The life and work of St. Paul

126 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL.
ominent of Jewish schools, his earliest appearances on the arena of controversy
would be awaited with contention and curiosity. We have no reason to
suppose that the animosity against the Nazarenes, which Saul himself had
kept ah've in Jerusalem, had as yet penetrated to Damascus. News is slow to
travel in Eastern countries, and those instantaneous waves of opinion which
flood our modem civilisation were unknown to ancient times* In the capital
of Syria, Jews and Christians were still living together in mutual toleration,
if not in mutual esteem. They had been thus living in Jerusalem until the
spark of hatred had been struck out by the collision of the Hellenists of the
liberal with those of the narrow school the Christian Hellenists of the
Hagadoth with the Jewish Hellenists of the Halacha. To Saul, if not solely,
yet in great measure, this collision had been due ; and Saul had been on his
way to stir up the same wrath and strife in Damascus, when he had been
resistlessly arrested 1 on his unhallowed mission by the vision and the
reproach of his ascended Lord.
But the authority, and the letters, had been entrusted to him alone, and
none but a few hot zealots really desired that pious and respectable persons
like Ananias children of Abraham, servants of Moses should be dragged,
with a halter round their necks, from peaceful homes, scourged by the people
with whom they had lived without any serious disagreement, and haled to
Jerusalem by fanatics who would do their best to procure against them the
fatal vote which might consign them to the revolting horrors of an almost
obsolete execution.
So that each Euler of a Synagogue over whom Saul might have been
domineering with all the pride of superior learning, and all the intemperance
of flaming zeal, might be glad enough to see and hoar a man who could no
longer hold in terror over him the commission of the Sanhedrin, and who had
now rendered himself liable to the very penalties which, not long before, he
had been so eager to inflict.
And had Saul proved to be but an ordinary disputant, the placidity of
Jewish self-esteem would not have been disturbed, nor would he have ruffled
the sluggish stream of legal self-satisfaction. He did not speak of circumcision
as superfluous he said ;
nothing about the evanescence of the Temple
service, or the substitution for it of a more spiritual worship. He did not
breathe a word about turning to the Gentiles. The subject of his preaching
was that "Jesus is the Son of God." 2 At first this preaching excited no
special indignation. The worshippers in tho synagogue only felt a keen
astonishment 3 that this was the uiau who had ravaged in Jerusalem thosa
who called on " this name," 4 and who had coine to Damascus for the express
Priest. But when once self-love
purpose of leading them bound to tho High
is seriously wounded, toleration rarely survives. This was the case with tho
Jews of Damascus. They very soon discovered that it was no mere Ananias
* Phil. iii. 12, icaTA.!J0jjv irirb ToO Xpiorov 'IrjcroS.
3
'lipn/vv, not xptarbc, ia here the true reading (, A, B, O, E).
Acts ix.
*
21, ItitrnvTo,
V.