The life and work of St. Paul

THE 1PISTUB TO TITOS. 659
the murder of James the Lord's brother. 1 Soon after the accession of Gessius
Floras to the post of Procurator, there were violent disturbances throughout
JndaBa. The war which culminated in the total destruction of the Jewish
polity did not indeed break out till A.D. 66, but the general spirit of
turbulence, the deeply-seated discontent with the government of Agrippa IL
and the threatening multiplication of the Sicarii, showed that everything
was ripening for the final revolt. 1 We may be sure that when the ship of
Adramyttium sailed from Tyre, St. Paul had seen his last of the Holy Land.
From Macedonia he doubtless went to Oorinth, and he may then have sailed
with Titus to Crete.
On the southern shores of that legendary island he had involuntarily
touched in the disastrous voyage from Myra, which ended in his shipwreck
at Malta. But a prisoner on his way to trial, in a crowded Alexandrian
corn-vessel which only awaited the earliest opportunity to sail, could have had
but little opportunity to preach the gospel even at the Fair Havens and Lasyea,
and we may at once reject the idle suggestion that the Church of Crete had
then first been founded. It is probable that the first tidings of Christianity
those Cretan Jews who had heard the
had been carried to the island by
thrilling words of St. Peter at Pentecost ;
and the insufficiency of knowledge
in these Churches may be accounted for in part by these limited opportunities,
as well as by the inherent defects of the Cretan character. The stormy shores
of Crete, and the evil [reputation of its inhabitants even from mythical days,
may well have tended to deter the evangelising visits of the early preachers
of Christianity; and the indication that the nascent faith of the converts
was largely tainted with Jewish superstition is exactly what we should have
expected. St. Paul's brief sojourn in the island with Titus was probably
the first serious effort to consolidate the young, struggling, and imperilled
Churches and we can ;
easily imagine that it was the necessity of completing
an anxious work which reluctantly compelled the Apostle to leave his companion
behind him. The task could not have been left in wiser or firmer
hands than those of one who had already made his influence felt and his
authority respected among the prating and conceited sophists of turbulent
Corinth. Those who argue that, because Paul had but recently parted with
Titus, the advice contained in the letter would be superfluous, are starting a
purely imaginary difficulty, and one of which the futility is demonstrated by
the commonest experiences of daily life. Objections of this kind are simply
astonishing, and when we are told that the instructions given are too vague
and commonplace to render them of any value, and that " the pointlessness of
the directions must have made them all but worthless to an evangelist," 8 we
can only reply that the Christian Church in all ages, in spite of the incessant
tendency to exalt dogma above simple practice, has yet accepted the Pastoral
Epistles as a manual which has never been surpassed.
f
Jos. Antt. rx. 9, 1, 2 ; Acts xii. 111. Jos. B. J. ii. 14, 2.
8
Davidson, Introd. ii. 129 ; Keuss, Lts ii. Eptfres, 333.