James Hope Moulton: It is a daring thing to announce a lecture upon Paul, whose myriad-sided character and work could not be exhausted in a series of courses by very different students of his personality. I offer only a few stray suggestions, mostly connected more or less with that new field of illustration with which these lectures are specially concerned.
An early traditional account of the personal appearance of Paul comes down to us from the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. Here there is a description which Sir William Ramsay regards as authentic. Perhaps the best thing to be said for it is that it is hardly likely to have been invented; but this is hardly sufficient attestation should any strong objection arise. The general line of this description is that Paul was a little man, with meeting eyebrows, with a large nose and bald head and bow legs, but strongly built and full of grace. Well, Paul himself tells us that his enemies said he was not much to look at, and he certainly did not mind. The story went on to say that when Paul spoke he looked like an angel. That, at least, is all right.
But there are two considerations as to this description of Paul, both of which come out of the Book of Acts. In the first place, you remember that wonderful fourteenth chapter, in which Paul and Barnabas go to the little town of Lycaonia, Lystra. There they performed a miracle, healing a man all his life lame. As soon as the people saw this miracle they were immensely excited, and immediately dropped into their native tongue.
They had been listening to Paul in Greek, and Paul did not understand the Lycaonian dialect. The people were saying: `Gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.' Now it happened that the local legend told how Zeus, the king of the gods, and Hermes, the messenger of the gods, had come down to the earth and people had not recognized them. They sought for lodging, and at last came to the house of an old couple, Philemon and Baucis, who entertained them generously, and received a blessing when they went away. The Lystra folk were determined not to be again caught napping, and when they saw these two deities in their midst they prepared for a sacrifice to them.
Now I have just to ask one question: Be it granted that in Lycaonia the conception of these deities would be different from that of people in Athens, yet one always has to remember that these names of the Greek gods were associated with the very highest ideals of beauty. The principle, `Handsome is that handsome does,' did not always work; but in all history, so far as outward beauty went, one could never beat the Greek gods. Surely for the Lystrans to call upon the name of Hermes, even if it did carry with it less than it did in Greece, when they saw a little bald, bow-legged man with a big nose, was a most unlikely thing, was it not? One may say that the magnitude of the miracle overweighed the mere aesthetic consideration. Perhaps, but it may stand just as an initial difficulty.
I take another part of the Book of Acts. You will remember Paul's thrilling escape from the Jewish mob, when the Roman soldiers came down just in the nick of time and got hold of him when he was being battered to death by the infuriated Jews. When, by main force, the soldiers had dragged him away out of the crowd and got him into the citadel, it appeared that he had only escaped being tortured to death by the mob to be tortured to death in a more systematic way by the Roman soldiers. They began to prepare him to be flogged, and he only got his breath in time to protest. But as soon as he began to speak there was a great difference. It seems that Claudius Lysias, who thought he was the leader of a band of brigands at the head of an army of wild cut-throats, was quite astonished to hear him talking in Greek. Now here again is a difficulty. It is not often we hear of a horde of brigands following a little, bald man with bow legs. Must not these two improbabilities combine to put the evidence of the apocryphal Acts out of court?
The reason of my bringing in all this is that I want to ask a question which, oddly enough, I have never heard put. What on earth was Claudius Lysias doing when he thought Paul was a brigand leader? What suggested it? I think we can get an answer out of the papyri. We have among them a multitude of official papers, containing with a man's name his eikon, his personal description. A man writing a census return or other such document describes himself thus: First comes his name and his father's name; then he will put in such additional points as straight hair, long nose, with a scar on his shin or some other part of him. An extraordinary thing is that in every kind of description that scar seems to be necessitated. If a man has not a convenient kind of a scar somewhere, he has to put to his name the word asemos, `without distinguishing mark.' (You know where Paul says he is of the city of Tarsus, no mean - no `undistinguished' city, a city with many marks, though not necessarily scars.) Accordingly, we should expect to find in any personal description the needed scar by which a man might be recognized.
Now I fancy that we may be safe in saying that this brigand was badly `wanted by the police.' All over certain parts of the Roman Empire there were descriptions telling how he might be found. Every Roman governor was looking out for him. It would be worth his while to capture that man, living or dead. It is perfectly clear that Claudius Lysias on this occasion thought he had got hold of the brigand. Why? Why, surely because Paul's appearance answered pretty closely to the circulated description of the brigand. And you may be certain that the scar was very prominent there. What about the scar? As to the brigand, that is easy. He had been in many a scrimmage, and he had come out with the marks of them - like German students with marks of duelling on their faces. We may safely speculate that there was a mark so conspicuous that as soon as Claudius Lysias saw his man he recognized by this the man on whose head there was a price.
And probably that is why he took so much trouble to get Paul out of the hands of those wild Jews. But how do we know that Paul had a scar anywhere? Let us go back to that fourteenth chapter. I sometimes think the most splendid thing we hear about him is recorded there. Look at the picture of those fickle Galatians, how they turned right over when the Jews came from the next city and `persuaded the multitudes'; and those very multitudes who had been regarding Paul as a deity come down from heaven are now prepared to stone him. Soon the jagged stones are flying, aimed, naturally, at his head, and he lies senseless and bleeding upon the ground. His disciples, of only a few hours' standing, are there around him. How soon, they think, has their discipleship been terminated!
And while they sadly look on him where he lies, after the mob has dragged him over the rough ground out of the town, he regains consciousness and staggers to his feet. He must have been `strongly built' after all to stand such an ordeal. What does he do then? Slinks away to hide till he can recover strength again, of course.
Not he! He goes right back, back into the city where he has just been stoned, in order to exhort those new-made disciples to continue steadfast in the faith. And he says, pointing to his face, all covered with ugly wounds, `Through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God.' (Acts 14:22)
We have, then, a possible explanation for the scar by which Paul was recognized as a brigand. But does he make any other allusion to it? Why, yes. He is writing - as we believe who hold to the `South Galatian theory' - to these very people here at Lystra, Derbe, and Iconium the Letter to the Galatians, and he says at the end: `From henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus' (Gal. 6:17). The marks, as Deissmann puts it, were a talisman which should protect him, surely, in Lystra! He bears about with him until his dying day the scars which told how he had been a partaker of the afflictions of Christ, how he for that dear Name's sake had come so near to death. They are his identification marks, which will tell the churches wherever he goes how he has fought the battle of his Saviour.
Naturally, while we are talking about Paul's exterior you will be recalling that problem about his health referred to in his own words at the end of 2 Corinthians. You remember those pathetic words about his `thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet' him (2 Cor. 12:7). On this famous problem I have no new suggestions.
I cannot choose even between those suggested already. The only thing I want to say is that the Revised Version, going upon the knowledge accessible thirty years ago, put in the margin the suggestion that we ought to read, instead of `thorn,' the word stake. Now this word skolops in the classical Greek does mean a stake; and since, in the barbarous East, death by impaling was common, the suggestion of it is that the man has had the stake thrust right through his body. But this suggestion we are now able to deny with confidence, and the margin had better disappear. We have a very illiterate papyrus in which the word most clearly means splinter. In medical writers we find the word used for a tiny lancet. You can see that it must have lost any connection with size. However, a thorn in the flesh can sometimes be painful enough to destroy one's peace of mind or body, and Paul's description of his ailment as a thorn fits the conditions extremely well. Satan is allowed to inflict on Paul what would never let him rest, something which always reminded him that he was still in the body; but as he bore it he also realized that He who allowed it to remain was Himself abundant compensation. We hear Paul saying, `Concerning this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And He hath said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee : for power is made perfect in weakness.' (2 Cor. 12:8) Sometimes I think that one little change - `He hath said' [from KJV `He said'] - is one of the gems among the innumerable beauties of the Revised Version, suggesting, as it does, a message realized once for all, but repeating itself daily as the `thorn' pricks him, and bringing a new joy with every stab of pain.
I pass to something quite different, without attempting to be very orderly. I want now to make a short incursion into the literary criticism of the Pauline letters and get some help out of our papyri. I am not proposing to go over the writings of the Apostle Paul in this New Testament of ours. I can only remind you that in this matter criticism is very favorable indeed to the views which probably most of us here would like to hold. There was a time when only four letters of Paul were allowed by the more advanced critics; while now there is nobody with a reputation to lose who would dream of allowing us less than eight, and, as to the rest, even they are in a better position than in times past. But there is one of Paul's most precious letters the position of which has raised a great deal of difficulty, and about which I want to make a suggestion.
That is the letter called the Letter to the Ephesians. There is very good reason to believe that this was not a letter especially to the Ephesians. The words `in Ephesus' are left out in our very best authorities, and the explanation advanced two hundred years ago by Archbishop Ussher, that the letter was a circular letter addressed to various churches in Roman Asia, holds the field still. That is to say, it was a letter to Ephesus, but it was also a letter to the Laodiceans.
In Colossians Paul speaks about a letter sent to the Laodiceans, which would come on to Colossae to be exchanged for that which they have just got. That letter of which he speaks was almost certainly what we call Ephesians.
But then there comes another question. Was this letter to the Ephesians really written by Paul? There are a number of difficulties about it. The style is unmistakably different in many ways; and, though one does not want to lay too much stress upon this fact, it must count for something. A few months ago I was reading a paper at Oxford, and I had a curious experience. I was reading on quite a technical subject, the question of the `Semitisms' of New Testament Greek - that is, traces of very close translations from Semitic language so that the translation was really not, properly speaking, Greek. I was discussing whether there were really such things as `Semitisms' in the language of Paul. I examined two or three idioms which are rather test cases, and was extremely surprised to find that I could say about these particular uses that they were not to be found in Paul except in Ephesians; two or three instances appeared in that Epistle not to be found elsewhere.
The question immediately raised, of course, is whether this must be added to the arguments urged against Paul's authorship. I have been thinking about it, and venture a suggestion by which we may conclude this letter to be Paul's in every sense of the word except one, and that is that the actual writing down of it was done by another man.
Let me try to restore by sheer conjecture the conditions under which Ephesians may have been written. Paul, Timothy, and others have a long and anxious conversation as to the religious condition of the churches in Roman Asia. Paul determines to write to them. He has not time to dictate a letter to every one of them, but arranges to write one letter for them all, to be sent on its way from one church to another. But, then, there are special conditions in the church at Colossae. The church at Colossae is being harassed by perils that need special treatment, and nothing else than the very careful handling of Paul himself could adequately meet the situation. So Paul must compose a special letter to Colossae.
But he will not leave the other churches without a message. So in a long talk with his companions and friends he goes right over the whole ground; he tells them what he wants said, and then commissions one, shall we say Timothy? - to draft a letter.
I suggest Timothy especially because we read of him that `from a babe' () he was steeped in the sacred writings; and he is the one of whom we can easily believe biblical phraseology would come naturally from his lips, so that he would easily drop into `Semitisms.'
Paul was equally steeped in these sacred writings, but it does not follow that every man who knows his Bible will use biblical phrases in his writings. Paul quoted the Bible, but he did not let it mould his style to any appreciable extent; while Timothy may well have let biblical phraseology color his ordinary writing. The letter, then, as we conceive it becomes simply a written report of exhortations which Paul has just been giving orally - as if, for example, somebody were here engaged in writing out a report of what was said to us last hour. The thoughts would be those of the speaker; but the language would tend to be the language of the writer.
This, then, is what I take it Timothy had to do. He took Paul's thoughts and Paul's words, so far as he could reproduce them, and brought the draft to Paul. Paul then proceeded to amend his letter, striking out a phrase there and putting in a phrase here. He turned it inside out quite freely, and at the end that letter was Paul's absolutely. It started from him and it ended with him; but there was the trace of another hand in it which, I think, is quite enough to account for those differences of style which have given some people not a little trouble as to the authorship.
This conjectural account explains, I think, the close resemblances between the letter to the Ephesians, so-called, and that to the Colossians. I have still to illustrate from the papyri, as I promised, the combination of resemblances and differences of style between these two Epistles. I have been assuming, you see, that the reason why Ephesians and Colossians are so much like each other is that they were written at the same time, Colossians by Paul himself, and Ephesians by a friend who reported from memory an oral discourse of the apostle.
Now among the papyri we have two letters which I may read, as interesting in themselves and for the light which they throw upon the New Testament. The situation of the two, and the date, viz. 168 B.C., is identical. A man having a wife and child had been in very serious money difficulties, and, to save himself from further trouble, he promptly went into `retreat' in a monastery. Perhaps you may think that the monastery suggests Christianity, but the date is B.C., and monasticism is in fact not a Christian institution at all, but much older. (Some of us think that there is not much Christianity in it at the best of times!) In the Serapeum, the temple of the god Serapis, at Memphis, there used to be from time to time companies of temporary monks, who went there into retreat and stayed for a fixed period. These letters are written after the retreat has come to an end. Most of the people have gone home, but this man has not. He knows that he will find things uncomfortable at home, and so he determines to be very religious and stay. When his poor wife knew the retreat was over, she wrote this touching letter:
'Isias to Hephaestion, greeting:'
Brother here means husband.
`If you are well and everything else goes with you reasonably, it would be as I perpetually pray the gods. I myself am in good health, and the child and all in the house.'
And then the good woman adds words between the lines, `making mention of you continually.' You will find that phrase in Rom. 1:9, in Eph. 1:16, and so on. It was a formula of writing which was used, you see, among the heathen, and which Paul took up.
And then her letter proceeds:
`When I received from Horus your letter in which you explained that you were in retreat in the Serapeum at Memphis, I immediately gave thanks to the gods that you were well, but that you did not return when all the others who were shut up returned distresses me; for in view of having piloted myself and your child through such a crisis, and having come to the last extremity because of the high price of corn, thinking that now at last your return would give me some relief, you have never even thought of returning nor sparing a look for our helpless state. While you were still at home I went altogether short, not to mention how long time has passed since, and such hard times, and you having sent nothing. But now that Horus; who has delivered your letter, has told us about your having been set free from the retreat, I am altogether distressed. And your mother, too, is in great trouble about it. I entreat you for her sake and for ours to return to the city, unless, indeed, something most important is keeping you. Remember to take good care of yourself and be in good health. Good-bye. July 24, 168 B.C.'
This letter was found in the temple. No doubt he left it behind in his hurry when he went home. From the same place comes this second letter, dated on the same day - from his brother. I think you will agree as you hear it that the wife and the brother-in-law had been having a conversation in which they have made up together the pleas they will urge in separate letters.
`Dionysius to his brother Hephaestion, greeting If you are well and other things suit you reasonably, it would be as I perpetually pray to the gods. I myself am well, also Eudaemonis and the children and Isias and your children, and all in the house. When I received your letter explaining that you had been brought safely out of great dangers and were in retreat, I rendered thanks to the gods that you were well, but I wished you had returned and come to town as Conon and all the others who were shut up, that Isias, who when your child had been in the utmost danger had done everything to pull him safely through, and had suffered such hard times in addition, might at last get a little breathing space by seeing you. For it is altogether needless for you to stay in seclusion until you can make something and bring it. Every one when he has pulled safely out of danger tries to get home quickly and greet his wife and his children and his friends. So please try quickly to return, unless something most important is keeping you. Take good care of your bodily health. Good-bye. July 24.'
The similarity of these letters comes from the same reason as the similarity - to compare small things with great - of Ephesians and Colossians.
I am going to say something now about Paul's position as a Greek, and why, incidentally, we can suppose that Paul was really familiar with the Greek life. In the first place, there are his quotations from Greek literature. A few years ago Dr. Rendel Harris discovered a passage in one of his Syriac manuscripts, a passage in which was embedded one of Paul's well-known quotations from classical literature. The passage consisted of four lines which were translated very easily into Greek hexameter verse. They ran thus:
`A grave have they fashioned for thee, O Zeus, highest and greatest, the Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons. But thou art not dead, for everlastingly thou livest and standest; for in thee we live, and move, and have our being.'
The allusion is to the fact that in Crete there was shown a tomb of Zeus, the supreme deity of the Greeks, a fact which always roused the indignation of orthodox Greek religion, where, of course, Zeus was immortal.
Now you have already recognized the bearing of the striking quotation unearthed for us by Dr. Harris. We begin with learning the reason why the Cretans were called liars, in words which became proverbial. But we have seen the familiar line from Titus brought into close connection with one much more familiar, which has now to be referred to the same author, traditionally said to be the Cretan poet-philosopher Epimenides, who lived in the sixth century before Christ. There were two contributions from Greek poets, then, in that wonderful speech - or, rather, exordium of a speech - that Paul addressed to the Areopagites in Athens. Not only `For we are also His offspring,' but also `In Him we live, and move, and have our being,' is a gem from Greek thought. How far these quotations prove Paul's reading in Greek literature is not easy to say. If you found an Englishman saying, `To be or not to be : that is the question,' you could not inevitably prove he had read Hamlet. It might be he got the tag out of a newspaper. If, however, he continued the speech beyond that line, it would be a little better evidence that he knew his Shakespeare. But I think, on the whole, Paul was not unfamiliar with some of the things that had been said about the gods by Greek poets. He was just the sort of a man to search the literature for traces of these higher things.
We have a striking parallel especially urged by Sir William Ramsay. We know how constantly Paul referred to the Greek games, which, let us not forget, were religious ceremonials. Greek athletics were clean in comparison with some modern sports, and brought out the very best there was in the Greek character. They always seemed to have a great attraction for Paul.
`Whatsoever things are manly, whatsoever things are of good report' (Phil. 4:8) - Paul was always very sympathetic towards such things wherever he found them. And if some one had come to him and said, `These Greek games are in honour of heathen gods,' what would he have said? `Yes,' we may hear him reply, `suppose they are! Whether you eat or whether you drink, or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God; and if you do not know my God, then I have come to tell you about Him. Meanwhile, if you know anything about God it is something if you dedicate the best part of life to Him.' I am quite sure Paul's mind was so large and so tolerant that he would not stick at the fact that they were `heathen' deities. What he saw was a groping after God, and he saw that men who groped after God had some of them found Him.
There was a very beautiful fact brought out by a friend of mine, a great archaeologist, at Cambridge. He told me something new about the most famous of all statues ever graven by art or device of man - the wonderful `Olympian Zeus' of Phidias, which looked down the race-course at Olympia. Phidias was an innovator in a very startling way. His predecessors always portrayed Zeus as majestic and terrible, brandishing the thunderbolt before he hurled it to work havoc among men. The new Zeus had a face of unspeakable majesty, but the majesty of benevolence and fatherliness. Five centuries before Christ that great sculptor, that deeply religious man, had realized the idea that God was good. I think if Paul ever saw that figure he must have caught its meaning. The glorious figure disappeared somewhere during the Dark Ages, but the face lived on. It was actually taken over by the Church to become in Christian art the traditional face of Christ. So true it is, to quote that text that I was explaining in a former lecture, that `unto us the toll of the ages has come as our inheritance.'
One other question about Paul I should like to examine before I have done. What was his education and what his social position? No less a scholar than Professor Deissmann has regarded him as a plain, working man, like most of the Twelve. But would an artisan have had a chance to study at the feet of Gamaliel? Would he have been charged by the priestly aristocracy to carry out that mission in Damascus?
I greatly prefer Ramsay's view that Paul's father was a Roman citizen, and presumably, therefore, a man of wealth and of importance in Tarsus. Moreover, as Ramsay most persuasively argues, there was a time in Paul's life when he was in possession of a good deal of money, which must have come to him by the death of his father. Since men among the Jews did not have wills, when a man died his money descended automatically to his sons, and Paul would thus get money which certainly never would come to him by his father's consent. The father, who gave his brilliant son a costly training under the greatest of the Rabbis, was not likely to take cheerfully his defection to `the sect of the Nazarenes,' and we might safely assume that he cut him off with, or without, a shilling.
I wonder if we can see in Acts 11:25, `Then departed Barnabas to Tarsus, for to seek Saul', a hint that Barnabas had some trouble in finding Paul, who was not at his father's well-known address, but in an obscure corner, living as best he could? Whether that is so or not, we can at least recognize what new meaning Ramsay's suggestion gives to Paul's own record that for Christ's sake he `suffered the loss of all things' (Phil. 3:8).
In favor of Paul's lowly origin it is urged that his vocabulary is that of the common people. That is quite true. A German scholar, Dr. Nägeli, who has made a very careful study of Paul's vocabulary as far as the first five letters of the alphabet, has shown that Paul's words can all of them be paralleled from quite vernacular sources, and that none of them are out-of-the-way words, but such as the common people could understand. Quite so; but that does not make us believe that Paul could not have used philosophic and out-of-the-way words if he liked. The reason why he did not use them was because it was of first importance to him to speak so that he could be understood by everybody.
If you read John Wesley's sermons, you will find exactly the same thing. John Wesley was a learned man, a man of refinement, a man who could have gone in for polysyllables with the best of them if he had cared to; but he meant to be understood. And so, surely, did Paul!
One rather interesting example of this has struck me quite lately. In going over the record of the Greek word Hades, I was rather surprised to find that it occurs only once in the innumerable papyri that Professor Milligan and I have been searching, and that in a document very far from the normal style. What is the reason?
I am satisfied that this word had dropped out of the ordinary vernacular.
But, you say, surely the word occurs in the New Testament, and very often in the Greek of the Old. Quite so; but that was, I believe, only because the Septuagint translators found it an exact rendering to represent the Hebrew Sheol. They took it for this purpose from the technical language of Greek religion, but as a word in ordinary life it was apparently no longer in use. We seem to have at once an explanation of what has always rather puzzled me. You will remember that at the end of one of Paul's greatest chapters; the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, he brings it into that sublime apostrophe: `Where, O death, is thy sting? Where, O grave, is thy victory?' as the Authorized Version has it.
That is a quotation from Hosea, and in the original you have both death and Sheol mentioned. And I think we all agree that the phraseology is much more impressive than this that Paul uses. How does Paul quote it? `Where, O death, is thy sting? Where, O death, is thy victory?' Why did Paul use the same word twice, and spoil the rhetorical effect from Hosea? The reason was that the word was not in common, ordinary use, and so, even if it were to spoil the literary effect, Paul put the word that everybody knew into the passage.
While I can only briefly put it before you, I do not want to talk about Paul this morning without mentioning something which has a great deal to do with the whole of the history of his life. Had Paul ever seen the Lord Jesus in the flesh? Had he seen Him before that great day when, in the clouds outside of Damascus, he saw that wondrous Face which changed his life?
There is a very able discussion by a brilliant German theologian, Johannes Weiss, translated into English in an American series published by Harpers, and called Paul and Jesus. Johannes Weiss argues, I think with conclusive force, that that text in 2 Corinthians, `Even if we have known Christ in the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more,' necessarily implies that Paul really had seen Jesus. Now, after all, that is very natural. We know that Paul was in Jerusalem before the Passion, when he studied under Gamaliel; he was there very soon after, for the story of Acts implies it. The ordinary theory assumes that Paul had gone back to Tarsus when Jesus was exercising His ministry.
It is at least as easy to believe that Paul never left at all. There are some indications in Paul's language that Paul really was in Jerusalem at the time when the Lord Jesus was there. And the most significant suggestion I find of that kind is in the Passion story as it is written in his friend Luke's writings. There are several places in Luke's story of the Passion not to be found in Mark. There are places where, apparently, Luke has deserted his usual source for a source which he regards as more important still. What can that source be?
Why not the personal experience of Paul?
I think we can easily realize why Luke took up that authority. Just let me simply mention some of those traces.
You remember the question that was addressed to Jesus by a deputation from Jerusalem as to the question of divorce. Have you ever asked the question why it was that they thought they were trapping Him when they asked Him this question? If He said a man must not divorce his wife, the only thing for them to say was that He agreed with Shammai, one of the greatest Rabbis. If He said he might divorce his wife, why, the only thing for them to say was that He agreed with Hillel, a still greater Rabbi. What did they think they were going to gain by getting Christ to pronounce upon this question?
Professor Burkitt, of Cambridge, has pointed out the relation of all this to the marriage of Herod and Herodias. Where Jesus says that not only must not a man divorce his wife but a woman must not divorce her husband, the critics have sometimes raised a great deal of difficulty. What does that mean? No woman could divorce her husband in those days. No; but a princess could do what an ordinary woman could not, and it happened that Herodias had done it.
Paul has an allusion to that very matter in 1 Cor. 7, where he does actually raise the question of a woman's divorcing her husband. It came out in that question between the Pharisees and Jesus, and I believe that Paul was on that deputation. You may be very sure if he were in Jerusalem at all he would take care to go down and put in every effort to convict Jesus of unorthodoxy.
And then there is that expression `a house not made with hands.' (2 Cor. 5:1). That is very significant. In what is described as `false testimony' in Jesus's trial, it was alleged that He had said, `I am able to destroy this house which is made with hands, and in three days raise another, made without hands.' That is described as false testimony; but the `lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.' What I think Jesus said was, `Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise another made without hands.' Hence two or three allusions in the Epistles.
Then again, `Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.' The word for tribute in that passage of Mark is a Latin word. In Luke it is a Greek word, and Paul uses the same word in the similar passage, Rom. 13:7.
I believe Paul was also on that deputation. Finally, there is that tremendous saying of Jesus in the Garden, reported by Luke alone. He protested against arrest, telling them He was daily in the temple and they had never laid hands on Him, `But,' He said, `this is your hour, and the authority of darkness.'
Darkness may enshroud the Prince of the Light, in order that darkness may be expelled for ever from the world which He came to redeem. With that word He relapses into awful silence.
We meet with that phrase again in the Epistle to the Colossians, where Paul says, `Who hath delivered us out of the authority of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.' (Col. 1:13).
Here I must leave it, trusting that you will think of other quotations that might have been made. I only remind you that we may say, and with some confidence, that the poet may very likely have been right when he proclaims Paul as having been present to the end. You remember that thrilling stanza in F. W. H. Myers's Saint Paul - a better exposition of the apostle than perhaps any commentary has achieved:
Oh, with what bitter triumph had I seen them,
Drops of redemption bleeding from Thy brow!
Thieves, and a culprit crucified between them,
All men forsaking Him - and that was Thou!
Yes, Paul was there, and what he saw burned itself upon his brain until, at last, the time came when he saw that Face in glory and he knew that He who thus died had died for him. I think we can understand why Paul says so little about the earthly life of Jesus. What he talks about is what he has seen and heard of, and for him the Cross was the central thing, as it could not be for the other disciples, just because it made up the whole of what he knew of Jesus.
The Cross was the interpretation; it was the purpose of everything; it was the goal to which the Son of Man was going.
It was the purpose for which He had come into the world, and for Paul the Cross was just absolutely the beginning and the end of all things. That is why this many-sided man, this wonderful Paul, who might have achieved the highest distinction in absolutely any rank of life, who might have become the most famous of men, that is why he determines to narrow himself, to cut himself off from everything else in the world and say, `I determined not to know anything at all among you save one thing, Jesus the Messiah, and Him - not as a great Teacher, not as a matchless Example, not as winsome Love - no, but something more than that - and Him as crucified,' as the Sacrifice for the life of the world.
Paul lived and died for one purpose. He lived to point men to Calvary; he, a Hebrew, a Greek, a Roman, a man in whom all the different strands of the knowledge and the life of the day met in so unique a way, he felt that he was raised up to go and point to that title on the Cross where, in letters of Greek and Hebrew and Latin, were written the words,
This is the King.
from "Egyptian Rubbish Heaps", Five Popular Lectures on the New Testament with a Sermon, delivered at Northfield, Massachusetts, in August, 1914, by James Hope Moulton, Professor in Manchester University and Tutor at Didsbury Wesleyan College.
James Hope Moulton: "From Egyptian Rubbish Heaps", Northfield, 1914
I. Egyptian Rubbish-Heaps and the Study of the New Testament
II. A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt
III. Some Sidelights upon Paul
IV. How We Got Our Gospels
V. The Fullness of the Time
VI. The New Song
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