THE CITIES OF ST. PAUL.*
THE first part of Sir William Ramsay's volume is not, we think, the most valuable. He sets forth what he calls the "Pauline Philosophy of History." This, briefly put, is that "the history of religion. among men is a history of degenera- tion." The modern theory is, we are told, one of development. It holds that from prehistoric man, the semi-bestial creature who could just fashion the rude implements which it takes a practised aye to distinguish, up to the lateat product of civilisation, there has been a gradual rise, and that we can still Sea something of what man was in the savage. This modern theory our author traverses. St. Paul, he maintains, "would have said that the savage represents the last stage of degeneration, that he is the end, not the beginning." Is this so ? St. Paul never had the savage in his mind. His great indictment of man in Romans i. is an indictment of civilised man. When he was discoursing to his audience at the Areopagus be told them of a beneficent Maker and Father of men, whom His children might have found and known if they had searched for Him aright. The hindering cause, he told the Athenians, was idolatry. This was the thought that then dominated him. The sight of Athens, with all the splendour of its art, bad stirred his spirit. When he wrote to the Romans he put forth another cause which he had been too courteous to insist upon at Athens, —the hindrance had been in the moral corruption of man. But where does he tell us of "the ancient harmony with the order of nature and of sympathy with the Divine" P He looked back to Eden, doubtless, and the Paradisaical life of the sinless pair. But the harmony had never existed outside the Eden gates. Adam's sin had broken it. The very first event in human history was a murder, and the sequel had been like the beginning. There was no room in his philosophy for the Golden Age of which the poets had dreamed.
But whatever we may think of this philosophy of history, whether it be Pauline or not, • there can be no doubt as to the value of what Sir William Ramsay tells us about the influence of St. Paul's surroundings on his thought. This is set forth in Parts II.-VIL Tarsus, of course, occu- pies the first place, and has allotted to it nearly as much space as that assigned to the other four "cities of St. Paul," —the Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Derbe, and Lystra. Into St. Paul's words that God had called him through His grace to reveal His Son in him, that he might preach Him "among the Gentiles," our author reads a full appreciation of the circum- stances of his birth. "There was one nation, one family, and one city out of which the Apostle must arise. The nation was the Jewish ; but the family was not Palestinian, it was Tarsian. Only a Hebrew sprung from Hebrews' could be the Apostle of the perfected Judaic faith ; but be must be born and brought up in childhood among the Gentiles, a citizen of a Gentile city, and a member of that conquering aristocracy of Romans which ruled all the cities of the Mediterranean world." And this combination was actually brought about.
Tarsus, which Sir William Ramsay identifies with the Tarshish of the Old Testament, rejecting the common
The Cities of St. Paul: their Influence on- his Life and Thought: By W. M. Ramsay, Kt., D.C.L. London; Hodder and Stoughton. [12s.]
klentification with Tartessus, was' an early Greek colony. This does not mean that Greeks occupied, a previously uninhabited place and built a town there. Such occupa- tions are uncommon, at least in a region settled from so remote an antiquity as was the Mediterranean littoral. They founded a home for themselves—on what terms we can only guess—in a place previously occupied. Then the Greek element decayed; the situation was not wholly favourable to a vigorous life. We know little or nothing of the history of the city during the period following 850 B.C. (circa), when the Assyrian King, Sbalmaneser, recorded his capture of it. There were Cilician sub-Kings who bore the names of Syenuesis, and played• a somewhat important part in the history of Western Asia. Extant coins show a curious mixture of the Oriental and the Hellenic elements,—Greek heads and Aramaic lettering. The glimpse that we get of the city in Xenophon's .Anabasis shows us the same state of things. Two companies of the Greek army were lost among the Cilician hills, and their comrades execute vengeance on the city of Tarsus, an action which seems to imply that they regarded the place as Persian rather than Greek.
After Alexander's conquest Greek influence naturally revived. The revival was developed by the Seleucid Kings. A colony was planted in Tarsus as elrowbere, and the city for a time actually changed its name to Seleucia-on-the-Cydnus. The change did not last long ; such changes seldom do when there is a great past to which the inhabitants can look back. In the second century B.C. came an important development in the direction of independence. Tarsus received the right to coin. At first it had to submit to another change of name. It was to be Antiochia-on-the-Cydnus. And it was handed over to a Royal favourite, Antiochns. This the Tarsians resented, and Antiochus, we are told, exerted himself to "appease matters," 'a phrase which indicates that he preferred negotiation to force. The new settlers of the Antiochian period seem to have been Greeks and Jews, the latter being probably enrolled in a tribe of their own, as they certainly were at Alexandria. Another element was introduced a little more than a century later with the conquests of Pompey. There were then for the first time Roman Tarsians. So we get the three constituent elements in the personality of Paul,—.1evr, Greek, Roman. Those who know Sir William Ramsay's work will not need to be told that all this is done in the most lucid way, and with a most felicitous use of detail. By great good fortune we are able to get a view of Tarsus during the period before Paul's birth in the Life of Athenodorus (74 B.C.-7 A.D.) Athenodorus had been tutor to the youthful Augustus, and was in touch with him for many years. Nothing could be more honourable to him than what we hear of the way in which he bore himself :—
" In this summary of the few known events of his life Atheno- dorus stands before us as a personage of real distinction and lofty character, no mere empty lecturer and man of words, but a man of judgment, good sense, courage and self-respect, who stooped to no base subservience to a despot, but rebuked his faults sharply, when the greatest in Rome were cowering in abject submission before him, a man of affairs who knew what were his limits and did not overstep them, and a writer, every one of whore few preserved sayings is noble and generous."
Athenodorus retired to Tarsus in B.C. 15, and the city had the advantage of his personal care. One of the later Roman Emperors conceived the idea of handing over a number of cities to the rule of philosophers. The scheme came to nothing. Few Emperors had much time allowed them to carry out their ideas. Tarsus, however, had the privilege of this philosophical government for a while, for Athenodorus had in Nestor, an Academic philosopher, a not unworthy successor. One result of this rule was the development of what may be called, with more or less propriety, the University of Tarsus. That it was a great University, as has been some- times said, surpassing even Athens and Alexandria, is not true. What is true, if we are to believe Strabo—and nothing could be more to the point—is that the Tarsians were very much in earnest about learning. After Tarsus we come to Antioch. The later fate of the two cities is curiously different. Tarsus, now called Tersons, is a fairly flourishing place, in view of the fact that it has been subjected for many centuries to Ottoman rule. Antioch has utterly perished. There are not even ruins to show what it was. The most noticeable relic of the past is a ruined aqueduct, "a work of the best period," our author tells us, speaking as usual from "personal observation, a most valuable characteristic of his work. Of course the importance of the Pisidian Antioch in St. Paul's career is objective. It was here that he is described as including in his message Jew and Gentile. Whatever he may have done in the other Antioch, it is from the Pisidian city that we get the first reported address in which be appeals to both classes. "Men of Israel and ye that fear God, hearken."
Not the least valuable part of Sir William Ramsay's book is the seventh part, in which be sets forth his view of "St. Paul in the Roman World." He traces a change in the Apostle's attitude to the Imperial power. We cannot do better than let him speak for himself. After pointing out that the Apostle's earlier experiences in Asia Minor and Macedonia had been unfavourable, he goes on :—
" In Corinth we find that Paul's attitude towards the Imperial Government had altered. The decision of Gallio (which owing to the force of precedent in Roman administration was practically a charter of freedom for Christians to preach and teach, valid until reversed by some higher tribunal) had something to do with the change in his attitude towards the Government ; but, probably, a more important cause lay in the development and the widening of his own views, as he better understood the problem of the Roman world. He realised that the Empire was for the present the vehicle destined to carry the Christian Church, and that the Imperial Government was in a sense necessary to the Church. Further, he had learned that the Empire was tolerant of the Church ; and there seems to have arisen in his mind the idea that Christianity might ultimately make itself the religion of the Empire. But that ultimate aim could not possibly blind him to the inevitable fact that there must be war against the great and crowning idolatry of the Imperial cult, which was the keystone of the Imperial arch, the basis of the Imperial unity."
This should be studied, as our author suggests, along with the Epistles to the Thessalonians. If we cannot always accept Sir William Ramsay's theories, we always find him full of enlightening suggestion.
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