HOBART_Medical_Langu.. - Bbc-cromwell.org

NOTE.] THE MEDICAL LANGUAGE OF ST. LUKE. 295
words, also, ware (^aiTopri9i]vai rj/xus koI tov (rjv, ' so that we utterly despaired
even of life,' are such as would not be used of a tumult where life woidd have
been thcjirst thing in danger, if St. Paul had been at all mi.xed up in it, but
are applicable to some wearing and tedious suffering, inducing despondency in
minor matters which even reached the hope of life itself."
And, further, the
words of verse 9 (aAA.' avTol iv kavTots rh air6Kpi/xa tov Qavarov e'o'x'jKaM*''?
"moreover we had in
or death, om- answer, within ourselves,
ourselves the answer of death"—to the question of life
was death—we had no other expectation,
so far as our judgment reached, than that we were to die) point to a
dangerous illness, in which he despaired of recovery.
There is, besides, in the Epistle internal evidence that the Apostle, when he
wrote it, was suffering from ill-health, coupled with deep and wearing anxiety.
Mr. Conybeare {Life of St. Faul, ch. xvii.), while thinking that the "real
weight which pressed upon him was the care of all the Churches," says, "it
has been sometimes supposed that this dejection was occasioned by an increase
of the chronic maladj' {(tk6ko^ iv ffapKl) under which St. Paul suffered, and it
seems not unlikely that this cause may have contributed to the result. He
speaks much in the Epistle, written at this time from Macedonia, of the frailty
of his bodily health (2 Cor. iv. 7 to 2 Cor. v. 10, and also 2 Cor. xii. 7-9), and
in a very affecting passage he describes the earnestness with which he had besought
Ms Lord to take from him this thorn in the flesh, this disease which
continually impeded his efforts, and shackled his energy."
We thus find St. Paul, after a dangerous illness in Asia, and ^^•hile still
labouring under bodily weakness and dejection of spirit,
setting out to Macedonia,
taking Troas on his way, as he expected to meet Titus there with intelligence
respecting the effect produced at Corinth by the First Epistle to the
Corinthians, and, when he does not find him there, proceeding to Philippi,
where he had left St. Luke six years before, and there, with St. Luke,
the return of Titus.
waiting
Taking all the circumstances into account, it cannot well be regarded as an
improbable or arbitrary assumption that one at least of the Apostle's objects in
this visit to Philippi was to have the benefit of "the beloved physician's" advice
on the state of his health. This at all events is remarkable, that now, on a
second occasion, we find St. Paul, after an illness, in company with St. Luke,
and that these two occasions are the only ones, up to this period of the history,
on which we have any record of their meeting one another. It may also have
been with the object of continuing his professional services that St. Luke now,
after presiding for seven years over the Philippian Church, left it, and accompanied
St. Paul on his retmn to Jerusalem.