The life and work of St. Paul

46 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
conversion, had been a married man. It is the extraordinary importance
attached by the majority of Jews in all ages to marriage as a moral duty, nay,
even a positive command, incumbent on every man. 1 The Mishna fixes the
The Baby-
age of marriage at eighteen, 3 and even seventeen was preferred.
lonist Jews fixed it as early as fourteen. 8
Marriage is, in fact, the first of the
613 precepts. They derived the duty partly from the command of Gen. i. 28,
partly from allusions to early marriage in the Old Testament (Prov. ii. 17;
v. 18), and partly from allegorising explanations of passages like EccL xi. 6 ;
Job v. 24.* The Rabbis in all ages have laid it down as a stringent duty that
parents should marry their children young ;
6 and the one or two who, like
Ben Azai, theoretically placed on a higher level the duty of being more free
from incumbrance in order to study the Law, were exceptions to the almost
universal rule. But even these theorists were themselves married men. If
St. Paul had ever evinced the smallest sympathy with the views of the
Therapeutse and Essenes if his discountenancing of marriage, under certain
immediate conditions, had been tinged by any Gnostic fancies about its
essential inferiority we might have come to a different conclusion. But
he held no such views either before or after his conversion;* and certainly,
if he lived unmarried as a Jerusalem Pharisee, his case was entirely
exceptional.
CHAPTER V.
ST. PETER AND THE FIRST PENTECOST.
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