Chapter IX: Appendix: A

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CONCERNING PAUL’S MISSIONARY TOURS
AND DISPUTED POINTS

“The Christian religion takes its stand upon the ground of history,” says Malden in his _Problems 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 the _Acts_, 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 the _Acts_. 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’ Life_ gives 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 the _Acts_, 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 the _Acts_. 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.

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 the _Acts_ is: “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’s _Babylon 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.

THE FAMILY OF HEROD THE GREAT

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 the _Acts_ and 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 are _not_ in 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 on _Early Church History_, explains why Clement’s _Letters_ are 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 the _King James Version_ came out. Any one who wants to follow up how desperately dissatisfied the King James translators felt with their work, should read the _Journals 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 the _Philemon Letter_, I have followed the Weymouth translation, rather than the _King James Version_, or the _Revised 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 the _New 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’s _Paul_ (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.

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The quenchless lightChapter IX: Appendix: A

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