V. The Hellenism of Paul A preliminary question about the thought of Paul imperatively demands some notice. How much did he learn from his surroundings and early life as a Roman citizen, a member of the privileged aristocracy of the Roman world, born and educated in a half-Greek city, “the one city which was suited by its equipoise between the Asiatic and the Western spirit to mould the character of the great Hellenist Jew”? (This is quoted from, as I think, the Cities of St. Paul.) My friend Principal Garvie — if he will permit me to call him so, though we only once met, and I know him better from his written than his spoken words — challenges my position that “Gentile influences were far more potent factors in Paul’s development than has hitherto been generally recognized”. (In the Expositor, May, 1911, p. 346 ff.) I have maintained this, and still maintain it. These Tarsian influences were what marked out Paul, already before his birth, as the man who was destined to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. (Galatians 1:15-16.) The expression fades into insignificance if it is not taken in this way; it becomes a mere general statement of the vague truth that, wherever he lived and whatever he was by birth, the purpose of God had chosen him out to be the Apostle of the Roman and Greek world. But can we add that it made no difference to that purpose whether he was born in Jerusalem or in Mesopotamia, in Ethiopia or in Tarsus? This is not, as I believe, the way in which the New Testament should be read. The view which I have repeatedly maintained is that the Jewish nature and character was the strongest and the most fundamental part of Paul’s endowment. (It is my habit to begin every lecture I give on this subject by this statement.) This has been so much emphasised by others that I was absolved from any need to discuss it; and I professedly left this side of his nature apart, both because it had been so vigorously insisted on, that there was nothing to gain by repeating what had been already better said, and because I was not competent to treat that side of Paul’s character. I do maintain, however, that the thought and plans of Paul are “wholly inexplicable in a mere narrow Hebrew, and wholly inexplicable without an education in Greek philosophy”. A Palestinian Jew could never have grown into the Apostle of the Graeco-Roman world. He was an outsider in that world. He could not touch its heart or even feel its pulse, as Paul could do. Paul had a certain power of comprehending it that no Jew of Palestine could attain. He began in the Roman’ world on the level which our greatest missionaries have rarely been able to attain by many years of study and thought and growing familiarity, and which others of our missionaries have hardly been able to attain and have regretted their failure to attain throughout a long and useful life. The real question is whether or not I have laid too much stress on the Hellenic side of Paul’s thought. It is a question of degree. Principal Garvie admits that there was a Hellenic side, but thinks that I have assigned too much importance to this aspect of Paul’s thought. I have frequently said that the Jewish side of Paul’s nature was the foundation on which his whole character was built up and the strongest and most determining part of his mind; but I have left it to better qualified scholars to analyse and describe it. Principal Garvie does not, and could hardly exaggerate its importance; but he seems to me to minimise unnecessarily the other side. We are, however, agreed that both sides exist; and it is a matter of words to assign the proper emphasis to each.
I mentioned two respects in which Paul had taken up into his thought the ideals of Hellenism: “Hellenism had showed how the freedom of the individual could be consistent with an ordered and articulated government, and it organised a system of State education”; (It failed to keep true to its ideal, and Hellenism gradually sank to be the heritage of a few.) and Paul insists on freedom and on education as essential to the Christian life. To my statement Principal Garvie objects that I have myself admitted that, as regards the freedom of the individual, “we can trace this Pauline idea back to its origin in the teaching of Jesus”; and he goes on to say that “surely the phrase of James, ‘the law of liberty,’ shows that the idea of freedom is involved in the distinctive Christian conception of salvation”. And “again the second idea, the necessity of education in the Christian life, is surely not so peculiar as to need so special an application. The Jews, too, cared for education; Jesus had given much pains to the training of His disciples,” etc.
I think I have emphasised as strongly as any one both the importance of the idea of freedom in the teaching of Jesus, (Luke the Physician and other Studies in the History of Religion, p. 92 ff., following in the footsteps of Harnack.) and the “truth which will soon be discovered and emphasised by the Germans, and will then be brought over and emphasised among us, that the Hebrew nation was at that time the most highly educated people in the world — in the true meaning of the word education”. (The Education of Christ, p. 67.)
What I can do I have tried to do in the way of making these truths the basis of all my studies; but you cannot exhaust the idea “freedom” or the word “education” in a sentence or in a paragraph or in a book. You have to feel them and live in them in order to know what they mean. In the first place, if Jesus had “freedom” and “education” in His heart, it does not follow that His disciples caught those ideas and worked them out. The disciples, as we know from the Gospels, used often to lament that the meaning of Jesus’s words was hidden from them, and that they had failed to comprehend Him. Is it so unusual a thing for the pupils of a great teacher to miss his meaning? Does not every teacher in a university learn by experience that, except in so far as he dictates his lectures and has them reproduced to him (which trains the power of memory, but not of thinking), the examinations which he sets to his pupils are a constant humiliation to him, because he finds that the things on which he has lavished all his efforts at explanation and clear statement are reproduced to him more or less wrongly, by 90 per cent, of his classes? Yet he will find years later that he had not failed so completely as he fancied, and that pupils had caught far more than they could express in an examination, and that the ideas which they had caught, but could not formulate on paper, were far more useful and educative than the part which alone appeared in their examination work. Who would compare the Socrates, as depicted to us by Xenophon, with the Socrates set before us in Plato’s Dialogues? There is little inner resemblance between them; it is only in externals that the likeness can be traced. Xenophon understood only in the narrower style of his own mind anything that Socrates said; Plato understood Socrates in his own way, and was roused by his master’s teaching to reach conclusions which Socrates did not contemplate, or contemplated only dimly. If you ask whether Xenophon or Plato best understood Socrates, I cannot understand any one voting for Xenophon. Plato set before us one of the greatest figures in human history. Xenophon sets before us a striking and even heroic personality: his practical mind could recognise and show to us a man who could powerfully influence other men: he was incapable of seeing or appreciating the great philosopher. The impulse which Socrates gave to Greek thought proves that he was one of the great master-thinkers of the world, such as Plato, but not Xenophon, shows us.
It is therefore not sufficient to say, as both Principal Garvie and I have said each in our own way and each with equal emphasis, that the idea of freedom was fundamentally involved in the teaching of Jesus. How was it, and in virtue of what education and character was it, that Paul caught this feature in the teaching of Jesus? There had to be something in the mind of Paul to respond to the teaching of Jesus, otherwise he would have remained as deaf to it as the mind of Xenophon was to all (or almost all) the higher teaching of Plato.
If there is any quality which beyond all others distinguishes the teaching of Jesus, it is that He “rose high above such a narrow idea” as that of Jewish exclusiveness. I trace to Paul’s mixing in the Roman world and his early training in the Stoic school his familiarity with “this wider and nobler idea of a unity and brotherhood that transcended the limits of a city or a tribe; but the conception of universal brotherhood remained as yet an abstract and ineffective thought, devoid of driving power to move the world”. So long as Paul knew this idea only in the abstract and ineffective way of the Stoic thought, or in the half-hearted fashion of the Roman Empire (where the distinction, first between slaves and free, second between the Roman aristocracy, the provincials, and the subject races such as those of Egypt, obscured the general principle), the thought remained only external to him. It was when he had to recreate the whole religious and philosophic foundations of his life, during the two years of quiet meditation which followed on the epoch-making experience of his conversion, that he began to comprehend what lay in the idea of Universal Brotherhood as taught by Jesus: “there can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Galatians 3:28.) What was it that enabled Paul to comprehend, and to express to others, the full meaning of that “freedom” which Jesus taught? What, but his wider experience, his better realisation of the inchoate facts of the Roman world, his familiarity with the abstract and unapplied teaching of the Stoics? He was prepared to grasp the truth, and he comprehended it in the form and fashion that made it suitable to the educated middle class of the Roman world.
Moreover, although Principal Garvie quotes from James the phrase “the law of liberty,” one need not hesitate to maintain that the phrase is post-Pauline. The writer of the Epistle attributed to James (whom I am quite ready to regard as James the “president” of the Apostolic Council) had certainly been strongly influenced by Paul, and had not confined his studies to the narrower type of Jewish literature. When the three leading Apostles recognised Paul as divinely appointed to be the Apostle of the Gentiles, this implies a very great step on their part. It does not merely mean that they accepted Paul as permitted to do something which they did not wish to do themselves. It means that they accepted Paul as commissioned directly to take the leading part in one branch of their duty; but it did not absolve them from taking an interest in this duty and a general oversight of it. The Council of the Apostles, several times called in the Acts simply “The Apostles,” (In the Acts, sometimes, “the Apostles” simply means the governing body of the Church in Jerusalem, without implying whether many or few were present. So, e.g., inActs 9:27Paul was brought into the presence of “the Apostles,” but from himself (Galatians 1:19) we learn that only James and Peter were present; whether many or few, “the Apostles” were the supreme administrative body. The idea is Roman: one member of the board has the power of all. There was no need for a quorum to exercise the powers of the board.) still retained a general superintendence of the entire work throughout the Church over the whole world; and this authority was fully acknowledged by Paul (Acts 15:2; Galatians 2:2). (The misconception which identifies the visit to Jerusalem ofGalatians 2:1-10with that described inActs 15:2-30destroys the perspective of Church history in the first century. The visit described inGalatians 2:1ff. is briefly noticed by Luke inActs 11:30;Acts 12:25.) In men like Peter and James and John the recognition of this duty implies a corresponding growth and broadening out of their ideas and plans. It is pointed out elsewhere (Pictures of the Apostolic Church repeatedly.) that the original Council of the Apostles, and mainly the leaders of the Council, were never prevented by any scruples or prepossessions or prejudices from learning, even though their teachers were younger and less experienced than themselves. Stephen carried the Apostles with him wholeheartedly in his resolute breaking with the old ties and opening up of the Church to the world. So did Paul, when his time came. It was after these lessons had been learned that James spoke of “the law of liberty”. He then recognised that, though his eyes had formerly been holden that he could not see, still the law of liberty was embodied in the teaching of Jesus. For the Apostles the test always was that the new teaching should simply be an explanation and a declaration of the truth as it had been originally taught them. But the influence of Hellenic surroundings on Paul’s early life and the growth of his mind should not be restricted to the higher ideas of his education: it is equally applicable to the cast of his language, I need not do more than refer here to the paper on this subject which forms part of my Luke the Physician and other Studies in the History of Religion, pp. 285 ff., on “St. Paul’s use of Metaphors from Greek and Roman Life,” and to the argument there stated that these metaphors (to a much greater degree than the similes of Philo) show how deeply the early familiarity with the surroundings of Hellenic life had affected the fabric of his mind and his style of expressing his thought.
Finally, I may quote the opinion of a distinguished German scholar. Professor Johannes Weiss, on this subject. There are many people in this country to whom nothing can commend itself unless it appears in the German tongue; and I may therefore quote from his Paul and Jesus, 1909, p. 59 ff., §§ 11-13, “Previous comparisons have not sufficiently appreciated that which may be stated in one word as Paul’s Hellenism”. Much of what Weiss has said in that work is exactly in accordance with my views. He carries his statement even further than I have gone; but his arguments and reasons are in the same spirit as those from which I started. There are, however, some expressions from which I should dissent, e.g., “For Paul, the unit is the country or nation, not the individual” (p. 66). According to my view the unit for Paul is the individual human soul; (This needs to be amplified from what is said in Section XLV about the family.) but he marches in his victorious course from Province to Province, and counts his steps by their capitals. He did not think of countries or nations, but of Provinces, as the constituents of the empire; and he accepted these political entities as passing phenomena, powerful for the moment. The real and permanent element in the world was the soul of man and the soul of God.
