MR. BARING-GOULD ON ST. PAUL.*

THOSE who best know Mr. Baring-Gould's work will be least surprised to hear that this is a strange book. We are accus- tomed to see the documents included in the Canon treated with considerable freedom. But this freedom is commonly exercised on questions of authenticity, authorship, and date, on supposed interpolations, and other matters that come within the province of criticism. This is not Mr. Baring- Gould's method. He accepts the narrative of the Acts and the Epistles attributed to St. Paul pretty much as they stand. He does not distinguish between the four letters which all are agreed in accepting, and the disputed group to which Ephesians and Colossians belong, and the still more questioned Pastoral Epistles. His freedom of treatment is shown in a very bold handling of the Apostle's career and character. The portrait of St. Paul which results after the " study " is complete is very different from the familiar con. ception of him.

In the first place, Mr. Baring-Gould questions his secular learning. He was brought up on the narrowest plan of Hebrew teaching, made familiar with the knowledge that formed the staple subject of the Rabbinical schools, but kept in absolute ignorance of Hellenic belles-lettres and philosophy. If he quotes now and then a Greek poet it is only because such fragments of verse were floating about in common con- verseion. Of course there has been much exaggeration about St. Paul's general culture. A half line from Aratus and a whole line from Epimenides—the verse from Menander is not given in its metrical form—do not prove much. On the other hand, the culture is not disproved. It is possible that the relaxation of Hebrew strictness which certainly took place at Alexandria, which enabled Philo to become what he was, may also have existed at Tarsus. There was much, intellectual movement at Tarsus, and it may have touched the Hebrew community. And the general impression left by the Pauline Epistles is that of a writer who was familiar with. great models. No mere colloquial knowledge of Greek could have produced such writing. The splendid rhythm of the more rhetorical passages cannot possibly have been the accidental accomplishment of an unlettered man.

It is a more serious matter when we find it asserted that "Paul never had a liberal mind ; it was essentually narrow and one-sided. He swung from one pole to the other in his. convictions, but he never saw more than one horizon at a time [there never can be but one horizon to any vision], never- allowed gradations." The question is too large to argue here. But need we go beyond the utterance in Gal. iii. 28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek ; there is neither bond nor free ; there is neither male nor female "P That is a point which the world is still a long way off reaching.

We shall comment on a few of the points made, or sought to be made, by Mr. Baring-Gould as they occur. In the account of Stephen before the Sanhedrim, it is certainly a note- worthy suggestion that when it is said that the Deacon's face seemed to all that sat in the Council "an it had been the face of an angel," it was an expression of wrath such as that which terrified the keepers of the tomb on the Easter morning rather than of spiritual beauty. The temper which the speaker showed before he had got far on with his subject was certainly not what we should commonly call "angelic," for it, manifestly provoked the outbreak which took place.

In speaking of the missionary preaching Mr. Baring-Gould

• A Study of St. Paul: kis Character and Opinions. By S. Bariag-Gould, KA> London; 'abider and Co.

exaggerates, we think, the Hebraism of the Apostle's thought and expression. We cannot allow that the "Epistles are saturated with Mosaism," and that consequently his speech must have been such as a pagan audience could hardly have nnderstood. The multitude at Lystra which compared him to Hermes, the god of elcquence, could hardly have received that impression. Our author will have it that it was only very rarely that he attempted to address a non-Jewish audience. On one such occasion, of which we have a minute description, doubtless communicated by the Apostle himself to the historian, St. Paul's speech was, according to his latest critic, "a failure." "He tried to bring in too much, his entire system, and to introduce mysteries his audience was totally unprepared to receive." That it was a failure may

be conceded, but only from circumstances over which the speaker had no control. It was the audience, not the address, that was at fault. That the Apostle made "a blunder" when he spoke of the inscription to an "Unknown God " we cannot allow, or that he had "misread and wholly misconceived the dedication." St. Jerome, indeed, gives a colour to the idea when he writes : " Inscriptio arm non ita erat ut Pauline amnia ignoto Deo ; sed ita : Diis Asim et Europm et Africa), Diis ignotis et peregrinis"; but the lan-

guage of Pausanias and Philostratus may be taken without straining to support the accuracy of St. PauL The Galatian experiences of St. Paul bring us into contact with that very curious document, the Acts Theclie. Mr. Baring-Gould agrees with Professor Ramsay in accepting this as a substantially authentic and contemporary narrative. It suggests to him a curious, and, we feel bound to say, a not improbable, explanation of an obscure passage in 1 Cor. vii., vhere the Apostle is comparing the advantages of the -na.rried and the unmarried life. That there was a practice in the Primitive Church of spiritual alliances between men and unmarried women, and that these had ultimately to be forbidden, may be taken as certain. Mr. Baring-Gould says :—

"St. Paul addresses himself to this custom in writing to the Corinthians, and his words may be thus paraphrased, There is a difference between a wife and a female companion. It is much better to be attended by the latter, and to live in platonic affection, because then the time of the woman is not taken up with domestic -affairs. But if one so living finds that his affection is ripening into love, by all means let him marry her.'"

The Revisers have inserted " daughter " after the words, "if a man thinketh that he behaveth himself unseemly towards his

virgin," but the word does not seem in place. "Behaveth him- self unseemly" (cioxye‘oyfiv) looks much more like the scandal that might arise out of such a companionship than the im-

putation of arbitrary conduct which a father unduly dis- .couraging his daughter's marriage might incur. This, Mr. Baring-Gould thinks, was the relation between St. Paul and Thekla, not of the Apostle's choice, but rather forced upon :him by the enthusiastic woman, and accepted as the only means of rescuing her from a hateful marriage with a heathen suitor.

It is somewhat strange to find after this that our author is somewhat inclined to believe that St. Paul was married, or would have been married "but for untoward circumstances," to Lydia, the purple-seller of Thyatira, whom be converted .at Philippi. The reason for this conjecture has some force,—

that "it was from her and the Philippians alone that he con- descended to receive money." She is not mentioned by name among the salutations in the Epistle, but is possibly the "true yoke-fellow" who is entreated to help the women who

laboured with the Apostle. Clement of Alexandria and Eueebius understand the person addressed 014.-1.5 to mean " wife ; " but this seems unlikely in the context, even if the gender of the adjective yvieiE were not an insuperable objection. But the conclusively adverse passage is 1 Cor. vii., where the writer distinctly speaks of himself as unmarried. Our author for once, we feel bound to say, offends against good taste when he speaks of the incongruous appearance which this supposed couple must have presented. He must have been aware that his book would anyhow be bound to

vex many devout souls, and might have spared them this jest.

We cannot help thinking that Mr. Baring-Gould is too much inclined to play the part of advocates diaboli. It is unfair, for instance, to press the illustration of the wild olive-tree in Romans to show the writer's ignorance of Nature. It might fairly be argued that the grafting of the wild olive is purposely used as being an impossibility, to show what a miracle of grace the admission of the Gentile into the privileges of the Divine Covenant was. Nor did St. Paul show himself indifferent to the welfare of the brutes when he spoke of the precept as to not muzzling the ox that trod out the corn being written for man's sake. This was a highly rhetorical way of saying that the ultimate end of all man's relations with the lower creatures is the development of his moral and spiritual nature. That the ox should not leave the threshing-floor hungry was but a small matter in comparison with the gain of his master in the cultivation of a generous temper.

But with all its faults this book is suggestive and stimulating.