PAUL 



813 



Festus sent him, in charge of the centurion Julius, 

 to Rome. St Luke, who, with Aristarchus, was 

 his companion, gives us a minute account of the 

 voyage to Myra, and thence in an Alexandrian 

 wheat-ship to Crete, where they lay windbound at 

 Fair Havens. Continuing the voyage in spite of 

 Paul's warning, the crew were caught in a cyclone 

 called Euro-aquilo, and the ship, in spite of under- 

 girding and every other precaution, became a 

 complete wreck. Amid the despair and misery of 

 all on board, St Paul, comforted by a vision, assured 

 tiiem of their safety, and though the vessel finally 

 became a total wreck at Ras el Koura, in Malta, 

 every life was saved. At Malta he waited three 

 months for another ship. He was held in great 

 honour by the barbarous natives because he bad 

 shaken a viper off his hand unhurt, and healed 

 the father of Publius, the Protos of Malta. The 

 prisoners were taken to Italy on board the Castor 

 and Pollux, and landed at Puteoli, proceeding by 

 land to Rome. Paul was met by Christian brethren 

 at Appii Forum and the Three Taverns, and went 

 along the Appian Road to the capital, where he 

 was handed over to the observatio of Afranius 

 Burrus, the prretorian prefect. For two years he 

 continued a prisoner at Rome, and, as the Jews 

 refused to accept his preaching, he did what he 

 could to make the gospel known to the Gentiles, 

 gaining converts even among the praetorian soldiers 

 and the slaves of -Caesar's household, and being 

 suffered to live in his own hired apartment, under 

 the supervision of the soldiers. From the pastoral 

 epistles we securely infer that his trial ended in a 

 complete acquittal. His next movements are un- 

 certain, but we find traces of his probcible visits to 

 Colossfe, Crete, and Nicopolis, and of his final 

 arrest in the house of Carpus at Troas. He seems 

 to have been tried and imprisoned at Ephesus, and 

 again sent to Rome. Meanwhile the Neronian 

 persecution had broken out, and his second im- 

 prisonment, in which nearly all deserted him, was 

 far more imperilled and miserable than the first. 



At his first trial perhaps before Nero in person 

 he seems to have been remanded ; but at a second 

 trial we learn from unanimous Christian tradition 

 that he was condemned to martyrdom, probably, 

 as he was a Roman citizen, by decapitation. His 

 'trophy,' or martyr's memorial, was a familiar 

 object in Rome in the 2d century, but his death 

 was so lonely and unrecorded that not even tradi- 

 tion has preserved a single trustworthy detail 

 respecting it. All that we can see from his last 

 writings is that he remained heroic, indomitable, 

 cheerful, faithful to the end, never doubting, amid 

 an apparent failure which the world might well 

 have regarded as absolute, that the hundredfold 

 harvest of eternity would spring up from the grain 

 which he had sown. in tears. Yet it is unlikely 

 that even he, on this side the grave, was at all 

 able to estimate the far-reaching grandeur and 

 many-sidedness of the work which it bad been 

 given him to do. He hail set an example of life- 

 long zeal and devotion in the willing endurance of 

 numberless perils and privations, such as has never 

 been equalled, much less surpassed ; and he had 

 done this with a mind acutely sensitive to the 

 blasts of hatred which came to him from every 

 region of the Jewish and Gentile world, and with 

 a body weakened by chronic disease. He bad 

 formulated the language and systematised the 

 doctrines of theology. He had saved the gospel 

 from dwindling into a Pharisaic Judaism, and had 

 established for ever its freedom from the yoke of 

 priestly and ceremonial bondage. He had carried 

 the faith over a vast extent of Asia from Jerusalem 

 to Antioch, to Ephesus, to Macedonia, to Athena 

 and Corinth, to Rome, and perhaps even ' to the 

 farthest limit of the west. ' He had been the founder 



of many flourishing churches. He had written 

 epistles of various orders, of which even the most 

 casual is ' weighty and powerful,' and which con- 

 stitute him one of the greatest moral and spiritual 

 teachers whom the human race has ever seen. 



It only remains to glance at these epistles. They 

 are thirteen in number, and fall into four well- 

 marked chronological and doctrinal groups. The 

 first group (1, 2 Thess., written 52-53 A.D., during 

 the second missionary journey) are mainly escha- 

 tological, and represent St Paul's earliest stage of 

 thought. The second group, written during the 

 third missionary journey, may be called broadly 

 epistles of Judaic controversy. 1 Corinthians 

 (written at Ephesus in 57) is mainly polemical 

 and ecclesiastical. 2 Corinthians (written at 

 Philippi in 58?) is the apostle's Apologia pro 

 VitA Sud. Galatians and Romans (written at 

 Corinth in 58) are mainly doctrinal and soterio- 

 logical. The third group are the epistles written 

 during St Paul's first imprisonment at Rome. 

 Philippians (62) is personal and ethical. Colossians 

 and Ephesians (63) are Christological, Ephesians 

 being especially the epistle of the ascension. Phile- 

 mon is an exquisite personal epistle, the first 

 charter of emancipation, and was written (63) as 

 a sort of annex to the Epistle to the Colossians. 

 The fourth group contains the pastoral epistles of 

 St Paul's closing years. 1 Timothy and Titus may 

 have been written in Macedonia about 66, 2 Tim. 

 about 67 in Rome. 



They may also be classified according to their 

 forms, as ( 1 ) Circular letters to the churches ( Eph. 

 and Romans), which are rather treatises than 

 letters; (2) Letters to special churches, or little 

 groups of churches (1 and 2 Thess., 1 and 2 Cor., 

 Philip., Col., and Gal.); (3) Letters to friends 

 (Philemon, Titus, 1 and 2 Tim.). 



The genuineness of some of these epistles has 

 been fiercely contested. Four (1 and 2 Cor., Gal., 

 and Romans) are absolute homologoumena, of which 

 not even the school of Tubingen questioned the 

 genuineness ; but they regarded 1 and 2 Thess., 

 Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon 

 as antilegomena, of uncertain authenticity, and 

 the three pastoral epistles as spurious. The 

 Christian church has amply met the arguments 

 against the authenticity o{ all the epistles, and 

 even Renan only rejects the pastoral epistles, and 

 that mainly on historic and chronological grounds, 

 because with many others he holds that St Paul 

 perished in the Neronian persecution in 64 A.D. 



The mission of St Paul was fourfold. Had he 

 done nothing more than set the world an example 

 of saintly self-sacrifice, his work would have been 

 sufficiently memorable to make him immortal ; but 

 besides this he was a missionary, a moralist, a 

 reformer, and a theologian. 



( 1 ) Of his missionary work we have spoken, and 

 have shown that to him pre-eminently belongs the 

 honour of having made known the gospel to the 

 civilised world around the basin of the Mediter- 

 ranean ; so that before his death the Christians 

 bad grown from a little community of 120 Galileans 

 in an upper room at Jerusalem into a number of 

 flourishing Asiatic and European churches, and 

 even in that early day Christ liad His followers in 

 the Praetorian camp at Rome, and in Caesar's 

 household. 



(2) As a moralist St Paul laid down, with in- 

 comparable clearness, the relations of ethics to 

 the gospel, and the secret of the loftiest moral 

 standard as rendered possible by the new life. No 

 moralist before him had more distinctly illustrated 

 the eternal principles taught by Christ, by showing 

 their bearing on the simplest concrete duties ol 

 life. To take but one example no moralist ever 

 dealt with the duty of purity, so universally 



