03. II. Method and Plan

II. Method and Plan

We take it, then, for granted that Paul started his mission to the Roman world (Acts 13:3) having already in mind a philosophic and carefully meditated view of human life in its relation to the Divine power that moves and guides the universe. We are to try to express his view as it would present itself to one trained in the schools of the present day. There are, however, certain preliminary questions which present themselves, each demanding some notice.

One question which has been much discussed deserves and rewards some attention. It is generally admitted that Paul’s Tarsian origin and experiences formed an influence in his life. He was a Jew, but a Jew of Tarsus, and a Roman Jew. He was a burgher of a very aristocratically constituted city, where citizenship was narrowly restricted: he was a member of the supreme aristocracy of the world, as born a Roman citizen. (This is outlined in St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, and more fully described in Cities of St. Paul.) I have always held and expressed the opinion that, except for these formative influences, Paul could never have been what he was. Yet he is fundamentally the Jew. The force, the fire, the depths of his nature, are Hebrew; but his Jewish power is tempered and ordered and in a measure guided by his Greek training and his Roman position in the world.

I have often used a homely and simple illustration to explain what seems to me to be the right measure of these two influences on Paul’s mind. If you take a glass half-filled with wine and add water to it, then the water mingles in and affects every drop of the liquid that fills the glass, but the power and the spirit come from the wine alone. The Greek influence is to temper and to order, but it added no fire to the nature of the great Apostle. As Paul himself says, he owed much to the Greeks; but he was not indebted to them for any religious stimulus, nor did he learn from them any religious thought or method. A recent fashionable theory is that he was profoundly influenced by the pagan mysteries, and even that he was initiated into the mysteries and borrowed from them much with which he transformed and adulterated the simple teaching of Jesus. This theory rests (as I think) on a complete misunderstanding of the thought of Paul, and is therefore valueless for our present purpose; but, as will be pointed out in the first Section of Part III., recent discovery regarding the Mysteries shows that Paul knew and condemned their spirit and their method. In one respect, however, Paul’s situation amid the Graeco-Asiatic world and its religious life exercised an immense effect on him. Therefrom springs his intense hatred for idolatry. (On this subject see also Section XXIII.) It was not his Hebrew experiences that produced his passionate detestation of idolatry. Idolatry as a present danger in Israel could implant this detestation in the old Hebrew prophets; Israel was then always on the point of slipping back into pagan rites and superstition; but in Paul’s time it was no longer a pressing danger among his people. They had learned their lesson slowly; but at least they had learned it long before Paul was born, and they had learned it completely and for ever. (See also Section IX.) In Tarsus, however, and the cities of the Graeco-Roman world, idolatry presented itself as the great enemy, impeding the victory of Hebraism and the coming of the Messiah, who was the dream and the vision of Paul’s early life. It was the embodiment of Satan’s power, contradicting and preventing the purpose of God.

Luke, as usual, has caught this trait in Paul’s character. “His spirit was provoked within him as he beheld the city full of idols,” is Luke’s description of what Paul felt at Athens. The chosen home and centre of Greek education was the nursing-ground of idolatry. Paul found that Greek philosophy was hostile to him; but he never entertained the same hatred for it as for the popular form of paganism. (Compare Section XIX and the opening Section of Part 3.)

However, as I have been criticised for assigning too much influence to the Hellenic element in the mind of Paul, I shall attempt to justify my view; and it will tend to keep the discussion on more profitable lines if I put what I have to say in the form of a criticism and a reply to criticism. I take the criticism from Principal A. E. Garvie, an excellent and highly esteemed authority: see Sections V and VL, also XIX and XXVIII.

While we must regard Paul’s thought as developing in an ordered fashion from the childhood of a Jewish boy in a Greek city and in the position of a Roman born, we must also bear in mind the great crisis of his life, viz., his Conversion. He was not one of those natures which develop in a smooth and uniform course from first to last. He was a nature of fire and passion, a volcanic nature, subject to great and sudden changes. His experience of Jesus, whom as he says he had seen, and to whose victory over death he could testify from eye-witness, had remade his life. From this great event he reckoned his course anew. From it he counted the years of his life. (In Galatians 1, 2.) Henceforth, he was a new man, a different man with different thoughts and aims; and yet he was the same Paul throughout.

Here we are struck with the same fact which will frequently meet us in the sequel: in all that concerns Paul we can usually express him and his thought and his intentions in a pair of contradictory statements: he is, and he is not: he was a different Paul, and he was the same Paul.

It is not proposed to discuss here the phenomena of his Conversion. We are to content ourselves with his own statements and his own view of that event. It was a sudden, unprepared, completely revolutionising change. Nothing had been in his mind consciously that seemed to prepare the way for it. He was sailing on a diametrically opposite course. Suddenly he was seized by a higher power, and set on a new course. Yet it was the most real, as well as the most powerful, issue in his life. He never could doubt about its meaning or its character. The Divine Power had taken hold of him, and swayed him as God chose. This is what Paul says; this is what he thought; and we are studying him as he was.

Further, it is not part of our task to speak of the position of Paul in the development of early Christian thought, or of his relation to his contemporaries. I content myself with a few words in Section VII f. about the relation of St. Paul to St. John. The New Testament as a book, or set of books, begins with Paul and ends with John. From one point of view the New Testament is a single work; from another point of view it is a collection of separate writings. It is the same thought throughout, and yet it differs according to the personalities through whom it finds expression. The few pages which I give to this topic are also thrown into the form of a criticism or a reply to criticism.

Paul deals with life, not with speculation. He does not seek to discuss problems, but to help men. He had no patience with subtle questions and speculations: all such discussion was in his esteem mere verbal trifling. He thought of, and spoke to, men and women. “Avoid silly talking,” he says, “it will eat like a canker: it grows towards ungodliness.” (2 Timothy 2:17.) Avoid people that talk about such empty questions, “whom I have handed over to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme”. (2 Timothy 2:20.) You should learn to work and live and teach, not to talk.

We must take Paul with his limitations. We do not go to him for an intellectually plausible system of abstract philosophy. Yet his teaching makes very high intellectual demands: see Section III.

Another question comes up, not because it appears to me to reward discussion, but simply because it has been raised and has caught the attention of the world, and has even been incautiously answered in the affirmative by scholars who did not realise what was implied in the affirmation. This is the medical question, whether Paul was afflicted with epilepsy. To the medical mind that presents itself in this harsh form: are the visions of which he speaks the symptoms of epileptic madness? Medical friends of my own have declared unhesitatingly that Paul’s visions can be paralleled in any asylum for epileptic lunacy.

Such a statement could never be made by a scientifically trained man, unless there were a certain resemblance between the two cases. In one respect, however, the resemblance fails completely, Paul’s visions have moved the world, and changed the current of history, and profoundly affected in one way or other the thought of all educated men. On no rational system of thought can it be admitted that the dreams of an epileptic lunatic could become a force to transform all educated human life. That answer seems in itself sufficient; (It is stated in my Historical Commentary on Galatians, p. 423 ff.) but I add to it a brief discussion from the medical side in Section XLVIII.