The life and work of St. Paul

CONDITION OF THE CHUECH AT COEINTH. 381
sible to wrest the truths which he himself had taught into the heretical notions
which were afterwards promulgated by Marcion, his keen eye could detect in
the perversions of the Alexandrian eloquence of Apollos the deadly germs of
what would afterwards develop into Antinomian Gnosticism.
ii. But Apollos was not the only teacher who had visited Corinth. Some
Judaic Christians had come, who had been as acceptable to the Jewish mem-
bers of the Church as Apollos was to the Greeks. 1 Armed with commendatory
letters from some of the twelve at Jerusalem, they claimed the authority of
Peter, or, as they preferred to call him, of Kephas. They did not, indeed, teach
the necessity of circumcision, as others of their party did in Galatia. There
the local circumstances would give some chance of success to teaching which
in Corinth would have been rejected with contempt ; and perhaps these particular
emissaries felt at least some respect for the compact at Jerusalem. But
yet their influence had been very disastrous, and had caused the emergence of
a Potrino party in the Church. This party the ecclesiastical ancestors of
those who subsequently vented their hatred of Paul in the Pseudo-Clemen-
tines openly and secretly disclaimed his authority, and insinuated disparagement
of his doctrines. Kephas, they said, was the real head of the Apostles,
and therefore of the Christians. Into his hands had Christ entrusted the keys
of the kingdom ; on the rock of his confession was the Church of the Messiah
to be built. Paul was a presumptuous interloper, whose conduct to Kephaa
at Antioch had been most unbecoming. For who was Paul ? not an Apostle
at all, but an unauthorised innovator. Ho had been a persecuting Sanhedrist,
and he was an apostate Jew. What had he been at Corinth ? A preaching
tent-maker, nothing more. Kephas, and other Apostles, and the brethren of
the Lord, when they travelled about, were accompanied by their wives or by
ministering women, and claimed the honour and support to which they were
entitled. Why had not Paul done the same ? Obviously because he felt the
insecurity of his own position. And as for his coming again, a weak, vacillating,
unaccredited pretender, such as he was, would take care not to come
again. And these preachings of his were heretical, especially in their pronounced
indifference to the Levitic law. Was he not breaking down that
hedge about the law, tho thickening of which had boen the life-long task of
centuries of eminent Rabbis ? Very different had been the scene after
Peter's preaching at Pentecost ! It was tho speaking with tongues not mere
dubious doctrinal exhortation which was the true sign of spirituality. We
are more than sure that the strong, and tender, and noble nature of St. Peter
would as little have sanctioned this subterranean counter-working against the
Apostle of the Gentiles, as Apollos discountenanced the impious audacities
which sheltered themselves under his name.
1 The circumstances of Corinth were very similar when Clement wrote them his first
Epistle. He had still to complain of that "strange and alien, and, for the elect of God,
detestable and unholy spirit of faction, which a few rash and self-willed persons
(irpoawira) kindled to such a pitch of dementation, that their holy and famous reputation,
BO worthy of all men's love, was greatly blasphemed " (Ep. ad. Cor, i.),