Читать книгу Church History (Vol.1-3) - J. H. Kurtz - Страница 19

Set apart to the work by the church by prayer and laying on of hands, Paul and Barnabas started from Antioch on their first missionary journey to Asia Minor, A.D. 48–50. Notwithstanding much opposition and actual persecution on the part of the enraged Jews, he founded mixed churches, composed principally of Gentile Christians, comprising congregations at Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. When Paul undertook his second missionary journey, A.D. 52–55, Barnabas separated himself from him because of his refusal to accept the company of his nephew John Mark, who had deserted them during their first journey, and along with Mark embarked upon an independent mission, beginning with his native country Cyprus; of the success of this mission nothing is known. Paul, on the other hand, accompanied by Silas and Luke, with whom at a later period Timothy also was associated, passed through Asia Minor, and would thereafter have returned to Antioch had not a vision by night at Troas led him to take ship for Europe. There he founded churches at Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, and Corinth, and then returned through Asia Minor to Syria. Without any lengthened interval he entered upon his third missionary journey, A.D. 55–58, accompanied by Luke, Titus, and Timothy. The centre of his ministerial activity during this period was Ephesus, where he founded a church with a large membership. His success was extraordinary, so that the very existence of heathenism in Asia Minor was seriously imperilled. Driven away by the uprising of a heathen mob, he travelled through Macedonia, pressed on to Illyricum, visited the churches of Greece, and then went to Jerusalem, for the performance of a vow. Here his life, threatened by the excited Jews, was saved by his being put in prison by the Roman captain, and then sent down to Cæsarea, A.D. 58. An appeal to Cæsar, to which as a Roman citizen he was entitled, resulted in his being sent to Rome, where he, beginning with the spring of A.D. 61, lived and preached for several years, enduring a mild form of imprisonment. The further course of his life and ministry remains singularly uncertain. Of the later labours and fortunes of Paul’s fellow-workers we know absolutely nothing.

It may be accepted as a well authenticated and incontestable fact that Paul suffered martyrdom at Rome under Nero. This is established by the testimony of Clement of Rome—μαρτυρήσας ἐπὶ τῶν ἡγουμένων οὕτως ἀπηλλάγη τοῦ κοσμοῦ—and is further explained and confirmed by Dionysius of Corinth, quoted in Eusebius, and by Irenæus, Tertullian, Caius of Rome (§ 16, 1). On the other hand it is disputed whether it may have happened during the imprisonment spoken about in the Acts of the Apostles, or during a subsequent imprisonment. According to the tradition of the church given currency to by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., ii. 22), which even in our own time has been maintained by many capable scholars, Paul was released from his first Roman imprisonment shortly before the outburst of Nero’s persecution of the Christians in A.D. 64 (§ 22, 1), and made a fourth missionary journey which was brought to a close by his being a second time arrested and subsequently beheaded at Rome in A.D. 67. The proofs, however, that are offered in support of this assertion are of a very doubtful character. Paul certainly in A.D. 58 had the intention (Rom. xv. 24, 28) after a short visit to Rome to proceed to Spain; and when from his prison in Rome he wrote to Philemon (v. 22) and to the Philippians (i. 25; ii. 24), he believed that his cherished hope of yet regaining his liberty would be realised; but there is no further mention of a journey into Spain, for apparently other altogether different plans of travel are in his mind. And indeed circumstances may easily be conceived as arising to blast such hopes and produce in him that spirit of hopeless resignation, which he gives expression to in 2 Tim. iv. 6 ff. But the words of Clement of Rome, chap. 5: δικαιοσύνην διδάξας ὅλον τὸν κόσμον καὶ ἐπὶ τὸ τέρμα τῆς δύσεως ἐλθών, etc., are too indefinite and rhetorical to be taken as a certain testimony on behalf of a Spanish missionary journey. The incomplete reference in the Muratorian Fragment (§ 36, 8) to a profectio Pauli ab Urbe ad Spaniam proficiscentis may be thought to afford more direct testimony, but probably it is nothing more than a reminiscence of Rom. xv. 24, 28. Much more important, nay almost conclusive, in the opposite direction, is the entire absence, not only from all the patristic, but also from all the apocryphal, literature of the second and third centuries, of any allusion to a fourth missionary journey or a second imprisonment of the Apostle. The assertion of Eusebius introduced by a vague λόγος ἔχει can scarcely be regarded as outweighing this objection. Consequently the majority of modern investigators have decided in favour of the theory of one imprisonment. But then the important question arises as to whether the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, claiming to be Pauline, with the journeys referred to or presupposed in them, and the residences of the Apostle and his two assistants, can find a place in the framework of the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles, and if so, what that place may be. In answering this question those investigators take diverse views. Of those who cannot surrender their conviction that the Pastoral Epistles are genuine, some assign them to the Apostle’s residence of almost three years in Ephesus, others to the imprisonment in Cæsarea which lasted two years and a half, and others to the Roman imprisonment of almost three years. Others again, looking upon such expedients as inadmissible, deny the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles, these having appeared to them worthy of suspicion on other grounds.