Not Paul, But Jesus

After all, was it really matter of pure invention – this same battle? or may it not, like so many of the quasi-miracles in the Acts, have had a more or less substantial foundation in fact? The case may it not have been – that, while he was at Ephesus, somebody or other set a dog at him, as men will sometimes do at a troublesome beggar? or that, whether with hand or tongue, some person, male or female, set upon him with a degree of vivacity, which, according to Paul's zoology, elucidated by Paul's eloquence, entitled him or her to a place in the order of beasts? – Where darkness is thus visible, no light can be so faint, as not to bring with it some title to indulgence.

Of the accounts, given us by the historiographer, of the exploits and experiences of his hero while at Ephesus, one article more will complete the list. When any such opportunity offered, as that of presenting him to view, in his here assumed character, of a candidate for the honours of martyrdom, – was it or was it not in the character of the historiographer to let it pass unimproved? To our judgment on this question, some further maturity may be given, by one more law-case, now to be brought to view. Under some such name as that of the Ephesian Diana, not unfrequent are the allusions to it. Church of Diana silversmiths versus Paul and Co. is a name, by which, in an English law report, it might with more strict propriety be designated. Plaintiffs, silversmiths' company just named: Defendants, Paul and Co.; to wit, said Paul, Alexander, Aristarchus, Alexander and others. Acts, 22:41. Action on the case for words: – the words, in tenor not reported: purport, importing injury in the way of trade. Out of the principal cause, we shall see growing a sort of cross cause: a case of assault, in which three of the defendants were, or might have been, plaintiffs: cause of action, assault, terminating in false imprisonment. In this exercetitious cause, defendants not individually specified: for, in those early days, note-taking had not arrived at the pitch of perfection, at which we see it at present. That which, – with reference to the question – as to the truth of the beast-fighting story, – is more particularly material in the two cases taken together, – is this: in the situation, in which these junior partners of Paul found themselves, there was some difficulty, not to say some danger. Pressed, as he himself was afterwards, in his invasion of Jerusalem, – pressed in more senses than one, they found themselves by an accusing multitude. What on this occasion does Paul? He slips his neck out of the collar. So far from lending them a hand for their support, he will not so much as lend them a syllable of his eloquence. Why? because forsooth, says his historiographer, Acts xix. 30, 31, "the disciples suffered him not: " item, v. 30, "certain" others of "his friends." When, as we have seen him, spite of everything that could be said to him, he repaired to Jerusalem on his Invasion Visit, – he was not quite so perfectly under the government of his friends. On the present occasion, we shall find him sufficiently tractable. Was this a man to be an antagonist and overmatch for wild beasts?

Now as to the above-mentioned principal case. Plaintiffs, dealers in silver goods: Defendants, dealers in words. To be rivals in trade, it is not necessary that men should deal exactly in the same articles: – the sale of the words injured the sale of the goods: so at least the plaintiffs took upon them to aver: for, in such a case, suspicion is not apt to lie asleep. The church of Diana was the Established Church, of that place and time. To the honour, the plaintiffs added the profit, of being silversmiths to that same Excellent Church. To the value of that sort of evidence, which it is the province of silversmiths to furnish, no established church was ever insensible. The evidence, furnished by the church silversmiths of these days, is composed of chalices: under the Pagan dispensation, the evidence furnished by the church silversmiths of the church of the Ephesian Diana, was composed of shrines. When, with that resurrection of his own, and that Gospel of his own, of which so copious a sample remains to us in his Epistles, – Paul, with or without the name of Jesus in his mouth, made his appearance in the market, Plaintiffs, as we have seen, took the alarm. They proceeded, as the pious sons of an established church could not fail to proceed. Before action commenced, to prepare the way for a suitable judgment, – they set to work, and set on fire the inflammable part of the public mind. The church was declared to be in danger, ver. 27: the church of Diana, just as the church of England and Ireland would be, should any such sacrilegious proposition be seriously made, as that of tearing out of her bosom any of those precious sinecures, of which her vitals are composed. In Ephesus, it is not stated, that, at that time, any society bearing the name of the Vice Society, or the Constitutional Association, was on foot. But, of those pious institutions the equivalent could not be wanting. Accordingly, the charge of blasphemy, it may be seen, ver. 37, was not left unemployed. So the defence shows: the defence, to wit, made by the probity and wisdom of the judge: for, by the violence of the church mob, – who, but for him, were prepared to have given a precedent, to that which set Birmingham in flames, – the defendants were placed in the condition of prisoners: and the judge, seeing the violence, of the prejudice they had to encounter, felt the necessity, of adding to the function of judge, that of counsel for the prisoners.

But it is time to turn to the text: not a particle of it can be spared.

ACTS xix. 22-41

22. So he sent into Macedonia two of them that ministered unto him, Timotheus and Erastus; but he himself stayed in Asia for a season. – And the same time, there arose no small stir about that way; – For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen; – Whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth. – Moreover ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying, that they be no gods, which are made with hands: – So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth. – And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians. – And the whole city was filled with confusion: and having caught Gaius and Aristarchus, men of Macedonia, Paul's companions in travel, they rushed with one accord into the theatre. – And when Paul would have entered in, unto the people, the disciples suffered him not. – And certain of the chief of Asia, which were his friends, sent unto him, desiring him that he would not adventure himself into the theatre. – Some, therefore, cried one thing, and some another: for the assembly was confused; and the more part knew not wherefore they were come together. – And they drew Alexander out of the multitude, the Jews putting him forward. And Alexander beckoned with the hand, and would have made his defence unto the people; – But when they knew he was a Jew, all with one voice, about the space of two hours, cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians. – And when the town clerk had appeased the people, he said, Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess Diana, and of the image which fell down from Jupiter? – Seeing then that these things cannot be spoken against, ye ought to be quiet, and to do nothing rashly. – For ye have brought hither these men, which are neither robbers of churches, nor yet blasphemers of your goddess. – Wherefore, if Demetrius, and the craftsmen which are with him, have a matter against any man, the law is open, and there are deputies: let them implead one another. – But if ye inquire anything concerning other matters, it shall be determined in a lawful assembly. – For we are in danger to be called in question for this day's uproar, there being no cause whereby we may give an account of this concourse. – And when he had thus spoken, he dismissed the assembly.

The Judge by whom the principal cause was tried, and the plaintiffs non-suited, is styled, we see "the Town Clerk:" the more appropriate and respected title would not on this occasion have been ill-applied to him. Except what we have here been seeing, we know nothing of him that is positive: but, seeing thus much of him, we see that he was an honest man: and an honest man is not ill portrayed by negatives. He had no coronet playing before his eyes: no overpaid places and sinecures for relatives. He had not been made judge, for publishing a liturgy of the church of Diana, with an embroidery composed of his own comments, – or for circulating, with anonymous delicacy, a pious warning, never to be absent from the shrine of Diana, when the sacred cup was, proffered by the hands of holy priests. Accordingly, when the charge of blasphemy was brought before him, – being a heathen, he found no difficulty in treating it, in that gentle and soothing mode, in which, when, from the bosom of an established church it enters into a man, the spirit, which calls itself the spirit of Christianity, renders him so averse to the treating it. If, when his robes were off, he spoke of Diana what we now think of her, – he did not, when they were on, foam or rave, declare – that all, who would not swear to their belief in her, were not fit to be believed, or so much as fit to live.

By him, one man was not robbed of his rights, because another man, when called upon as a witness, refused to perjure himself. By him, a man was not refused to be heard as a witness, nor refused protection for the fruits of his industry, nor deprived of the guardianship of his children, because he waited to see Diana, before he declared himself a believer in her existence. In the open theatre was pronounced the judgment we have seen. He did not, by secret sittings, deprive men of the protection of the public eye. He did not, we may stand assured – for we see how far the people of Ephesus were from being tame enough to endure it – he did not keep men's property in his hands, to be plundered by himself, his children, or his creatures, till the property was absorbed, and the proprietors sent broken-hearted to their graves. He did not – for the people of Ephesus would not have endured it – wring out of distress a princely income, on pretence of giving decisions, declaring all the while his matchless incapacity for everything but prating or raising doubts. He did not display, – he could not have displayed – the people of Ephesus could not have endured it – any such effrontery, as, when a judicatory was to sit upon his conduct, to set himself down in it, and assume and carry on the management of it. He would not have sought impunity – for if he had sought it in Ephesus, he would not have found it there – he would not have sought impunity, in eyes lifted up to heaven, or streaming with crocodile tears.

Thus much as to his negative merits. But, we have seen enough of him, to see one great positive one. When, from the inexhaustible source of inflammation, a flame was kindled, – he did not fan the flame, – he quenched it.

The religion of Diana having thus come upon the carpet, a reflection which could not be put by, is – spite of all efforts of the church silversmiths, in how many essential points, negative as they are, the religion of Diana had, on the ground of usefulness, the advantage of that, which is the religion of Paul, and is called the religion of Jesus. Diana drove no men out of their senses, by pictures or preachments of never-ending torments. On pretence of saving men from future sufferings, no men were consigned by it to present ones. No mischievous, no pain-producing, no real vice, was promoted by it. It compelled no perjury, no hypocrisy: it rewarded none. It committed, it supported, it blessed, it lauded, no depredation, no oppression in any shape: it plundered no man of the fruits of his industry, under the name of tithes. For the enrichment of the sacred shrines, – money, in any quantity, we may venture to say, received: received, yes: but in no quantity extorted. One temple was sufficient for that goddess. Believing, or not believing in her divinity, – no men were compelled to pay money, for more temples, more priests, or more shrines.

As to the religion of Jesus, true it is, that so long as it continued the religion of Jesus, all was good government, all was equality, all was harmony: free church, the whole; established church, none: monarchy, none; constitution, democratical. Constitutive authority, the whole community: legislative, the Apostles of Jesus; executive, the Commissioners of the Treasury: not Lords Commissioners, appointed by a King Herod, but trustees or stewards; for such should have been the word, and not deacons, —agents elected by universal suffrage. In this felicitous state, how long it continued – we know not. What we do know, is – that, in the fourth century, despotism took possession of it, and made an instrument of it. Becoming established, it became noxious, – preponderantly noxious. For, where established is the adjunct to it, what does religion mean? what but depredation, corruption, oppression, hypocrisy? depredation, corruption, oppression, hypocrisy– these four: with delusion, in all its forms and trappings, for support.

So pregnant is this same boasting passage – 1 Cor. xv. 32, the labour it has thrown upon us, is not altogether at an end. By what it says of the resurrection, the memory has been led back, to what we have seen on the same subject, in one of Paul's Epistles to his Thessalonians: brought together, the two doctrines present a contrast too curious to be left unnoticed. Of the apparatus employed by him in his trade of disciple-catcher, his talk about the resurrection, was, it may well be imagined, a capital article. Being, according to his own motto, all things to all men, 1 Cor. ix. 22, whatever it happened to him to say on the subject, was dished up, of course, according to the taste of those he had to deal with. To some it was a prediction: for such, we have seen, was the form it assumed when the people to be wrought upon were the Thessalonians. To others, when occasion called, it was a statement concerning something past, or supposed to be past. On an occasion of this sort it was, that the name of Jesus, another article of that same apparatus, was of so much use to him. True it is, that to the doctrine of the general resurrection in time future, he had, it must be remembered, no need of declaring himself beholden to Jesus: at least, if on this point, the Acts' history is to be believed: for, of the Pharisees, – the sect to which Paul belonged – of the Pharisees, as compared with the other sect the Sadducees, it was the distinctive tenet. But, of the then future, the then past, as exemplified in the particular case of Jesus, could not but afford very impressive circumstantial evidence. Of this momentous occurrence, there were the real Apostles, ready to give their accounts, – conformable, it may be presumed, to those we see given, as from them, by the four Evangelists. These accounts, however, would not suit the purpose of the self-constituted Apostle: in the first place, because they came from the real Apostles, with whom, as we have so often seen, it was a declared principle with him not to have had anything to do: in the next place, because the Apostles were too scrupulous: they would not have furnished him with witnesses enough. His own inexhaustible fund – his own invention, – was therefore the fund, on this occasion, drawn upon: and, accordingly, instead of the number of witnesses, – say a score or two at the utmost – he could have got from the Apostles, – it supplied him with five hundred: five hundred, all at once: to which, if pressed, he could have added any other number of percipient witnesses whatsoever, provided only that it was at different times they had been such.

So much for explanation: now for the announced contrast. Whoever the people were, whom he had to address himself to, – they had contracted, he found, a bad habit: it was that of eating and drinking. Reason is but too apt to be seduced by, and enlisted in the service of her most dangerous enemy —Appetite. Not only did they eat and drink; but they had found, as it seemed to them, reason for so doing. They ate and drank – why? because they were to die after it. "Let us eat and drink," said the language we have seen him reproaching them with, 1 Cor. xv. 32. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."

The case is – that, in pleasure, in whatever shape they see her, – all men, to whose ambition supernatural terrors supply an instrument of dominion, behold their most formidable rival. Against such a rival, wonderful indeed it would be, if their hostility were not proportionable. No morality accordingly do they acknowledge, that does not include, with or without other things, hatred, – with or without contempt, of pleasure. Such, too, as is their morality, such is their law. Death is scarce severe enough, for a pleasure, which they either have, or would be thought to have, no relish for. So at least says what they teach: but, teaching how to act is one thing; acting accordingly, another. Thus we all see it is, in so many instances: and thus, without much danger of injustice, we may venture to suppose it may have been, in that of the self-constituted Apostle.

Not so Jesus: no harm did he see in eating and drinking, unless with the pleasure it produced greater pain. With this reserve, no harm, – for anything that appears in any one of the four histories we have of him, – no harm did he see in anything that gives pleasure. What every man knows – and what Jesus knew as well as any man – for neither in words nor in acts did he deny it – is, – that happiness, at what time soever experienced, – happiness, to be anything, must be composed of pleasures: and, be the man who he may, of what it is that gives pleasure to him, he alone can be judge.

But, to return to eating and drinking. Eating and drinking – he gives his men to understand – even he, holy as he is, should not have had any objection to, had it not been for this same resurrection of his, which he was telling them of: eating and drinking – a practice, to which, notwithstanding this resurrection of his, and so much as he had told them of it, he had the mortification to find them so much addicted. So much for his Corinthians. It was, as we see, for want of their paying, to what he was thus telling them about the resurrection, that attention, to which it was so well entitled, – that they still kept on in that bad habit. But his Thessalonians– they too, as we have seen, had got the same bad habit. Well: and what was it that gave it them? What but their paying too much attention to this same resurrection of his, dished up in the same or another manner, by the same inventive and experienced hand. In conclusion, on laying the two cases together, what seems evident enough is – that, in whatever manner served up to them, his resurrection, whatever it was, was considerably more effectual in making people eat and drink, than in weaning them from it.

SECTION 6.

GAMALIEL – HAD HE PART IN PAUL'S PLAN?

Gamaliel – in the working of this conversion, may it not be that Gamaliel – a person whose reality seems little exposed to doubt – had rather a more considerable share, than the above-mentioned unknown and unknowable Ananias?

Gamaliel was "a doctor of law" Acts 5:34 – a person of sufficient note, to have been a member of the council, in which the chief priests, under the presidency of the High Priest, Acts 5:24, took cognizance of the offence with which Peter and his associates had a little before this been charged, on the occasion of their preaching Jesus. Under this Gamaliel, had Paul, he so at least is made to tell us, studied, Acts 22:3. Between Paul and this Gamaliel, here then is a connection: a connection – of that sort, which, in all places, at all times, has existence, – and of which the nature is everywhere and at all times so well understood – the connection between protegé and protector. It was by authority from the governing body, that Paul was, at this time, lavishing his exertions in the persecution of the Apostles and their adherents: – who then so likely, as this same Gamaliel, to have been the patron, at whose recommendation the commission was obtained? Of the cognizance which this Gamaliel took, of the conduct and mode of life of the religionists in question, – the result was favourable. "Let them alone," were his words. Acts v. 38. The maintenance, derived by the protegé, on that same occasion, from the persecution of these innoxious men – this maintenance being at once odious, dangerous, and precarious, – while the maintenance, derivable from the taking a part in the direction of their affairs, presented to view a promise of being at once respectable, lucrative, and permanent; – what more natural then, that this change, from left to right, had for its origin the advice of this same patron? – advice, to which, all things considered, the epithet good could not very easily be refused.

FALSE PRETENCES EMPLOYED

To the self-constituted Apostle, false pretences were familiar. They were not – they could not have been – without an object. One object was power: this object, when pursued, is of itself abundantly sufficient to call forth such means. But, another object with Paul was money: of its being so, the passages referred to as above, will afford abundant proofs. A man, in whose composition the appetite for money, and the habit of using false pretences are conjoined, will be still more likely to apply them to that productive purpose, than to any barren one. In the character of a general argument, the observations thus submitted, are not, it should seem, much exposed to controversy.

But, of a particular instance, of money obtained by him on a false pretence, – namely, by the pretence of its being for the use of others, when his intention was to convert it to his own use, – a mass of evidence we have, which presents itself as being in no slight degree probative. It is composed of two several declarations of his own, – with, as above referred to, the explanation of it, afforded by a body of circumstantial evidence, which has already been under review: and as, in the nature of the case, from an evil-doer of this sort, evidence to a fact of this sort, cannot reasonably be expected to be frequently observable, – the labour, employed in bringing it here to view, will not, it is presumed, be chargeable, with being employed altogether without fruit.

First, let us see a passage, in the first of his Epistles to his Corinthians, date of it, A.D. 57. In this, we shall see a regularly formed system of money-gathering: an extensive application of it to various and mutually distant countries, with indication given of particular times and places, in which it was his intention to pursue it: also, intimation, of a special charitable purpose, to which it was his professed intention to make application of the produce of it, at a place specified: namely, Jerusalem.

First then comes, 1 Cor. 16:1-8. A.D. 57.

"Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given order to the churches of Galatia, even so do ye. – Upon the first day of the week, let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come. – And when I come, whomsoever ye shall approve by your letters, them will I send to bring your liberality unto Jerusalem. – And if it be meet that I go also, they shall go with me. – Now I will come unto you when I shall pass through Macedonia; for I do pass through Macedonia. – And it may be that I will abide, yea and winter with you, that ye may bring me on my journey whithersoever I go. – For I will not see you now by the way: but I trust to tarry a while with you if the Lord permit. – But I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost." At Ephesus, where he becomes an object of jealousy, as we have seen, to the church-silversmiths; and, from his declared business at those other places, some evidence surely is afforded of what was his probable business in that place.