturally were for the most part not Jewish 
 but Greek and Roman, go far to explain the pos- 
 sibility of the development from primitive to 
 Catholic Christianity. 
 
 At the present moment further progress in 
 the understanding of these subjects seems likely 
 to come from an enlargement of the field. By 
 a better understanding of later Jewish thought, 
 by the broadening of knowledge of the Greek and 
 Roman world into which Christianity came and 
 the perception of the mode in which that world 
 reacted on Christianity itself, by a longer out- 
 look upon the next following age,— in these and 
 similar ways we may hope to undei^tand better 
 the age of the apostles. As we understand it 
 better, we shall find ourselves more and more 
 
324 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 convinced that the power and fruitfulness of 
 Christianity, in that age and in this, springs 
 from the character and person of that Jesus Christ 
 whom the simple and uncritical reader can learn 
 to know in the Gospels. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbot, Ezra, 314. 
 
 Acts, Book of, 23-24; trust- 
 worthiness, 24-31, 75; au- 
 thor, 235-236 ; point of view, 
 289-291 ; limitations, 291- 
 294. 
 
 Acts of Paul and Thecla, 133. 
 
 Alexandrian thought, 163, 263 
 ff., 270 f. 
 
 Almsgiving, 80, 203. 
 
 Alogi, 242. 
 
 Ananias and Sapphira, 28, 81. 
 
 Antioch, 43 ff., 86, 113, 169, 
 210. 
 
 Apostles, 55, 207 f.; twelve, 
 77 f., 83, 93, 209 f. 
 
 Apostolic Age, historical study 
 of, 15 f., 289-324; signifi- 
 cance, 16-22; not to be re- 
 produced, 19 f. ; defined, 22 
 f.; sources, 23 ff., 31-34; gen- 
 eral conception, 34 f., 321, 
 323. 
 
 Archaeology, 28 ff. 
 
 "Ascension of Isaiah," 190. 
 
 Asceticism, 182, 280. 
 
 Authority, 16-21. 
 
 Baptism, 198 f. 
 Barnabas, 45-48, 87, 208. 
 Baur, F. C, 299-307. 
 Bishops, 200 f., 284. 
 Bushnell, Horace, 309. 
 
 Calvinism, 280 f. 
 
 CathoUc Church, Old, 22, 36 f., 
 
 232, 248-258, 274-288. 
 Catholic Epistles, 36. 
 
 CathoHc theory of Christianity, 
 17-20. 
 
 Christians, name, 44. 
 
 Christology of Paul, 149, 163 f., 
 252; of John, 260-267. 
 
 Church, doctrine of the, 166, 
 278 ff. 
 
 Churches, gentile, 204 ff. ; char- 
 acteristics, 171-182; dangers, 
 182-187; membership, 187ff.; 
 meetings, 188 fif., 196. 
 
 Clement of Rome, 223, 256, 
 319. 
 
 Clementine literature, 96, 217. 
 
 Corinth, 115-116, 188 ff. 
 
 Cornelius, 86. 
 
 Cosmopolitanism, 52. 
 
 Council at Jerusalem, 27, 88 ff., 
 113, 210. 
 
 Criticism in historical study, 2 
 ff. ; presuppositions and meth- 
 ods, 3-6, 30 ff. ; results in Old 
 Testament, 7 f., in New Tes- 
 tament, 11-16. 
 
 Criticism, historical, of Acts, 
 26-32, 170 f., 300 ff., 307 f., 
 311, 319; of Gospels, 236 ff. 
 
 Cyprian, Church of, 17. 
 
 Deacons, 83, 200, 284. 
 Development, 16-18. 
 "Devout persons," 49 f. 
 Dispersion, Jewish, 48. 
 Dobschiitz, Ernst von, 317. 
 Dutch scholars, 318-320. 
 
 Ebionites, 95. 
 Elxaites, 96. 
 
 325 
 
326 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Emerson, R. W., 308. 
 England, 309 f., 312 f. 
 "Enthusiasm" of early Chris- 
 tians, 176 ff. 
 Eschatology, 165 f., 172-175. 
 Ethiopian eunuch, 86. 
 Eusebius, 294-296. 
 
 Franciscan movement, 42. 
 
 Galatia, 115. 
 
 Gospels, as sources for Apos- 
 tolic Age, 32, 36 ff., 74 f.; 
 synoptic, 219-239. 
 
 Gospels, apocryphal, 238 f. 
 
 Greek influences in Christian- 
 ity, 19, 27, 32, 50, 71, 103 f., 
 123 ff., 160, 257, 263 £f., 323. 
 
 Greek language, 50. 
 
 Hackett, H. B., 314. 
 Harnack, Adolf, 19, 315. 
 Hebrews, Epistle to the, 187, 
 
 269-272. 
 Hegesippus, 95. 
 Hermas, 190 f. 
 Holtzmann, Heinrich, 316. 
 Hort, F. J. A., 313. 
 
 Ignatius, 179, 246 f ., 273, 284. 
 Intellectualism, 259 ff., 267 ff., 
 273 ff. 
 
 James, son of Zebedee, 86. 
 James, the Lord's brother, 86, 
 
 90 f., 94, 210. 
 Jerusalem, 39 f., 44, 69, 71-80, 
 
 86-95, 102 f., 105, 114, 117, 
 
 210. 
 Jesus Christ, 11-14, 19, 37 f., 
 
 65 ff., 137-142, 259 f., 265 ff. ; 
 
 resurrection, 67 f., 69, 77 f. ; 
 
 second coming, 75, 165, 172 ff. 
 Jewish Christians, 38 f., 65-98; 
 
 return to Jerusalem, 70 ff., 
 
 ideas, 75, 81 ff. ; outward life, 
 74 f., 79 ff. ; "communism," 
 80 f . ; organization, 83 f . ; per- 
 secutions, 84 ff. ; Judaizers, 
 88 ff., 118, 185, 303 ff., 311; 
 withdrawal to Pella, 95; reli- 
 gious ideas, 145 f., 148 f. 
 
 Jewish element in Christianity, 
 22, 48, 81, 83 f., 161, 172, 253, 
 280, 303 f., 319, 321. 
 
 John, 239-241; Gospel of, 250; 
 authorship, 241-243; date, 
 243, 244-246 ; characteristics, 
 245; ideas and purpose, 260- 
 268 ; Third Epistle of, 284. 
 
 Justification, 156, 256. 
 
 Justin Martyr, 95, 273. 
 
 Law, 2. 
 
 Law, Jewish, 84, 89 ff., 153 ff., 
 
 161 f., 168, 252 f., 257, 281. 
 Legend, 7, 31 f. 
 Lightfoot, J. B., 313 f. 
 Logos, 163, 263 ff. 
 Lord's supper, 196 f., 275 ff. 
 Luke, 24 f., 208, 235 f.; Gospel 
 
 of, 23, 228 ff., 233 ff. 
 
 Maccabees, Fourth Book of, 
 
 146. 
 McGiffert, A. C, 316 f. 
 Manen, W. C. van, 318. 
 Marcion, 281. 
 Mark, 46, 208, 218 f . ; Gospel of, 
 
 225 ff. 
 Matthew, 209, 227; Gospel of, 
 
 228 ff., 231 ff. 
 Miracles, 5, 11 f. 
 Missions, 37 ff. ; earliest motives 
 
 for, 38 ff., 60; in Judaea, 40 ff. ; 
 
 in Palestine, 44 ; in the gentile 
 
 world, 44 ff . ; preaching, 54 ff. ; 
 
 results, 58 ff. 
 Mohammed, 96. 
 
INDEX 
 
 327 
 
 Montanists, 248. 
 Morals, 91, 101, 157, 160, 182 f., 
 203, 254 ff. 
 
 Natural science, 2. 
 New England, 308 f . 
 Nicaea, theology of, 18, 287. 
 
 Old Testament, 50, 194 ff. 
 
 Religion in first century, 59 f. 
 Renan, Ernst, 232, 314 f. 
 Revelation, 262 f., 270 f. 
 Revelation, Book of, 191, 195, 
 
 202, 204. 
 Ritschl, Albrecht, 310 ff., 316, 
 
 321. 
 Robinson, Edward, 314. 
 Roman civilization, 47, 51 ff. 
 
 Papias, 218 f., 273. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 308. 
 
 Pastoral epistles, 120 f., 272- 
 273, 284 f. 
 
 Paul, life, 46 ff., 84, 88, 99-120 
 education, 103 ff. ; conver 
 sion, 27, 106-112, 140 f. 
 epistles, 115-120; Greek ele- 
 ment in, 103 f., 122 f., 160 
 essentially Jewish character 
 105; temperament and mind 
 122-128; physical character- 
 istics, 132 f . ; theological 
 \-iews, 134-168, 278-280; re- 
 lation to teaching of Jesus, 
 138-143, 155 f. ; influence on 
 succeeding age, 100 ff., 251- 
 256. 
 
 Pentecost, 78 f. 
 
 Persecutions, 40, 84 f., 202 ff., 
 285. 
 
 Peter, life, 69 f., 83, 86 ff., 114 
 f., 210 ff., 215 ff. ; speeches in 
 Acts, 75 f. ; writings, 212 f., 
 217 f. ; relation to Mark, 218 f. 
 
 Pfleiderer, Otto, 317. 
 
 Pliny, letter to Trajan, 62. 
 
 Presbyters, 83, 199 f., 284. 
 
 Prophecy, 190 f. 
 
 Puritans, 17-20. 
 
 Redemption, 152 f., 155 ff., 262, 
 270. 
 
 Sacramentarianism, 275 ff. 
 
 Sacrifice, 158 f. 
 
 Sectarianism, 184 f. 
 
 Septuagint, 50. 
 
 Sin, 152 ff. 
 
 Speaking with tongues, 179, 
 
 191 ff. 
 Speeches in Acts, 56, 75 f . 
 Spirit, Holy, 157 ff., 164 f., 
 
 176 ff., 253. 
 Stephen, 76 f., 84 f. 
 Strauss, David, 297 f. 
 " Supernatural Religion," 312. 
 Syncretism, 186, 265. 
 Synoptic problem, 224-231. 
 
 " Teaching of the Twelve Apos- 
 tles," 285. 
 Thayer, J. H., 314. 
 Timothy, 208. 
 Travel, 48, 51 f. 
 Tubingen scholars, 299-308. 
 
 Vicarious expiation, 144 ff., 148, 
 158 ff. 
 
 Weiss, Bernhard, 315. 
 Weizsacker, Carl von, 316. 
 Wernle, Paul, 317. 
 Westcott, B. F., 313. 
 Women, 181 f. 
 
 Zahn, Theodor, 315. 
 
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