The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL A HAGADIST. 701
been mingled In his thoughts with the other details of the Roman pomp and that if not
from the Mamertine, yet from some other Roman prison he would only be dragged
forth to die.
EXCURSUS IV. (p. 83).
ST. PAUL A HAQADIST : ST. PAUL AND PHILO.
THERE are two large divisions of Rabbinic lore, which may be classed under the heads
of Hagadoth, or unrecorded legends, and Halachoth, or rules and precedents in explanation
of dubious or undefined points of legal observance. 1 It is natural that there should
be but few traces of the latter in the writings of one whose express object it was to
deliver the Gentiles from the intolerable burden of legal Judaism. But though there is
little trace of them in his writings, he himself expressly tells us that he had once been
enthusiastic in their observance. 2 "I was making," he says to the Galatians, "con-
tinuous advance in Judaism above many who were my equals in age in my own race,
being very exceedingly a zealot for the traditions handed down from my fathers." 8 And
there are in the Epistles abundant signs that with the Hagadoth he was extremely
familiar, and that he constantly refers to them in thought. Thus in 2 Tim. iii. 8 he
traditionally names Jannes and Jambres, two of the Egyptian magicians who withstood
Moses. He adopted the current Jewish chronologies in Acts iii. 20, 21. He alludes to
the notion that the Adam of Gen. i. is the ideal or spiritual, the Adam of Gen. ii. the
concrete and sinful Adam. 4 The conception of the last 5
trumpet, of the giving of the
Law at Sinai by angels, 6 of Satan as the god of this world and the prince of the power
of the 7
air, and of the celestial and infernal 8
hierarchies, are all recurrent in Talmudio
writings. When, in 1 Cor. xi. 10, he says that " a woman ought to have a veil 9 on her
head because of the angels," there can, I think, be no shadow of doubt in the unprejudiced
mind of any reader who is familiar with thrsa Jewish views of the subject in
which St. Paul had been trained, that he is referring to the common Rabbinic interpre-
tations of Gen. vi. 2 (LXX. Cod. A, " the angels "), where the Targum, and, indeed, all
Jewish authorities down to the author of the Book of Enoch (quoted in the Epistle of
Jude), 10 attribute the Fall of the Angels to their guilty love for earthly women. St.
Paul could not have been unaware of a notion which for many ages seems to have been
engrained in the Jewish mind 1] a notion which is found over and over again in the
I I have tried fully to explain the nature of the Halachah and the Hagadah In the Expositor,
October, 1877. The former dealt mainly with the Pentateuch, the latter with the Hagiographa.
Dr. Deutsch "
(Smith's Diet. s. Versions
"
y.
") says, If the Halachah used the Scriptural word as a
last and most awful resort against which there was no further appeal, the Hagadah used it as the
golden nail on which to hang its gorgeous tapestry. If the former was the irou bulwark round the
nationality of Israel, the latter was a maze of flowery walks within those fortress walls."
Gal L 14.
The n-opoSoTif did not mean the written Law, but the Oral Law, the irdrpta Iffy of which
Josephus speaks so much the ; germ, in fact, of the HalacMth of the Mishna and Gomara.
1 Cor. xv. 47. This is also found in Philo, De Opif. Mima. L 82.
1 Cor. xv. 52 ; 1 Thess. iv. 16. Gal. iii. 19.
* Epn, 11. 8.
Eph. i. 21 ; iii. 10 ; vi. 12 ; Col. 1. 16 ; li. 15.
Such, however arrived at, or whatever be the special shade of thought about the use of the
word which may be a mere provincialism is the obvious meaning of efouo-ux in 1 Cor. xL 10. St.
Paul gives three reasons for this rule (1) our instinctive sense that an uncovered head, like a
shaven head, is a dishonour to a woman, whose hair is a glory to her ; (2) the fact that woman's
hair indicates her subordinate position towards man, as man's covered head denotes his subordina-
10 2 Pet ii. 4 Jude ; 6, 14.
tion to God "
; (8) because of the angels."
II The argument that oi ayyeAoi is never used in the New Testament except for good angels la
quite valueless, for the fallen angels were supposed to have been good angels until they fell, and, if
they had fallen thus, there was nothing to show the impossibility that othel-s might similarly fall
This
"
interpretation is given quite unhesitatingly by Tertullian, de Virg. Vtl. 7, propter angelos,
scilicet quos legimus a Deo et coelo excidisse ob coneupiscentiam feminanun." I have thoroughly
examined this point in a paper in the Homiletic Quarterly of 1878, and quoted many Rabbinic illustrations.
(TaMhuma, f. 61, 4 Abhoth of Babbi ; Nathan, c. 84.)