The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03

But Paul knew well that doctrines alone would be insufficient to rouse the heathen world from its demoralized state, its dreary and stupid dreams; and he resorted to the most terrible and most shocking of all messages. He came to the heathens with the terror-striking proclamation, "The end is nigh!" The whole earth, with all the creatures thereon; the whole human family, with all its wickedness, all its atrocious crimes, will be destroyed in one moment. All of you, men, women, and children, with all your vices and crimes, will be suddenly summoned before the Eternal and All-just; you have to go, all of you, and appear before the omniscient God. The end is nigh, the destruction of the human family is certain and right before you. It will come soon. It may come any day, at any moment.

Now Paul's gospel came in. Here is your choice. There are death and damnation; here are life and happiness everlasting. God has sent his Son in advance of the approaching catastrophe to warn you, and he is appointed now to conduct the end of all flesh. Cling to him and be saved, or believe not and be condemned forever. So he came to the heathens. This was his gospel. How did he succeed? We will explain after a brief pause.

All passages in the Gospels and the Acts which have reference to the above Christology, to the end of things or against it--in which the synoptics most fatally contradict one another--are the products of writers long after Paul, when the attempts to reconcile Jewish and Gentile Christianity were made. For with Paul begins the new form of Christianity and the struggle with the representatives of the old form. Within ten years he traversed the land from Antioch to Athens, in three different journeys, and established his bishopric, the first Christian congregations among the Gentiles. He organized them fully, with deacons and deaconesses, preachers and prophets; and he was their bishop, their oracle, their revelation, and their demi-god. He let his converts believe that they could do wonderful things, in healing the sick, driving out demons, prophesying and speaking with strange tongues, because it served his purposes, although he did none of these things. He gave them the Holy Ghost, i.e., he regenerated their feelings and pacified their stormy passions, suppressed their brutal lusts, and elevated their aspirations to higher ideals. He did not feel that sovereign contempt for money which the Master did whom he glorified; for he, like the other apostles, took his pay, and argued with the Corinthians, like a good Pharisean lawyer, that bishops and preachers must be paid--an argument well understood by the dignitaries of the Church to this day.

Wonderful, indeed, is the progress which Paul made among the Gentiles in ten years. Like a pillar of fire, he traversed the deserts of heathenism; like a second Elijah, he battled against the priests and prophets of Baal, and conjured down the fire from heaven to his assistance. Within ten years he laid the foundation of a new civilization, of the reorganization of society on the new basis. He did not live to see it realized, but he saw the new system take root and promise golden fruit. Wonderful, we maintain, was his success; for he was not only opposed by the entire heathen world, and by the orthodox Jews, although he proclaimed their God and their doctrines, their religion and their hopes, but was also most strenuously opposed by the apostles and the nascent congregation in Jerusalem, whose Master he glorified, and whose cause he made the cause of the world. The dissensions between Paul and the apostles were of a very serious character, and there was ample cause for them.

In the first place, he took it upon himself to be an apostle, and they had their college of Twelve, to which none could be added, especially not Paul, who had never seen Jesus of Nazareth. He maintained that God had appointed him, God had revealed his Son and his Gospel to him; but the apostles did not believe it, and never acknowledged him as an apostle. At the end of his journeys, Peter, James, and John, three out of Twelve, acknowledged him as an apostle to the Gentiles, but not to the Jews. The rest never did, which, of course, was a great trouble and drawback to Paul among his own converts.

In the second place, they could never forgive him for the idea of going to the Gentiles. Peter, who had become a pious Essene and considered it unlawful to go to the house or into the company of a Gentile; James, who dreaded the idea of eating of the bread of the Gentile, and made a hypocrite in this point of Peter at Antioch--and they were the heads of the Church--could not forgive Paul's innovation in going to the Gentiles. Paul was sensible enough to silence them by begging money for them, and to appoint the Sunday for collections to be made for the saints of Jerusalem. But it was too much for them that Paul went to the Gentiles.

In the third place, he changed their whole religion into a new sort of mythology. He made of Jesus a Son of God, of which they had no knowledge. He preached vicarious atonement, bodily resurrection, the end of the old covenant and the beginning of a new, the end of all flesh, the last judgment--all of which was foreign to them; not one word of all that had their Master told them, and they knew only what he did tell them. They naturally looked upon him as an unscrupulous innovator. They had not experience and forethought enough to understand that Paul's success among the heathens depended on that means. They were pious men who prayed much, believed seriously, and had no knowledge of the world as it was.

In the fourth place, they could not possibly give their consent to Paul's abrogation of the whole law, knowing, as they did, how their Master respected every tittle, every iota of the law; that he had come to fulfil the law, and to reëstablish the theocracy; how could they possibly think of the idea of abolishing Sabbath and holidays, circumcision and ablutions, all and everything, to be guided by the phantom of hope, love, and faith, against which James argues in his epistle with all the energy of his soul? Those inexperienced saints did not know that the Pharisean doctors held similar theories, and that Paul could not possibly hope to meet with any success among the Gentiles if he had come to them with the laws of the Jews. They were Roman citizens, who contemned the laws of the barbarians. Had Paul come with the word Judaism on his lips, he would have surely failed. Had he come to enforce a foreign law, he would have been laughed at as a madman. They did not know that Paul cared not for an hundred and one laws, as long as the essence and substance could be saved and preserved; that he held that laws are local, the spirit is universal; that laws are limitations, the spirit is free and the property of all men of all ages and climes; that he was determined to drop everything which could retard his progress.

In the fifth place, and this was the worst, they could not forgive him for preaching the theological kingdom of heaven. A kingdom of Israel--a throne of David, a Davidian prince, a Zion and a Jerusalem in heaven, and slavery, misery, and oppression on earth--was so new and foreign to them, so contrary to what they had heard from their Master, that they could not accept it. What should become of Peter's Messiah, of the hopes and promises connected with the second advent, if all at once the whole scheme is transported from earth to heaven? It was too much disappointment, they could not endure it. Those men did not understand that Paul had carefully to avoid every conflict with the Roman authorities. He was too prudent to be crucified. They could not comprehend that his great object was not to remove the evil at once; he intended to sow the seed, to bring forth the plant; to give to the heathens correct notions of God, duty, responsibility, purity, holiness, morality, justice, humanity, and freedom, which in proper time should necessarily break the chains, revolutionize the sentiments, and elevate the views, hopes, aspirations, and designs of the nations.

They could not comprehend that their Messiah and kingdom of heaven, together with his terrible message of the end of all flesh and the last judgment day, were means, and nothing but means, to captivate and reform the heathen. His Son of God was crucified and resurrected from the dead to forewarn all of the approaching end of all flesh; to show that in a little while all the dead should resurrect and the living should be changed to spiritual beings. He had been given all power by the Almighty to conduct the catastrophe of the world, and would be present at the last judgment day. But after all that is over, the earth and man changed to a new state of spiritual life, then the Son of God returns the kingdom to the Father, and God will be again all in all. So the Son of God was a general superintendent, the demiurge for the time being, a doctrine of which the apostles had no knowledge, and to which they could not give their consent. He could not get them to understand that these were the means for the conversion of the Gentiles, and that he had quite another gospel for the enlightened portion of the community. They could not see that among heathens used to apotheosis, man-worship, and plastic gods, ideas, to become effective, must put on concrete and tangible bodies.

They could not imagine that the sensuality and corruption of the age required heroic and terror-striking means to rouse and to move the masses; and so the dissensions and troubles between Paul and the nascent Church increased with the success of Paul among the Gentiles. His epistles, one and all, are polemics, not against heathenism or against Judaism, but against his colleagues in Jerusalem, whom, together with their doctrines, he treats in a most reckless manner. They could not write to counterbalance Paul--in fact, there were no writers of any note among them. Therefore, only one side of the polemics, that of Paul, is fully represented in the New Testament; and the side of the Jewish Christians remained mostly matter of tradition.

Messengers were sent to follow Paul to undo his gospel and preach that of the apostles; to introduce the law and circumcision among the Gentile Christians. Those messengers in many cases succeeded, notwithstanding the thundering epistles of Paul. So his influence was weakened and his progress retarded among the Gentiles till finally, after ten years of hard work, he concluded upon going to Jerusalem and, if possible, effecting a compromise with the apostolic congregation. It was a dangerous time for him to go to Jerusalem, for just then the fanatic high-priest, Ananias, had convened a court of his willing tools, tried James, the brother of Jesus, and, finding him guilty, of what God only knows, had him and some of his associates executed--a bloody deed, which cost him his office, on account of the loud and emphatic protestations of the Jews before Agrippa II and the Roman governor. Therefore, Paul was cautioned by prophets and friends not to go to Jerusalem.