APP. LATE OF SECOND IMPRISONMENT. 471 journey in different parts of Greece and Asia Minor, with notices of different persons encountered during that journey. If it was not after the first imprisonment and the trial, the journey must have taken place above five years before; for the going up to Jerusalem was in A.D. 58; the close of St. Paul's captivity in Rome, whether by release or death, A.D. 63. Now, I. As to the cloak, books, and parchments left at Troas in the care of a certain Carpus. If St. Paul had been lately there, we can conceive his anxiety about them. But after five or six years or longer (see Acts xvi. xx.) it seems hardly to be accounted for. II. Erastus abode at Corinth. This appears to imply that he had recently left Erastus there. "Trophimus have I left at Miletus, sick." This cannot have been five or six years before. With this difficulty Wieseler seems to me to struggle entirely without success. III. The incidents relating to Timotheus are to me equally conclusive. In the Epistle to the Philippians, written, as all agree, from Rome in 61 or 62, Timotheus was with St. Paul at Rome. The Apostle was about to send him to the East (ii. 19, 23). That he did go to the East there can be no doubt, and with a charge of the most solemn responsibility, requiring a long time to organise Churches, to fulfil arduous missions in many places and in many ways. Yet Timotheus is summoned back to St. Paul in Rome (iv. 9). Now, if this Second Epistle was written early-according to Wieseler's theory, A.D. 63— we have St. Paul, engaged in a design not less magnificent than evangelising at least the Roman empire, sending forth, if I may so say, his legate, with instructions to visit, to organise, to correct, to be, as it were, his own vicar, a kind of apostle all over the East among a multitude of distant and wide-spread communities; and then recalling him after so brief a time, when his task could not have approached fulfilment, to Rome, it would appear, to share his own dangers, perhaps to share his own martyrdom. This after a few years is conceivable-a few years of common labour; in less than a few years it is to me utterly incredible. For all these reasons, I adhere with confidence to the view, as old as Eusebius, if not as old as Clement of Rome, as to the second imprisonment of St. Paul after some years of renewed apostolic labours. I adhere to Eusebius, and differ from some writers of credit, as Pearson, in referring the first answer-the рórn årroλoyía (2 Tim. iv. 16)—to the close of the first imprisonment. Nothing could be more natural than, as danger for a second time was darkening around him, that his mind should revert to his former danger, to the deser 472 REASONS FOR PAUL'S BEING AT ROME. APP tion of friends who might again desert him; now that the lion had begun to roar again and to open his threatening jaws, that he should remember how God once had delivered him from the terrors of that lion. Moreover, that he should be permitted, after the Neronian persecution, to make any defence; that he should make a defence even temporarily successful; that he should have been permitted in that defence to preach Christ, and that such preaching of Christ should be heard not unfavourably even by Gentiles, is absolutely inconceivable. For Paul was not at that period, according to his own view, a Jew, arraigned by the Jews of Palestine on some strange, to the Romans unintelligible, questions of their Law, at worst of being the cause, it might be the blameless cause, of riot against the peace of the empire; he was now the ringleader, the notorious, avowed, boastful ringleader of a wicked, hateful sect, convicted, as it was generally believed, of having burned glorious, holy Rome; a sect which the blood-battened magnates and populace of Rome had seen with gloating joy and vengeance exposed to torments at which even they might shudder; mockery added to martyrdom; sewn up in skins, swathed in pitch-vests and set on fire, holding in their agony torches over the voluptuous banquets of senators. But one word more. How came Paul at Rome? at Rome, at such a time? Because he was the Apostle of Christ-of Christ who died for men. What could be more expedient, what more necessary, than the restoration, the reorganization, the resettlement of the Roman Church, persecuted, scattered, decimated worse than decimated-by the fierce persecution; of the few faithful, probably most in concealment, whom not less than the profoundest faith could keep from apostasy; not less than that love which Christianity alone inspires could keep from disclaiming their spiritual kindred? And to whom but an Apostle, to whom but to St. Paul, belonged the perilous, the almost desperate office of confronting Rome, glutted but not satiated with Christian blood ?—of offering, if necessary, his life, and of leaving his blood of martyrdom as the prolific seed of the future Church in the Imperial City? END OF i. LONDON: PRINTED BY KILLTA CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, |