FOREWORD TO APPENDIX
As a child and later a student, I recall intensely disliking Paul. I wasn’t quite sure he was a “crazy fanatic and self-hypnotized epileptic and self-deceived, unconscious fakir,” which I have heard teachers of youth in our colleges call him; terrible views for a child to hold about a saintly character—I only set them down to show how wrong teaching can color our version of the Bible—but I regarded him as fanatical, narrow, crabbed, sour, domineering, eager to dragoon men into believing as he did, whether by fear of Hell-fire, which seemed to me a cowardly fire-insurance policy against retribution or by sheer force of will, I had not decided. I distinctly disliked saints, whose milk of human kindness had turned sour. Later, years later, when I came back to read his life in the sacred records, as I would read with unprejudiced eyes in the search for facts which we carry to the reading of an ordinary life, I was amazed and staggered to find he was a small man, frail of body, short-sighted, suffering some physical ailment from the persecutions to which he had been subjected, fearless as a lion where the faith was concerned, humble and simple as a child in other matters, generous in money matters—see the loan to Philemon—so independent that while he collected funds for famine in Jerusalem, he would never touch those funds himself, but supported himself by the making of tents, for which there was great demand owing to caravan travel being universal, and so great of heart that his tenderness extended to a little slave boy, who came to him in Rome and who ultimately became the youngest bishop in the Christian Church in the third largest city of the Roman Empire.
About this time I began reading the Bible as I would any other book, or a newspaper editorial, critically but shorn of early beliefs and prejudices. I read ignoring chapter divisions and verse divisions, which too often have provided controversialists with bullets for sharp-shooting in ambush by wresting sentences from context and meaning, and using them as “the Devil quotes Scripture” for his own purposes; and I can conceive of nothing that will restore belief quicker than to read the Bible as a historical record of the birth and growth of a great redemptive force for humanity—using redemption as a force in present-day life, not in a far-away, vague shadowy Kingdom of the Hereafter.
About this time, too, I realized what one of the greatest American theologians has frankly admitted—that the worst foes of Christianity are not its enemies but “the friends in its own house,” and those foes are sometimes medieval inheritances of superstitious interpretations, of which we are unconscious; scraps of misapplied, ignorant Sunday-School teaching. In fact, I have often wondered, if secular teaching were given with as colossal ignorance of historic data as sacred teaching is given, how many pupils could pass even a primary examination? How much would be known of applied science, or even our own secular historic development? For instance, how many Bible teachers know that Christ and John and Paul all quote from the Book of Enoch, which is variously dated as from 200 to 120 B.C.? How many know that “the camel and the eye of a needle” was an Arab expression used to this day? How many know that many of the expressions precious to the whole world were quoted by the writers from ancient masters sacred and secular—such as the reference to “principalities and powers” separating us from the love of God? How many realize that “oil out of the flinty rock” was not a metaphor, but a fact—such a fact, that modern drillers for petroleum have found oil in that very spot? How many know that the fiery furnace recorded in the book of Daniel to destroy the three young Hebrews is corroborated by references in the Maccabees and other ancient books to naphtha waters which burned with a flame to consume all towards whom the wind blew, but which had a funneling air center inside, which left the furnace harmless in the middle? How many know that tiles and statuary dug out of the ruins of Babylon show a man lying unharmed under a lion in the lion’s den of the king’s royal gardens? We ridicule the story of Jonah and the whale; yet from the belly of a stuffed sacred alligator in Egypt amid scraps of waste paper were taken precious lost records of the sayings of Christ.
The Bible is not much longer than seven short novels. The most of people read seven novels in a year. The ordinary modern magazine has the same number of words as a short novel. A great many people read a magazine from cover to cover once a week. If the Bible were read in the same free spirit, unclouded by inherited prejudice or taint of “creeds,” the return to belief among youth would be a thing to astound the world.
Why isn’t it so read?
To quote the theologian—because “the literalists” insist that in the reading, youth shall read into the context what they dictate rather than what youth finds of everyday usable livable truths; and to-day, youth will not be dragooned. He is going to follow the light of truth as he finds the light of truth and proves the truth. He isn’t going to accept one set of opinions on Sunday, which he finds won’t work out in everyday life on Monday. Christianity has to be a workable scheme for every day in the week, or youth is going to leave the church pews empty and crowd to “the movies,” to the theater, to the anarchist lectures, to the wild abandon of joy in the rhythmic emotional dance; and—youth is right. With unfettered feet and wings of dawn to its soul, it faces always the new day. It never looks backwards. It rejoices in Life; and Christianity must be put in terms of youth, or preach to emptier and emptier pews. Paul never ceased reiterating “Rejoice—rejoice and again I say—rejoice.” Too often we have clothed a glad and glorious message in habiliments of age and woe, which are really the consciousness of past sins and failures. The Communion is not a Doleful Supper commemorating a death. It is a Loving Cup commemorating a wonderful and glad new birth. The Kingdom of Heaven is not to-morrow. It is now; or else it is never. And yet, let us not blame the Middle Age interpretations shadowy with crime and sorrow. In a carnival of lust and crime and rapine and sword, the Middle Age Church preserved and conserved for humanity, like an oasis of the spirit in a desert of materialism, all that has helped humanity most, and this in spite of the fact it foolishly punished astronomers, who proved the earth round and burned men who differed by a hair’s breadth from its “credo.” While it was guilty of these tragical mistakes of obeying the letter rather than the spirit—as the Pharisees who crucified Christ, had done before it—the Middle Age Church kept the faith for us, inspired and conserved art, science, letters, in a wilderness of barbarism. Who encouraged almost sublime architecture? Who produced paintings that have never been equaled to this day? Where did Roger Bacon work out his great, though concealed, truths of science? In the safety, though it was the imprisonment, of a friar’s cell. Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the friar at Oxford, wrote these words. Were they clairvoyant foresight, or the superior knowledge of a scientist from facts? “Ships will go without rowers and with only a single man to guide them. Carriages without horses will travel with incredible speed. Machines for flying can be made in which a man sits. Machines will raise infinitely great weights. Bridges will span rivers without supports.” His superior knowledge was ascribed by his superiors to Black Magic; but Pope Clement IV supported him and ordered his knowledge set forth in books, of which he wrote three in eighteen months without secretary; but his own immediate superiors ascribed his marvelous knowledge to communications from the Devil, and had him imprisoned for fourteen years. After seven hundred years, the light of that cell comes out to the world: yet, the men who suppressed him thought they were protecting God’s word from assault. It can only be added that the history of ignorance repeats itself with surprising persistence. The good men of his day were simply trying to tie truth down to the dead line of their own ignorance. With a charity and a clarity infinite as the love of God, let us be careful we do not do the same thing.
Rather than condemn the mistakes of the Middle Age Church from whose darkened and superstitious interpretations we yet suffer, let us beware we do not repeat their mistakes by shutting out the new light of history and archæology and science, where we should welcome it.
Christianity does not need to apologize for itself, or beg the question. When it does that, he who excuses accuses. When it does that, it is off the carpet in the modern world. It can stand on the solid foundation of its own truth. If that foundation cracks, it will fall as the Holy City fell before a New Order. Rather than repel attack, we should welcome it. Attack is the storm wind that strengthens the hold of the roots on the eternal rocks. It is the wind that causes the corn stalk to put out guy ropes above its roots to hold fast to sure foundation. I love to read attacks on Christian truth if they are sincere and not cheap, cynical, ignorant sneers, which never get anywhere. They force examination of the certainty of the facts beneath our faith.
To take but one example of what muddy thinking has done to stir up shallow waters to make them look deep—consider the furious and foolish controversy in the modern church over “miracles.” “We believe in miracles,” shouts one section of the Church, “and if you don’t, we’ll see that you are put out of the church and prove that you are damned.” “We don’t believe in miracles and we defy you to put us out of the church; or we’ll pull down the pillars of youth like Samson as we go out,” shouts back the other section; and neither stops to ask in simple clarity:
What is a miracle?
Is it God breaking, or intervening to prevent, the effect of His own laws?
We have no such phenomena in natural life, and shy back from answering that question in as bold terms as it is asked.
Or is it the working of a higher law overruling and annulling a lower law? There are cases of that in nature, as when the effect of a warm and constant ocean current is annulled by a cold wind from the north; but in this case, neither law is abrogated. We are getting the effects of each; but the effect of one is stronger than the other. That might be the meaning of “a miracle”; but the explanation is so obscure and the workings so complex and in the unknown, that if that be the conception of “miracle” we had better not split the church over it. We are dealing with too many unknown quantities to postulate with mathematical certainty what we do know and what we don’t of fact, or to exclude from fellowship on the grounds of what is unknown.
Or is a miracle a superior knowledge of all laws and the use of that knowledge to get certain effects, such as the knowledge of Roger Bacon, who was seven hundred years in advance of his time? If that be “miracle,” the controversy vanishes in thin air.
A century ago, if any man had told us we could see through a man’s flesh and count his ribs and the joints in his backbone, we would have called him an unconscious fakir, or a conscious liar. Yet X-rays have worked that “miracle.”
Fifty years ago, if any one had told us we could go round the world under the sea like Jonah in the whale’s belly, we would have answered him in the language of Missouri, “Show me.” Yet the submarine has worked that “miracle.”
Twenty-five years ago, if any one had predicted we would course the skies in winged chariots of which you can read a description in the First Chapter of Ezekiel, we would have told him a comic legend about Darius Green and his flying machine. Yet the aeroplane has worked that “miracle.”
Ten years ago, if some one had told us soberly and expecting belief that he could talk without wire or letter from New York with a friend in Honolulu, we would have had him examined for his sanity. Yet wireless has worked that “miracle.”
The impossibility of yesterday is the wonder of to-day and the commonplace of to-morrow. The laws of the X-ray, of under-sea navigation in submarine, of air travel in aeroplane, of wireless communication, existed just as much and the same in the days of Christ as they exist to-day; but men did not know those laws and did not know how to use them. “Greater works than these shall ye do,” said the Master. We didn’t believe Him, though we thought we did; and we witness the fulfillment of the prophecy. We are heirs to the fulfillment of the prophecy by the greatest Master in foresight the world has ever known, by One who did more to set the human soul free of the shackles of ignorance and prejudice than any other leader of all humanity.
He, who postulates to-day on what is, or is not, miraculous, simply writes himself down an ignorant muddy-brained thinker, stirring up shallow waters to make them look deep. The “literalist” in this case simply tries to bind youth down to “old wives’ fables” and to nursery beliefs. He tries to level Christian truth down to the dead line of the most ignorant.
And so of nearly all the disputes in the Christian Church—“the resurrection,” “the descent into Hell,” “the Immaculate Conception,” “the letter inerrancy of the Scriptures.” Ask definitely what the controversialist means by his own terms, and whether agnostic or fundamentalist, instead of answering you, he backs against the wall of his “rightness” and hurls thunder bolts of damnation and excommunication from fellowship at you; and Youth still goes on its way in laughter and gladness; and I thank God that it does. It would be terrible if Christianity ever became as static and dead as the faith of the Pharisee, who crucified Christ because He would not conform to the letter of the law instead of the spirit.
We should remember the simple words, “He will not wrangle.” All Christianity asks is—“prove all things.” If they don’t prove up, don’t take them.
Not long ago, a friend had an experience that illustrates this. For twenty years, she had practically never read the Bible. She had been taught the Bible wrong and when the Bob Ingersoll era came on, ridiculing these vulnerable teachings, she had quit reading the Bible. As a professor, who teaches teachers in the largest teachers’ institution in America, once said to me: “Really I envy you your naïve beliefs! I envy any one who can believe that old stuff”; she had discarded the Bible as a book of myths and fairy tales. She said once “I can’t read it. I simply can’t read it. I read into it the old impossible prejudices and creeds I was taught when I was a girl; and now I know they are not true.” To overcome that mental habit of reading into the Bible what isn’t in it, I suggested Weymouth’s translation in modern phraseology with strictest adherence to linguistic scholarship. We miss some of the old and beautiful phrases in this translation, but we get a translation free of the old controversial doubtful implied interpretations. She began re-reading the Bible as she would any other authentic historic record. In her enthusiasm, she carried her new treasure to a devout elderly saintly friend of the old school. The friend sat up in horror. How dare any one suggest there could be any improvement in the translation of the Bible. The good friend was evidently in devout and blissful self-righteous ignorance of the sources of the Bible. She evidently did not know that the Tindale Bible of 1555 was improved in the King James Version of 1611, and the King James Version was improved in the 1888 version; and there are still phrases and words which linguistic research is improving. And recall that, in old texts from which the Bible is taken, some of the old manuscripts did not use the vowel but left the vowel to be guessed. The good friend—and she was sincere—mistook the pebbles and the small rocks of the trail up the slopes of light for the main foundation and the light ahead; and promptly began hurling those rocks and pebbles at a true seeker after light.
It was a case of a saint’s shadow darkening a seeker’s trail.
APPENDIX ACONCERNING PAUL’S MISSIONARY TOURSAND DISPUTED POINTS
“The Christian religion takes its stand upon the ground of history,” says Malden in hisProblems of the New Testament; “but there is now a feeling abroad that the authority of the New Testament has been severely shaken by recent studies, if it is not in danger of being destroyed outright.”
Fifteen years ago, such a statement would have been acknowledged as voicing general sentiment, not to be denied; and the liberal wing of scholars would have regarded the statement as grounds for relegating the New Testament in history to the junk heap of picturesque myths, in which there was, of course, some dim reflex of events that had happened, but so embroidered by superstition as to be utterly untrustworthy as a basis for belief founded on facts; while the literalists would have regarded the same general sentiment as grounds for blind belief, for dogmas to embody their blind belief, to which all Christians must subscribe, or be cast out. Indeed, the most excited and least informed of the literalists would have gone even farther as late as 1922—they would have passed laws prohibiting free speech, free thought, the teaching of any brand of belief but their own. The panic reiteration of dogma was a sad evidence of lack of faith in the truth beneath their own beliefs.
Truth needs no bludgeon of civil law or religious threat of exclusion. All it needs is to be put forth with its proofs. He who seeks to establish his own beliefs by disproving some one else’s—is wasting precious time. Truth needs only that its torch be held high aloft lighting the way, and humanity will follow; and the dark illusion called error will vanish as darkness always disperses before light.
But with the War has come a subtle change. The change of front is something deeper than a complete collapse of the scheme on which our civilization seemed founded. It is a something deeper than the fear of death that took such awful toll in the War. It is deeper than a panic stampede from the impasse of our own former conclusions.
It is a determination to get at basic truths and with them rebuild a better civilization. Even if we have to proceed slowly step by step as up a steep trail of rolling stones to higher outlook, we are determined to eliminate error and get at truth, on which we’ll found our faith for the morrow.
The War only hastened a tendency that had been ripening for half a century. It opened doors long closed in the East to linguistic scholars, to archæologist’s spade, to such purely secular scientific expeditions as the American expedition to the deserts of Tartary and Mongolia to find if the original home of mankind and prehistoric life were really in Asia.
Men and women back from the horrors of War somehow vaguely realized that dogmatic religion had not prevented a hideous throwback of civilization to the practices of barbarism. They discovered with horror civilization was only skin deep; and while some came back with hopeless fears that science, in submarine and aeroplane and poisonous gases and armaments of long-range devilish powers undreamed as possible, seemed to have created a monster that would devour civilization, like the destruction of the fabled Atlantis, others came back with a deeper insight. While science had created the monsters of destruction, it had also discovered the angels of mercy in surgery, in aeroplane, in wireless, that seemed almost to rend the veil into the unseen.
So humanity came back from the War seeking foundations for belief in truth facts—sifting error from truth, proving all things, and holding fast only to what it could prove and use; and neither science nor religion asks any other criterion—“Try it; if it works, take it: if it doesn’t, don’t”; and the latest scholarship declares bluntly Christianity takes its stand on the ground of history.
The story of Onesimus will be found in outline in the letter to Philemon. Though Rome had neither Titus’ Triumphant Arch, nor Vespasian’s magnificent colosseum, when Paul was prisoner in the hut near the Three Taverns, one can reconstruct from Josephus and from the Roman historians of the period the character of the Rome in which the young Phrygian slave found himself enmeshed, and how Paul lived with the radiance of a quenchless diamond amid the cesspool slime of a great imperial city in the first stages of its moral decay. How great and hideous was that moral decay could not be told in a book going through the mails. Hints of it can be found in Philostratus’Apollonius(Oxford, 1912). The references to Nero need no proof. They are well-known history; and if space permitted, the letters, true or false, of Paul and Seneca could be given. These letters can be found in the Apocryphal Books of the New Testament, on which Malden (Oxford), Turner (Oxford), Sir William Ramsay and Bishop Lightfoot have given the latest best views. At first, my impression was Onesimus might have been a colored slave like the Apostle later known as “Niger,” but on looking up the past history of the Phrygian mountain clans, it was easy to see how the constant raids of robber bands from upper Galilee to kidnap the mountain boys and girls and sell them as slaves in the cities of the Roman Road, might have produced a character like Onesimus, and that he was pure Greek. To this day, the Druse descendants of these mountain clans have resisted all enslavement. If captured and reduced to servitude, they become fanatic demons of crime. If left free, they preserve a peculiarly pure form of Christian belief, though primitive and superstitious. Felix’s part in clearing out the robber bands of Galilee is also history and can be found fully given in Josephus though too often when he rescued the kidnapped victims, it was to resell them to enrich himself. The jealousy between the sisters—Drusilla and Bernice—is also given in Josephus. The fact that Felix, who had once been slave himself, rose to marry the royal and proud line of the Herods attests a character of peculiar force. The scene in the Cæsarean Judgment Hall will be found given in theActs, and still more fully in Josephus. Of later authorities on Paul, besides Malden and Lightfoot, are Robinson of Cambridge, Rendell Harris in his volumes of 1893 and 1911, Parry of Cambridge, 1920, Smith, 1919, and Kersopp Lake in 1916. Students wishing to trace back these modern authorities to the ancients and nearer contemporaries of Paul will find the references in these volumes leading them back to Clement and Ignatius and Iræneus and hosts of others. The name of Paul’s custodian on the ship wrecked en route to Rome is variously spelled, but I have followed the spelling of theActs. The same name is again found in the fall of the Holy City.
Church historians have been very severe on Bernice, who became a character famous or infamous—as you will—in Titus’ day in Rome. Her angling to ensnare the Emperor, who was a young general at the time, became a joke in the Roman theaters, but would judgments be so severe, I wonder, if censors looked up the age at which this child was married to her first husband, and then to silence evil gossip about the affection between herself and her brother, was married to a second aged husband whom she at once left? She could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, when married to the second husband. All the Herods notoriously married off their daughters and sisters to strengthen their own insecure thrones. Women were a pawn for empire; and I, for one, would hate to cast a stone at a girl of eighteen, who when she found herself a pawn between lust and power, if she had to pawn herself, aimed at the highest bidder. The name of Bernice’s second husband from whom she fled—Polemo or Polemon—should be noted carefully; for it comes again in the story of Thecla. The royal Roman lady, a relative of the Emperor, was either wife or daughter of this ancient satyr, and her sympathy for Thecla may have arisen from her own similar experiences.Apollonius’ Lifegives the brand of the man’s vices. Young Agrippa, the last of the Herod line, while too weak to master circumstances and rule with the iron ruthless hand of Herod the Great, was undoubtedly the most decent of all the evil Herods, and his character as portrayed by Josephus, hardly bears out the evil insinuations of the Jews, who mobbed and would have murdered both him and his sister. Paul’s opinion of the young man, we get in theActs, and Agrippa’s reaction to that appeal does not bear out proof of a degenerate youth. “Almost,” says the boyish prince, he could not have been much over twenty, “you would make me a Christian.” All that is merely hinted here of the Daphne Gardens is mild compared to the truth that can be found in any Roman record of the day. The lure of the Daphne Gardens drew many Romans to spend the winter at Antioch, with fatal results to the morale of officers and governors; and after the fall of Jerusalem compelled the change of the headquarters of the Christian church from Antioch to Ephesus. The best testimony to the influence of the new faith in counteracting the evil of those Gardens is found in the charges and countercharges when the temples were destroyed, that the Christians had burned them. It was not with earthly fires they had burned them but with the divine fires of the faith.
In one secular account of the return of the Roman troops after the sack of Jerusalem will be found mention of a shipwreck almost similar to that which overtook Paul on his journey to Rome; and in early Grecian statuary and pottery will be found ships “trussed” or “frapped” by ropes to keep the timbers from going to pieces just as recorded in theActs. Lucian’s history describes the corn ships of the period; and Josephus’ account of a wreck is an exact parallel of Paul’s experiences, except that Josephus’ ship carried six hundred passengers. “Corn,” it need hardly be told here, was not our modern corn but such grains as wheat and barley. Palestine is now known to have been the original area of the first wheat cultivated in the world.
One very pointed question occurs here. Where Josephus refers to Christ, his words are: “Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it is lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works . . . he was the Christ . . . and when Pilate . . . had condemned him to the cross . . . he appeared alive again the third day. . . .”[3]
[3]By some scholars, this paragraph is regarded as a forgery.
[3]
By some scholars, this paragraph is regarded as a forgery.
And he hints that the destruction of Jerusalem was divine chastisement for the murder of James, the disciple. His words are: “The brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James . . . he (Herod) delivered to be stoned.” Luke’s account of this in theActsis: “Herod the king stretched forth his hand to vex certain of the church; and killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.” The two accounts do not seem to agree, but recall all men wore swords in these days, even the disciples—see the cutting of Malchus’ servant’s ear—and in a rabble stoning a man to death both accounts may be true. That being Josephus’ belief, why did he not refer more frankly to Christ as the Messiah of Jewish expectation? That has been a puzzling question that has cast discredit on Josephus as historian of the Roman era. Yet it would not cast discredit on him if one paused to examine the circumstances under which his history was written. He had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees, in the best sense, and a Zealot of the Zealots for the defence of Hebrew rights; but when he saw that Judea had not a chance on earth against Roman power—that Rome could give order and law where the Hebrews, themselves, could not, like Isaiah before him, he counseled coöperation with the strong power rather than the opposition that would inevitably end in national extinction. In the siege of Jerusalem, like Agrippa, he went over to the Roman side against the lawless robber bands, who held and plundered the Holy City. He did everything in his power to save the city from total destruction by imploring its surrender till he was stoned away by the fighters on the walls. When the Holy City was conquered and totally destroyed but for the Herod Towers on the west, he was taken to Rome and given quarters in the royal palace, and wrote his record of the Roman era in Palestine for Titus and Vespasian, as their guest and pensioner. As historian in an era when emperor worship was being set up by Rome throughout the Empire, he could hardly issue an official history under Roman approval that acknowledged Pilate, the Roman governor, had crucified, at the behest of the Jews, the unacknowledged Messiah. We wish for his own sake he had frankly given record of the Christ, whose career he must have known in detail in a land not much larger than Vermont, or say, about a hundred and seventy-five miles long by sixty broad, which was the area of the Jewish Palestine in his day. He gives full record of all the High Priests and the Sanhedrim to the cutting of their throats in the Aqueduct twenty-five years after Christ’s death. He was in and about Jerusalem during the most of Christ’s life. Familiar with every foot of Palestine, that life he must have known; but he is silent because he was the pensioner of the government that had consented to Christ’s death.
That Paul and Josephus and Apollos must have known one another is self-evident. Each was a great student of the law and of philosophy. Each was familiar with the studies of the great philosophies of Alexandria. Paul quotes from them continually. Paul and Josephus had both studied in Jerusalem. Paul and Apollos had both spent their boyhood in Tarsus. Apollos seems to have been the richest of the three, and a traveled gnostic. Josephus was soldier till he laid down arms in Jerusalem to become historian in Rome, and he was a liberal Pharisee. Paul was fanatical student of the Hebrew law till he became follower of Christ. That Paul was tentmaker did not place a social chasm between him and the other two; for every Hebrew boy had to learn a trade to forefend against want in perilous times.
Solely because it would require a library of books to give the corroborative data of Paul’s life in Rome and in Cæsarea, the data bearing on Onesimus’s story must here be condensed to notes for reference.
The Spring Festival in the Roman Empire occurred at almost the same period of the year as the Jewish Passover and the Christian crucifixion; so that the tortures inflicted on Christ and the later Christian martyrs at this period were really to glut the lust for blood that was part of the old pagan worship. Free gifts for charity to the mob had degenerated into a bribe to the populace in place of justice. Rome was no longer Roman. It was a composite of the known world. Though Rome gave her Empire good laws and stable government, as Apollonius, the sage, pointed out to the General, Vespasian, she could not ensure the execution of those laws for two reasons: if she appointed local governors or kings, like the Herods, to hold loyalty, she could not prevent them exacting extortionate taxes for their own wealth; if she appointed Roman governors like Pilate, they could not speak the languages of the far-flung provinces and had to depend on underlings of native birth, who perverted Roman justice. The Roman Empire was falling to pieces from over-extension. Democracy was degenerating to mobocracy and mobocracy to the tyranny of the Army.
Would the old Idumean guard have been executed for the loss of his prisoner in the shipwreck? He most certainly would; for Rome was as ruthless to her own, as to her provincials.
The object in kidnapping a beautiful slave can be found in the four lives that have been written of Apollonius. We sometimes despair of the world because religion seems to have done so little to change men. The despair is the voice of unbelief. Read the old records. The tortures of Thecla were mild compared to the martyrdom of many a Christian in the pleasure gardens of Nero, where the victims were dipped in oil and then tied to stakes, as torches, in ridicule of the claim that they were the torch bearers of light and glad news.
Rome standing for irresistible brute power, was ever jealous of the cultured Greeks; and the Greeks returned scorn for scorn—which would explain why Onesimus, a Greek runaway, was friendless in Rome.
By the time of Paul’s first imprisonment, 63-64 A.D., Nero’s madness was acknowledged in Rome. The great fire, of which Paul and Seneca corresponded, took place in 64 A.D., but Rome, rolling in wealth and luxury, did not want to upset prosperity by destroying good times; and only after Nero’s suicide and three years of turbulence, when the Army loomed as a terrible menace, was Vespasian, the strong general, called to become Emperor.
Regarding the Three Taverns, all through the Empire at this time, the keepers of the wine shops were women; and in the East, they were called Rahabs—a name with evil import to us to-day; but all the Rahabs were not harpies—as witness the Rahab of Jericho in Joshua’s day.
Fuller details of the equinoctial gales at Crete will be given on the chapter on Apollos and John.
In Malta, or Melita, is St. Paul’s Bay, to this day commemorating the site of his landing and shipwreck, just as Lud gave London its name, and the myth of Lud points back to a personality behind the myth.
The songs of the Arabs are the same to-day as in Paul’s time and can be found in Newman’sBabylon and Nineveh.
The whole story of the gladiatorial combat in Cæsarea, to which old Julius refers, will be found in Josephus. Both sides fought till the arena swam in blood to the ankles, and of one side not a man was left alive. Other victor slaves were given their freedom.
Felix, like Herod the Great, tried to clean out the robber bands from the caves of Galilee; but Felix was charged with selling the rescued victims as slaves to accumulate a fortune for himself, though he had, himself, been slave. This can all be found in Josephus with the full story of the Herod family and their perplexing intermarriages and repudiations of marriages. Bernice’s flight from her old husband was by pretense a religious vow, but openly in the theater of Rome, she was twitted with taking the vow to escape her spouse.
Titus, Vespasian’s son, not yet thirty, will be more fully described in the chapter on the fall of Jerusalem. Keep him distinct in your mind from Titus, the Greek evangelist of Crete, who became Bishop.
Philemon, the merchant of Colossé, Paul’s friend, was converted to the new faith in Corinth or Athens.
Who were “the friends in Cæsar’s household” of whom Paul wrote? Bishop Lightfoot shows of the forty-three Christianized Jews and Greeks, who met Paul when he reached Rome, and whose names may be found in the letter to the Romans; many were in Roman governmental positions of trust. Their names can be found scattered through theActsand the apostolic letters to Rome and Asia.
There seems almost no reason to doubt that the great Epaphroditus, the Greek lover of learning, to whom Josephus dedicated his volume, was the same benevolent Greek of Philippi who supplied Paul with money for his needs in Rome, and who carried Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and who seems to have been under surveillance with Paul in Rome; for in Rome, even if his eyesight would have permitted Paul to follow his mechanical means of supporting himself by tentmaking, there was not the same demand as in the East for tents for desert travel, or in Greece for maritime sailcloth. Aquila and Priscilla, who came later in the Apollos story, like Paul, were tentmakers. Paul’s knowledge of seafaring was gained as sailcloth maker.
Always when religious faith wanes, necromancy, clairvoyance, sorcery thrive. The Old World with its dying faiths both Roman and Grecian, was now overrun with sorcerers of every description, practising wonder-working and miracles by methods variously known as Black Magic and White Magic. The knowledge of the methods underlying these powers was undoubtedly drawn from India and Persia. Some workers were good and some were bad. Some miracles were fraudulent and some were undoubtedly genuine—using the word “miracle” in the sense of wonder-working; only the Christians, the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Nazarenes refused to work these wonders for profit. For some reason or other, probably because they had lost faith in God, and learned magic from the Persians and the Babylonians, the Jews had become great sorcerers in Paul’s day. More will be given of this in the chapter on Apollos. It is given also in the Acts.
The reference of Onesimus to the luminous look, or radiance round Paul in the half dark, and the old Idumean’s legend of Antioch’s invading soldiers finding nothing in the Holy of Holies of the Temple between the Cherubim and Seraphim but a little thin blue flame, would have been laughed out of any court of evidence by science ten years ago. Not so to-day. The study of wireless waves is opening the door to the wonder-world of these waves.
The caution to Timothy as the old soldier put it, “to beware the widows,” and Paul’s somewhat severe injunctions regarding women to the churches of Ephesus and Corinth arose from great trouble from the activities of two women called Euodias and Syntyche, of whom nothing more is known than that they were quarreling in the church of Clement at Philippi, who wrote some of the finest and most universally accepted Epistles, which arenotin the New Testament. Clement will be quoted later. He was Bishop of Rome about the time John “fell asleep.” Turner, one of the most critical of the higher critics, in his studies onEarly Church History, explains why Clement’sLettersare not in our New Testament. They were not disinterred from Alexandria till 1628, when they were sent in a present to Charles I, which was seventeen years after theKing James Versioncame out. Any one who wants to follow up how desperately dissatisfied the King James translators felt with their work, should read theJournals of Evelyn, a most devout churchman, on his conversation with the survivors among the translators. Such letters as Clement’s should be in supplementary readers in every Sunday School and Church in the land.
While Paul seems to have been prisoner in Rome for certainly two years, and before coming to Rome, prisoner in Cæsarea for at least as long, he was not without friends in both places. Philip’s four daughters, who were prophetesses or teachers, resided in Cæsarea; and Paul seems to have had great latitude in seeing his friends. This was because he was not only a Jew but a Roman citizen.
The tendency of modern scholarship is to regard Luke, the physician, as “the man from Macedonia,” who begged for help. The Greek scholar is supposed to have accompanied Paul as medical helper.
When Onesimus left Rome carrying the personal letter to Philemon, in 64 A.D. or thereabouts, he also carried along with one Tychicus the circular letter to the Colossians. These facts can be found in the postscript to the Epistles, which ought rather to be called simply Letters with advice for the guidance of the Christians.
In thePhilemon Letter, I have followed the Weymouth translation, rather than theKing James Version, or theRevised Version. In fact, I had read Philemon in the old versions many times before I saw its beauty. Then one day, I happened to read it in Spanish, and the old message in a new language of peculiarly graphic imagery shocked me into a visualization of the picture—the old fighter down and out in chains awaiting death, the slave running to him for safety, and the crippled prisoner pleading for, not his own, but the boy’s freedom. Then, I hunted up the best modern translation I could get—which was Weymouth’s; and the picture struck me as one of the most pathetic and beautiful recorded in theNew Testament. No longer I saw Paul as the hunter of heretics, the fanatical convert, the tireless preacher of a new creed, but as a little old man in chains waiting for the headsman’s axe and writing to Timothy: “I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” This was before his second trial. Then there follow the sad brave lines, “Demas hath forsaken me . . . only Luke is with me . . . At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me . . . the Lord stood with me and strengthened me . . . I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.” In other words, they could not throw Paul to the wild beasts because he claimed his Roman citizenship; so they slew him with the headsman’s axe.
How do we know Onesimus was a mere boy, when with Paul in Rome? This question will be answered fully in the chapter on John and Apollos. Suffice to say, Rome had such a surplus of slaves from conquest—there were more than 30,000 Jews enslaved after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.—that only those between the ages of eighteen and thirty were considered of the slightest monetary value. Past thirty, they had either won their freedom in war, in gladiatorial combat, by purchase, or had been “worked out” and relegated to the mines, or the farm plantations, or the galley ships, to die. Onesimus would not have been worth passage money back to Philemon, if he had been old. The value of a slave had fallen to $18 of modern money at this time. Human life was the cheapest and least sacred thing in the world market. Slavery was the dry rot eating away the underpinnings of the Roman Empire; for while, of a population of a million and a half in Rome at this time, a tenth of the people rolled in a luxury undreamed before or since, that tenth lived by sapping the life blood of the slave hordes, who numbered in Rome alone, almost a million of the populace.
The theater and judgment hall at Cæsarea, where Paul pleaded his case before the young Herod rulers, are fully described in Josephus, or in such modern works as have already been mentioned, or in Dr. Taylor’sPaul(1881). The city, itself, was reputed to have a population of 200,000; but it was detested by the Jews and chiefly peopled by Greeks, Phœnicians, Romans, and the riff-raff of Rome’s Asiatic world. Jerusalem was to the Jew the Holy City but Cæsarea was the city of the conqueror. Here were held the carnivals, the free feasts, the races where the chariot wheels wore grooves in the stones, the gladiatorial combats, the torture of prisoners, the wild-beast combats, and all the hippodrome exhibitions by which Rome tried to hold the populace loyal. Josephus gives a description of the Herod here who had caused the death of James, the great scene in the judgment hall, when the Herod, who was Bernice’s first husband, appeared in coat of silver mail; how the owl flying in was observed as an omen of ill; and the King fell in a fit of apoplexy either from overeating or intestinal troubles.
By the time Paul and Peter perished in Rome, more than nine Christian bishops had been tortured in the public forums and relegated as broken wrecks to the mines. All these details will be found in the authorities already quoted.
APPENDIX BOLD DOCUMENTS AND MODERN VIEWSON THE HEROD FAMILY
The many disputed points preceding the fall of the Holy City do not enter into this story; but as many students may care to follow up the history for themselves, the facts of the case with the pros and cons may be set forth.
Was the Apollos of Paul’s letters the same as Apollonius the great sage of Asia Minor, variously known as a reformer, a gnostic, a mystic, but refusing to ally himself with any government or any church? The early Fathers’ antagonism to the Gnostics was so bitter that a record of it would fill many volumes.
The New Testament references to Apollos may be counted on one hand. We hear of him first in theActs, date about 54 A.D., “And a certain Jew named Apollos born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man was instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in the spirit, he spoke and taught diligently the things of the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John. And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue; whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly. And when he was disposed to pass into Achaia, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him; who, when he was come, helped them much which had believed through grace: for he mightily convinced the Jews and that publicly, shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ. And it came to pass that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the upper coasts, came to Ephesus.” These words are written by Luke.
We next find Paul writing to the Corinthians from Philippi about 59 A.D., “Every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. . . . For while one saith, I am of Paul and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed? . . . I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. . . . Therefore let no man glory in men . . . whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas . . . and these things . . . I have transferred to myself and to Apollos for your sakes. . . . As touching our brother Apollos, I greatly desired him to come unto you with the brethren; but his will was not to come at this time; but he will come when he shall have convenient time.” Then in a letter to Titus, now Bishop of Crete, about 65 A.D., Paul begs Titus to bring “Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey diligently, that nothing be wanting unto them.” Titus, it should be added, was a Greek.
This is practically all that is said of Apollos, Paul’s coworker, in theNew Testament, except that in one of the early Luke manuscripts on theActs, Apollos is given as Apollonius; see Turner’sEarly Church History.
In Ignatius’ letter to the Magnesians, there is a reference to Apollonius as a presbyter in the Asiatic Greek Church.
Many authorities, among them Luther, considered that this Apollos wrote theHebrews.
As to Apollonius, the Gnostic and Sage of Cappadocia, he shunned fame and the populace to such an extent, though a temple was built and named after him by a collateral descendant of the same family as rescued Thecla, no authentic life of Apollonius was written till many years after his activities had ceased. It is his misfortune that the legends of his life and letters, which had passed into the hands of the Emperor Hadrian, were handled by a supercilious court hanger-on, a Greek writer, who knew nothing of the Gnostics and less of the Christians, and would have considered either beneath his notice if he had known. Apollonius’ biographer was Philostratus; and though there are constant references to him in early writings as a reformer, a revivalist, a miracle or magic-worker, no other authoritative life of him has been given than Philostratus’, drawn from notes compiled by Damis, Apollonius’ secretary. He seemed to have aroused as violent controversies in his lifetime as since his death. His learning and piety, no one disputed. His purity of life was known from India to Rome. He was born rich and deeded his property over to his brother and his poor relatives. Yet so great was the veneration of the populace and royalty for him, wherever he went he lacked naught and traveled in great estate. He was born at Tyana sometime just before or after the birth of Christ; but like Paul born at Tarsus, he might still have been a Grecian Jew; and having studied in Egypt, when young, his birthplace might easily have been confused as Alexandria. By one class he was regarded as “a sorcerer,” “a quack,” “a bonesetter in religion”; by another class, as a miracle-worker and great revivalist; but we must not forget that the Greeks first called Paul “a beggarly babbler.” He had the gift of clairvoyance or prophecy, and foretold the famine mentioned in theActs, the murder of Domitian, and many other events of the period. In his public addresses, he quoted repeatedly the language of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul—in fact, nine such phrases can be picked out of Philostratus’Life of Apollonius—to my mind one of the most striking being where he speaks of “seeing through a glass darkly”—which his enemies called the superstition of crystal gazing. Origen thought him a sorcerer. Eusebius called him a philosopher, and in legend he became in Greek-Asia a sort of St. George, or St. Patrick. He was known to have been in Ephesus, Corinth and Crete from 60 to 65 A.D. Like Paul, he had studied in Tarsus. At sixteen, he became a vegetarian or wandering evangelist, like the Essenes. He undoubtedly possessed the power of healing and refused all gifts for it. At Daphne Gardens, he incurred enmity by calling the men “brute beasts.” His lodging was always in the temples. He seemed to prefer to preach in the pagan temples, either because he would be sure of a large audience, or secure from interruption, or to find people whose spirits were blindly reaching for God. He studied in Egypt, Ethiopia, India and Persia.
Of translations of his life there have been many, Berwick’s one of the earliest English, Phillimore’s, Mead’s and Flinders Petrie’s, the best of the latest. Phillimore’s is bitter towards other translators. Mead’s would, of course, be biased as both Gnostic and Theosophic; but Flinders Petrie’s can hardly be accused of any bias but scholarship. Thanks to Flinders Petrie, the details of Apollonius’ life are now known more fully than any other Apostle except Paul. There are still differences as to certain dates, but roughly, I think the following dates are accepted by the majority of scholars. Please compare with Paul’s letters.
Born 4 or 6 B.C.
Tarsus 11 A.D. as a student.
16 to 21 A.D. under the discipline of speechless silence traveling through Asia Minor and the East.
23 to 43 A.D. teaching, preaching, studying in Antioch.
43 to 45 A.D. India and Persia.
45 to 46 A.D. Crete, Sparta, Athens, Corinth.
46 to 59 A.D. unknown.
59 to 65 A.D. Corinth, Ephesus, Crete, Greek Asia.
66 to 68 A.D. Greece, Rome, Spain, Africa, Sicily.
69 A.D. Egypt and Alexandria and Phœnicia and Antioch and the East.
83 A.D. Ephesus and Crete.
Somewhere here he suffered trial for disrespect to Emperors; a most dramatic story as given by Phillimore.
83 to 96 A.D. preaching and teaching in Ephesus and Crete.
When he had reached the age of a century, he disappeared in Crete as told in a later chapter.
Where Paul went out for the Gentiles to call sinners to repentance, and Peter seems to have gone among the dispersed Jews of the Euphrates and Rome, Apollos went forth to call “the righteous” to repentance; and from the records of the times, the call to the sod-bound “righteous” seemed as badly needed as the call to the sinners.
Now whether Apollos were Apollonius, I do not know. They lived in the period in the same places. For fiction purposes to throw the flashlight on the conditions under which the Apostles labored, it does not matter; but granted he may have been, isn’t there a dilemma in having him East of the Dead Sea, on his way back from the Far East?
Didn’t Apollonius, according to the legendary life of him, come back from India by the Red Sea to Egypt? Didn’t he meet Vespasian in Alexandria; and wasn’t he sent by Vespasian on an errand to Tarsus, North of Palestine? How then, would he go East of the Dead Sea towards Damascus? Fiction could brush these questions aside as immaterial in a story; but it does not need to. From 66 to 70, every port in Egypt, Palestine and Grecian Asia was packed with the Roman Armies hurrying to crush Jerusalem. Christians had already hurried east of the Jordan and Dead Sea to hide in the caves of the desert as Christ had warned them to do, when he foretold the destruction of the Holy City. Travelers from the Far East to Grecian Asia had to follow the Damascus Road; for they could not safely venture in the war zone of the Coast and Jerusalem.
How do we know Peter was in Babylonia? Because he says so in one of his letters. Critics say the Babylonia he mentions is really Rome. I leave that dispute wide open. There is no proof Paul and Peter were together in Rome, when the former was executed. Paul’s death is given variously as between 67 and 69 A.D. Note John’s references in theApocalypseto “the two witnesses” in the other world! If Peter hastened from the Euphrates to take up the work of Paul’s dispersed followers in Rome—and there is no proof of Peter being elsewhere in these years—he must have hastened for Rome almost contemporaneous with the revolt that ended in the overthrow of Jerusalem; for his death by crucifixion took place soon after Paul’s. Onesimus’ trip to Peter in the East is, of course, pure fiction, for Peter’s first round-robin letter to the churches of Asia was sent by Silvanus, a friend of Paul; and very few details are known of the second letter. They are dated 60 to 66 A.D. The Vatican books in this period are invaluable to all students of early Christianity. They reject ruthlessly all fabulous stories. See “Pope’s Aids to the Bible,” Vol. II; and Fouard’s “St. Peter.”
How do I infer that in the siege of Jerusalem the Herod women were sent for safety to the Herod Fort east of the Dead Sea instead of west? First, because the Herod Fort on the west side of the Dead Sea was in the hands of the rabble zealots and bandits, and was therefore against Rome and the Herods. It was one of the first forts to be reduced after Jerusalem. Second, because the Herod Fort east of the Dead Sea was always an arsenal of defence against revolt and against the invasion of Arab and Idumean from the east. Here, the Herods had their family country place in distinction from the Palace in Jerusalem and from the public buildings in Cæsarea on the sea. Here, Herod the Great entertained Cleopatra and spurned her blandishments. Here, the Herods retired with their families for family conference and often for the most terrible crimes known in family history. It was a secret fort. Here were the sulphur baths. Near Jericho were their pleasure gardens. Here, it is now almost universally agreed, John Baptist was imprisoned and executed; and Herod the Great passed the hideous days preceding his hideous death. I can’t prove it was where they were kept for safety during the siege of Jerusalem; but it does not seem to me there was any other place where they could have been safely kept; for Cæsarea was in wild disorder. Bernice had gone down to Jerusalem from her old spouse in Syria to lay her plans for Titus, the Roman general; but as far as we know until the end, she was not in the siege. Agrippa was with the Roman forces throughout. Herodias’ madness and remorse can be found in her banished husband’s letters. The final fate of the last of the Herods beneath Vesuvius’ eruption can be found in Josephus.
Letters from Pilate to Herod, from Herod to Pilate, give the data as to Herodias’ blindness. In these letters, Herodias’ daughter is referred to as a younger Herodias, not as Salome. Therefore I left Salome out of these stories. The fiction woven about Salome’s name in modern literature seems to me the most perfect example of sensualizing and degrading biblical records that could be devised. The most cursory glance at the Herod family tree show she must have been little more than a baby at the time of the Baptist’s death—certainly under eight or ten. When you consider the colossal pyramid of unclean modern literature and music built on Salome’s name, it isn’t much of a testimony to the modern heart being much cleaner than the Herod heart which we condemn.
The superstition of the flower foretelling the lovers’ fate, which has come down to our own day in the petals of the field daisy, dates back to the very lotus flower worship of India and Egypt.
The legendary “Ardath, the Field of Flowers” is, of course, from the Persian and will be found in theBook of Esdras. In fact, to understand this whole era, no student should fail to readEsdrasandEnoch, which are parallel in writing and sentiment toDanielandRevelation. Pilate’s fate and letters will be found in theApocryphal New Testament.
Malden thinks from Paul’s letters to the people of Thessaly 54 A.D. that, up to the assault on Jerusalem in 69-70, many of the Christians still looked for Christ’s second coming in glory and majesty and power; but in the letter to Cornith, when Paul had drawn his immortal picture of “the celestial body,” it is evident the Christians knew they were working for and in an Invisible Kingdom such as Onesimus described. Malden gives the correct chronology in which the books of the New Testament were written; so that one can follow the fuller and higher and closer outlook the workers were attaining of their own mission.
Details on the trails down to the Jordan at this time can be found in Josephus, or Thomson’s famousLand and the Book. There is a full description of Machærus Fort in Thomson also.
It is interesting to note that the Roman Consul, who befriended Paul at Corinth in the days of his work with Apollos, was Junius Galleo, a relative of Seneca’s, which seems to bear out that Paul and Seneca knew each other in Rome. In this period before Paul’s death, Burrhus, Nero’s handy man, was sent again and again on messages from the Jews of Cæsarea and Ephesus to Rome.
Where was Mariamne, Herod the Great’s proud wife, murdered by him? Her tomb has recently been discovered near Jerusalem; but it was in the Fort east of the Dead Sea that Herod went mad with remorse over his crime against her.