In dedicating his collected Letters to his friend Septicius, Pliny says, "You have often urged me to collect and publish my letters"-colligerem publicaremque. The science of New Testament Introduction has paid too little attention to the part played by publication in ancient life and in the development of the New Testament literature. We must not forget that there was really just as much difference in antiquity as there is now between a letter written and a letter published.John Edgar The scattered letters of Paul had no considerable effect upon developing Christian literature until someone thought of seeking them out, gathering them into a collection, and publishing them. That action had a very marked effect upon the production of further Christian writings, quite apart from the composition of the several letters by Paul a generation before. Of course, the mere undertaking of such a collection implies a developed Christian activity where it was made, and so has a value for the historian as well as for the interpreter.

Our concern with it here is for its contribution to the science of Introduction, for which the making of that collection has as much importance as the writing of almost any book in the New Testament. It was, of course, a significant thing for Paul to write his letters to Corinth, send them there, and experience their effects. They fell into the soil of the early Corinthian church and disappeared. But it was a very different thing when, some thirty-five years later, someone had the acumen to seek out those letters and publish them as part of a Pauline letter-corpus. It was that act that made them active as literature and put them in the way of influencing Christian writing as they had never done before.

This long-neglected matter of the collection and publication of Paul's letters is of great significance for New Testament Introduction, since it at once organizes the whole material into the works written before that event, and the ones that were written after it and under the influence-many of them, indeed, in imitation-of the newly published collection.

This is no external or mechanical principle of organization; for the forms, views, and groupings of all this subsequent literature show the influence of the published Pauline letters. Not only does the personal letter become the model for the formal epistle, as Deissmann observed, but these later epistles are not for private use but for publication and circulation. Further, the Pauline letter-corpus became the model for a whole series of later letter-corpuses-those of the Revelation, Ignatius, John, the Pastorals. The recognition of this sets all these groups of documents in new perspectives. We perceive that they are not to be considered atomistically, as though they originated one document at a time; they came into being as corpuses and were published as such. This is plain in the case of Revelation, chapters 1-3; it is no less important to observe it in the Johannine and Pastoral corpuses. It is not without significance even for the Ignatian corpus as well.

In the published Pauline corpus, in short, we possess an instrument by which we can effect a new and fruitful reorganization of New Testament Introduction. It is such a reorganization that is undertaken in the present volume.

New Testament Introduction has suffered from a general tendency toward atomistic treatment. Cherished positions of various origins, traditional or critical, are found to be attended with what seem difficulties, and these are necessarily dealt with one by one and disposed of. The fault of this procedure obviously is that the investigator falls into the attitude of supposing that, if the one particular objection or difficulty under immediate scrutiny can be disposed of, the desired position is established. But of course it is precisely the cumulative effect of these difficulties that matters. We must not assume that, if this one difficulty be disposed of, the position is established, when nineteen other difficulties just as serious are waiting to be dealt with. In such a situation it is time to recognize that these objections can no longer be viewed as difficulties; they should rather be regarded as clues to the true solution of the problem. In fact, a host of considerations that have usually been regarded by learning as difficulties to be zealously and ingeniously whittled away, one by one, are really nothing less than invaluable clues to the very solutions the achievement of which is the historical student's sole concern.

Not only is atomism a grave peril in detailed problems of Introduction, but it seriously affects its broader aspects. The individual letters of Paul have absorbed so much attention that their greater and very different value as a collection has been entirely lost sight of in Introduction. The letters, when collected, formed a new literary unit and at once and for the first time began to exert a literary influence. The Four-Gospel corpus has been similarly disregarded, as though it were of no concern for Introduction but only for the history of the canon. The letters to Timothy and Titus have been dealt with severally, as though they had separate origins instead of having originated as a corpus, which makes the study of them quite another matter.

How long it has taken us to perceive that Luke-Acts is not two works, written at different times, but simply two volumes of a single work-a very fruitful finding for all that concerns Introduction! And under the baneful influence of the old chapters and verses we have always interpreted the New Testament too atomistically, so that most people never dream a gospel or a letter has any broad general controlling purpose or message of its own.

Whatever may be said of the historian or the critic, it is the task of the interpreter to understand. The writer on Introduction must take account of the findings of history and of criticism, but his primary concern is interpretation. It is for the understanding of the literature that he labors. Its sources are for him a matter of secondary interest; the rebuilding of history upon it is not his immediate responsibility, though he will be satisfied that a sound history can be built only upon a faithful interpretation.

The interpreter must not, therefore, be drawn aside into the search for sources which might so absorb him as to make him forget his proper sphere. Nor should he become so engaged with historical reconstruction as to neglect his own task. His peculiar business is to understand and make understandable the literature he deals with, to appreciate and appraise the use his authors have made of their sources, and to find out the ends to which they used them.

What some antique sentence taken up into Revelation or Acts may have meant when it was first framed does not matter for his present task; what does matter is the use to which it is put in the New Testament book in which it now stands. Form criticism is, therefore, not the province of the introductionist; the discernment of the origins of the materials behind the sources is not a part of his immediate task. Much may be learned from such studies for the history and life of the early church, but it must of course be remembered that the fact that a saying fits a particular historical situation does not always mean that the situation created it.

The rise of the New Testament canon I have not dealt with in this introduction, inasmuch as I have treated it elsewhere, in my Formation of the New Testament, and I feel that brief accounts of it as adjuncts to volumes on Introduction are likely to be unsatisfactory.

Within twenty years after the death of Jesus the Christian movement was entering the Greek world. It was a reading and a writing world. Greek settlers were scattered along the shores of the Mediterranean, and everywhere they went, as the Greek papyri from Egypt have shown us, they read Greek books, old and new.

Into this Greek atmosphere of books and writing Christianity entered with astonishing vigor. Paul wrote his letters in Greek for Greek converts; Mark wrote his gospel for Greek Christians in Rome. Soon a Greek took up the pen and wrote a two-volume work on the history of the movement. John recast the Christian message for the Greek world, and the Rylands Library fragment shows that within a generation his gospel was circulating in Egypt in the new codex or leafbook form which was just coming into fashion. It now

seems probable that Christianity, which had a huge religious literature to circulate, was among the leaders or actually took the lead in adopting that ingenious innovation in book forms. Certainly the earliest leafbooks which we possess are Christian documents-John, Paul, Hermas, the Oxyrhynchus Sayings, the British Museum gospel.

The New Testament may be described as the literary precipitate deposited by the Christian movement when it impinged upon the Greek world.

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Occasion. Twenty years after the death of Jesus, and about the middle of the first century, a man sat down in the Greek city of Corinth to write a letter, and with his letter Christian literature began. Beyond a doubt a new spirit there and then began to inform the written word-that spirit which sets Christian writing apart from all other and which now so largely pervades the world's best literature.

For the writer was Paul, a Jew, brought up in the Greek city of Tarsus, a member of the pharisaic party, educated in Jerusalem to be a rabbi, but won over to faith in Christ through an experience so deep and transforming that it made him the greatest Christian missionary of the first century.

He had just been through an anxious experience. Only a few months before he had taken the momentous step of crossing from Troas into Macedonia, thus carrying the gospel from Asia, the continent of its origin, to Europe, the continent of its destiny. These first undertakings in the new field were full of promise but attended with no little difficulty. No sooner was an impression made and some success achieved than jealousy and opposition developed in town after
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town, and Paul had to hasten on, leaving his work only begun.

It was so at Philippi, and it was so at Thessalonica. Jewish hostility developed, and Paul had to leave, sometimes under a cloud and at the demand of the authorities. What must have been the effect of these ignominious nocturnal departures upon the little groups of believers that he had been able to gather in the course of four or five weeks? He could not help being anxious over that question, as he went on to Berea and later, when the old hostility which had forced him out of Thessalonica drove him on to take refuge in Athens.

In his anxiety over the little groups he had so precipitately abandoned, he sent his two lieutenants back to see them, explain his disappearance, and conserve what might remain of his work in Thessalonica and Philippi. Acts speaks as though he sent them back when he left Berea and set out for Athens (Acts 17:14, 15). Paul's own words in I Thess. 3:1, 2 are not incompatible with this, though they sound rather as if his messengers did not leave him until he had reached Athens: "I made up my mind to stay behind alone at Athens and I sent my brother Timothy, .... to strengthen you in your faith, and encourage you not to be led astray, any of you, in all these troubles."

From Athens, Paul soon proceeds to Corinth, and there finds employment at his trade, resumes his work of preaching, and is soon embarked upon one of the great ministries of his life. But his thoughts still turn anxiously back to Thessalonica, and doubtless Philippi
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too. What is going on there? Have his few converts retained their new faith and held together in a little church? Or have they been disheartened and disillusioned by the abrupt flight of their teacher and returned to their old religious and social affiliations?

It made an enormous difference to Paul and his prospects. For if a missionary must settle down in a Greek city for years of steady labor to establish a Christian church there, it will be a slow business taking the gospel to the Greek world. But if a few weeks' work in a place will suffice to form a lasting Christian group in it, the gospel is going to go through the Greek world like wildfire. Which is it to be? Timothy and Silvanus will give the answer when they come down from Macedonia to rejoin Paul.

The books of the New Testament are most of them definitely occasional in character; they connect themselves immediately with some particular situation or event that called them forth. This is true of the First Letter to the Thessalonians. It states its occasion very specifically and crisply. Timothy has just come back to Paul, 3:6, brought him good news of their faith and love, and told him how kindly they think of him and that they are just as anxious to see him as he is to see them.

So the news, when at last it comes, is good news-the very news Paul has been so anxiously hoping for. Not only are his apprehensions about his new Christian friends at Thessalonica relieved, but his hopes for the whole Greek mission are brightened. Paul is immensely encouraged. He can really live once more,
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now that he knows they are standing firm in the Lord. No doubt Silvanus brought equally good news from Philippi. The Philippians seem always to have been a comfort and stay to Paul, and we cannot help wishing we had the letter he must have written them at the same time that he wrote I Thessalonians.

In his relief and gratitude Paul sits down and dictates a letter, probably to one of those public letter-writers that were to be found on every hand, in eastern cities especially, in the Greek world. Sometimes his amanuenses were brothers in the church; "I, Tertius, who write this letter, wish to be remembered to you as a fellow Christian," Rom. 16:22. Paul had a way of adding a few words in his own hand, which looked large and awkward beside the swift, regular hand of the professional letter-writer. Paul felt this. "See what large letters I make when I write to you with my own hand!" he says to the Galatians, 6:11. But the body of all his letters was written by the professional writer, to whom Paul dictated it, sentence by sentence.

Contents. So we may picture the apostle, after a long day spent at his trade in Aquila's shop, seated by his amanuensis or pacing to and fro and pouring out the paragraphs of his letter in his animated style, almost as though the Thessalonians were right before him. It is a classic of Christian friendship. He wonders now that he ever doubted the steadfastness of the Thessalonian brothers. When he recalls the welcome they gave his preaching when he first appeared in Thessalonica, the way they followed his example, and
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what we should call the Thessalonian revival that broke out there during his short stay, he can only thank God for them. He should never have had any doubts about them. Their acceptance of the gospel he had preached to them had been so spontaneous and joyful that it had become famous all over Greece, and Paul was known as the man who had led them in it.

For though our message brought you great trouble, you welcomed it with joy inspired by the holy Spirit, so that you set an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Greece. For the Lord's message has rung out from you not only over Macedonia and Greece, but the story of your belief in God has gone everywhere, so that we never need to mention it. For when people speak of us, they tell what a welcome you gave us, and how you turned from idols to God [1:6-9].

These extraordinary words conjure up a remarkable picture of what the Thessalonian response to Paul's preaching had done for his work in this new continent he was just entering. The story of it had gone before him, paving the way for him in the Greek cities about the Aegean, 1:2-10.

But the news Timothy has brought from Thessalonica is not all good. The old stock slanders so often brought against the bearers of a new religion have appeared there and are faithfully reported to Paul. Nowadays, when a man appears in a modern community with a new religion, he is generally suspected of being either immoral, mercenary, or inordinately
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vain, and just these slanders were being circulated in Thessalonica about Paul.

Paul often had occasion to defend himself against charges of one kind or another, and most of his letters contain an apologia, long or short. The second paragraph of I Thessalonians is such a defense.

Our appeal does not rest on a delusion, nor spring from any impure motive; there is no fraud about it. . . . . We never used flattery, as you know, or found pretexts for making money, as God is our witness. We never sought praise from men, either from you or anyone else, though as Christ's apostles we might have stood on our dignity. We were children when we were with you; we were like a mother nursing her children. . . . . You remember, brothers, how we toiled and labored. We worked night and day, when we preached the good news to you, in order not to be a burden to any of you. You will testify, and God will, how pure and upright and irreproachable our relations were with you who believed [2:3-10].

The Thessalonian Christians have indeed had their difficulties since Paul's visit. Their acceptance of a new faith had cost them a great deal. It had meant breaking off old and valued social and religious associations. But the Thessalonians had felt that the gospel was peculiarly a message from God himself, and that conviction had fortified them to endure such misunderstanding and ill-treatment as had overtaken them. To their old friends and neighbors they now appeared as renegades, just as the Christian Jews had seemed to their people. Paul rejoices that the Thessalonians had stood fast.
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For you, brothers, followed the example of God's churches in Judea that are in union with Christ Jesus, for you in your turn had to bear the same ill-treatment from your neighbors as they did from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and persecuted the prophets and us; [2:14, 15].

Paul has thus far dealt with three matters: his relief at the Thessalonians' steadfastness, 1:2-10; the slanders against him that have been circulated among them, 2:1-12; and the annoyance to which they have been subjected because of their change of religion, 2:13-16. He now admits the great anxiety he had felt about them, his desire to revisit them in person, and the suspense he felt while he waited for Timothy to go to them and bring him word of their state, 2:17-3:10. For when the suspense had become unendurable, he had sent Timothy to them to strengthen and encourage them:

That was why, when I could not bear it any longer, I sent to find out about your faith, for I was afraid that the tempter might have tempted you and all our labor might be lost. But now that Timothy has just come back to me from you, and brought me good news of your faith and love, and told me how kindly you think of me, and that you long to see me just as much as I long to see you, I feel encouraged, brothers, about you, in spite of all my distress and trouble, at your faith, for now I can really live, since you are standing firm in the Lord. For how can I thank God enough for you, for all the happiness you make me feel in the presence of our God, as I pray night and day with intense earnestness that I may see your faces and supply what is lacking in your faith? [3:5-10].
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This affectionate passage is followed by a great benediction:

May our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus open my way to you! May the Lord make your love for one another and for all men wide and full like my love for you, so that your hearts may be strong and faultlessly pure in the sight of our God and Father, when our Lord Jesus Christ appears with all his saints! [3:11-13].

This concludes the first part of the letter.

It has sometimes been said that Paul regarded the Christian salvation as an opus operatum, a thing completed or at least accomplished in the very act of faith. In a sense this is true. And yet in every letter Paul shows his solicitude that Christian believers should not rest content with this assurance but strive to develop their moral sense and perfect their characters in every possible way. Toward the end of each letter he turns to practical moral admonition, in no dry formal way but with great vitality and vigor.

In just this way he now appeals to the Christians in Thessalonica to go on trying to live in such a way as to please God. He does not suggest that they are not doing this already; they are doing it, only they must do it more and more, 4:1, 2.

Nothing in the pagan system was more in need of elevation than the relation between the sexes, and Paul's first admonition has to do with marriage. It must be honorably and purely entered into and sacredly respected, 4:3-8.

The early Christians were always ready to help one
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another in material ways, when any need arose, and the Thessalonians are cheerfully doing this. But some of them are in danger of taking advantage of this disposition and of relaxing their own efforts to support themselves. Paul has something to say to each of these groups at Thessalonica, 4:9-12.

The Thessalonians, like Paul, confidently expected the early return of Jesus on the clouds of heaven in messianic state. But they feared that their friends who did not survive until then might miss the glorious experience of witnessing it. Paul reassures them. In his picture of the messianic advent those who had fallen asleep were to rise first and be ready to meet the Lord at his coming, 4:13-18.

When all this was to be, was of course the great question. Paul can say only that it will be when it is least expected. Their task is to be vigilant and composed. If they are armed with faith and love and the hope of salvation, the Day when it comes will not take them unprepared, 5:1-11.

Paul bespeaks respect and co-operation for the leaders of the Thessalonian church, 5:12-13. He also has something to say to these same leaders, 5:14. And then, in a wonderful series of crisp appeals, he gives us glimpses of the Christian life as he saw it. "Treat everyone with kindness. Always be joyful. Never give up praying. Thank God whatever happens. . . . . Do not stifle the Spirit," 5:15-22.

A second benediction, with greetings to all, and then a third conclude the letter, 5:23-28. Verses 25-28 probably form the concluding paragraph in Paul's own hand which, in II Thess. 3:17, he says is his mark in every letter.
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Problems. New light has been thrown upon the date of I Thessalonians by the letter of Claudius to the city of Delphi imperfectly preserved in an inscription, fragments of which have been unearthed at Delphi. It mentions Gallio as proconsul of Greece (Achaea) at the time of Claudius' twenty-sixth imperatorial acclamation, which was not earlier than the closing months of A.D. 51 or later than the spring of 52; for he received his twenty-seventh such acclamation before August 1 of A.D. 52. That is, Gallio was proconsul during some part of the time between summer, 51, and summer, 52. But since proconsuls came out about June and held office for one year, his incumbency must have been from June of 51 to June of 52.

The reference to Gallio in Acts 18:12-17 reads as though he had only recently arrived in Corinth, whereas Paul's stay there is nearly over; "Paul stayed some time longer, and then bade the brothers goodbye and sailed for Syria," Acts 18:18. But he had spent a year and a half in Corinth. If Gallio came to his province in the summer of 51-the natural time for him to arrive-and Paul had been there eighteen months, Paul must have arrived in the winter of 50. [1] We have seen that he wrote I Thessalonians very soon after his

[1] As Deissmann puts it, "If Gallio entered on his office in the middle of the summer of 51, and if the accusation of Paul by the Jews took place soon afterwards, then since he had already been working for approximately eighteen months in Corinth, Paul must have come to Corinth in the first months of the year 50, and left Corinth in the late summer of the year 51" (Paul, p. 282).
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arrival. We can therefore say with a good deal of confidence that it was written in the spring of A.D. 50. It is a matter of no little satisfaction to be able to date so closely the earliest of Paul's letters and the first book of the New Testament.

Some scholars have felt that Galatians must be given the honor of being the earliest of the letters of Paul that has come down to us, instead of I Thessalonians. But, while McGiffert has wisely warned us against acting as though we possessed a complete file of Paul's letters, and hence knew the ebb and flow of his thoughts and interests with any continuity and fulness, yet it is hard to understand Paul's neglect of the Judaizing problem in I Thessalonians, if it had risen so acutely and so recently in Galatia as would have been the case if Galatians had been written only a year of two before. We can see the overhang of the Galatian and the Corinthian conflicts in Romans, written some years after the trouble in Galatia and very soon after that in Corinth, and if Paul had had his trouble with the Galatians only a few months or a year or two before, we should expect some reminiscence of it to appear in I Thessalonians, as it does long after in Romans. Since it does not, we may rest assured that the Galatian controversy has not occurred and Galatians has not been written.

People used to approach the New Testament for its contribution to theology; that was their main interest and concern. But now we are interested in all it has to teach us about early Christian life and thought. All the problems, situations, emotions, and aspirations of
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that amazing age are of interest and of value to us. The New Testament has far more than a theology for us.

And, so considered, this first book of the New Testament is of wonderful interest and worth. What light it throws upon the relations between this first great missionary and his converts! His attitude to them is not in the least official or perfunctory. He and they are friends, and friends in a new and particularly Christian sense, for they are all friends of Christ, members of one great household of God. Paul does not say this in I Thessalonians, but the friendship and kinship in Christianity which were afterward expressed by Paul, and later by John, are unmistakably here. I Thessalonians is a great document of Christian friendship. Here, already, at the beginning of Christian literature, is that church life which we all know so well, which is unlike any other social relationship in the world, being based upon self-forgetting devotion to the good of all. A new kind of friendship had come into the world.

Deissmann, Adolf. Paul (2d ed.; New York, 1911), pp. 261-86.

Dobschutz, Ernst Von. Die Thessalonicher-Briefe (Gottingen, 1909).

Frame, James E. Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians (New York, 1912).

Milligan, George. St. Paul's Epistles to the Thessalonians (London, 1908).

Occasion. The eagerness and zeal with which the Thessalonians had welcomed the gospel (I Thess. 1:5-9) had actually run away with some of them. These persons were so convinced that a new age had dawned that they had given up work and were absorbed in waiting for the return of the Messiah on the clouds of heaven. This threw a heavy burden upon their more practical brothers in the church, who felt obliged to provide for their material wants. Paul had been warned of the danger of this development before he wrote I Thessalonians and had touched upon it in I Thess. 4:11, 12, hoping to prevent it from becoming acute. But a few months later it developed into more serious proportions.

It had its origin in the idea which had sprung up in Thessalonica, perhaps from something Paul had said or was reported to have said, that the Day of the Lord, foretold by the prophets, had now come. In a sense this was true. For if the great messianic Day was to be that on which the Christ came to the earth, one might well think it had come, since he had come, in the person of Jesus.

The group at Thessalonica thought of it in other
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terms, however. They believed the messianic age had begun, and that the messianic reorganization was now so imminent that they might better give themselves to religious reflection and contemplation than to mundane matters like earning their daily bread. This threw a heavy strain upon their more practical fellow Christians, who had to support them as well as themselves. This was not all. Not all of those who had given up earning their living devoted themselves to spiritual exercises. There was just as much human nature in the first century as there is now, and leisure as well as labor has its temptations. So the Thessalonian drones became a cause of scandal in the community, not only because they let their Christian brothers support them but because they were getting to be loafers and busybodies.

News of this situation soon came to Paul at Corinth, and he dealt with it promptly and energetically in a second letter to Thessalonica, written not long after I Thessalonians, probably in the year 50. There was no place in his practice or teaching for such a proceeding. His own life was a marvel of efficient, independent energy. He earned his living by his trade and preached the gospel in his leisure hours. So far from looking to the Jerusalem church to support him in his missionary travels and labors, he himself used to raise money to send back to them for their Christian poor. He was about the last man in the world to have any sympathy for the present course of these Thessalonian adventists.

Of course, he was an adventist too; he believed in the speedy return of Jesus in messianic splendor, to
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judge the world and adjust its wrongs. He also believed that the Messiah had already come, but he held that as he had not performed the characteristic messianic function of judgment, he must come again to perform it. That would indeed be the Day of the Lord, foretold by the prophets, for with them that Day had always been described as a Day of Judgment.

THE use to be made of the short interval between these two messianic comings, the coming of Jesus and the Day of Judgment, Paul and the Thessalonian adventists took opposite views. They thought it had better be spent in reflection, religious exercises, and self-preparation. Paul thought it should be spent in making the Christian salvation known as widely as possible in the Greek world. His aim was to become everything to everybody, so as by all means to save some of them. The Thessalonian idlers looked within and saw their own sinful hearts, all unready for the messianic advent. Paul looked without and saw a world of men and women who might be saved in time.

Paul had already written the Thessalonians that the Day was coming without any warning and like a thief in the night, I Thess. 5:2. In the stress of the new situation, however, he somewhat modifies that opinion. Out of his Jewish inheritance, which had already given him his doctrine of the coming of the Messiah to judge the world and usher in the Day of the Lord, he now brings forward another apocalyptic doctrine: the Antichrist.

It is true the word "Antichrist" is not used by Paul, either here or elsewhere in his letters, nor has it ever
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been found in earlier literature, Jewish or Christian. Its first recorded occurrences are in I and II John (I, 2:18, 22; 4:3; II, 7), which were written probably sixty years later than II Thessalonians. But Jewish messianic thought dramatically pictured the long conflict between right and wrong, good and evil, as culminating in a gigantic duel between the two embodiments of the rival forces. Evil would indeed wax worse and worse, until at length the champion of wickedness, the Antichrist, would appear and assume control. And then the Christ would come and in a great conflict with Antichrist overthrow him and his whole regime. This Antichrist some believed would arise out of the tribe of Dan; it is a curious fact that in Rev. 7:4-8 Dan is not included among the tribes of Israel. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Dan 5:6,10 (100-50 B.C.), also rather suggest this: "I have read in the book of Enoch, the righteous, that your prince is Satan, .... And there shall arise to you from the tribe of Judah and of Levi the salvation of the Lord, and he shall make war against Beliar." We should compare also Gen. 49:17, Jer. 8:16, and Dan. 11:36. But the fact remains that the classical passage for this Antichrist doctrine is the second chapter of II Thessalonians.

To this very Jewish idea Paul now appeals to convince the Thessalonian idlers that the Day of the Lord has not come, at least in the sense that they suppose. For the Antichrist has not yet appeared and made the triumph of evil really complete. It is true his work is developing, and he is soon to come, but just now for
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a time something and someone are holding him back. When these restraining forces are withdrawn, he will come in all his pretension and deception and for a time prevail, only to be destroyed by the Messiah at his coming.

But since this Embodiment of Disobedience has not yet unmistakably appeared, and since his appearance must, according to the messianic program, precede that of the Messiah, then evidently the final coming of the Messiah cannot have taken place.

This curious doctrine is worked out with Paul's usual trenchant boldness in II Thessalonians, chapter 2. He proceeds in chapter 3 to draw from it some practical inferences.

Contents. As in the first letter, Silvanus and Timothy are associated with Paul in writing II Thessalonians, 1:1, 2. The opening expression of thanksgiving for the Thessalonians' faith, love, and steadfastness in persecution leads to denunciation of their persecutors, who will be terribly punished in the approaching messianic judgment, 1:3-12.

They must not suppose that the Day of the Lord has come; that will not be until the Embodiment of Disobedience appears, for his coming is to precede that of the Messiah who is to overthrow him. He is, in fact, already at work but is being temporarily held in check. Presently he will make his appearance, with all his pretended signs and wonders, only to be destroyed by the Lord Jesus, the true Messiah, when he in turn makes his appearance upon the scene, 2:1-12. After renewed thanksgiving for their divine election
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and an exhortation to steadfastness, the main part of the letter closes with a benediction, 2:13-17.

Paul asks them to pray for his work in Corinth and expresses his confidence in them, 3:1-5. The practical side of their situation is then dealt with: they are not to countenance idlers in their number. They must remember Paul's own course. He ate nobody's bread without paying for it. He worked night and day to keep from being a burden to any of them. He might as their teacher have claimed the right to be supported by them, but he would not do this, for he wanted to set them an example by his own conduct. He repeats the rule he had given them when he was at Thessalonica: "If anyone refuses to work, give him nothing to eat." In the most solemn way he charges the idlers to go to work again and earn their own living. The brothers who have been supporting them are not to get tired of helping the really needy. But any who will not obey Paul's order, they are to have nothing to do with. Not that they are to look upon them as enemies; they are still to warn them as brothers, 3:6-16. Paul's autograph greeting concludes the letter, 3:17, 18.

Problems. Two objections have been brought against the authenticity of II Thessalonians. One is the apocalyptic objection. It is pointed out that in I Thessalonians Paul declares that the Day is coming without any warning at all; it will be like a thief in the night. Everyone will be saying "What peace and safety!" when suddenly destruction will be upon them. All anyone can do is to be vigilant and composed. But now, in II Thessalonians, he declares that
^{{page 19.}}

there will be some warning, in the coming of the Antichrist with his pretended signs and wonders and his claim of being God himself. Some scholars feel that the inconsistency between these two positions is so great that they cannot have been held by the same man.

If we were to view Paul's writings dogmatically and to assume that he could never alter his position under the stress of circumstances, but must always and everywhere have agreed with himself, this objection might be valid. But if we view Paul historically, as a man of great power and sincerity and strength, grappling vigorously with immediate personal conditions that were constantly changing, we shall find no difficulty here. Paul's letters are not to be viewed like a textbook on mathematics or even dogmatics. And it is precisely the best and wisest of men who honestly and sincerely shift their ground as circumstances may demand. Moreover, this is simply another piece of that same Jewish apocalyptic messianism: the Messiah coming on the clouds of heaven to execute judgment and usher in the Day of the Lord - with which Paul was clearly saturated.

The idea of a restraining influence, that is now holding the Antichrist back, is another important element in the situation. The way in which it is mentioned - now as impersonal, 2:6; now as personal, 2:7 - somewhat suggests that the Roman Empire and emperor are thought of as holding the forces of evil in check for a time, until this restraining force is overridden by the powers of evil. Paul shows in Romans that he believes in obeying the emperor and his governors, 13:1-10.
^{{page 20.}}

But after Nero's outbreak against the church in Rome, in August of 64, it is difficult to see how anybody could any longer have conceived the Empire as a beneficent force restraining the full triumph of evil. Even I Peter, loyal as it is, takes a comparatively chastened view of it.

We must not be content to set aside an ancient writing as not authentic; some better place in the history of early Christian literature must then be found for it, for we are seeking to interpret these documents, and to do that we must discover their place in history - the date and circumstances of their composition. No one has found a better place or date for II Thessalonians than Corinth about A.D. 50. In view of these considerations most serious students of II Thessalonians now give little weight to the apocalyptic objection.

But another objection has been raised of a very different kind; in fact, it is almost the exact opposite of the apocalyptic objection. It is the psychological objection. The two letters, we are told, are too much alike to have been written by one man, especially a man so full of originality and freshness as the author of Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans. Not only are the letters alike in plan with a sonorous benediction, perhaps two-thirds or three-fifths of the way through, marking the close of the doctrinal part - I Thess. 3:11-13; II Thess. 2:16, 17 - but many sayings of the first letter are repeated in the second. Thus I Thess. 2:9 is practically repeated in II Thess. 3:8, and in both letters much is said about thanking God for the Thessalonians, I, 1:2; 2:13; 3:9; compare II, 1:3; 2:13.
^{{page 21.}}

References to Jesus' messianic return are met with in both letters, I, 1:10; 3:13; 4:13-17; 5:23; compare II 1:7-10; 2:1, 8, 14. In both letters the church is suffering ill-treatment and persecution, I, 2:14; compare II, 1:4-6.

But in writing again within a few months to the same group, some repetition would be inevitable, and the contrasting character of II Thessalonians, chapter 2 certainly makes the second letter anything but a feeble copy of the first. The second letter has too much of the characteristic Pauline trenchant vigor (see chap. 2) to be dismissed as an imitation, and the developed situation above described sufficiently accounts for such resemblances as there are. So the psychological objection, like the apocalyptic, fails to disturb the authenticity of II Thessalonians.

Paul must, of course, have written many private letters before I and II Thessalonians, but they are the earliest of his letters that have been preserved. The Thessalonians read them and valued them so much that they preserved them, perhaps with the rolls of the Greek Old Testament which were their first scriptures . But forty years were to pass before these letters were published and made any impression upon the general Christian thought of the first century. To the Thessalonians they were just private letters to them from their great teacher, worth preserving, indeed, and occasionally re-reading but never meant for a wider circulation. So these letters, like all of Paul's, fell into the soil of the early church, did their work, and for a time disappeared.
^{{page 22.}}

The fact that our earliest Christian writings are personal letters carries with it two considerations that bear upon their interpretation and use. For one thing we must expect to find them difficult to understand. Professor Grenfell once remarked that of all papyrus documents private letters were the most difficult to understand and interpret. This is entirely natural, of course, for they necessarily assume a common background of situation and information possessed only by the writer and the particular person or group to which he writes. On the other hand, such letters are also the most trustworthy of all historical sources, for they are written not to be published but simply for the people addressed in them. They actually reflect immediate historical situations. If, then, there are in Paul's letters some things hard to understand, as II Peter long ago pointed out, [1] we shall be more than compensated by the original, first-hand character of their contents, which constitutes them historical documents of the first order.

Bousset, W. The Antichrist Legend: A Chapter in Jewish and Christian Folklore, trans. A. H. Keane (London, 1896).

Brooke, A. E. The Johannine Epistles (New York, 1912), pp. 69-79.

Dobschutz, Ernst von. Die Thessalonicher-Briefe (Gottingen, 1909).

Frame, James E. Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians; (New York, 1912).

Milligan, George. St. Paul's Epistles to the Thessalonians (London, 1908).

[1] II Pet. 3:15, 16.

Occasion. Paul had hardly reached the shores of Syria, on his return from his long residence in Corinth, when he was met by bad news. Someone had been spreading a narrower type of Christianity among the churches he had organized in Galatia a few years earlier, and the Galatians were swinging away from Paul's simple doctrine of faith.

The Galatian mission had been the most fruitful part of the work Paul had done in company with Barnabas four or five years before, on what is usually described as his first missionary journey. They had first preached in Cyprus and then crossed to the south coast of Asia Minor, where Paul seems to have been prostrated by illness, perhaps one of those fevers still so severe along that coast. From the lowlands his companion had taken him up into the high-lying interior to Galatia, so that Paul could afterward remind the Galatians that it was because of an illness that he had preached the good news to them the first time.[1] So the gospel came to Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. Again, on his second journey, these Galatian churches were among the first ones visited by Paul and Silas after setting out

[1] Gal. 4:13.
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from Syrian Antioch; indeed, it was at Lystra that a young man named Timothy became a member of their missionary party. So Paul knew these churches well; in fact, he was peculiarly bound to them through Timothy, who had developed into a trusty lieutenant. It was Timothy whom he had sent back to Thessalonica to steady the Thessalonians, and who had brought back the good news that called forth I Thessalonians.

Paul's party had called at Ephesus on their way east from Corinth, but there was as yet no Christian body there, and it is difficult to see how he could have learned of the disturbed state of things in the little Christian groups in Galatia before he reached Antioch in Syria, which was his headquarters in so far as he had any. In Antioch, Paul had many friends, and the work he had done in Galatia was well known. There at any rate he might learn what had been going on in the Galatian churches while he had been so far away.

Into these little bodies had come Christian teachers of a more rigorous and Jewish type. They considered Jesus the fulfiller and completer of the old agreement between God and Abraham. The blessing promised in that agreement was to be for Abraham and his descendants, and for nobody else. In order, then, to profit by the spiritual blessings Jesus had brought, one must be a descendant of Abraham, or become one, by being incorporated into the Jewish people. In short, one must become a Jewish proselyte. The synagogue was the only door to the church.

The first step was, of course, the acceptance of the
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rite of circumcision, to be followed by the observance of at least a minimum of the Jewish Law. Christianity so understood would be a kind of modified Judaism, with none of the spiritual freedom which Paul so greatly enjoyed and so ardently taught.

As for Paul, he was not really an apostle at all - that is, one of the Twelve Apostles - nor was he authorized by them to offer the Christian salvation to Greeks on such easy terms. These Jewish-minded teachers felt that he was cheapening their old prerogative and throwing open the blessings of their cherished faith to all the heathen. They thought of religion in terms of privilege, of which they were the custodians, and it is a fair question whether they were more concerned to win the Gentiles to the Jewish salvation or to keep it from them.

The Jews had, it is true, translated their scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint Version) and sent Jewish missionaries about the Greek world before the time of Christ.[1] But, on the other hand, by the formal demands they made upon converts and by their superior and exclusive spirit they repelled more than they attracted. To this day, as in the time of Ezra, in orthodox Jewish circles a man or woman who marries a Gentile is cast out of his or her family as a renegade, and something of this condescending spirit marked the work of the Judaizers in Galatia. The blessings of true religion seemed to them their exclusive property, all that was left to them of their old national glory, and

[1] F. M. Derwacter, Preparing The Way For Paul (New York, 1930).
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the terms on which the Greeks might share them were still the same as they had always been.

The logic of this teaching was really unassailable, once its premises were granted. But Paul had found in the Christian life something that entirely transcended the old scribal dialectic - a great, vital, inward experience which he described as faith, before which such mere legalistic logic shriveled away. That the Galatians who had once had this sublime experience should now lapse into the dull, lifeless, formal kind of religion their new teachers offered them was more than he could bear.

This is the situation that confronts Paul immediately upon his arrival at Antioch, for bad news travels fast and his friends would not be slow in letting him know the fate of what must have seemed his most successful mission east of the Aegean. It would have been quite unlike Paul to accept such a defeat. Yet he cannot immediately leave Antioch, where he had only just arrived after a long absence. It may seem to us at this distance of time that the main thing Paul had to do was to write his letters, but of course as a matter of fact they were a very minor part of what he did. This is a point often lost sight of by students of his work.

Much as he would like to face the Galatians and show them the truth, 4:20, he cannot do so, and so he writes a letter. Paul's letters are probably the most extraordinary letters in the world, but none of them is more remarkable than Galatians. Its vigor, variety, audacity, and self-revealing frankness, together with
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its deep and direct insight into religious truth, put it in a class by itself among the books of the New Testament. Conventional proprieties and courtesies are forgotten, for tremendous issues are at stake and Paul is writing under very great excitement. He cares deeply for the Galatians, and their religious welfare is a matter of the utmost personal concern to him. They are the children of his Christian ministry, and he will not let them fall into blindness and folly without a struggle.

Contents. With his first words he attacks. He is an apostle, whatever the Judaizers may say of him; not commissioned by the Twelve, indeed, but with higher credentials than they could give, for Christ himself has commissioned him. Paul had realized the great truth that the indispensable authorization in religion is that of inward experience and conviction, and that without that no formal election or laying-on of hands amounts to anything.

With himself he associates, in all he has to say, all the brothers that are there with him. This must mean the whole church at Antioch - the one great missionary church of the New Testament. It was from that church, so rich in prophets and teachers - Barnabas, Symeon, Lucius, Manaen, and Saul - that Barnabas and Saul had first been sent forth into the Greek world of the West, Acts 13:1-4. Paul puts the authority not of Jerusalem but of Antioch back of his message to the Galatians.

He addresses not a single church, as he usually did, but all the churches of the Galatian series - Derbe,
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Lystra, Iconium, Pisidian Antioch, as his messenger from Syria would come to them. There is not time for individual letters, and so Paul for once writes a circular letter to all four, 1:1-5.

He is amazed that they are turning to a different gospel from the one he preached to them. For it is no true gospel they have now been given but an upside-down one, the very reverse of the one he had given them. No matter who preaches it to them, even if he be an angel from heaven, it is false! In his indignation Paul calls down curses upon its preachers, 1:6-9.

They have charged him with flattery and cajolery; he calls the Galatians to witness that this does not sound much like it. Paul's gospel, he would have them know, was not something he had received from other men but came to him out of a great inward experience - a revelation of Jesus Christ, 1:10-12.

He now turns to deal with the charge that he was not recognized or commissioned by the Twelve Apostles. He does not deny this; rather he reviews his whole Christian life to show how little he had seen of Jerusalem or the Twelve. Three years after his conversion he had indeed spent a fortnight with Cephas, as he calls Peter, but saw no other apostle. Fourteen years later he went to Jerusalem again, with Barnabas and Titus, and explained to the leaders of the church the work he was doing among the Greeks. The Jerusalem leaders did not even require his Greek companion Titus to accept circumcision. On the contrary, they pledged Paul and Barnabas their co-operation
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and definitely assigned to them the mission to the Greeks, 1:13-2:10.

On a later occasion Paul had met the same problem in Antioch, when Peter came there. At first Peter had eaten with the heathen - the Greek Christians - without scruple, but the arrival of some overscrupulous Christian Jews from Jerusalem led him to give up this liberal practice for fear of the "party of circumcision," as Paul calls the Judaizers. Paul then brought up Peter's former course with devastating effect: "If you live like a heathen and not like a Jew, though you are a Jew yourself, why should you try to make the heathen live like Jews?" The fact that Peter had eaten freely with Greeks, regardless of the ceremonial regulation against it, showed that he really held the same position that Paul did about that and similar regulations and could not consistently demand that Greek Christians observe them, 2:11-14.

Paul goes on to show that men born Jews had found their way to the Christian salvation only by the exercise of faith; they had not found it through the observance of law. So for Jew and Greek alike the way to the Christian salvation is the way of faith. The Law has no part in it. Yet it was to the Law that the Judaizers were trying to recall the Galatians, 2:15-21.

In a passage of the utmost boldness, 3:1-6, Paul points out the illogical folly of their conduct. The early Christians experienced a great release of religious intuitions when they came into the attitude of faith. Had a set of legal observances given it to them? Was it not the simple exercise of faith that had done so?
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If, then, their new religious life began on the high levels of inward spiritual experience, do they expect it to conclude and culminate on the low levels of external precept and statute? The Judaizers had made much of the agreement with Abraham. But what was Abraham's experience? He had faith, and it was credited to him as uprightness.

With these words Paul really snatches the sword from the Judaizers and turns it against them. Abraham on whom they had built so much now turns out to be Paul's ally. The men of faith are the real descendants of Abraham. The Scripture said all the heathen should be blessed through him, and here they are, experiencing that blessing, 3:7-9.

In a kaleidoscopic series of arguments Paul now rakes the Judaizers' position from every side. He pours them forth in a torrent that must have swept it all away. What had the law achieved? It only left all its devotees under the curse, for none of them had fully observed it. From that curse Christ's death had ransomed us all, in order that the blessing promised to Abraham might indeed through Christ reach the heathen as the Scripture had promised it would, 3:10-14.

The mere fact that the Law was not given until centuries after Abraham's time shows that it cannot possibly be read into the promise made to him. "An agreement already ratified by God cannot be annulled and its promise cancelled by the Law, which arose four hundred and thirty years later," 3:17. The Judaizers cannot claim the promise and then try to combine
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the Law with it, as though the Law were a kind of belated codicil to the promise. Paul holds the Judaizers strictly to Abraham and the promise. If they wish to drag in the Law, then they must let go the promise, 3:15-18.

This leaves Paul with the difficult question of the Law. It was subsequent, subordinate, and temporary. It was like the attendant who, in the ancient world, took the boy through the streets to school and there turned him over to his teacher. (To render paidagogos "schoolmaster" spoils the figure entirely. Jesus was the "schoolmaster," not the Law.) Now that we are, through faith, in the presence of the teacher himself, we have no further need of the Law, 3:19-25.

This figure of the noble child being conducted to school reminds Paul of the noble condition of the Christian believers. They are all sons of God through their faith. The old distinctions of race, sex, condition are no more; they are no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female; one with Christ, they are all one. If they belong to Christ, they are true descendants of Abraham and heirs of the promise made to him, 3:26-29. The noble boy suggests to Paul another telling figure. The Christian is like the heir to some great inheritance. Through the years of his minority, under tutors and guardians, he is little better than a slave himself. But a day arrives when he comes of age and is free and master of it all. So we are sons and heirs, with a spirit in our hearts that makes us call God "Father," 4:1-7.
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From such a prospect how can the Galatians turn back to the old dull, mechanical views of religion that are now being offered them? Paul begins to fear that the labor he had spent on them was wasted, 4:8-11. He turns from argument to impassioned emotional appeal. What friends they had been once! With what understanding sympathy the Galatians had once received him when he came among them, miserable in his illness! They would have done anything for him then. What has changed them so? It is these Judaizers who have done it, and for their own ends, 4:12-20.

Paul's final argument has in it more than a touch of allegory. But the wonder is that his letters contain so little of that favorite ancient type of thinking. Let the Judaizers remember that Abraham had two sons: one, of the flesh, by a slave; the other, of the promise, by a free woman. Let those who make so much of physical descent from Abraham remember that Ishmael was just as much his physical descendant as Isaac was. For we who share Abraham's spiritual experience and so inherit his promise are in Isaac's line and children of no slave but a free woman, 4:21-31.

"This is the freedom with which Christ has freed us. So stand firm in it, and do not get under a yoke of slavery again." This is the trumpet call to religious freedom in which Paul's argument reaches its climax. Men cannot progress in religion half slave and half free, winged with faith on one side and limping on a crutch of law on the other. In union with Christ neither circumcision nor the want of it counts for anything but only faith acting through love, 5:1-12.
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Paul knew well enough the dangers of freedom - how easily it becomes an excuse for laxity and license, for just following impulse. The Galatians will not do that, however, if they really admit the Spirit to their hearts and listen to what it directs. For what the Spirit produces is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. If Paul's argument culminates in his call to freedom, his exhortation reaches its climax here, 5:13-24.

"If we live by the spirit, let us be guided by the spirit." We must not be censorious but bear one another's burdens. The old law of retribution still holds: a man will reap just what he sows, 5:25-6:10.

Paul's closing paragraph in his own hand stands out curiously from the swift, even writing of the letter writer who had penned the letter. "See what large letters I make, when I write to you with my own hand." He repeats in his own hand the main theme of the letter, the scars of his beatings in Philippi he describes as the brand he wears as a slave of Christ, for the ancients would sometimes brand their slaves. No one can say now that Paul is not a slave of Christ. We are left to wonder whether the Judaizers had any such honorable scars to show, 6:11-18.

So ends Galatians, a perfect torrent from the first word to the last, a blaze of fiery eloquence, strongly charged with emotion from beginning to end. Paul was never greater than in this letter. Its great doctrine of freedom of religion, set forth here almost at the beginning of the New Testament, has again and again awakened the church from formalism and conventionality
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to religious life and vigor. It is not an antiquated ideal but one which we have never overtaken, which still beckons us onward toward the higher possibilities of religion. One thing is certain; we shall never go beyond it.

Problems. One serious problem about Galatians is the location of Galatia as Paul understood it and as he used the word. Gal. 1:2. It was Paul's usual practice (as distinguished from Luke's) to use, and to use accurately, the regular Roman provincial designations-Asia, Macedonia, Greece (Achaea), Judea , Syria, Cilicia, etc. We may expect that he uses Galatia in this way. But the region into which the Pergamenes under Attains I had herded the invading Kelts, or Galatae, in 239 B.C. was that about Tavium, Ancyra, and Pessinus in north-central Asia Minor. If that is the region intended by Paul by the word Galatia, the Galatian churches were founded not on the first missionary journey but on the second, in the hurried tour described in Acts in 16:6. "They crossed Phrygia and Galatia." They would probably be located in Tavium, Ancyra, and Pessinus. But there is no record of any very ancient Christianity in these places, and it would have meant a far swing to the northward in Paul's itinerary, as a glance at the map will show, though of course there is nothing impossible in that.

Recent studies in Roman provincial organization have shown that Lycaonia was included with Galatia in Roman administration. Tacitus says that Galba made Asprenas governor of Galatia and Pamphylia, [1]

[1] Tacitus Histories ii. 9.
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which strongly implies that those provinces were contiguous. This shows that, soon after Paul's day at least, it was customary to speak of the district of Derbe, Lystra, and Iconium as part of Galatia; Galba was emperor in A.D. 68, and Tacitus wrote his Histories about A.D. 115.

It has been urged by some that Paul would hardly have addressed people of Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch as "Galatians," even though their country had for years been combined with Galatia proper as one administrative district. Still, he does speak of his friends in Thessalonica and Philippi as "Macedonians," II Cor. 9:2, 4, certainly with no suggestion that they were of Macedonian stock or descent. Luke's usage is less strict than Paul's, but he speaks of Paul as a "Roman," Acts 22:25, 26, 29 (cf. 23:27), of course in no ethnographic but in a very technical political sense. Trophimus of Ephesus is classed with Tychicus as an "Asian" in Acts 20:4, and no one imagines that they must have come from the Lydian town of Asia from which the province and then the continent of Asia had already taken their names. If Paul could refer to the brothers in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea as "Macedonians," he could quite reasonably speak of those of Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch as "Galatians." For at least seventy-five years-that is, since the death of Amyntas in 25 B.C. - these towns had been a part of Galatia, and it is fantastic to suppose, as J�licher does, that they would not in that length of time have come to be referred to as Galatians; when, as we have seen,
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Thessalonians could be called Macedonians; Ephesians, Asians; and a Tarsian like Paul, a Roman. It is a mistake to think that it would have taken a hundred years to accustom a Lystran to the fact that he was also, provincially speaking, a Galatian.

The mention of Barnabas as though well known to the Galatians, 2:13, accords better with the view that they were first evangelized by Barnabas and Paul, hence on the first missionary journey and in south Galatia, rather than on the second, by Paul and Silas, so summarily sketched in Acts 16:6. Moreover, when the money collected by Paul for the Christian poor in Jerusalem was carried there, representatives of the various contributing groups were to take it, I Cor. 16:3; as the party was finally made up, there were two from south Galatia, Gaius and Timothy, but nobody from north Galatia.

It is difficult to see under what other name Paul could have grouped the Christian residents of Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch. On the whole it is reasonable to conclude that his Galatians were the inhabitants of those south Galatian cities, especially as there is no record of any Christian churches in the northern part of the province until long after Paul's day.

To Paul's argument in 3:10 it is sometimes objected that the Jewish Law nowhere demands full obedience to itself in all its details. But that is just what it seems to do in Deut. 28:58: "If you are not careful to observe all the provisions of this code [Torah], written in this book, .... then the Lord shall bring extraordinary
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plagues on you and your descendants." At the end of the last code, that of Deuteronomy, the observance of the whole legislation seems to be enjoined: "At the end of every seven years, .... you must read this code [Torah] in the hearing of all Israel, .... that they may hear it .... and be careful to observe all the provisions of this code [Torah]," 31:10-13. The word "all" is indeed absent from the Hebrew text of Deut. 27:26 (the passage Paul quotes in 3:10), as we have it, but it is present in the Septuagint Greek version. That this is the clear intention of the passage is shown by the frightful curses pronounced immediately after, in 28:15-68, upon all who are not "careful to observe all his commands and statutes which I am commanding you today," 28:15. These passages amply support the contention of Paul that the Law demanded full obedience to all its particulars. For in Jewish use these predicates were of course extended to the whole Law, all of which it was understood Moses had written.

A somewhat different situation has been proposed by L�tgert [1] and developed by Ropes [2] to explain Galatians. On the basis of a number of passages in the letter, especially 3:6-4:7; 5:11-6:10, it is claimed that there were in the Galatian churches not only persons of the extreme Judaizing type but, over against them, a group of spiritualistic radicals, pneumatikoi, who thought Paul too much inclined to find the roots

[1] Wilhelm L�tgert, Gesetz und Geist (G�tersloh, 1919).

[2] J. H. Ropes, The Singular Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians (Cambridge, 1929).
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of Christianity in Judaism, from which they wished to detach it altogether, being for their part entirely satisfied with faith and the religious endowments which it brought. It was these radicals who were out of sympathy with those who taught the word, 6:6, and were inclined to disdain the flesh and its temptations and fall into the libertinism and perfectionism of which Paul speaks in 5:13-17. There were, therefore, on this view two kinds of errorists in Galatia, each of whom had seized upon a part of Paul's teaching and exaggerated it. It is against the contentions of these perfectionist radicals that Paul in 1:11-2:14 shows that his gospel has not been influenced by the Jerusalem authorities. In fact, throughout the letter, he seems to be facing now one party and now the other.

Such is the theory. But it seems that, if there had been two groups so diametrically opposed to each other in Galatia, Paul could hardly have failed to make the fact clear instead of generally addressing the Galatians as though they were all of one stripe.

Burton, E. D. The Epistle to the Galatians (New York, 1920).

Lightfoot, J. B. St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (10th ed.; London, 1890).

Ropes, J. H. The Singular Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians (Cambridge, 1929).

Occasion. Dr. Stalker once said that the letters of Paul take the roofs off the meeting places of the early Christians and let us look inside, [1] and this is peculiarly true of the letters to the Corinthians. Paul had again journeyed westward, through Asia Minor, to the Aegean and was settled at Ephesus for what was to prove the longest missionary activity of his life. He had previously reconnoitered Ephesus as a place for missionary work. Acts 18:19-21, when he left Corinth after his eighteen months' stay there, described in Acts 18:1-17, and set out for the east. We are to think of him as settled in Ephesus, working as usual at his trade and preaching in his leisure hours with such success. Acts records, "that everyone who lived in Asia, Greeks as well as Jews, heard the Lord's message," 19:10.

Just across the Aegean, almost opposite Ephesus, lay Corinth. It was not the old luxury-loving city of classical times; that had been destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C. The new city had been founded just a century later by Julius Caesar and had developed rapidly. The notorious Astarte-Aphrodite worship of the older

[1] James Stalker, The Life of St. Paul (Edinburgh), � 129.
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city was revived but never regained its old proportions, when it had claimed a thousand hierodules. The new Roman Corinth was pervaded by the mystery religions, and their practices of initiation and religious meals, their universalism and sense of individual salvation, and their mystical experience of identification with a Lord and Savior, form part of the background of I Corinthians and had an undoubted influence upon Paul's ways of describing the religious significance of Jesus to them. To the Corinthians the Christian faith must have appeared another, but superior, mystery religion.

Corinth was only a couple of days' sail from Ephesus and must have been in constant communication with it. Visitors from Corinth were frequent in Ephesus, and among those who came and went were some who knew the little group of Christians in Corinth and indeed probably belonged to it. They are referred to by Paul as "Chloe's people." Perhaps they were her slaves or her freedmen or were employed by her in some way. At any rate they had brought Paul news about his Christian friends in Corinth, and it was very disturbing.

The Corinthians it seemed, according to these visitors, were breaking up into cliques or factions; not about anything of moral or doctrinal significance but merely about their favorite teachers. Perhaps Apollos with his polished Alexandrian style had caught their fancy and struck them as a better man than Paul. At any rate Acts speaks of his coming to Corinth, 18:24-19:1, and of his being there when Paul reached
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Ephesus and settled there, and Paul repeatedly speaks in I Corinthians as though he were being compared with Apollos, 1:12; 3:4; 4:6. Certainly a distaste for Paul's style had developed. The Corinthians considered him "rude in speech" and wished he would give more attention to the refinements of expression, like the Stoic philosopher-preachers to whom they were accustomed. But Paul insisted upon talking simply and directly in the plain speech of everyday life. That he used the vernacular in his letters the Greek papyri discovered in the sands of Egypt in the last forty years have abundantly proved. These are documents of common life, written by all sorts of people - men, women, and children - and they exhibit the same linguistic features as Paul's letters. Paul made no effort to be "literary" in writing his letters.

Not only did Paul seem less gifted than Apollos but the Corinthians had come to think him inferior in position to such Christian leaders as Cephas, that is, Peter. Possibly Judaizing Christian teachers from Jerusalem had come among them, as they had among the Galatians, and aroused these suspicions.

But more serious evils than these were reported to Paul by Chloe's people. There were cases of immoral conduct among the Corinthian Christians. One man had married his widowed stepmother. And in their business disagreements among themselves the Corinthians were actually going to pagan courts to have their differences settled.

Another matter brought to Paul by his Corinthian visitors was the shocking way in which the Lord's
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Supper was being kept in Corinth. It was the custom there for each one to bring his own food and drink for the occasion and to join some congenial group to share it, so that some had not enough to eat and drink and others had too much, and the Supper degenerated into a carouse.

Paul's mind was seesing with all this distressing information, when three men from Corinth sought him out in his lodgings at Ephesus or perhaps at Aquila's workshop, where he was probably employed. Acts 18:2, 3, 24, 26-28; 19:1, and put into his hands a letter, I Cor. 7:1. Paul must have received hundreds of letters, for the papyri show that the Greeks were great letter-writers, and Paul himself has lived in history chiefly as a writer of letters. But this is the only one that we definitely know of his receiving. It was from the Christians at Corinth and was brought to him by Stephanas, Achaicus, and Fortunatus as representatives of the Corinthian church. Stephanas may have been the leader of the Corinthian church, for Paul seems to speak of him in that way, in I Cor. 16:15-18.

Paul had already written a letter to Corinth, charging the Corinthians not to associate with immoral people who were supposed to be Christians, I Cor. 5:9-13. This letter was probably short and must have been lost, unless it is preserved, perhaps in pan, in what we know as II Cor. 6:14-7:1. That section seems quite detached from its more spirited context; in fact, the context gains greatly in coherence and movement without it. And while Paul often interrupts himself, he usually interrupts a less animated passage
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with a more animated one. But here it is the less animated passage that interrupts the more animated one. It reads:

Do not get into close and incongruous relations with unbelievers. What partnership can uprightness have with iniquity, or what can light have to do with darkness? How can Christ agree with Belial? Or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? What bargain can a temple of God make with idols? For we are a temple of the living God, just as God said, "I will live in them and move among them, And I will be their God and they will be my people." [1]

Therefore,

"Come out from them,

And separate from them, says the Lord,

And touch nothing that is unclean. [2]

Then I will welcome you,

I will become a father to you, [3]

And you shall become my sons and daughters,

Says the Lord." [4]

So since we have promises like these, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves of everything that can defile body or spirit, and by reverence for God make our consecration complete. [5]

The passage deals with just the matter with which Paul's missing letter evidently dealt; except that it has to do with the Christian's relation with unbelievers, and the lost letter dealt with immoral people inside the church, I Cor. 5:9-13. But it must be noted that it required some explanation in Paul's next letter to[1] Lev. 26:11, 12[2] Isa. 52:11.[3] Jer. 31:1. [4] Hos. l:10; Isa. 43:10.[5] II Cor. 6:14-7:1
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make this distinction clear. We cannot be by any means sure that II Cor. 6:14-7:1 is the lost letter, or even a part of it, but II Corinthians is certainly not a single letter but a combination of letters, and the passage is a difficult interruption where it now stands.

Whatever may have become of that first letter to Corinth, the Corinthians now had a host of other questions for him to answer. They had not been Christians very long, and there was no Christian literature to guide them in their new life. Yet problems were constantly arising. One was the age-long question of the sexes and their relations, which each new generation discovers for itself with delight and surprise. What is the meaning of marriage? Is it wrong to marry? What about divorce? What about engaged people? Shall they proceed to marry?

Another question that greatly concerned the Corinthians was where they should buy their meat. The best meat in Corinth was to be had at the markets connected with the great idol temples. It was from specially bred and fattened animals, in prime condition and properly slaughtered, and may be compared with the prize beef from a modern fat-stock show, which is so much better than even the best beef one can ordinarily buy. The Corinthians knew what good living was, and they had been accustomed to buy this meat. But now that they were Christians, what ought they to do?

One party at Corinth, knowing that an idol was nothing and the meat had suffered nothing from being offered in sacrifice, maintained its right to buy and
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eat this meat, as it had always done. But there was another group in the church that had grave misgivings about it. They pointed out that this proceeding made the Christians supporters of the heathen cultus, which was of course, in part maintained by the profits of these temple markets. And when Christians were found attending dinners given in the clubrooms attached to the idol temples, other Christians might easily be led into semi-idolatrous practices. [1]

How men, and especially women, should conduct themselves in church was a matter that gave rise to a whole series of questions at Corinth. One was whether women should wear veils in Christian meetings. The early Christians of course had no church buildings and held their meetings in private houses. Some brother with a large house would open it for Christian worship. In such a place should a woman dress as she would in a private house or as in a public place? Eastern and Western proprieties were also involved. Paul was a Jew by education, and women had no part in Jewish worship; it was carried on by the men and boys. Even to this day, in orthodox Jewish synagogues, the women witness the service from a gallery or from behind a screen. In Herod's temple the women could not advance beyond their own court into the Court of the Men of Israel. But, through the influence of the mystery cults and other forces, women in the Greek world had more freedom and a greater place in religion, and capable Greek women in Corinth felt quite equal to taking part with the men in the meetings

[1] Cf. Oxyrhynchus Papyri 110, an invitation to dinner at the Serapeum.
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of the church. The Corinthians are not sure which practice to follow in their meetings.

But the great problem in their worship was occasioned by ecstatic speaking. This familiar religious phenomenon, not unknown today in unsophisticated circles, was disturbing the Corinthian meetings and giving the brothers great concern. There is always something infectious about it, and when one brother under great religious excitement broke out into an unintelligible babble, others were almost sure to follow his example. The result was bedlam; a stranger coming in would have said that they were mad. Still Corinthian leaders like Stephanas hesitated to forbid ecstatic speaking altogether, for they recognized it as in a sense, though a very primitive one, a religious expression.

Another question on which the Corinthians needed Paul's counsel was the matter of the Resurrection. To the Greek mind, immortality was a familiar idea, but the Jewish way of describing it as "Resurrection," which formed part of Paul's apocalyptic teaching, created grave difficulties. These they seem to have laid before Paul in their letter, which was, in short, a veritable question box.

Contents. Paul's answer is our I Corinthians. But, before he begins to deal with their list of questions, he takes up the matters of which he had been told by Chloe's people, which had been preying upon his mind for some time, chapters 1-6. He seems unable to talk over the Corinthians' questions until he has got
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the matters of hearsay off his mind, and, first of all, the Corinthians' objections to his literary style.

The vigor and informality of Paul's style in his letters give us some faint idea of how trenchant, swift, and informal he must have been as a speaker. He does not deny the familiar, conversational style of his preaching. On the contrary, he admits it and declares that he will never attempt fine language in preaching, lest his diction come to have more of his attention than his message and so the cross of Christ may seem an empty thing. It is just here that the modern discoveries of Greek papyrus documents in Egypt have come to our aid in translating and understanding Paul. These papers of common life - deeds, letters, leases, contracts, notices, invitations, accounts - have given us for the first time a complete picture of the familiar spoken Greek of New Testament times. We actually possess at least one dated Greek document from every single year of the first century, and they have proved that Paul meant just what he said. His style was not literary, it was colloquial. The New Testament was written in colloquial Greek. The modern-speech translations that have resulted from this discovery have made Paul's letters more coherently intelligible and continuously readable than they have ever been in English before.

Paul condemns the Corinthian factions and explains what his relation to other teachers really is. He presented the gospel to them in simple direct terms, for they could not have grasped anything more advanced. He had done the planting, Apollos the watering, but
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it was God who had made the plants grow. Their belittling of his work stirs Paul to compare himself to the men condemned to death in the arena, who trudged along at the very end of the procession that passed through the streets to the amphitheater. He still feels toward them like a father, he declares, 4:14, 15, but he closes this discussion of the factions and parties at Corinth, chapters 1-4, on a threatening note:

"Which will you have? Shall I come to you with a stick, or in a loving and gentle spirit?"

In chapters 5 and 6 he takes up the case of immorality at Corinth, insisting upon the Christian duty of purity and truth. Business differences are not to be taken before heathen tribunals for settlement; the Christians are to judge the world, how much more ordinary matters? The Christian is the temple of the Spirit of God; they must honor God with their bodies.

The matters of hearsay brought to Paul by Chloe's people having been mostly disposed of (with the exception of the Lord's Supper, 11:17-34), Paul turns to the Corinthians' letter which he has not thus far even mentioned. The procedure here is like that in the Letter of Claudius to the Alexandrians, written soon after his accession, in reply to a letter from them, proposing certain honors for him and asking certain favors. [1] The phraseology with which new topics of their letter are introduced is like that with which Paul passes to each new subject raised by the Corinthians, 7:1, 25; 8:1; 12:1.

[1] H. I. Bell, Jews And Christians in Egypt (London, 1924), p. 24.
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The first of their questions has to do with marriage, chapter 7. We are so accustomed to think of the church as the one great force favoring and fostering marriage that it seems strange that it is here so depreciated. Once entered into, it is of course to be sacredly respected. But Paul feels that the single life is the one more likely to be pleasing to God. "It is an excellent thing if they can remain single as I am."

Two things must be remembered in dealing with Paul's letters and especially with the letters to Corinth. One is his half-oriental background - his Jewish upbringing. The other is his vivid expectation of Jesus' speedy messianic return. It was Paul's Jewish background that led him to refuse support from his churches, for the rabbi taught without pay, while the Greek lecturer expected a fee from his class. [1] Paul's Jewish background also held him in spite of himself, as revealed in Gal. 3:28, to a low view of the place of women in religion: "Women are to keep quiet in church," I Cor. 14:34.

But it was his messianic expectation that largely controlled his views on marriage and slavery. The time is short. The Lord is at hand. Let the unmarried remain unmarried, the married not seek to separate, the slave disdain emancipation. Not that it is a sin to marry, but the unmarried man or woman is freer to do the Lord's work. Young people who are engaged may marry if passion is getting too strong for them; but the better course is for them to remain as

[1] Justin Dialogue ii. 3.
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they are. [1] A widow may marry again, if she marries a Christian; but she will be happier, Paul thinks, if she does not.

It may seem that no problem could have been more unpromising than where the Corinthians should do their marketing, 8:1-11:1, and yet nowhere does Paul show his greatness as a teacher more than in this and the next discussion - that on order in public worship. He might have dismissed these petty questions with curt answers, but instead he states them fully and fairly and then debates them until he reaches some great principle of Christian conduct, vastly more far-reaching than the petty question in hand might seem to call for.

The positions of the party that has knowledge and the party that has scruples are both fairly stated, chapter 8. Then Paul seems to forget all about the question and to wander off into a long series of rhetorical questions about his own procedure in a variety of matters, which at first appear to have little to do with the Corinthians' questions, chapter 9. The chapter is suggested by the claim of the party of knowledge that it has a perfect right to buy meat at the temple markets, as it had always done. Paul admits this but points out that he had relinquished a whole series of cherished rights in order to do a greater service for the Kingdom of God. In so doing he actually works out the program of civilization, for it is only by the voluntary

[1] This position has recently received strong Jewish support from Samuel Belkin, "The Problems of Paul's Background," Journal of Biblical Literature, LIV (1935), 49.
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relinquishment of natural rights that man has been able to rise out of barbarism.

So when Paul returns to the problem of where the Corinthians are to do their marketing, chapter 10, there is nothing more to be said. He has freely admitted the Corinthian claim to certain rights but has then shown by his own experience and example that sometimes the best possible use we can make of our rights is to relinquish them when a great cause will be furthered by our doing so. They must follow his example in this as he follows Christ's.

When the matter of dress and behavior in church is reached, 11:2-14:40, Paul's Jewish training is again involved. Paul had already come to see that in union with Christ differences of sex no longer mattered, Gal. 3:28. But old social inheritances are not easily cast aside, and it still seemed to him indecent for a woman to appear in church without a veil - not, indeed, over her face, but on her head and shoulders. And it must be remembered that from a strictly Jewish point of view it was a great concession when Paul admitted women to any share in public worship. While Paul says farther on in the letter, 14:34, that women are not allowed to speak in church, here he speaks of them as offering prayer and explaining the will of God, 11:5, 13, apparently in church. They evidently had some speaking privileges, and the prohibition of 14:34 is probably much less sweeping than is usually supposed.

The matter of dress and behavior in church seems to remind Paul of what he has heard, doubtless from
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Chloe's people, of the abuse of the Lord's Supper at Corinth. It had evidently degenerated into a sort of carouse. This was not so strange in a Greek world, accustomed to the rites of Bacchus, which found something religious even in intoxication. Paul interrupts his answers to the Corinthians' questions to correct this matter with a good deal of sternness. He takes occasion to repeat, evidently from the Oral Gospel familiar to them in its Greek form, the oldest account of the Last Supper and tells them to make every observance of it the occasion of a serious self-examination, 11:17-34.

Returning to the topics of their letter, he comes to the question of spiritual endowments, and particularly the disturbing matter of ecstatic speaking, which was apparently wrecking their public worship and mutual instruction, chapter 12. Paul deals with this matter patiently and fairly, not denying it a place in religion, and pointing out what varied manifestations there are of the Spirit. Then, in chapter 13, he seems to turn aside again, as he had done in chapter 9, and talk of other things. He breaks forth into an encomium upon love, the supreme endowment, one of the three really enduring ones, and the greatest of the three. And here as in chapter 9, he carries the Corinthians through with him to a great Christian attitude which will settle the matter of ecstatic speaking and most other problems besides. For here Paul has worked out nothing less than the principle of Christian courtesy - one of Christianity's chief endowments. In the light of that principle even ecstatic speakers will first consider
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whether their meaningless speaking is going to be helpful to the brotherhood, and if it is not, they will of course be silent.

So Paul comes back from the praise of love to the matter of ecstatic speaking, chapter 14, with the matter really settled, just as he came back from his discussion of the voluntary relinquishment of personal rights for a larger good at the beginning of chapter 10. It is these great principle to which Paul leads the halting and perhaps rather small-minded Corinthians that make his letters live so fruitfully today.

Whether the Resurrection was also one of the matters about which the Corinthians asked has been much debated, but the place it has in the letter and the tout in which Paul discusses it seem to prove that it was. In a magnificent series of paragraphs Paul argues for it, chapter 15, as no one among his Jewish predecessors had ever done.

The letter draws to a close with what may be called business and personal matters, chapter 16. Well-to-do Jews out in the Greek west were accustomed to send money to Jerusalem to help maintain the Jewish group there, just as they do today. Paul and the Christian leaders at Jerusalem were anxious to continue such aid to dependent Jerusalem Jews who became Christians, Gal. 2:10. He now invites the Corinthians to join in this contribution, as the Galatians were doing, 16:1-4. He is planning a visit to Corinth, for his work in Ephesus is nearing its end, 16:5-9. There are personal messages, interspersed with crisp
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epigrams, 16:10-20. He closes as usual with his autograph farewell, 16:21-24.

No document of the New Testament is more closely and convincingly integrated with the church life of its time than I Corinthians. It reveals it frankly and fully, in its imperfections and in its strength. In mountain regions one sometimes wanders through dark, intricate defiles and then suddenly emerges, surprised, upon some vast and dazzling prospect. It is so with I Corinthians. One is led through intricate antique discussions of petty and insignificant matters of ancient life, like marketing and speaking with tongues, to sudden, vast outlooks upon human life, its motives and its possibilities, that still command the assent of all thinking people.

Lietzmann, Hans. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament: An die Korinther I-II. (2d ed.; T�bingen, 1923).

Robertson, Archibald, and Plummer, Alfred. First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (2d ed.; New York, 1916).

Occasion. First Corinthians has always stood so high in popular esteem, especially by reason of the thirteenth and fifteenth chapters, that it is difficult for us to understand why it should not have been welcomed by the Corinthians whom it immortalized. But it was not. Its effect was not at all what Paul intended. So far from ending the opposition and hostility to himself and the Corinthian factions, it intensified both. The parties opposed to Paul united in opposition to him, as the party of Christ, and matters there went from bad to worse.

It is only when we examine the letter from what must have been the point of view of its original recipients that this development can be understood. If we look at it for a moment from the Corinthians' position, the situation soon becomes clear. To begin with, Paul hardly acknowledges their letter. He is so full of what Chloe's people have told him that he does not mention it until he is a third of the way through. Imagine the effect upon the assembled Corinthian church of the reading of this long criticism of themselves, based upon what some third party had told Paul about them! Whatever steps Paul may have
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taken to satisfy himself of the truth of all these charges, the Corinthians would have been very much annoyed at them. In fact, the truer the charges were, the more vexed they would have been.

Paul's tone in dealing with them was also far from conciliatory. Again and again he seeks to bring the Corinthians into line with the practice of other churches, or asks them whether they think they are the only Christian church in the world. 11:16; 14:33, 36. It was no doubt quite true that not many of them were what men call wise, or influential, or of high birth, and that Paul had to treat them like babies in Christian living, 1:26; 3:1, but we should not have liked being reminded of it, if we had been the Corinthians, and they evidently liked it just as little as we should have done. The severity of Paul's rebuke, 5:1; 6:1-11; 11:17, 22, and his threat in 4:21, "Shall I come to you with a stick?" coupled with his steadily depreciatory way of speaking of them - "Who sees anything special in you? And what have you got that you have not been given?" 4:7 - must have stung the Corinthians and put them in no mood to think reasonably and patiently of Paul's instructions. At any rate, as compared with what Paul meant it to accomplish in Corinth, I Corinthians seems to have been a failure, no matter how greatly it has been prized elsewhere ever since the first century.

The next stage of the correspondence is reflected in Paul's words in the early part of II Corinthians, where he tells them of his distress in Asia, when he was so utterly and unendurably crushed that he actually
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despaired of life itself and felt in his heart that the end must be death, 1:8, 9. It is not like Paul to use strong language like this of physical hardship or peril, but where sacred personal loyalties and understandings were at stake, he might well speak in this way. It there appears that, in the effort to straighten out matters with them, in view of their reaction to I Corinthians, he has made them a visit, for he says he had made up his mind not to make them another painful visit, 2:1; compare 12:14; 13:1. He had finally written another letter, 2:3, 4, so painful and distressing that it was bound to hurt their feelings; in fact, after it was sent, Paul regretted having written it, 7:8. He had sent it to Corinth by the hand of Titus, and then completed his long ministry at Ephesus and proceeded to Troas, where he expected to meet Titus with news of how the letter had been received, 2:12, 13. It was evidently one of those letters which most of us have sometimes to write - letters which are so frank, personal, and severe that we know they will either mend matters or make the breach irreparable. That seems to have been Paul's feeling about this harsh, painful letter, written with many tears and regretted after it was sent, 7:8.

What has become of this third letter of Paul's to the Corinthians? For this description will not fit our I Corinthians at all. It cannot be described as particularly painful to Paul, or hurtful to the Corinthians' feelings, or likely to have been regretted by him after he had sent it. I Corinthians is not the letter written with many tears.
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Problems. The problem of II Corinthians is its unity; is it one letter? From the beginning through chapter 9 it is pervaded by a sense of harmony, reconciliation, and comfort. Paul's mind is at last completely at rest. The Corinthians and he are fully reconciled. The letter opens with a commanding statement of the comfort he feels, 1:3-7; the Corinthians are not only on Paul's side, they are in danger of going too far in their enthusiasm for him, 2:5-11. Paul cannot say enough about their present devotion to him, 7:7, 11, 12. "I have the greatest confidence in you. I take the greatest pride in you. I am fully comforted. After all my trouble, I am overjoyed," 7:4.

But suddenly, without any warning at all, this mood of harmony and reconciliation gives place to the very opposite. With the beginning of chapter 10 we are once more in the midst of personal misunderstanding and bitterness, and these continue to dominate the letter to the end. This sudden change of tone is the greatest problem about II Corinthians. Efforts have been made to explain how Paul could have felt so differently in the two parts of the letter. If the parts were arranged in the other order, with the harshness first and the reconciliation second, the matter might be somewhat easier. As it is, it seems impossible that Paul should have sent by the same messenger and as parts of one letter two representations of his own frame of mind so fundamentally contradictory. He cannot have felt as thoroughly satisfied with the Corinthians as he declares in chapters 1-9 and at the same time have been so deeply injured and profoundly incensed
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as he appears in chapters 10-13. It is psychologically impossible.

This undeniable incongruity between the two parts of II Corinthians naturally suggests that we have in it two letters instead of one - one conciliatory and gratified, the Other injured and incensed. And as the early part of II Corinthians clearly looks back upon a painful, regretted letter, the possibility suggests itself that we actually have that letter in chapters 10-13. As we proceed to examine it with that possibility in mind, the possibility grows to a probability. We cannot say a certainty, but no other explanation meets the peculiar conditions so well - the manifest incongruity of the two parts of II Corinthians and the fact that a harsh and painful letter intervened between our I Corinthians and the early part of our II Corinthians. Let us examine the latter part, chapters 10-13, on the theory that it is the missing letter or part of it, always remembering that, when we really hit upon the historical situation that called forth an ancient document, especially a personal letter, it should gain greatly in intelligibility and meaning.

Contents. This four-chapter letter is one long apologia. Paul is on the defensive. Chapter 10.opens with an ironic reference to what was evidently a Corinthian slur upon Paul - that he was humble enough when face to face with them but bold in dealing with them when he was far away. The claim of the Christ party at Corinth that it "belonged to Christ" leads Paul, 10:7, to declare that he "belongs to Christ" just as much as any of them. Other charges and criticisms
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gleam through these paragraphs: that he boasts too much of his authority, 10:8; that his letters are impressive and telling, but his personal appearance is insignificant, and as a speaker he amounts to nothing, 10:10; that he is beyond his proper missionary field when he tries to control the Corinthians, 10:13; that their present religious authorities are his superiors, 11:5.

The Corinthians are annoyed because Paul will not follow the Greek practice of accepting a fee or at least his support for his preaching, 11:7, 8. And we can understand this, for most of us would much prefer to pay our minister a salary to having him earn his living as a neighborhood artisan or by working in some brother's shop. But the sting of this matter at Corinth lay in the fact that they believed that Paul had accepted money from other churches; in fact, while he was at Corinth, brothers from Macedonia had brought him money. This made them feel that their standing was inferior to that of the Macedonian churches - probably Philippi, in particular, for we know from the letter to the Philippians that they had sent him money repeatedly. Paul probably felt that a gift from his friends there was not at all the same thing as accepting his support from week to week from the Corinthians or anybody else.

The Corinthian way of putting it, however, was that he robbed other churches, letting them pay him to work for the Corinthians, 11:8. But Paul insisted that he would not give up this policy; he would never become a burden to them, and by following this course
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he would expose their new religious masters, their superfine apostles, for the unprincipled masqueraders they were, 11:12, 13.

The situation roused Paul as he was probably never roused before. The ungrateful belittling of his work by the Corinthians, for whom he had done so much, stirs him to boast like his rivals, foolish as it is to do it. The result is a passage of the most amazing force and vigor - the catalogue of hardships, 11:21-33, which leaves the reader simply breathless at the end. These few informal lines, deeply imbued with Paul's intense feeling, have a power and effectiveness seldom equaled in any literature. Paul will not tell of visions and revelations of the Lord; that would be a profanation of them. He will rather boast of his weaknesses, for it is when he is weak that he is really strong, 12:1-10.

The fires of his indignation have not yet burned out, however, and he resumes his invective against the superfine apostles and his ironic defense of his financial course at Corinth, 12:11-13. They must forgive him that wrong! He insists that neither he nor his lieutenants have ever taken any financial advantage of the Corinthians: "I was clever about it, you say, and took you in by a trick! Yet did I make anything out of you by anybody that I sent to you? .... Did Titus make anything out of you?" 12:16b-18.

These piercing thrusts alternate strangely with emotional outbursts of great affection for the Corinthians; indeed, it was clearly his deep personal attachment to them that made him feel their defection so deeply. It is not your money but yourselves that I want.
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.... I will be glad to spend all I have and all I am for your sakes," 12:14b, 15a. But in general the severe tone is maintained almost to the end of the thirteenth chapter. Yet Paul has no desire to be proved right at their expense. "Be what you ought to be, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace," 13:11b.

It is at once apparent that this letter, or part of a letter, was a painful one to write and must have hurt the feelings of the Corinthians. We can also easily understand that, after writing it, Paul might well have felt regret and misgivings about it. In short, it fits remarkably well the picture of the lost intervening letter given us in the early part of II Corinthians. Moreover, without it, chapters 1-9 (with the exception of 6:14-7:1) form a thoroughly intelligible and harmonious unit, ending in chapters 8, 9 with business and personal matters. To recognize in chapters 10-13 the lost third letter to Corinth relieves II Corinthians of its greatest difficulty - the incongruity of its two parts with each other - and restores to us the missing letter or the bulk of it. And so understood the two letters at once take on new clearness and significance. For there are some things in II Corinthians, chapters 1-9, which become clear only as the sequels of other things in chapters 10-13. Thus the catalogue of hardships in II Cor. 6:4-10 (cf. 4:7-11) is a milder form of the great catalogue in 11:21-33.

Such in all probability was the letter sent by the hand of Titus (2:13; 7:6-9, 13, 14) and reflected in II Cof. 2:3, 4; 7:&-12. After writing it, Paul stayed
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on for a time in Ephesus, concluding his work there, and then proceeded to Troas where he expected to meet Titus with news of the effect the letter had had upon the strained situation. But Titus did not appear, 2:12, 13. There was a good opening for the Christian mission in Troas, but Paul had no heart to establish new churches when his old ones were crumbling beneath his feet, so he said goodbye to them and went on in great distress of mind to Macedonia. His poor human nature could get no relief - there was trouble at every turn, fighting without and fear within, 7:5.

It was then and there in Macedonia that God, who comforts the downcast, comforted him by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming but by the comfort the Corinthians had given him, for he told Paul bow they longed to see him, how sorry they were for what had happened, and how they now took his part, 7:5-7. The long, painful misunderstanding was over. Paul and the Corinthians were reconciled.

So somewhere in Macedonia, perhaps among his loyal Philippians, Paul wrote the fourth letter in this extraordinary correspondence, the letter of reconciliation. From the first sentence it breathes the serene air of harmony, understanding, and comfort. It is no conventional commonplace that it begins with a cry of gratitude to God. The fact that the same great expression was repeated later in Ephesians and I Peter has made it seem little more than a form, but it was more. It was a heartfelt outburst of relief and thanksgiving. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the merciful Father and the God
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always ready to comfort! He comforts me in all my trouble, so that I can comfort people who are in any trouble with the comfort with which I myself am comforted by God." He goes on striking this note of comfort until in this paragraph he has used it, as verb or noun, ten times, 1:3-7, and he returns to it again later in 7:6,7, 13, 14.

The letter is addressed to the Christians not only of Corinth but of all Greece, 1:1, 2; as though Paul wanted the widest possible circle to share in his joy over his reconciliation with the Corinthians. His jubilant expression of relief and comfort, 1:3-7, is followed by a dark picture of the anguish of spirit he endured before that relief came, 1:8-11.

Just as after any heated controversy it seems necessary to review the main points of misunderstanding in a gentler vein, before cordial personal relations can once more be happily resumed, so to cement the new understanding Paul reviews some of his differences with the Corinthians in a milder tone. They do not need to read between the lines of his letters; there is no ulterior meaning in them, 1:12-14. He is not vacillating, as they have sometimes thought, though he had planned to go to see them before visiting Macedonia and then to revisit them after leaving Macedonia, 1:15-22. As it is, he has stayed away from Corinth and gone to Macedonia first simply to spare them what, before their misunderstandings were cleared up, would have been a painful visit, 1:23-2:3. He refers to his previous letter, 2:4, almost in an apologetic tone: "I was in great trouble and distress of mind,
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when I wrote you, and I shed many tears as I did it, yet it was not to hurt your feelings, but to make you realize the extraordinary affection I have for you."

The Corinthians have turned about so completely that their former leader in attacking Paul must now be protected by the apostle from their indignation. Paul has forgiven him, and they must restore him to his place in their affections, 2:5-11.

Paul proceeds to tell of his anxiety at not hearing from them through Titus, and soon finds his way, informally and naturally, into one of the most remarkable things anywhere in his letters - an account of his motives and methods in his ministry, 2:12-6:10. This statement of the ideals of the Christian missionary as they appeared to the greatest Christian missionary of the first century, though generally overlooked, is certainly one of the great treasures of Christian literature.

Paul thinks of himself as one of those incense bearers who accompanied triumphal processions through the ancient streets, filling the air with a divine fragrance. He is no peddler of God's message, but like a man of sincerity, commissioned by God and in hit presence, in union with Christ he utters Christ's message, 2:12-17.

He needs no credentials with the Corinthians. His authorization is from God, who has qualified him to serve him in the interests of a new agreement, not in writing but of the Spirit, 3:1-6. A greater splendor than shone on Moses' face attends this new revelation, 3:7-18. In such a service Paul never loses heart. He
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disowns disgraceful, underhanded ways. He will not practice cunning or tamper with God's message, "It is by the open statement of the truth that I would commend myself to every human conscience in the sight of God." It is not himself but Christ Jesus that he is proclaiming as Lord. Paul is the bearer of the heavenly light, 4:1-6.

Much as he has suffered, he has never really known defeat, 4:7-15. He never loses heart. His eyes are on the unseen, eternal values, 4:16-5:5. His hope of a heavenly dwelling gives him confidence, 5:6-10. Christ's love controls him. In union with Christ we are new beings. God has commissioned Paul to proclaim reconciliation - how God through Christ reconciled the world to himself and intrusted Paul with the message of reconciliation, 5:11-21.

In a gentler but still vigorous and dramatic way Paul reviews his hardships, 6:1-10, another grander catalogue of which had formed the climax of the third letter (11:23-33). We can hardly suppose he would have put two such lists into the same letter. Then he looks back and realizes how he has laid bare his inmost emotions and calls upon them to reciprocate. Yet they have already done so; he has the greatest confidence in them; he takes the greatest pride in them. He is fully comforted. After all his trouble he is overjoyed, 6:11-13; 7:2-4. [1]

In a more matter-of-fact tone he resumes the account, broken off at 2:13, of his movements after leaving Ephesus and Troas. At last, in Macedonia, Titus

[1] This paragraph is interrupted by the fragment of the first letter to Corinth, 6:14-7:1, which seems to have no possible connection with it.
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had rejoined him, and his long suspense was over. The Corinthians had come over to his side without reserve. The harsh letter had indeed hurt their feelings but to good purpose, for it led them to repent. "See how earnest this God-given pain has made you! how eager to clear yourselves, how indignant, how alarmed, how eager to see me, how zealous, how avenging! At every point you have proved that you are clear of this matter." Titus shares his gladness over their changed attitude. Paul can now feel perfect confidence in them. The reconciliation is complete, 7:5-16.

Paul is preparing to return to the east, to Antioch and Jerusalem, and the fund for the Jerusalem Christians, mentioned in I Cor. 16:1, must be ready for him to take with him. It is decidedly interesting for us moderns to see Paul as a money-raiser, chapters 8, 9. He has already told the Corinthians of his instructions to the Galatians about this fund, and now he tells of his efforts to interest the Macedonians in it. It was destined to have a decisive influence upon Paul's life and fate.

As we look back over this correspondence with Corinth, the fullest that we possess from Paul's hand, we therefore recognize four letters written by Paul to the Corinthians:

1. The letter mentioned in I Cor. 5:9, written from Ephesus about A.D. 54 and probably preserved in part in II Cor. 6:14-7:1. The Corinthians replied with a letter asking further questions, which is mentioned in I Cor. 7:1.

2. I Corinthians, written from Ephesus in answer to this letter from Corinth about A.D. 54.
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3. The painful letter, mentioned in II Cor. 2:3, 4, 9; 7:8, written from Ephesus about A.D. 55, probably preserved, at least in part, in II Corinthians, chapters 10-13.

4. The letter of reconciliation, written from Macedonia about A.D. 55, preserved in II Corinthians, chapters 1-9.

The intensity of feeling revealed in the third letter has been obscured by traditional forms of translation and even more by its location at the end of II Corinthians, where its sharpness of tone is blanketed and masked by the opposite character of chapters 1-9. It is a proof of the completeness of the Corinthians' repentance that they preserved in their church chest a letter that so gravely reflected upon them. When, a generation later, some great admirer of Paul undertook to assemble what could still be found of his letters, it was natural to mask the indignant reproof of the third letter with the serenity and friendliness of the fourth. Historical situations and chronological sequence did not so much interest the collector of the letters as practical religious values.

As for Paul himself, nowhere else have we such a full-length self-portrait as in the Corinthian correspondence. Its length, variety, and intensity, together with the heights to which it sometimes rises, give it a unique place in the Pauline literature.

Lietzmann, Hans. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament: An die Korinther I-II. (2d ed.; T�bingen, 1923).

Plummer, Alfred. Second Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (New York, 1915).

Occasion. Paul's work in the Eastern world was done. It had begun in Syria and Cilicia, extended to Galatia, and then passed beyond the borders of Asia into Europe, to the provinces of Macedonia and Greece. The foundations he had laid in Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus, and his conviction that his work was to pioneer and break new ground for the Christian mission, now led him to turn his eyes to the West, to Rome and the western Mediterranean, even to Spain.

The name of Spain sounds strange in the New Testament, and especially here in these earliest writings in it. But Roman roads and aqueducts, amphitheaters and bridges, had made Spain a new world. Some of the bridges, built under Augustus, still stand, as solid and serviceable as ever, and the great aqueducts which so awed the medieval Spaniards that they called them "miracles" still fill the traveler with wonder.

It was not only in material progress that Spain was coming to the front in the first century. It is a curious fact that, in the very years when Paul was writing his letters, the torch of Latin literature was passing from Italian to provincial hands, and men from Africa and Spain were beginning to write Latin books. First
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among these Spanish writers stands Seneca, Nero's tutor, a contemporary of Paul. Martial, Lucan, Columella, Pomponius Mela, and even Quintilian, the great authority on Latin style, were all from Spain. Materially and culturally Spain was, in Paul's day, a new world.

This was the Spain that so attracted Paul as a field of missionary pioneering. He stood now on the pinnacle of the third journey at Corinth - Corinthus Bimaris, Corinth on two seas - with its two ports, Lecheum and Cenchreae. From one he could take ship for the East, for Antioch and Caesarea. From the other he could sail away over the Gulf of Corinth to Brundisium and the Appian Way, which led to Rome.

Paul is poised upon a momentous decision. The West is calling him. He wishes to visit the Roman church and have a hand in shaping its religious life. Galatia and Corinth have shown him into what mistaken attitudes Christian groups might suddenly veer, and his great conception of faith as the central thing in Christian experience must be put before the Roman Christians, if they are to be safeguarded against grave errors. With his vivid messianic expectations Paul can hardly have foreseen much of the vast future that lay before the Roman church. But its immediate importance for the Greek mission was evident enough. The founding of the Roman church is lost in obscurity. The legend connecting Peter with its foundation is clearly unhistorical. We are left to suppose that Roman visitors to Corinth, Ephesus, or Antioch had carried the gospel back with them to Rome, or that
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visitors from those places or others like them had carried the good news to Rome and it had taken root there. Paul's friend and employer Aquila was from Rome, Acts 18:2, and he and his wife Priscilla may have had a hand in it. Or perhaps Paul, in his slow voyages about the Mediterranean, had sowed the seed of it in conversation with strangers from Rome on the moonlit deck of some coasting vessel. At any rate, Paul had learned that there were already believers there. He would have liked to lay that foundation himself; but if it was already laid, he would want, above everything else, to go there and make his views and presence felt in the formative period of the church that was taking shape in the capital of the world.

Everything, in short, draws Paul westward, first to Rome and then to Spain. At Corinth he is already well on his way to the West. Only one thing holds him back, but that is a decisive thing - the collection for the poor brothers in Jerusalem. The churches of four provinces - Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, and Greece - have raised the fund Paul had asked for, and now he must take it to Jerusalem.

He might, of course, have sent a draft.[1] The bankers of his day were quite capable of transmitting credits about the Mediterranean. But that would not do. This money was not simply to feed so many hungry mouths; it was to bind the two parts of the Christian body together, to satisfy the Jerusalem group of the reality of their union with the Greek churches of the

[1] M. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1926), p. 170.
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West. The fund had to be interpreted by Paul in person if it was to do the thing he most hoped for, that is, to reconcile Jerusalem to the Greek mission.

Raising money in the first century or the twentieth carries with it grave responsibilities, and it was these that now controlled Paul's movements - most unfortunately, too, as it turned out. For it was this fatal collection that took Paul to turbulent Jerusalem, already seesing as he knew very well, 15:31, with that mad unrest that ten years later was to break into open war. It was this charitable fund that cast him into prison and terminated the missionary work of the best missionary of them all. We may talk as we like about Paul the prisoner and what he could accomplish talking to his guards or writing his letters, but common sense tells us that what a man shut up in prison can accomplish is nothing to what the same man, free and at large, can do.

So Paul must turn his face eastward once more, with the representatives of the contributing churches whose names are given in Acts 20:4. But he cannot turn his back upon Rome and the West without some gesture indicative of what he felt and desired about them. So he writes the letter to the Romans.

Burton called it "prophylactic," designed to safeguard them against dangers he had seen other churches experience. Sanday called it "testamentary," the compressing of his gospel into a letter and bequeathing it as a last will and testament to their keeping. There is truth in both interpretations. The echoes of the Galatian controversy, chapters 3-5, and the manifest
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allusions to the kind of thing that had happened at Corinth, chapter 14, show that the letter was designed to safeguard the Roman believers against similar errors. And the more ordered manner of presentation that distinguishes Romans from the other letters of Paul, together with the constructive character of the letter, justifies Sanday's description of it as testamentary. Paul may well have felt that he might never be able to reach Rome. Certainly it has, in fact. become what Sanday said it was intended to be - Paul s bequest of his gospel to the Roman Christians and to the world.

Contents. No book of the New Testament appears more formidable to the modern reader than Romans. It is positively awe-inspiring, and this fact considerably impedes the understanding of it. At the risk of violating sound principles of pedagogy and interpretation, let us turn aside for the moment from the front of the letter and see if the student's apprehensions may not be appreciably lightened if we approach it from the rear.

We are here confronted by one of its problems. Chapter 16.is a letter of introduction for Phoebe, an assistant of the church at Cenchreae, who is about to make a journey, apparently to Rome. There is nothing impossible or improbable about that, of course, Aquila and Priscilla had come from Rome to Corinth and established their business first there and then at Ephesus, Acts 18:1, 2, 18, 19, 26. Here in Rom. 16:3 they are mentioned as at the place which Phoebe was about to visit. It would seem that they have gone
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back to Rome, though at last accounts they were in Ephesus, I Cor. 16:19, where one congregation met in their house. The fact that greetings are sent to Epaenetus, the first man in Asia to turn to Christ, 16:5, rather suggests, however, that Ephesus is Phoebe's destination, not Rome, unless he too has, like Aquila and Priscilla, betaken himself to Rome. The extraordinary number of persons greeted in the chapter, twenty-six in all, is surprising if it is addressed to Rome. Not that Paul might now know that many people in a city he had never visited (he has never been in Rome) but because he is so familiar with their domestic or religious groupings; he knows that Rufus has his mother with him, that Philologus and Julia are together. Nereus has his sister with him, and they form the nucleus of a Christian congregation. So do Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, and Hermas; a group of brothers meets with them. No less than twenty-four people - men and women - are greeted by name, not to mention Rufus' mother and Nereus' sister, 16:13, 15. The Christian record of some of these people is also emphasized. Some of them had worked very hard in the Lord's service: Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis. Paul knows of three different congregations and the individuals that they rally around, perhaps in whose houses they meet, 16:5, 14, 15. Some of the people greeted are old comrades of Paul's in missionary work; some have shared imprisonment with him, 16:7.

All this makes it seem extremely probable that Paul is not writing to a strange city but to his
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well-known and greatly loved Ephesus. Acts records that, on his final journey to the East, he had a special farewell for the elders of Ephesus, 20:17-38. Having just spent more than two years in Ephesus, Acts 19:8-10, he would, of course, have just such knowledge about people and groups there as chapter 16 exhibits and, if a friend were crossing at once to Ephesus, would naturally send .them his greetings. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how he could know so much in detail about the Christians in Rome, or how so many of his old friends could so suddenly have removed to Rome. The warning against departing from "the instruction you were given," 16:17, fits Rome poorly if Paul has never been there, and on the whole it is very probable that chapter 16 was written not to Rome but to Ephesus. Short journeys are more numerous and hence more probable than long ones, and it is likely that Phoebe was making the short voyage to Ephesus, not the longer journey to Rome. It may be added that Cenchreae was the Aegean port and slightly favors contacts with Ephesus rather than with Rome. Not that a resident of Cenchreae might not undertake a journey to Rome; only that a woman of Cenchreae would be rather more likely to have contacts - business or social - with Ephesus than with Rome.

The separation of the bulk of the sixteenth chapter from the rest of Romans has very recently received striking support in the Ann Arbor papyrus manuscript of Paul's letters, [1] published by Professor Henry A.

[1] Ten leaves of this very ancient papyrus codex of Paul's letters were published by Sir Frederic G. Kenyon in London in 1934 (Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, Fasc. III). Thirty others from the same codex were published at Ann Arbor by Professor Henry A. Sanders in 1935, and forty-six others, also from the same codex, have been published by Sir Frederic from the Chester Beatty Collection, in 1936, as Fasc. III, Suppl.
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Sanders in 1935 and dated by Wilcken and Gerstinger about A.D. 200. The Michigan leaves include Romans and place the great doxology, 16:25-27, at the end of chapter 15. This so fully accords with the main facts about the sixteenth chapter that it may be said to complete the evidence. The Letter to the Romans ends with the fifteenth chapter and the doxology; the sixteenth chapter is not a part of it; it is a letter of introduction, one of those letters so frequent in the ancient world, referred to by Paul in II Cor. 3:1. There are numerous examples of them in the Greek papyri, [1] and Christians must have made use of them constantly, for in moving about the ancient world, where the inns were so often places of ill-repute and questionable morals, the Christians on their journeys formed the practice of stopping with some Christian brother, to whom they carried letters of introduction. III John is such a letter. So Romans, chapter 16, makes Phoebe known to Paul's old friends, the Christians of Ephesus. That it contains so little in the way of instruction, coupled with the references to instruction previously given, verses 17-20, is natural enough in view of the fact that Paul has so lately come from there by way of Troas and Macedonia. [2]

[1] Milligan, Greek Papyri (Cambridge, 1910), p. 24.

[2] The objections raised by C. H. Dodd (The Epistle to the Romans [New York, 1922], pp. xix and xx) yield readily to this approach: (1 and 2) If Phoebe is going to a city from which Paul has just come, after spending almost three years preaching in it, it is natural that he should take advantage of the opportunity to greet many old friends there, thus also introducing Phoebe to them personally; that he has no new body of instruction to impart is entirely natural in the situation. The preponderance of greetings creates no difficulty; cf. the letter of Sempronius to his mother (second century A.D.), in which in a letter of seventeen lines eleven persons or groups are saluted; cf. also Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (New York, 1927), pp. 192-94. This sort of thing is a marked and well-known feature of ancient Greek letters. (3) Dodd's excellent solution of 16:16b, "All the churches of Christ wish to be remembered to you," fits Ephesus quite as well as Rome: "Paul was at the moment in close touch with the churches of Galatia, Asia, Macedonia and Achaia, over the business of the relief fund, and it may be that their delegates had already assembled" (op. cit., p. 240). (4) It is no longer necessary to suppose that the letter ended at 15:33; the Ann Arbor papyrus shows that the great doxology, 16:25-27, originally stood after 15:33.
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If we pursue our plan of beginning Romans at the end, we find that the next main portion of it is concerned with an account of Paul's situation and prospects, 15:14-33. Much that has just been said about his situation when he wrote the letter is drawn from these lines. The next preceding section, 12:1-15:13 tells what the Christian's conduct ought to be in the world, the state, and the church. This is our longest statement from Paul's pen of his ideal of Christian behavior and deserves to stand next to the Sermon on the Mount among such statements.

It is, in turn, preceded by a discussion of the hardening of Israel or, as we should say, the Jews' rejection of Christianity, chapters 9, 10, and 11. The fact that the Jews did not accept their own Messiah must have greatly embarrassed the efforts of Paul and other missionaries to interest Greeks in Christianity and called for a good deal of explaining on their part. This is
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Paul's chief effort to deal with that problem, which was still acute when the Gospel of Matthew was written, some twenty-five years later.

The formidable letter is thus reduced to more feasible proportions when we temporarily dismiss these last two-fifths of it as supplementary matters, not intimately related to its main argument. And the three chapters next preceding may also be detached as setting forth the relation of those who possess faith to sin, law, and the new life, chapters 6, 7, and 8.

The commanding part of Romans, its great argument, is really in what remains - chapters 1-5. The rest is largely sequel to what is established there. Let us now approach this main trunk of the letter from the beginning.

Paul addresses his letter to those in Rome whom God loves and who are called to be his people, describes himself as commissioned in Jesus' name to preach obedience and faith among the heathen, and declares Jesus to be the long-foretold Messiah. And here one cannot forget the epigrams of Matthew Arnold: "The first chapter is to the Gentiles - its purport is: You have not righteousness. The second is to the Jews - its purport is: No more have you, though you think you have."[1] The third chapter goes on to show that, with sin and guilt thus shown to be universal among Jews and Greeks, there has now been revealed through Christ a way of becoming upright and accepted with God; it is the way of faith. Faith with Paul means an attitude of vital dependence upon

[1] St. Paul and Protestantism (New York, 1883), pp. 78-79.
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God - of repentance, obedience, and spiritual union with him. As such it was in simple fact the germ of all true uprightness, for it accepted his will and made it its own. This new uprightness comes through having faith in Jesus Christ, and it is for all who have faith without distinction. For all men sin and come abort of the glory of God, but by his mercy they are made upright for nothing, by the deliverance secured through Christ Jesus.

The relation of the death of Christ to this is set forth in two ways: It is an expiation for man's sin, and it is a revelation of God's own righteousness. It is the fashion nowadays to belittle sin and represent it as a sort of theological fiction. But one does not have to look very far about us in the modern world to find plenty of conduct which cannot be called by any less serious name. And if the modern world were all virtuous, the death of Jesus is by itself enough to prove that sin once existed on the earth, for how else could such a man be brought to such an end?

Paul somehow saw in the death of Christ a great gesture of reconciliation on the part of God. Man deserved the penalty; Jesus took it. He was a sacrifice of reconciliation, to be taken advantage of through faith.

The foes of this doctrine of faith were wont to appeal to Abraham and God's agreement with him. Christ was the completer of that old agreement which promised blessings to Abraham and his descendants. So, in order to benefit by this new salvation, one must be a descendant of Abraham. This was the battle
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fought out in Galatians. Here again, in Romans, Paul takes the sword from the hands of his Judaizing opponents and turns it against them. For it was by his faith, the Scripture says, that Abraham won God's approval. So for Greeks and Jews, as for Abraham, salvation comes by the way of faith. The story of Abraham is no obstacle to Paul's doctrine of faith; it has become one of its chief supports, chapter 4.

As in chapter 4 Paul has shown how Abraham illustrates his teaching, now in chapter 5 he turns to another great figure of the Jewish theology - Adam. It was a Jewish commonplace that Adam's sin had infected mankind with guilt. Over against this unitary source of condemnation Paul now puts Jesus as a unitary source of acquittal. He has hardly accomplished this, however, when he pulls down the scaffolding, which the figure of Adam had afforded, to leave Christ standing alone.

There is no comparison between God's gift [of salvation] and that offense [of Adam's]. For if one man's offense made the mass of mankind die, God's mercy and his gift, given through the favor of the one man Jesus Christ, have far more powerfully affected mankind. Nor is there any comparison between the gift and the effects of that one man's sin.

This plainly means that the good Christ did far outweighs the harm Adam did, and that can mean only that Paul perceived that good was more fruitful than evil. So the great idea of the superior fruitfulness of good gleams through this paragraph. Once more Paul
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has brought us, by devious intellectual paths, to a great spiritual outlook.

So in chapters 4 and 5, as Matthew Arnold put it, Paul employs the history of Abraham and Adam to illustrate his doctrine of faith. The great idea that shows now and again through the text is that God has forgiven the world. All man has to do is to accept that forgiveness in faith. This is the great undercurrent of chapters 3, 4, and 5, which form the heart of Romans.

The consequences of this great amnesty are presented, as we have already seen, in chapters 6, 7, and 8. The man who adopts this attitude of faith is saved from sin; it no longer has control of him, chapter 6. He is freed from law, chapter 7; and did anyone ever probe more deeply into the eternal conflict in man's moral nature than Paul does here? The man of faith lives a new life on a new spiritual level, as a son of God, with God's spirit in his heart. It is a tremendous thought, but the fact is he has in some way, however imperfect, attained God's point of view. He views himself and mankind and life itself just a little as God himself views them. God's will becomes his. He has found the river of the love of God. He is at one with the deepest life of the universe, chapter 8.

These are magnificent concepts in religion. No wonder Paul bursts forth at the end into exultation: "If God is for us, who can be against us? .... Who can separate us from Christ's love? Can trouble or misfortune or persecution or hunger or destitution or danger of the sword? .... In all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us."
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Nothing can separate us from the love of God, shown in Jesus Christ.

So the great letter, in its essential argument, really ends. But Paul must add an appendix to explain the failure of the Jews to accept the culmination of their own religion. To this he devoted chapters 9, 10, and 11. The Jews have indeed failed to see the values in the religion of faith, although Jesus was in truth the Messiah foretold by their own prophets. But it is their reluctance that has given the Greeks their opportunity, and it is the plain duty of the Greeks to seize it and not debate about it; otherwise they in their turn, wild olives as they are, may be pruned away. Still Paul is not without hope that Israel may yet turn to the gospel. "Only partial insensibility has come upon Israel, to last until all the heathen have come in, and then all Israel will be saved." The section on the hardening of Israel ends with another outburst. "How inexhaustible God's resources, wisdom and knowledge are! .... For from him everything comes; through him everything exists; and in him everything ends!"

The series of exhortations and moral instructions that follows, 12:1-15:13, is by itself a commanding statement and would attract far more attention if it were not overshadowed by the rest of Romans. But it still amazes us by its penetration, elevation, and breadth. Here is a morality that does not grow old or obsolete. And it is all so inward, so little concerned with the accidental or the temporary. Chapter 12.has to do mostly with relations in the church, while chapter 13 deals with relations to the state. "Love never
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wrongs a neighbor, and so love fully satisfies the Law."

Chapter 14.reviews some matters already worked out with the Corinthians, for the strong and the weak parties reappear - the party that has knowledge or the emancipated party, on the one hand, and the overscrupulous party, on the other. "It is the duty of us who are strong to put up with the weaknesses of the immature, and not just suit ourselves. .... Christ did not please himself. Therefore treat one another like brothers." The same splendid ideal of Christian courtesy set forth in 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, reappears here. The section of moral instruction ends with a quartet of Old Testament oracles showing the place the heathen were to have in the Kingdom of God and a final benediction. It is in its own way fully equal to the great argument that begins the letter, chapters 1-5 Paul turns in closing to personal plans and movements. As one peculiarly commissioned to the heathen, he has been moved to write them pretty boldly on some points. He reviews his work in the East and declares that it is now done, and he is looking toward Rome and Spain, but that his visit to them must be postponed until he has taken the collection to Jerusalem. Paul knows that this is a dangerous thing for him to do. "Pray that I may escape from those in Judea who are disobedient, and that the help I am taking to Jerusalem may be well received by God's people, so that, it is God's will, I may come with a glad heart to see you and enjoy a visit with you," 15:31, 32.
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This was the letter Paul sent from Corinth to Rome about A.D. 56. It is almost as though he had carried his gospel as far as he could toward Rome, and then, when he could go no farther, had rolled it into this letter and sent it the rest of the way.

Problems. Romans has its problems. Was it really addressed to a single body of Christians, or was it meant for a wider circle? There seems no reason to suppose that it was more than what it claims to be - a message to the Roman church, written when Paul's responsibilities obliged him to postpone the visit to Rome he had planned. Paul wrote long letters to his friends, as I Corinthians shows.

Lake has assembled evidence that a form of Romans without chapters 15 and 16, and perhaps also without the name of Rome in 1:7 and 1:15, was known in antiquity;[1] it is reflected in the list of chapter headings of the Codex Amiatinus of the Latin Vulgate and finds color in the apparent neglect of these two chapters on the part of Tertullian and Cyprian. Origen seems to have preferred manuscripts that omitted Rome in 1:7, 15. The abbreviated form of the letter may have been produced by Marcion or later hands by reduction - a common practice even today [2] - but its existence in antiquity is by no means certain, and the recent discovery of the Ann Arbor-Chester Beatty papyrus of Paul's

[1] The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1914), chap. vi.

[2] In a recent publication entitled The Bible, Designed To Be Read as Living Literature: The Old and the New Testaments in the King James Version, 1936, the Letter to the Romans breaks off with 14:12, followed by the Doxology, 16:25-27. Such reductions are frequent nowadays, and they were not unknown in antiquity.
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letters in Greek, dating according to the best paleographers from about A.D. 200 and designated P 46 bears most unfavorably upon it, for the closing chapters are present in the manuscript. This is the oldest of our manuscripts of Paul; it goes back to the time of Tertullian and to the boyhood of Origen.

It is, moreover, agreed that chapter 15 is closely linked in thought with chapter 14. Now, while most manuscripts have the Doxology, 16:25-27, at the end of chapter 16, many have it at the end of chapter 14; some have it in both places, and some omit it entirely. But the new papyrus text (P 46) has it at the end of chapter 15 - a strong corroboration of the suggestion that chapter 16, the letter of introduction for Phoebe, is an addition to the great letter. This is the obvious testimony of our oldest witness to the text of Romans.

It is altogether probable that the original form of Romans, as Paul sent it to Rome, consisted of chapters 1-15, plus 16:25-27. When the Pauline corpus was formed at Ephesus about A.D. 90, the Phoebe letter which had been written to Ephesus and preserved there, was appended to it. This is the form of Romans contained in the new papyrus text, about A.D. 200. The benediction was afterward variously shifted, on literary or liturgical grounds, from the end of chapter 15 to the end of chapter 14, or to the end of chapter 16; with the result that some later copyists omitted it in both places, while others inserted it in both.

Kenyon argues that "the difficulty still remains of understanding how a letter of introduction for Phoebe should have been extant without preface or
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conclusion, and should have been attached to the great Epistle to the Romans."[1] But if the Phoebe letter was originally directed to Ephesus, and the first collection of Pauline letters was made there, as I have sought to show, [2] that might very well have happened. The collectors of the letters would possess in their own church chest an unimportant letter of Paul's, which they might well wish to include in the corpus they were forming; they would be reluctant to publish so meager a letter as a separate unit, as the Letter to the Ephesians, to stand beside the massive letters to Rome and Corinth. Yet they would feel that they must not leave it out altogether. It would not be unnatural for them to append it to one of the longer letters, especially if they knew from Acts that Priscilla and Aquila had a Roman connection. It is enough to say that it was attached to Romans to insure its preservation and circulation, which is precisely what it has done. It could not possibly have been added to either of the letters to Corinth, for a woman of Cenchreae, a suburb of Corinth, would be well known already to the Corinthian Christians; she was, in fact, one of them. As one surveys the Pauline letters, it is difficult to find a better one to which to attach it, and the first collectors and editors of Paul's letters had no hesitation about combining two letters into one, as II Corinthians and Philippians show. Moreover, they seem to have been holding the collection to seven churches, the typus septiformis ecclesiae; certainly the collection

[1] Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, Fasc. III, Suppl. (London, 1936), p. xviii.

[2] Formation of the New Testament (Chicago, 1926), pp. 28 and 29.
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has always contained letters to seven and only seven churches, though they are not always the same seven.

There is something very impressive about Paul as we see him in Romans. To the eye, he may have seemed just a Jewish artisan, wandering from one Mediterranean port to another. But what great concerns were occupying his mind! Carrying a conciliatory gift to the Jewish believers of the East with one hand, with the other he dispatches westward a masterly account of the Christian faith in a letter to the new Greek church at Rome; heroically striving to bring East and West, Jew and Greek, together in the Kingdom of God. Such is the giant figure that shines through the pages of the Letter to the Romans.

Lake, Kirsopp. The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1914), chap. vi.

Sanday, William, and Headlam, Arthur C. The Epistle to the Romans (New York, 1895).

Occasion. Paul was in prison. His years of free wandering about the eastern Mediterranean, carrying the Christian gospel far and wide, were over. His apprehensions about the perils that might await him in Jerusalem, Rom. 15:31, had been only too well founded; compare Acts 20:25, 38; 21:4,13. He had been mobbed in Jerusalem, arrested there, and transferred to Caesarea, and finally, when he appealed as a Roman citizen to the emperor's court, had been removed to Rome for trial.

All this came to the ears of his faithful friends, the Philippians, and they prepared to stand by him as usual. They had been his partners in this gospel business, Phil. 4:15,17, ever since he had first come among them. Even when he was at Thessalonica, his next stopping place after leaving Philippi, they had sent money more than once for his needs, Phil. 4:16, and after he left Macedonia and went on to Athens and Corinth, no church but theirs had helped him, 4:15. Indeed, this willingness of his to accept Macedonian - that is, Philippian - aid had been one of the grievances of the Corinthians, II Cor. 11:9. It seems to have made them jealous of the Philippians.

It is clear that the Philippians were a very practical
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group, and news that Paul was a prisoner and on his way to Rome, or already there for trial, would stir them at once to aid him. If he had needed their help before, when he was an able-bodied artisan busy at his trade, how much more he must need it now that he was shut up in prison. Ancient prisoners needed money, especially prisoners awaiting trial, for they must have counsel, and the Philippians evidently resolved that what money could do should be done for Paul. So they raised a fund and sent one of their number, a man named Epaphroditus, to wait on Paul, attend to his various wants, and stay with him until his matters were settled. Acts says that Paul lived in Rome for two full years in rented lodgings of his own (28:30), and it is very likely that the rent was paid by the Philippians.

It has been assumed that the Philippians would not know of Paul's being dispatched to Rome until he had arrived there, but of course this is not necessarily true. They may have known of it very soon after he did and have made their arrangements for helping him during the winter that he and his companions in shipwreck spent on the island of Malta, Acts 28:1, 11. It is not at all impossible that Epaphroditus was already in Rome when Paul reached the city, and that the deputation that went out from Rome as far as Appius' Forum and Three Taverns (Acts 28:15) to meet Paul as he approached the city included him; he may even have been their leader. Someone in Rome knew that Paul was coming, and Epaphroditus is the likeliest person we know of to have been informed.
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These observations are made because some have sought to date Philippians by calculating how long it would take news of Paul's presence in Rome to reach Philippi, how long it would have taken the Philippians to raise their money and find their man, how long it would have taken him to reach Rome, etc.[1] But when we consider that some time elapsed after Paul's appeal to the emperor's court before he actually started for Rome, and what a slow and unfortunate voyage he had, being shipwrecked and delayed for three months on Malta, Acts 28:1, 11, it is clear that such calculations are futile. The Philippians had begun to help Paul with money immediately after he left their town for Thessalonica, years before, Phil. 4:15, 16. They were prompt in taking action. They would not have waited now to hear that Paul had actually arrived in Rome before taking measures for his relief.

Problems. The problem of Philippians is its unity. Considered as a single letter, it presents a most disorderly series of materials - teachings, warnings, news about himself, acknowledgments, accounts of Epaphroditus. In chapter 1 he is making the best of his imprisonment; in chapter 2 he is sending Epaphroditus back to them; in chapter 3 he bursts forth against the Judaizers; in chapter 4 he acknowledges the gift Epaphroditus has brought him. Paul is usually much more orderly than this.

Moreover, there is between 3:1 and 3; 2 a break so harsh as to defy explanation. In 3:1 all is serene; they

[1] J. B. Lightfoot, St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (4th ed.; London, 1878), pp. 36 f.
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must not mind Paul's repeating himself, for it is for their good. But in the next verse he breaks out against the Judaizers with an intensity unsurpassed even in Galatians.

Look out for those dogs, those mischief-makers, with their amputation! We are the true circumcision who worship God by his spirit. .... If anyone thinks he can rely on his physical advantages, still more can I! I was circumcised when I was eight days old, I am a descendant of Israel. I belong to the tribe of Benjamin. I am a Hebrew, and the son of Hebrews.

It reminds one of II Cor. 11:22: "If they are Hebrews, so am I! If they are Israelites, so am I! If they are descended from Abraham, so am I!"

This sharp change after 3:1 (where Paul seems to be closing his letter and saying goodbye) raises the question whether our Philippians does not break at this point into two letters: 1:1-3:1 and 3:2-4:23. This division would entirely relieve the disorder of treatment we have noted. 3:2-4:23 reflects the coming of Epaphroditus with the Philippians' gift, 4:10-19, which Paul gratefully and somewhat playfully acknowledges. The Philippians are his partners in the gospel enterprise, entitled to the profits - of course, spiritual - that it will produce. It is a long time since he has needed their help, but he welcomes it now as an expression of Christian interest. The tone of the paragraph suggests that Epaphroditus has only recently come.

He seems to have brought bad news of the activities of the Judaizers at Philippi, so that Paul bursts out in
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condemnation of them with his first words, 3:2, 3, just as he does in Gal. 1:6. We must suppose the salutation of this letter was omitted when it was combined with 1:1-3:1. If so, the parallel to Gal. 1:6 is complete.

The idea that our Philippians combines two letters of Paul to Philippi finds some corroboration in the fact that Polycarp of Smyrna, writing to the Philippians some fifty years later, reminds them of the blessed and glorious Paul, "who when he was among you in the presence of the men of that time taught accurately and steadfastly the word of truth, and also when he was absent wrote letters to you, from the study of which you will be able to build yourselves up into the faith given you," 3:2.[1] Some knowledge or consciousness that Paul had written more than once to Philippi may have lingered in Asia, where the Pauline letters were first collected and published. It is of course possible that Polycarp is speaking generally; he knew Philippians and supposed that Paul wrote more than once to the Philippian church. But he clearly implies that the Philippians still have the letters and can study them, though he probably knew very well that they had only the published collection of Paul's letters. On the whole, the more closely one examines the passage, the more it seems to favor the recognition of two letters in our Philippians. Certainly this first direct allusion to our Philippians in Christian literature speaks of it as "letters."

Contents. We may, therefore, regard 3:1-4:23 (or 4:20, if vss. 21-23 be grouped with 1:1-3:1) as

[1] K. Lake, Apostolic Fathers (London, 1912), I, 287.
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Paul's letter of thanks to the Philippians, written on receiving their gift through Epaphroditus. It opens with a vigorous denunciation of the Judaizers, contrasting their legalistic attitude with Paul's reliance upon Christ and his aspiration toward Christian perfection through him, 3:2-16. On the other hand, the Christian profession must not be made a mask for passion and vicious self-indulgence; we belong to a higher realm, 3:17-21. Personal instructions, crisp admonitions, and farewells follow, 4:1-7.

In the disappointment and bitterness of his imprisonment, Paul had learned the great lesson of directing his thoughts. He might so easily have fallen into resentment, discontent, and despair. Here he was, the most competent missionary of the new cause, shut up in a meaningless imprisonment, while less capable men quarreled over the missionary task. That way madness lies! Instead, he tells the Philippians what he had found out himself, in the hardest possible school:

"Let your minds dwell on what is true, what is worthy, what is right, what is pure, what is amiable, what is kindly - on everything that is excellent or praiseworthy. Do the things that you learned, received, and heard from me, and that you saw me do. Then God who gives peace will be with you," 4:8, 9.

He goes on, in conclusion, to acknowledge what the Philippians had sent him. Not that he really needed anything; he can adjust himself to short rations or long; he can do anything through him who gives him strength. "But it was very kind of you to share my difficulties." It reminds Paul of the repeated help they had given him in former years. They have been his
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business partners in this gospel enterprise. "I am fully supplied with what I have received from you through Epaphroditus," 4:10-20.

Paul must have written the Philippians a letter of acknowledgment of their gift when he received it, and this must be either that letter of acknowledgment or a repetition of it. But there is no suggestion of the latter; it is altogether more probable that this is the original letter sent to Philippi to acknowledge the coming of Epaphroditus with the fund they had provided for Paul's needs and trial.

There is nothing improbable in the idea that two short notes to Philippi should have been combined into one longer letter; we have already seen the same thing done in II Corinthians and in Romans - two letters joined together or a short letter appended to a long one. The men who first assembled and published the letters of Paul were more interested in a few long units than in a long series of short notes. They were practical men with immediate religious uses in mind, perhaps occasional church reading, not as Scripture but as preaching; they were not scholars or pedants, absorbed in the technique of publication.

So Paul condemns the Judaizers and thanks the Philippians. Time goes on and Epaphroditus, who has become very useful to Paul, falls sick. Rome is not a very healthy place, and Epaphroditus may have had the Roman fever, still so familiar. At any rate he is very sick and at death's door. News of his illness reaches Philippi, and the Philippians are greatly distressed. Their representative, who they had hoped
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would be so useful to Paul, has now become an added care to him. But at length Epaphroditus recovers, at least sufficiently to be sent home. And then lest, when he reappears on the streets of Philippi, the Philippians blame him for leaving Paul still a prisoner. Paul puts into his hand a letter which will silence any criticism of him and make the Philippians respect what he has done for Paul. This second letter is preserved in Phil. 1:1-3:1, to which some think may be added 4:21-23. It begins with an expression of his deep attachment to the Philippians, who certainly seem from first to last to have been the most loyal and understanding friends he had, 1:3-11. He tells them reassuringly of the effect his arrest and imprisonment have had in rousing the courage of Christian preachers. He is clearly facing his trial and confidently hopes that his courage may be equal to the occasion, 1:1220. He is fully reconciled to his fate whatever it may be. Yet he believes that he will live to be of further service to them. They for their part must not waver, 1:21-30. They must make Christ and his humility and obedience their model. They must be all the more harmonious and obedient now that Paul cannot come and train them. If his life is to be a sacrifice, he is glad to have it so, 2:1-18.

He means to send Timothy to them soon, but now he is sending back Epaphroditus, who has been so very sick but is now able to travel back to Philippi. He calls him his fellow-laborer, his fellow-soldier, and says he had risked his life to serve Paul. "So give him a hearty Christian welcome." And so goodbye, 2:19-3:1.
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Since the letter of 3:2-4:20 seems rounded out by the doxology in verse 20, verses 21-23 probably belong to the other letter and should be read immediately after 3:1.

What we possess in Philippians is, therefore, not just a single letter but a section of Paul's correspondence with Philippi, covering two situations: the coming of Epaphroditus with their gift and the return of Epaphroditus weeks or months later, after he had been incapacitated by illness. Some time certainly elapsed between these two situations, perhaps a year, for news has gone to Philippi that Epaphroditus is sick and word has come back that Epaphroditus has heard of this, 2:26. The two letters may have been written as much as a year apart. As they now stand, the later one precedes the earlier, just as is the case with the two letters preserved in II Corinthians.

The Philippian letters were probably written from Rome about A.D. 59, or 59 and 60, respectively. (The question of their origin in an imprisonment at Ephesus will be considered among the "Problems" of Colossians.) They give us significant glimpses of Paul in his relations with the one of all his churches which seems to have stood nearest to him and done most to support and cheer him in his missionary journeys and in his subsequent imprisonment.

Lightfoot, J. B. St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (4th ed.; London,1878).

Vincent, Marvin R. The Epistles to the Philippians and to Philemon (New York, 1897).

Occasion. Between the material world and the divine spirit the ancients felt that there must lie a great gulf almost impossible to bridge. Yet man must cross it if he was to realize his religious destiny and enter into communion with God. Some thinkers found a way through the doctrine of Aeons, intermediate qualities or even beings, probably derived from the Platonic "Ideas." These aeons were conceived as rising, tier above tier, toward God; and by communing with one after another one might, through reflection, asceticism, and self-discipline, rise from material things into full fellowship with the Divine. It was like climbing a vast spiritual ladder.

When such thinkers entered the Christian church, they of course brought much of their old philosophical thinking with them and fitted it to their new Christian faith and experience. To them Christ became at once one of these divine aeons - the greatest, perhaps, but still only one of many. Communion with him seemed perfectly natural to them. So their old philosophy and their new faith fitted together. Their communion with these aeons was stimulated, they believed, by ascetic practices - fasts, vigils, and the observance of set days.
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This type of Christian thought and life had appeared at Colossae, one of the cities on the Lycus River in the Roman province of Asia. Christianity had probably reached Colossae and the near-by cities of Hierapolis and Laodicea as a result of Paul's work at Ephesus, when, as Acts says, everyone in Asia heard the Lord's message. Acts 19:10, 26. The leader of the Colossian church was Epaphras, and in his distress at the philosophic views of these Colossian brothers he sought out Paul in his prison at Rome and laid the situation before him. Col. 1:7, 8; 4:12, 13.

Not only did this system rob Christ of his supremacy in Christian experience; it also created within the church an esoteric group of Christians, claiming superiority over the rank and file of the brotherhood. It created classes within the fellowship and was at variance with the strong democratic strain that marked the early church. In the face of these difficulties Epaphras would very naturally seek out the man who had brought the Christian gospel to the province of Asia in the first place, and ask his counsel.