The life and work of St. Paul

SAUL'S RECEPTION AT JERUSALEM. 133
learning, might hare led him yet earlier to take a few hours' sail from Cyprus
to see what could be learnt in the University of Tarsus. If so, he would
naturally have come into contact with the family of Saul, and the friendship
thus commenced would be continued at Jerusalem. It had been broken by the
conversion of Barnabas, it was now renewed by the conversion of Saul.
Perhaps also it was to this friendship that Saul owed his admission as a
guest into Peter's house. There was a close link of union between Barnabas
and Peter in the person of Mark, who was the cousin l of Barnabas, and whom
Peter loved so tenderly that he calls him his son. The very house in which
Peter lived may have been the house of Mary, the mother of Mark. It is
hardly probable that the poor fisherman of Galilee possessed any dwelling of
his own in the Holy City. At any rate, Peter goes to this house immediately
after his liberation from prison, and if Peter lived in it, the relation of
Barnabas to its owner would have given him some claim to ask that Saul
should share its hospitality. Generous as Peter was, it would have required
an almost superhuman amount of confidence to receive at once under his roof
a man who had tried by the utmost violence to extirpate the very fibres of the
Church. But if one so highly honoured as Barnabas was ready to vouch for
him, Peter was not the man to stand coldly aloof. Thus it happened that
Saul's earliest introduction to the families of those whom he had scattered
would be made under the high auspices of the greatest of the Twelve.
The imagination tries in vain to penetrate the veil of two thousand years
which hangs between us and the intercourse of the two Apostles. Barnabas,
we may be sure, must have been often present in the little circle, and must
have held many an earnest conversation with his former friend. Mary, the
mother of Mark, would have something to telL 2 Mark may have been an eyewitness
of more than one pathetic scene. But how boundless would be the
wealth of spiritual wisdom which Peter must have unfolded ! Is it not certain
that from those lips St. Paul must have heard about the Divine brightness of
the dawning ministry of Jesus during the Galilaean year about the raising of
Jairus' daughter, and the Transfiguration on Hermon, and the discourse in the
synagogue of Capernaum, and the awful scenes which had occurred on the
day of the Crucifixion ? And is it not natural to suppose that such a hearer
a hearer of exceptional culture, and enlightened to an extraordinary degree by
the Holy Spirit of God would grasp many of the words of the Lord with a
firmness of grasp, and see into the very inmost heart of their significance
with a keenness of insight, from which his informant might, in his turn, be
glad to learn ?
It must be a dull imagination that does not desire to linger for a moment
on the few days during which two such men were inmates together of one
obscure house in the city of Jerusalem. But however fruitful their inter-
course, it did not at once secure to the new disciple a footing among the
1 Col. iv. 10.
2 St. John and other Apostles were probably absent, partly perhaps as a consequence
of the very persecution in which Paul had been the prime mover.