The life and work of St. Paul

222 THE LIFE AND WORK O*1 St. PAtTL.
Jews rose in arms. Who were these obscure innovators who dared to run
counter to the cherished hopes and traditional glories of well-nigh twenty
centuries ? Who were these daring heretics, who, in the name of a faith
which all the Rabbis had rejected, were thus proclaiming to the Gentiles the
abandonment of all exclusive claim to every promise and every privilege which
generations of their fathers had held most dear ?
But this was not all. To abandon privileges was unpatriotic enough ; but
what true Jew, what observer of the Halachah, could estimate the atrocity of
apostatising from principles? Had not Jews done enough, by freely ad-
mitting into their synagogues the Proselytes of the Gate ? Did they not
even offer to regard as a son of Israel every Gentile who would accept the
covenant rite of circumcision, and promise full allegiance to the Written and
Oral Law ? But the new teachers, especially Paul, seemed to use language
which, pressed to its logical conclusion, could only be interpreted as an
utterly slighting estimate of the old traditions, nay, even of the sacred rite of
circumcision. It is true, perhaps, that they had never openly recommended
the suppression of this rite ; but it was clear that it occupied a subordinate
place in their minds, and that they were disinclined to make between their
Jewish and Gentile converts the immensity of difference which separated a
Proselyte of Righteousness from a Proselyte of the Gate.
It is very possible that it was only the events of this journey which finally
matured the views of St. Paul on this important subject. The ordinary laws
of nature had not been reversed in his case, and as he grew in grace and in the
knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, so his own Epistles, 1
though each has
its own divine purpose, undoubtedly display the kind of difference in his way
of developing the truth which we should ordinarily attribute to growth of
mind. And it is observable that St. Paul, when taunted by his opponents
with having once been a preacher of circumcision, does not meet the taunt by
a denial, but merely by saying that at any rate his persecutions are a sign that
now that time is over. In fact, he simply thrusts aside the allusion to the past
by language which should render impossible any doubts as to his sentiments iu
the present. In the same way, in an earlier part of his Epistle, 2 he anticipates
the charge of being a time-server a charge which he know to be false in
spirit, while yet the malignity of slander might find some justification of it in
his broad indifference to trifles not by any attempt to explain his former line
of action, but by an outburst of strong denunciation which none could mistake
for men-pleasing or over-persuasiveness. Indeed, in the second chapter of
the Galatians, St. Paul seems distinctly to imply two things. The one is that
it was the treacherous espionage of false brethren that first made him regard
the question as one of capital importance; the other that his views on
the subject were at that time so far from being final, that it was with &
certain amount of misgiving as to the practical decision that he went up to the
1 2 Cor. v. 16 ; 1 Cor. xiii. 9 12. Bengel says that when tlie Epistles are arrangedchronologically,
" incrementum apostoli spirituals cognoscitur " (p. 5S3),
* Gal. i. 10.