The life and work of St. Paul

GAITJS AND THE JEWS PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 137
CHAPTER XIV.
CAIUS AND THE JEWS PEACE OF THE CHTJECE.
" Reliqua ut de monstro narranda aunt." SUET. Calig.
IMMEDIATELY after the hasty flight of Saul from Jerusalem, St. Luke adds, 1
" Then had the church rest throughout the whole of Judaea, and Galilee, and
Samaria, being built up, and walking in the fear of the Lord ; and by the
exhortation of the Holy Spirit was multiplied." At first sight it might
almost seem as though this internal peace, which produced such happy
growth, was connected in the writer's mind with the absence of one whose
conversion stirred up to madness the prominent opponents of the Church. It
may be, however, that the turn of his expression is simply meant to resume
the broken thread of his narrative. The absence of molestation, which caused
the prosperity of the faith, is sufficiently accounted for by the events which
were now happening in the Pagan world. The pause in the recorded career
of the Apostle enables us also to pause and survey some of the conflicting
conditions of Jewish and Gentile life as they were illustrated at this time by
prominent events. It need hardly be said that such a survey has an immediate
bearing on the conditions of the Days after Christ, and on the work
of His groat Apostle.
A multitude of concurrent arguments tend to show that Saul was converted
early A.D. 37, and this brief stay at Jerusalem must therefore have
occurred in the year 39. Now in the March of A.D. 37 Tiberius died, and
Gaius whose nickname of Caligula, or " Bootling," given him in his infancy
by the soldiers of his father Germanicus, has been allowed to displace his true
name succeeded to the lordship of the world. Grim as had been the
despotism of Tiberius, he extended to the religion of the Jews that contemptuous
toleration which was the recognised principle of Roman policy. When
Pilate had kindled their fanaticism by hanging the gilt shields in his palace at
Jerusalem, 2 Tiberius, on an appeal being made to him, reprimanded the
officiousness of his Procurator, and ordered him to remove the shields to
Ceesarea. It is true that ho allowed four thousand Jews to be deported from
Rome to Sardinia, and punished with remorseless severity those who, from
dread of violating the Mosiac law, refused to take military service. 3 This
severity was not, however, due to any enmity against the race, but only to his
indignation against the designing hypocrisy which, under pretence of proselytising,
had won the adhesion of Fulvia, a noble Roman lady, to the Jewish
religion ; and to the detestable rascality with which her teacher and his companions
had embezzled the presents of gold and purple which she had
entrusted to them as an offering for the Temple at Jerusalem. Even this did
1 Acts lx. 81, $ niv e&v x>)