The life and work of St. Paul

724 APPENDIX,
any ground for saying that St. Paul encouraged them, Though he used, on that as on
all such topics, the language of wisdom and of charity, the.whole tendency of his teaching
is to discourage them. 1
Moreover, if Paul had been aimed at, and if St. John, the
Apostle of Love, really had been the slanderous and rabid Judaiser which these allusions
would then imply, it is inconceivable that no word should be said about the points
respecting which, to a Judaiser, he must have seemed infinitely more assailable namely,
St. Paul's very low estimate of circumcision, and his declared conviction that by the
works of the Law no man can be justified in God's sight. Now, in the Apocalypse neither
circumcision, nor the Law, nor Moses, nor oral tradition are scarcely so much as mentioned
or alluded to, a while redemption by the blood of the Lamb, and the universality of
that redemption as extending to "every kindred and tongue and people and nation," 1
are asserted as absolutely and unconditionally as they could have been by Paul himself.
Further, it needs but a casual study of St. John and St. Paul to see that " Jesus Christ "
is in both of them the divine secret and the fundamental conception of all Christianity.
St. John at this time was the more contemplative, the less prominently active, St. John
of the Gospels. " The hidden fires of his nature " had not yet "burst out into a flame."
Two incidents preserved for us in the Gospels had indeed shown that those fires were
there ; 4 but it was not till James the Lord's brother, and Peter, and Paul himself had
'
passed away that he became the bold and uncompromising leader whose counsels were as
oracles to the Asian Church. Nevertheless, we may be sure that St. John was not found
among the opponents of St. Paul. That opposition is always connected with the
adherents and the influence of James. During the lifetime of Jesus James had not fully
accepted His mission, and seems only to have been converted by the Resurrection. He
had not therefore lived, as the other Apostles had lived, in daily contact with the mind
and influence of Jesus, and was in consequence more deeply imbued with the beliefs of
his early Jewish training, and less entirely permeated in intellect by the breath of the
new life. But Peter and John, more than any living men, must have known what was
the mind of Christ. We know that they were one in heart, and we may be sure that
they who had gone together to visit and confirm the detested Samaritans and witness
their participation in the gifts of the Holy Ghost, would be little likely to look with
rabid jealousy on the equal freedom of a yet wider extension of the Kingdom of God.
EXCURSUS XVHI. fo,254).
THE ATTACKS OK ST. PAUL IN THE CLEMENTINES.
THAT Paul, in consequence of the death-blow which he gave to Jewish Pharisaism, was
pursued by a particular section of the Judaeo-Christian Church with unrelenting opposition,
is a matter of history. It needs no further proof than the large sections in his
Epistles which are occupied with arguments against Pharisaic or Gnostic Judaism, such
as had invaded the Churches of Corinth, Galatia, Colossse, and Crete. But true though
it is that he wag obliged to contend in lifelong straggle with a party, it is not true that
he remained long unrecognised by the Church at large. The supposition that he was,
has merely originated from the exceptional literary activity of a single section of
Christian Ebionites. Dr. Lightfoot, in his essay on "St. Paul and the Three," has
shown, by patient and entirely candid investigation, that even the Church of Judaea was
not exclusively anti-Pauline, and that the anti-Pauline faction within it, go far from
representing the tendencies of the whole Christian Church, did not even represent the
Christians of Palestine. The Christian Jews of the Holy Land naturally continued, as a
1 Bee especially 2 Cor. vi. 14. * \Vhich will be explained by Bey. xr.'B.
Rev. v. : vli. 9. Lwtc is. 64 ; Matt. xx. 21.