Archives: Book Chapters

Peter was dead. The impulsive apostle who had followed Jesus about Galilee had lived to share in the world-wide gentile mission and had met his death in Rome. With him the chief link the Roman church had had with the earthly ministry of Jesus was gone. Western Christianity had lost its one great human document for the life of Jesus.

The familiar stories and reminiscences of Jesus, words and doings would no longer be heard from the lips of the chief apostle. East and west alike had heard them, but in the restless activity of the gentile mission, and especially in the general expectation of Jesus’ speedy return, no one had thought to take them down. And so with Peter a priceless treasure of memorabilia of Jesus passed forever from the world.

But there still lived in Rome a younger man who had for some time attended the old apostle, and who, when Peter preached in his native Aramaic to little companies of Roman Christians, had stood at his side to translate his words into the Greek speech of his hearers. His name was Mark. In his youth he had gone with Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey to Cyprus, but had disappointed and even offended Paul by withdrawing from the party when they had landed in Pamphylia and proposed to push on into the very center of Asia Minor. He had afterward gone a second time to Cyprus with Barnabas, to whom he was closely related. Through the years that had passed since then he had probably kept in close touch with the Christian leaders at Antioch and at Jerusalem, where his mother’s house had been from the first a center for the Christian community. It was probably as Peter’s companion that he had made his way at length to Rome, and there until Peter’s martyrdom had served the old apostle as his interpreter.

Mark saw at once the great loss the churches would sustain if Peter’s recollections of Jesus perished, and at the same time he saw a way to preserve at least the best part of them for the comfort and instruction of the Roman believers. He had become so familiar with Peter’s preaching, through his practice of translating it, that it was possible for him to remember and write down much that Peter had been wont to tell about his walks and talks with Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem, more than thirty years before.

In this way Mark came to write what we call the Gospel of Mark. But Mark did not call it his Gospel; indeed it is not certain that he called it a gospel at all; and if he had thought of naming its author he would quite certainly have called it Peter’s work rather than his own. But the order and the Greek dress of the Gospel are the work of Mark, however much he is indebted to his memory of Peter’s sermons for the facts that he reports.

In the selection of what he should record, Mark was doubtless often influenced by the conditions and needs of the Roman Christians for whom he wrote. But it is Peter’s picture of Jesus that he preserves, not of course just as Peter would have drawn it, yet with an oriental skill in story-telling which may be Peter’s own. We see Jesus drawn by John’s preaching from his home among the hills of Galilee, and accepting baptism at John’s hands, and then immediately possessed with the Spirit of God and filled with a divine sense of his commission as God’s anointed to establish God’s Kingdom in the world. Yet he is silent until John’s arrest and imprisonment, and only when John’s work is thus cut short does he begin preaching in Galilee. Marvelous cures accompany his preaching, and the Galileans soon throng about him wherever he goes. His freedom in dealing not only with Pharisaic tradition but also with the precepts of the law itself soon brings him into conflict with the Pharisees and their increasing opposition before long threatens his life. After two or three withdrawals from Galilee in search of security or leisure to plan his course, Jesus at length declares to his disciples his purpose of going up to Jerusalem to the springtime feast of the Passover. He warns them that the movement will cost him his life, but declares that God will after all save him and raise him up. Bewildered and alarmed they follow him through Peraea up to Jerusalem, which he enters in triumph, now for the first time declaring himself the Messiah by riding into the city in the way in which Zechariah had said the Messiah would enter it. Jesus boldly enters the temple and drives out of its courts the privileged dealers in sacrificial victims who had made it their market-place. The Sadducees, who control the temple and profit by these abuses, on the night of the Passover have him arrested, and after hasty examinations before Jewish and Roman authorities hurry him the next morning to execution. Up to the very hour of his arrest, Jesus does not give up all hope of succeeding in Jerusalem and winning the nation to his teaching of the presence of the Kingdom of God on the earth. The book more than once predicts his resurrection; and in its complete form it doubtless contained a brief account of his appearance to the two Marys and Salome after his burial; but it had by the beginning of the second century lost its original ending, and while two conclusions have been used in different manuscripts to complete it, the original one, probably only ten or twelve lines long, has never been certainly restored.

Informal and unambitious as Mark’s gospel narrative is, and lightly as it was esteemed in the ancient church, in comparison with the richer works of Matthew and Luke, no more convincing or dramatic account has been written of the sublime and heroic effort of Jesus to execute the greatest task ever conceived by man -- to set up the Kingdom of God on earth.

Of the many letters Paul must have written, only one that is purely personal has come down to us. It was sent by the hand of a runaway slave to his master, to whom Paul was sending him back.

During Paul’s imprisonment at Rome he had become acquainted with a young man named Onesimus, who under his influence had become a Christian. In the course of their acquaintance Paul had learned his story. He was a slave and had belonged to a certain Philemon, a resident of Colossae, or the adjacent town of Laodicea, and had run away from his master, probably taking with him in his flight money or valuables belonging to Philemon. He had found his way to Rome and so had been brought by a strange providence within the reach of Paul’s influence.

Paul’s belief in the speedy return of Jesus made him attach little importance to freedom or servitude. He prevailed upon the slave to return to his master and sent by him a letter to Philemon, whom he knew, at least by reputation, as a leading Christian of that region. He asks Philemon to receive Onesimus, now his brother in Christ, as he would receive Paul himself, and if Onesimus is in Philemon’s debt for something he may have stolen from him! Paul undertakes to be personally responsible for it. Havıng thus prepared the way for a reconciliation between Onesunus and his master, Paul asks Philemon to prepare to entertain the writer himself as he hopes soon to be released, and to revisit Asia.

While we may wonder at Paul’s returning a runaway slave to his master and thus countenance human slavery, it is noteworthy that he sends him back no longer as a slave, but more than a slave a beloved brother. It was at the spirit of slavery, not at the form of the institution, that Paul struck in this shortest of his letters.

The letter to Philemon was not the only one that Paul sent to Colossae at this time. There had appeared in Rome a man named Epaphras, who had been a Christian worker in Colossae and the neighboring cities of Laodicea and Hierapolis. It was probably through him that Paul heard that some of the Colossians had begun to think that a higher stage of Christian experience could be attained by worship of certain angelic beings and communion with them than by mere faith in Christ. They recognized the value of communion with Christ, but only as an elementary stage in this mystic initiation which they claimed to enjoy. It was only through communion with these beings or principles, they held, that one could rise to an experience of the divine fullness and so achieve the highest religious development. The advocates of this strange view were further distinguished by their scrupulous abstinence from certain articles of food and by their religious observance of certain days -- Sabbaths, New Moons, and feasts. Their movement threatened not only to divide the Colossian church, by creating within it a caste or clique which held itself above its brethren, but to reduce Jesus from his true position in Christian experience to one subordinate to that of the imaginary beings of the Colossian speculations.

Paul had never visited Colossae. But his interest in Epaphras and in all Greek or gentile churches led him to undertake to correct the mistake of the Colossians. Still a prisoner at Rome, he could not visit Colossae and instruct the Christians there in person, but he could write a letter and send it to them by one of his helpers, who was also to conduct Onesimus back to his master Philemon.

Paul begins by mentioning the good report of the Colossian church which has reached him, and expressing his deep interest in its members. He proceeds to tell them of the ideal of spiritual development which he has for them, and takes occasion in connection with it to show them the pre-eminent place of Christ in relation to the church. In him is to be found all that divine fullness that some of them have been seeking in fanciful speculations. This is the gospel of which Paul has been a minister, especially to Gentiles like themselves. He wishes them to realize his interest in them and in their neighbors at Laodicea, and his earnest desire that they may find in Christ the satisfaction of all their religious yearnings and aspirations.

As for the theosophic ideas which are being taught among them, Paul warns the Colossians not to be misled into trying to combine these with faith in Christ. In Christ all the divine fullness is to be found. They have no need to seek it elsewhere. The ascetic and formal practices, "Handle not, nor taste, nor touch," which are becoming fashionable at Colossae, are likewise without religious value and foreign to Christianity.

Over against these futile religious ideas and practices, Paul urges the Colossians to seek the things that are above. They are to live true and upright lives, as people chosen of God should do. The peace of Christ must rule in their hearts. Wives, husbands, children, fathers, slaves, and masters all have their special ways of service, but everything is to be done in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Paul says little about the state of his case. Tychicus, who takes the letter to them, is to tell them about that. An interesting group of his friends is gathered about him in Rome, and in closing the letter he adds their salutations to his own. Epaphras, the founder of their church, Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, and Luke, whom Paul here calls the "beloved physician," are among the number. Paul sends an earnest exhortation to Archippus, whom he speaks of as though he were at Laodicea, and asks the Colossians to let the church in the neighboring town of Laodicea read this letter, and to find an opportunity to read a letter he is sending to Laodicea.

What has become of this Laodicean letter? It is very likely what we know as Philemon, which was addressed not only to Philemon but to the church that met at his house, including Archippus, who was evidently the minister of it. But the way in which Archippus is spoken of in Colossians shows that he was not a Colossian but a Laodicean.

Years after, when the publication of the Acts had aroused new interest in Paul, and his letters were being collected, a general letter to all Christians was written by some gifted and devoted follower of Paul, to introduce the collected letters to the churches everywhere, and strike the great note of unity in Christ which the times so demanded. The letter sought to make the churches feel that these several messages to the Romans, Corinthians, or Galatians were in reality for all the churches, and thus put the collected letters, some of which taken by themselves were fire-brands of controversy, into step with the new spirit of unity. The old dividing wall was broken down. There was one Lord, one faith, one baptism. They were all one great spiritual fellowship in their union with Christ. Every spiritual blessing, the writer tells his readers, is theirs in Christ. Through him they are adopted by God as sons. Redemption and forgiveness and the gift of the Holy Spirit they receive through Christ. He would have them realize the greatness and richness of the Christian salvation which God has wrought in Christ, whom he has made supreme. To this thought of the supremacy of Christ, he comes back repeatedly in the letter. He is deeply concerned to have them know in all its vast proportions -- breadth and length and height and depth the love of Christ, through which alone the human spirit can rise into the fullness of God.

Paul appears as one especially commissioned to the Greek world, and the readers are referred to his other letters for a fuller account of his message. It is through Christ that the old separation of Jews from Greeks has been brought to an end, and the same great religious possibilities opened before both. As followers of Christ they must put away the old heathen ways and live pure, true, and Christlike lives. Wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters are shown how they may find in the Christian life the elevation and perfection of these relationships.

Thus what we know as Ephesians was really the first Christian encyclical, and served to introduce to the churches everywhere the first collection of Paul’s letters, which were destined to have so much greater influence than when they lay scattered and almost forgotten in the church chests of the generation in which they were written. But this was long after Tychicus and Onesimus journeyed eastward carrying Paul’s two letters, one for the Christian brothers at Colossae, and one which Onesimus must with no little trepidation have presented at the door of his old master, Philemon.

Paul was a prisoner. His liberty was at an end. On the eve of a new missionary campaign in Spain and the West he had been arrested in Jerusalem and after a long detention sent under guard to Rome for trial. At the height of his efficiency the arm of the Roman Empire halted his career and changed the history of western Christianity before it was begun.

It would be difficult to overestimate the bitterness of Paul’s disappointment. The great task of preaching the new gospel in western lands must go undone, or be left to men of far less power and vision, while the one man in all the world fittest for the task wore out his years in a dull and meaningless imprisonment. So it seems to us, and so at least at times it must have seemed to Paul.

Yet in his prison Paul had certain compensations. He could at least talk of the gospel to his guards, and through them reach a wider circle with his message. And he could keep in touch with his old friends and even make new ones by means of an occasional letter to Colossae or Philippi.

The first church Paul had founded in Europe was in the Macedonian city of Philippi, and the Philippians were among his oldest and truest friends. They did not forget him in his imprisonment. Hardly had his guards brought him to Rome when a man arrived from Philippi with funds for Paul’s needs and the evident intention of staying with him to the end, whatever it might be. Nothing could have been more loyal or more practical. Ancient prisoners even more than modern ones needed money if their lot was not to be intolerably hard; and the presence at Rome of one more man to supply Paul’s wants and do his errands must have been a great convenience to the apostle.

Unfortunately this man fell sick. Rome was never a healthful city, and we can easily imagine that his first summer there may have been too much for the Philippian Epaphroditus. His sickness of course interrupted his usefulness to Paul; indeed, it proved so serious and even dangerous that it greatly added to Paul’s anxieties. When at length Epaphroditus recovered it was decided that he ought to return to Philippi, and to explain his return to the Philippians and make fresh acknowledgment of their generous behavior. Paul wrote the letter that has immortalized them.

Paul had of course long since reported to the Philippians the arrival of Epaphroditus and acknowledged the gift he had brought. The news of Epaphroditus’ illness too had gone back to Philippi, and worry over that fact, and a certain amount of homesickness besides, had added to the misfortunes of Epaphroditus. As these facts put very kindly and sympathetically by Paul come out in the letter, we cannot escape the feeling that what Paul is writing is in part an apology for the return of Epaphroditus, who, the Philippians might well have thought, should not have left Rome as long as Paul had any need of him.

Paul’s letter exhibits from the start his cordial understanding with the Philippians. They are his partners in the great gospel enterprise. From the first day of his acquaintance with them they have been so. Again and again in his missionary travels they have sent him money, being the first church of which we have any knowledge which put money into Christian missions. But the Philippians did it quite as much for Paul their friend as for the missionary cause; for, when his missionary activity was interrupted, they continued and increased their gifts. Amid the divisions and differences -- with Barnabas, Mark, Peter, the Jerusalem pillars, the Corinthians, the Galatians and their teachers -- which attended the career of Paul, it is refreshing to find one church that never misunderstood him, but supported him loyally with men and money when he was at the height of his missionary preaching and when he was shut up in prison; one church that really appreciated Paul, and did itself the lasting honor of giving him its help.

Paul is able to tell the Philippians that his imprisonment has not checked the progress of the gospel preaching in the West. Not only has he been able to reach with his message many in the Praetorian guard and in that vast establishment of slaves, freedmen, and persons of every station known as the household of Caesar, but the very fact that he is in prison for his faith has given what little preaching he can still do added power, and inspired other Christians to preach more earnestly than ever. On the other hand, preachers of different views of Christianity have been spurred to new exertions now that their great opponent is off the field. So Paul’s imprisonment is really furthering the preaching of the gospel, and he comforts himself in his inactivity with this reflection.

The Philippians are of course anxious to know what Paul’s prospects are for a speedy trial and acquittal. He can only assure them of his own serenity and resignation. If he is to die and be with Christ, he is more than ready, but if there is still work for him to do for them and others, as he is confident there is, he will be with them again to help and cheer them. Meantime he plans to send Timothy to them to learn how they are, and he hopes shortly to be able to come himself. It would seem that while Paul’s situation is still decidedly serious it is not altogether desperate.

With these references to his own prospects and the progress of the gospel in Rome, Paul combines a great deal of practical instruction. The Philippians are to cultivate joy, harmony, unselfishness, and love. In the midst of his letter some chance event or sudden recollection brings to his mind the peril they are in from the ultra-Jewish Christian teachers who have so disturbed his work in Galatia and elsewhere, and he prolongs his letter to warn the Philippians against them.

Or it may be that Philippians as we have it combines two letters, one warning them vehemently against the Judaizers, and acknowledging the coming of Epaphroditus with their gift (3:2-4: 23), the other, urging them to be harmonious and unselfish, and sending Epaphroditus back to them after his illness. (1:1-3:1).

Paul must have had occasion to write to the Philippians at least four times before Epaphroditus carried this letter back to them. Perhaps those earlier letters were less full and intimate, confining themselves closely to the business with which they dealt. Or perhaps it was the very fact that these were the last letters they ever received from Paul that made the Philippian church preserve and prize them. For out of his narrow prison and his own hard experience Paul had sent them one of his greatest expressions of the principle of the Christian life: "Brethren, whatsoever things are true, honorable, just, pure . . . . think on these things . . . . and the God of peace shall be with you."

Paul’s work in the eastern world was done. For twenty-five years he had now been preaching the gospel in Asia Minor and Greece. His work had begun in Syria and Cilicia, then extended to Cyprus and Galatia, then to Macedonia and Achaea, and finally to Asia, as the Romans called the westernmost province of Asia Minor. In most of these districts Paul had been a pioneer preacher and had addressed himself mainly to Gentiles, that is, Greeks. From Syria to the Adriatic this pioneer work among Greeks had now gone so far that the gospel might be expected to extend from the places already evangelized and soon to permeate the whole East. Already ready Paul was planning to transfer his work to Spain, where the gospel had not yet penetrated

Between Paul in Corinth and his prospective field in the far West lay Rome, the center and metropolis of the Empire. Christianity had already found its way to Rome by obscure yet significant ways. Probably Jews and Greeks who had been converted in the East and had later removed to Rome, in search of better business conditions or the larger opportunities of the capital had first introduced the gospel there and organized little house congregations. The fervor of the early believers was such that every convert was a missionary who spread the good news wherever he traveled. The fact that Christianity was already established in Rome helps us to understand how Paul could think that Alexandria and Cyrene needed him less than Spain, and to realize how many other Christian missionaries were at work at the same time with Paul.

Paul was eager not only to occupy new ground in Spain, but also to visit the Roman Christians on his way and to have a part in shaping a church for which he rightly anticipated an influential future.

One thing stood in the way of these plans. It was the collection for Jerusalem. For some years Paul had been organizing the beneficence of his western churches, not to sustain wider missionary campaigns but to conciliate the original believers in Jerusalem. The primitive Jewish-Christian community seems rather to have resented the violent eagerness with which the Greeks poured into the churches and, as it were, took the Kingdom of God by force. The Jewish Christians were never altogether satisfied with the way in which Paul and his helpers offered the gospel to the Greeks, and the growing strength of the Greek wing of the church increased their suspicion. It had long since been suggested to Paul that this suspicion might be allayed by interesting his Greek converts in supplying the wants of the needy Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, and he had already done something in that direction: A more extensive measure of the same sort was now in active preparation. The gentile churches of four provinces, Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, and Achaea, were uniting in it. For nearly two years the Christians of these regions had been setting apart each week what they could give to this fund, and Second Corinthians shows how Paul encouraged them to vie with one another in this charitable work -- a hint of the importance the enterprise had to his mind. This collection for Jerusalem has especial interest as the first united financial effort on the part of any considerable section of the ancient church.

The clearest evidence of the importance Paul attached to this collection, however, is the fact that he turned away for a time at least from Rome and Spain in order to carry the money in person to Jerusalem. This can only mean that he felt that the whole success of his effort would hinge on the interpretation which its bearer put upon it when he delivered the gift there. In the wrong hands it might altogether fail of its conciliatory purpose; only if its spiritual significance was tactfully brought out could it produce the desired effect of reconciling the Jewish wing of the Christian church to the gentile.

Compelled by this undertaking to give up for the time his plan of moving westward, Paul took at least the first step toward his new western program. He wrote a letter to the Roman Christians. The letter would at least inform them of his plans and interest, and so prepare the way for his coming. In it too Paul could embody his gospel, and so safeguard the Roman church from the legalistic and Judaistic forms of Christian teaching that had proved so dangerous in the East. And if this Jerusalem journey resulted in his imprisonment or even his death, as he and his friends feared, this might prove his only opportunity of giving to the Romans and through them to the people of the West the heart of his Christian message.

Righteousness is to the mind of Paul, as he reveals his thought in this letter, the universal need. Jews and Greeks are alike in need of it, for neither law nor wisdom can secure it. But the good news is that God has now through Christ revealed the true way to become righteous and so acceptable to him. This is accomplished through faith, which is not intellectual assent to this or that, but a relation of trustful and obedient dependence upon God, such as Abraham long ago exemplified. This relation is fully revealed through Christ, and the new way of righteousness has been confirmed and illumined by his death. Persons who adopt this attitude of faith are freed by it from sin and from the tyranny of the law. The spirit of God now dwells in them and makes them his sons, never to be separated from his love.

In the failure of the Jews to accept the gospel more than one early Christian thinker found a serious problem. Was God unfaithful to his promises in his rejection of lsrael? Would the Jews never turn to the gospel? Paul explains the situation as due to the Jews’ want of faith. They are not ready to enter into the filial relation that Jesus taught and represented. But their rejection of the gospel and God’s consequent rejection of them are not in his opinion final. Some day they will turn to the righteousness of faith.

This setting forth of Christian righteousness is the longest sustained treatment of a single subject in the letters of Paul. From it he passes in conclusion to instruct the Roman Christians upon their practical duties to God, the church, the state, and society in general. Few things are more striking in these earliest Christian documents than their constant emphasis upon upright and ethical living. It is interesting to find Paul urging his Roman brethren to be loyal citizens, respecting the authority of the Roman Empire as divinely appointed, and the friend and ally of the upright man. The event proved that in this he idealized the Roman state. Yet, taking the situation as a whole, his counsel was both wise and sound for by virtue of it the church at grim cost indeed, disarmed and lived down the Empire’s misunderstanding.

The letter to the Romans is often thought of as the best single expression of Paul’s theology. But it is not less remarkable for its picture of himself. In it he appears as the man of comprehensive mind, not alienated from his own people, though he knows that his life is not safe among them, actively concerned for the harmonizing of Greek and Jewish Christianity, yet even while engaged in a last earnest effort to unite the eastern churches, eager to have a hand in shaping the Roman church and to reach out still farther to evangelize Spain. The apostle is never more the statesman-missionary than in the pages of Romans.

Many years after, when the Christians of Ephesus gathered together a collection of the letters of Paul, a short personal letter written by him to Ephesus from Corinth, probably at about the time he wrote Romans, was appended to Romans, perhaps because, while it was hardly important enough to be presented as a separate letter, yet, as something from the hand of Paul, the Ephesians wished to keep it with the rest. It was written to introduce Phoebe of the church at Cenchreae, near Corinth, to Paul’s old friends at Ephesus, whither she was going on some errand. A Christian traveling about the Roman world on business would find in many cities communities of brethren ready to entertain and help him. The value of this, in an age when the inns were often places of evil character, can be imagined. Most of all, Phoebe’s letter of introduction discloses to us the several little house congregations of which the whole Christian strength of a great city like Ephesus was made up in those early days when the church was still in the house.

First Corinthians was a failure. It has been so useful and popular in every other age of Christian history that it is hard to believe that it did not accomplish the main purpose for which it was written.

The factions in the church at Corinth, so far from sinking their differences and blending harmoniously into a unified church life, shifted just enough to unite all who for any reason objected to Paul, and then faced him and each other more rancorously than ever. His letters, they told one another, might put things strongly, but after all he was, when you actually met him, a man of ineffectual speech and insignificant presence. The old doubt of his right to call himself an apostle still prevailed at Corinth. What right had he to set up his authority against that of Peter and the apostles at Jerusalem, who had been personal followers of Jesus in Galilee? If he were indeed the apostle he claimed to be, he would have expected the Corinthians to give him financial support during his stay among them. His failure to do this suggested that he was none too sure of his ground. While a few remained loyal to Paul, the majority of the Corinthians yielded to these views.

News of this state of things was not long in traveling across the Aegean and reaching Paul, and stirred him profoundly. Perhaps he went so far as to visit Corinth and face his accusers in person. But if he did so, he was not successful in meeting their doubts of him and restoring their confidence, and he must have returned to his work at Ephesus in the deepest discouragement. Yet he was in no mood to give up in defeat or to rest under the slanders of his enemies, and he made one final effort in a letter to regain his lost leadership at Corinth. This letter is what we know as the last four chapters of Second Corinthians.

The chief characteristics of Paul’s letter is its boldness. So far from apologizing for himself, he boasts and glories in his authority, his endowments, and his achievements. In indignant resentment at their persistent misconstruing of his motives he fairly overwhelms them with a torrent of burning words. His authority, he declares; is quite equal to any demands they can put upon it; as the recognized apostle to the Gentiles he can without stretching his authority exercise it over them; and disobedience to it will bring vengeance when matters are settled up between them. Conscious that he is quite the equal of those "superfine apostles," as he ironically calls them, whom the Corinthians quote against him, he warns the latter against the teaching of such apostolic emissaries. His policy of self-support in Corinth was designed to save him from any suspicion of self-interest and to make the disinterestedness of his work perfectly unmistakable. The false apostles whom they are now following would find still more fault with him had he let the Corinthian church pay his expenses.

Foolish as boasting is, he will for once outboast his opponents. In purity of Jewish descent he is fully their equal, and in point of services, sufferings, and responsibilities as a missionary of Christ he is easily their superior. More than this, in the matter of those ecstatic spiritual experiences, visions and revelations, which the early church considered the very highest credentials, he can boast, though it is not well to do so, of extraordinary ecstasies that he has experienced.

For all this foolish boasting they are responsible. They have forced him to it by their ingratitude. He has shown himself an apostle over and over again at Corinth, but they have not been satisfied with that. Now he is coming to them again, but not to live at their expense. He prefers to spend and to be spent for them; he and his messengers have asked nothing for themselves. He writes all this not for his own sake but for theirs. They must put aside their feuds and factions if they are to remain in Christ. Paul is coming again to Corinth, and this time he will not spare offenders against the peace of the church, but will exert the authority they have denied.

Paul dispatched this letter to Corinth by the hand of Titus. While waiting for news of its effect he busied himself with concluding his work at Ephesus. Days came and went, and it was time for Titus to return, but there was no news of him. Paul’s thought went back again and again to the situation and the letter he had written in such distress. Had it been a mistake? He began to think so, and was sorry he had written it. If it did not win the Corinthians, matters would not be the same as before; they would be much worse. If the breach was not healed by the letter, it would be widened. Paul was still full of these anxious thoughts when the time came to leave Ephesus. He had planned to go next to Troas, and now expected Titus to meet him there, but to his great disappointment Titus did not appear. Conditions were favorable for undertaking missionary work in Troas, but Paul’s anxiety would not let him stay, and he crossed the Aegean to Macedonia, still hoping to find Titus and learn the result of his mission to Corinth. There at length they met, and to his immense relief Paul learned of his messenger’s success. The Corinthians were convinced. Titus and the letter together had shown them their blunder. They realized that Paul was the apostle he claimed to be, and that his course toward them had been upright and honorable. In a powerful revulsion of feeling they were now directing their wrath against those who had led them to distrust and oppose Paul, and especially against one man who had been the leader of the opposition to him. They were eager to see Paul again in Corinth, to assure him of their renewed confidence and affection, and were even a little piqued that he had not already come.

Paul’s relief and satisfaction found expression in another letter, the fourth and last of which we know that he wrote to Corinth. It constitutes the first nine chapters of Second Corinthians. He wishes to tell the Corinthians, now that they are ready to hear it, how much the controversy has cost him, and how great his relief is at the reconciliation. He acknowledges the extraordinary comfort which Titus news has given him, coming as it has after the crushing anxiety of those last days at Ephesus. He is satisfied with their new attitude, only he does not wish them to misunderstand his continued absence. He had intended to visit Corinth on his way to Macedonia, but their relations were then too painful for a personal meeting and he had put it off. When he leaves Macedonia, however, it will be to come to Corinth. He refers in a touching way to the anguish and sorrow in which he wrote his last letter to them, and to his purpose in writing it. His chief opponent whom they are now so loud in condemning must not be too harshly dealt with. Paul is ready to join them in forgiving him.

Paul describes his anxious search for Titus and the relief he felt when at last he met him and heard his good news. He no longer needs to defend himself to the Corinthians, but he does set forth again in a conciliatory tone, his ideals and methods in his ministry. In every part of this letter Paul shows that warm affection for the Corinthians which made his difference with them so painful to him.

Paul had been engaged for some time in organizing among his churches in Asia Minor and Greece the collection of money to be sent back to the Jerusalem Christians as a conciliatory token that the Greek churches felt indebted to them for the gospel. Such a gift Paul evidently hoped might help to reconcile the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem to the rapidly growing Greek wing of the church. In preparation for this the Macedonians have now set a noble example of liberality, and Paul seeks to stimulate them further by his report that the district to which Corinth belongs has had its money ready for a year past. He wishes the Corinthians to show the Macedonians that he has not been mistaken.

It is natural to suppose that this painful chapter in Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians was not put in circulation at once, probably not at all while the men who were involved in it still lived. The Corinthians could hardly have wished to publish the evidence of their own even temporary disloyalty to Paul, and visitors from other churches probably had little desire to take home copies of a correspondence so hotly personal. But when toward the end of the first century the letters of Paul came to be collected, the bitterness of the old misunderstanding had been forgotten, and anything that survived from Paul’s hand was thought worth including in the collection. So these last letters to Corinth were given forth together, but with the letter of reconciliation first, to take the bitterness off and commend the writing to the reader by the fine note of comfort with which it begins. Second Corinthians has never rivaled First Corinthians in usefulness and influence, but no letter of Paul throws more light upon his character and motives. It is in these last letters to Corinth that we come nearest to Paul’s autobiography.

Paul had received a letter. Doubtless he received many, but with all his letter-writing we know definitely of only one letter that came to him. He was settled at Ephesus, working at his trade, and very much absorbed in explaining the gospel to everyone whom he could reach in that city and its neighborhood. Ephesus was a thriving center of life and industry, and people from the other cities on the Aegean were constantly coming and going. Among them were many from Corinth, which lay almost directly across from Ephesus, only a few days’ sail away. Some of the Corinthian visitors to Ephesus were Christians, and others were acquainted with Paul’s Christian friends at Corinth and brought him word of them.

Their news was not encouraging. The Corinthian believers, though they were probably few and humble in station, had divided into parties. Some of them had begun to look down upon Paul as a man of inferior gifts, as compared with the eloquent Apollos and of insignificant position in the Christian movement as compared with Cephas, that is, Peter. They had perhaps been visited by Jewish-Christian teachers from Jerusalem for they were beginning to doubt Paul’s right to be called an apostle. Business disputes among them had led to lawsuits between Christian brethren in the pagan courts. Worst of all, immoral conduct in the Corinthian church was reported to Paul, for the Corinthians had not yet fully learned that the Christian faith meant a new life of righteousness and love. With all these abuses the very existence of the little church was being endangered.

Paul was already troubled by these reports when three Greeks who had come over from Corinth sought out his lodgings and put into his hand a letter from the Christians of Corinth. They had been Christians only a little while and had many things to learn. New situations were constantly coming up which they did not know how to meet. They had their social problems. What were they to do about marriage? Should they marry or remain single? Should a woman whose husband had not been converted continue to live with him? When they were invited out to dinner they might have served to them meat that had first been offered in sacrifice in some pagan temple. Was it right to eat such meat and must they inquire about it before they ate it? Questions were arising about their public worship. What part were women to have in it, and how were they to behave and dress? Even the Lord’s Supper was leading to excesses in eating and drinking and bringing out inequalities and misunderstandings. The Corinthians were much interested in spiritual gifts and their comparative worth. Some rated the ecstatic and unintelligible utterance which they called "speaking with tongues’’ above prophesying or teaching. Moreover, the persons endowed with these gifts were so eager to be heard that the meetings were becoming confused and disorderly.

On the whole the Corinthians were beset with difficulties on all sides, and they wrote to Paul for advice and instruction regarding their problems. He had already written them a short letter about some immoral practices that had appeared among them or had held over from their heathen days. But that letter had not told them enough. They wanted to learn more about the matter it dealt with, and about a variety of other things.

So Paul came to write what we call First Corinthians. No wonder it is so varied and even miscellaneous. Paul has first to set right the bad practices that are creeping into the church--the factions the lawsuits, the immoralities -- and to defend himself against the criticisms that are being circulated at Corinth. He attacks these abuses with the utmost boldness. They must give up their factions. Christ must not be divided. If Paul preached to them a simple gospel, it is because their immaturity required it. And it was such plain preaching, as they now consider it, that converted them to a life of faith. The gross immoralities which Paul has heard of among them ought to make them humble and ashamed instead of boastful. Their lawsuits against one another disclose their unscrupulousness and self-seeking. Unrighteous men, Paul reminds them, will never enter the Kingdom of God.

From these painful matters Paul turns to the questions the Corinthians had asked in their letter. Married people are not to separate, but the unmarried had better remain as they are. The offering of meat to idols is really meaningless and does the meat no harm, yet we have a duty to the consciences of others, and must not give them offense. When we are guests at a dinner, indeed, we should eat what is offered by our host without asking whether it has been offered to an idol. But in our freedom we are to remember to seek the good of one another.

In church meetings good order and modest behavior are to be the rule for both men and women. The Lord’s Supper especially is to be observed in a serious and considerate way. More than any spiritual gifts Paul recommends faith, hope, and love as abiding virtues, much to be preferred to the spectacular and temporary endowments in which the Corinthians are so absorbed.

Some of the Corinthians had found difficulty with Paul’s teaching about the resurrection, and probably a question about it had been raised in their letter to him. At all events. Paul comes last of all to the resurrection, and defends his belief in it in an impassioned argument, which rises at the end into a paean of triumph.

So far has Paul brought his Corinthian correspondents -- from their petty disputes about their favorite preachers to the serene heights of the lyric on love and the vision of the resurrection. It is instructive to see how he has done it. For he has worked each of their principal difficulties through with them, not to any rule or statute, but to some great Christian principle which meets and solves it. Nowhere does Paul appear as a more patient and skillful teacher than in First Corinthians. And nowhere does the early church with its faults and its problems rise before us so plainly and clearly as here. Someone has said that Paul’s letters enable us to take the roof off the meeting-places of the early Christians and look inside. More than any other book of the New Testament it is First Corinthians that does this.

Upon returning to the shores of Syria after his long residence in Corinth, Paul had news that greatly disturbed him. An enemy had appeared in his rear. Among the people who had accepted his teaching about Jesus were many in the towns of central Asia Minor -- Iconium, Derbe, Lystra, and Antioch. These places lay in what the Romans called Galatia, though that name included also an additional district lying farther north. They were in the region that has in recent years been traversed by the new railway through Asia Minor. Their people had welcomed Paul as an apostle of Christ and had gladly accepted his message of faith, hope and love.

But there had now come among them Christian teachers of Jewish birth, who looked upon the Christianity Paul presented as spurious and dangerous. Who these men were we have no way of knowing, but their idea of Christianity can easily be made out. They believed Jesus to be the completer of the agreement or covenant God had made with Abraham. In order to benefit by his gospel one must be an heir of Abraham, they held, and thus of God’s agreement with him; that is, one must be born a Jew or become one by accepting the rite of circumcision and being adopted into the Jewish people.

There was certainly some reasonableness in this view. The men who held it were indignant that the Galatians should call themselves Christians with out having first been circumcised and having thus acknowledged their adoption into the Jewish nation; and they considered Paul a wholly unauthorized person and no apostle at all, since he was not one of the twelve whom Jesus had called about him in Galilee twenty years before, nor even a representative of theirs. It was evidently the feeling of these new arrivals that the twelve apostles were the sole genuine authorities on Christianity and what might be taught under its name. This claim also seemed reasonable, and it made the Galatian believers wonder what Paul’s relation was to these authorized leaders of the church, and why he had given them so imperfect an idea of the gospel. They admitted the justice of the claims of the new missionaries and set about conforming to their demands in order that they might be as good Christians as they knew how to be.

Where Paul first learned of this change in the beliefs of the Galatians is not certain, but very probably it was at Antioch in Syria, to which he returned from Corinth. He wished to proceed as soon as possible to Galatia to straighten matters out in person. For some reason he could not start at once, and so he wrote or dictated a letter in which he did his best to show the Galatian Christians their mistake. This he sent off immediately, probably intending to follow it in person as soon as he could do so.

The letter Paul wrote is the most vigorous and vehement that we have from his pen. It shows Paul to have been a powerful and original thinker, and is the more remarkable as it was written, not as a book or an essay, but simply as a personal letter, intended to save some of his friends from wrong views of religion. In opposition to the claims of the Jewish-Christian teachers from Palestine, he affirms with his very first words that he is an apostle, divinely commissioned, with an authority quite independent of that of the apostles at Jerusalem. This authority Paul bases on his own religious experience and convictions, in which he feels that the Spirit of God speaks to him; and this rightly seems to him the best, and indeed the only, kind of religious authority that really reaches the inner life.

The demand of the newcomers in Galatia that the Christians there should undertake some of the practices of the Jewish law, such as circumcision and the religious observance of certain days, Paul denounces as unreasonable and dangerous. It is dangerous because if acknowledged it will surely bring in after it the necessity of obeying all the rest of the Jewish law, and will reduce the religious life of the Galatians to the tedious observance of countless religious forms. It is unreasonable because even in the case of Abraham, long before there was any Jewish law, faith, that is, an attitude of trust in God and obedience to his will, was the only thing that made men pleasing to God. It was when the Galatians came into this attitude of trust and dependence upon God that they felt the presence of his spirit in their hearts as never before, and in this fact Paul finds evidence of the genuine worth of the gospel of faith that he has preached to them. The Law and the life of religious formalism which it brings with it can never bring this consciousness, as Paul knows, for he gave it a long trial before giving it up in despair and turning to the gospel of faith, hope, and love. In a word, the Law makes men slaves, the Gospel makes them free. This has been Paul’s experience and it is his teaching.

Galatians is in fact a charter of religious freedom. Its noble ideal of the religious life, so far from being outgrown, still beckons us forward, as it did those obscure townsfolk of the Galatian uplands long ago. Paul knew its dangers, but he knew its promise too, and saw that for those who would sincerely accept it, it opened possibilities of spiritual and moral development which could never he reached by the lower path. The Christian had received the very Spirit of God. By that he must regulate his life. If he did so, he would be in no danger of gross and vulgar sin, but would find freely springing up in his life the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control.

This is the ringing message that Paul sent in hot haste to the Galatians. He usually dictated his letters to one of his companions, such as Titus or Tertius, writing only a line or two himself at the end. And this he probably did in this case, but emphasized it all, with a touch of humor, by writing his autograph lines in very large letters. But some have thought that in his haste he wrote this entire letter with his own hand. It was carried by some trusty messenger away through the mountains to the nearest Galatian church and there read to the assembled brethren. Then they probably sent it on to the next town where there was a band of believers, and so it passed from one church to another until all had heard it. Some perhaps had the foresight to copy it before it was sent on its way, and so helped to preserve to later times Paul’s first great letter.

About the middle of the first century, in the Greek city of Corinth, a man sat down and wrote a letter. He had just received some very cheering news from friends of his, away in the north, about whom he had been very anxious, and he wrote to tell them of his relief at this news. As he wrote or dictated, his feelings led him to review his whole acquaintance with them, to tell them about his anxiety and how it had been relieved, and to try to help them in some of their perplexities, and before he closed he had written what we should call a long letter. And this is how our New Testament, and indeed all Christian literature, began. For the writer was Paul, and his friends were the people at Thessalonica whom he had interested in his doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth, who had been put to death in Jerusalem twenty years before, was the divine Messiah, and was to come again to judge the world.

Paul himself had believed this for a long time, and five or six years before he had set out to travel westward through the Roman Empire with this teaching. At first he had worked in Cyprus and Asia Minor, and it was only a few months before that he with two friends had crossed from Asia to Europe and reached the soil of Greece.

Paul was a whole-hearted, loyal friend, and he doubtless made friends everywhere for himself and his teaching; but he never made quite such friends as those who had gathered around him in these first months in Greece. At Philippi, where he stopped first and tried to interest people in his gospel, his friends made him come and live with them; and they thought so much of him that then and for years afterward they sent him money so that he might not have to work at his trade all the time but might have more opportunity to teach and spread his message.

The Thessalonians too had become staunch friends of Paul’s. Some of them had risked their lives for him when they had known him only a few weeks, and others were to stand by him all through his life and to go with him long afterward, when he was taken, as a prisoner, from Caesarea to Rome. That was the kind of people in whom Paul had become so interested, and to whom he now wrote his letter. He had been welcomed by them when he first came to Thessalonica, and his very success among them had awakened jealousy and distrust on the part of others. At last Paul had been obliged to leave the city to prevent violence to himself and his friends. He had gone on westward along the Roman road to Beroea and later had turned south to Athens, but all the time he had been anxious about his friends at Thessalonica. What had happened to them? Had the opposition of their neighbors made them forget him and give up what he had taught them, or were they still loyal to him and his gospel? To go back and find out would have been perilous to him and probably to them also. So Paul had decided to send his young friend Timothy to seek them out and learn how matters stood. At the same time Paul’s other companion, Silvanus, an older, more experienced man, had been sent on a similar errand to the more distant city of Philippi and Paul, left all alone, had waited anxiously, first at Athens and then at Corinth, for news to come.

When at last it came, it was good news. The Thessalonians had not forgotten Paul. They still stood by him and his gospel, in spite of all that their neighbors were saying against him. They still held their faith in Jesus as the divine Messiah and were eagerly waiting for his return from heaven, to reward and avenge them; and they were eager to see Paul again. So Paul came to write his letter to them. He wanted to tell them of his relief and delight at their faithfulness and loyalty, which filled his heart with gratitude. He wished also to refute some charges against his own work and character which people whom he had antagonized in Thessalonica had been making against him. Then too Paul wished to tell his friends how much he had hoped to reach them, and how when this had proved impossible he had sent one of his two companions to them to find out all that he wished to know, and to give them encouragement and instruction; how he had waited for his messenger’s return, and how he had at last come with his welcome news.

But this was not all. Paul saw his opportunity to help his Thessalonian friends with their problems. Some of them were troubled at the death of friends, who would, they feared, thus miss the joy and glory of meeting the Lord Jesus on his return to the earth. Others were perplexed about the time of Jesus’ return, and needed to be told not to trouble about it, but to live in constant readiness for it. Others were falling into idleness and dependence because of their confidence that the time was close at hand. Some needed to be reminded of the Christian insistence on purity and unselfishness of life. To all these people Paul sent messages of comfort, counsel, or encouragement, as their needs required. He was already deep in his new work at Corinth, in some respects the most absorbing and exacting he had ever done. Yet he found time to keep in mind his Thessalonian friends and their problems, and to look out for them amid all his distractions at Corinth. Paul did it all, too, with a personal and affectionate tone which shows how wholly he gave his affection to those with whom he worked.

We can imagine how eagerly the brethren at Thessalonica looked for Paul’s letter and read and reread it when it came. They evidently put it away among their treasures, for that is probably how it came to be preserved to us. They certainly pondered over and discussed its contents; for before many weeks had passed Paul had to write them again more definitely about some of these things. Something Paul had said or written to them, or something they had read in the Old Testament, had made some of them think that the Day of the Lord had already come. Some of them had given up work, and were content to live in religious contemplation while their richer or more industrious brethren supported them. In their idleness some of them fell into unworthy ways of life and became a nuisance and a scandal to the church.

Paul was greatly stirred by this. He saw that it threatened the good name and the very existence of the church, and he at once wrote them another letter, our Second Thessalonians. It was a popular Jewish idea that in the last days the forces of evil would find embodiment in an individual of the tribe of Dan, who would make an impious attack upon God and his people but would fail and be destroyed by the Messiah. Paul in his letter appeals to this idea and points out that this great enemy has not yet appeared and so the Day of the Lord cannot have come. There is therefore no excuse for giving up the ordinary industry of life. He reminds them of a precept he has given them before: If anyone will not work, give him nothing to eat. Those who refuse to obey this ultimatum are to he practically dropped from the Christian fellowship.

With these two short letters Paul began Christian literature. Before he ceased to teach the churches he wrote more than one-fourth of what is now included in the New Testament. But in these first letters we see the difficulties that already were besetting the small new groups of Christians, and the patience, skill, and boldness with which their founder looked after their development.

The idea of presenting the successive situations out of which the books of the New Testament grew, one after another, and of showing how each book met the situation that called it forth, has proved a useful one, and this little book has met with increasing success ever since its publication twelve years ago. But New Testament study is not a closed system but a living and vigorous discipline, and its progress during these years has been such that some revision is now necessary, if the book is to continue to give its readers a sound historical view of the New Testament. In particular, it has come to be recognized that Luke and Acts are two volumes of a single work, and new light has been thrown upon the first collecting of Paul’s letters and the origin of Ephesians. ... Indeed it is hoped that with this brief introduction each book of the New Testament in such a version as my American Translation, for example, may be continuously read with understanding and interest by the general reader.

Edgar J. Goodspeed

March 1, 1928

It must always be remembered that Christianity did not spring from the New Testament but the New Testament from Christianity. Christianity did not begin as a religion of books but as a religion of spirit. There was neither time nor need to write books when the Lord Jesus was at the very doors. Still less was there need of authoritative books to guide men whose dominant conviction was that they had the Mind of Christ, the very Spirit of God, guiding them constantly from within.

But the ancient Christians did write. Situations arose that drew letters from them -- letters of acknowledgment, thanks, criticism, recommendation, instruction, or advice. These letters, like our modern letters, were written to serve an immediate and pressing need. Situations arose which even drew forth books from these early Christians -- books to save people from perplexities or mistakes, or to comfort them in anxiety or peril; but always books to serve some fairly definite circle, in a particular condition of stress or doubt. This practical and occasional character of the books of the New Testament can hardly be overemphasized, for it is only in the light of the situations that called them forth that these books can be really understood. Only when we put ourselves into the situation of those for whom a given book of the New Testament was written do we begin to feel our oneness with them and to find the living worth in the book.

It may be helpful to conceive the writings of the New Testament as grouped about four notable events or movements: the Greek mission, that is, the evangelization of the gentile world; the fall of Jerusalem; the persecution of Domitian; and the rise of the early sects. The New Testament shows us the church first deep in its missionary enterprise, then seeking a religious explanation of contemporary history, then bracing itself in the midst of persecution, then plunged into controversy over its own beliefs.

The New Testament contains the bulk of that extraordinary literature precipitated by the Christian movement in the most interesting period of its development. Christianity began its world-career as a hope of Jesus’ messianic return; it very soon became a permanent and organized church. The books of the New Testament show us those first eschatological expectations gradually accommodating themselves to conditions of permanent existence.

The historical study of the New Testament seeks to trace this movement of life and thought that lies back of the several books, and to relate the books to this development. It has yielded certain very definite positive results which are both interesting and helpful. Through it these old books recover something of the power of speech, and begin to come to us with the accent and intonation which they had for the readers for whom they were originally written.

The short chapters of this book are designed to present vividly and unconventionally the situations which called forth the several books or letters, and the way in which each book or letter sought to meet the special situation to which it was addressed. These chapters naturally owe much to scholars like Burton, Bacon, Scott, McGiffert, Moffatt, and Harnack, who have done so much for the historical understanding of the New Testament. But it is hoped that a brief constructive presentation of the background of each book without technicality or elaboration may bring back particularly to intelligent laymen and young people the individuality and vital interest of the writings of the New Testament.

The purpose of this work is threefold: (1) The book may be used as a basis for definite study of the New Testament individually or in classes. The Suggestions for Study are prepared for this purpose. … The student is advised not to attempt a detailed investigation of specific parts of the various books, but to seek to get the large general aim which controlled each individual writer. (2) It may be read as a continuous narrative ... It will then afford exactly what its name implies, the story of the New Testament ... (3) After each chapter the corresponding book of the New Testament may be read, preferably at one sitting, in some modern-speech translation, and thus each piece of literature may make its own appeal on the basis of the introductory interpretation.

Edgar J. Goodspeed

Chicago November 1, 1915