From Egyptian Rubbish Heaps, Moulton

7/27/2019 From Egyptian Rubbish Heaps, Moulton

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FROM EGYPTIANRUBBISH-HEAPS

Five Popular Lecures on the !?(ew 'Testament,with a Sermon,

delivered at D^orthjield, Massachusetts,in z/fugust, 1 9 14

JAMES HOPE MOULTONPROFESSOR IN MANCHESTER UNIVERSITYANDTUTOR AT DIDSBURY WESLEYAN COLLEGE

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CHARLES H. KELLY25-35 City Road, and 26 Paternoster Row, E.C


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First Edition. 1916


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MR, AND MRS. W. R. MOODYIN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR DeaRESTWHO

SINCE THOSE DAYS OF HAPPY FELLOWSHIPHAVE GONE INTO THE BRIGHT LaND

TO SING THE NEW SONG


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Digitized by tine Internet Arciiivein 2007 witii funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

littp://www.arcliive.org/details/fromegyptianrubbOOmouliala


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CONTENTSCHAP. PAGE

I. EGYPTIAN RUBBISH-HEAPS AND THE STUDYOF THE NEW TESTAMENT . . .11

II. A SHEAF OF OLD LETTERS FROM EGYPT . 3IIII. SOME SIDELIGHTS UPON PAUL . . -50JV. HOW WE GOT OUR GOSPELS . . -7^V. THE FULLNESS OF THE TIME . . . IO5

VI. THE NEW SONG I29


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PREFACEOn July 31, 1914, the ill-fated Lusitania landed atNew York after what proved her last peace voyage.A week later two of her passengers proceeded to theConference at Northfield, where some two thousandChristian people were gathered in sight of the graveof D. L. Moody. It was very hard for us all,doubly hard for Britons, to detach our thoughtseven partially from the horrors that were alreadybeginninghorrors which will long make it im-possible to name even the best of Germans withouta sharp stab of pain. But we were studjang the onlyBook that can ever bring peace and comfort to menin their direst need, and there is no fear that thosewho know will think we were ' fiddling while Romeburned.'

There is, however, a very obvious apology duefor the publication of this little book. Everyscholar will see at once its scrappiness and imper-fection, leaving out so much that seems to call formention, and recording many personal speculationsand theories which my better-qualified fellow-craftsmen will perhaps want to cancel. I can onlyinsist on the implications of the word Popular in

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8 Prefacethe sub-title. Popular lectures to audiences deeplyinterested in the subject, but including few experts,should aim at stimulating further study by freshnessof treatment, and presentation of matter whichwill capture attention, even if not claiming a placein any systematic handbook. I confess there area good many things in this little book which oughtto have seen the light first in technical journals,well provided with proofs and references. I canonly plead that I am overloaded just now with theproduction of technical matter, and must offer thesehints to the "wdder public if they are to appear at all.Both the scholar and the general reader are at leastwarned. I am correcting the press thousands ofmiles away from my library, and other shortcomingsmay well be due to this disadvantage. The lec-tures were originally taken down by a stenographerfor the Northfield Record of Christian Work, andfreely corrected by myself to make them readbetter. I had no time to do more, but the time Ihad to spend suggested the possibility that withoutfurther polishing they might interest a larger circle.Hence the kind permission to reprint was soughtand readily given.Without losing two or three months in writing for

leave, I have dedicated the little book to our hostswho made that August week so memorable to us bytheir lavish and genial hospitality. They and I


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EGYPTIAN RUBBISH-HEAPS AND THESTUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENTI AM trying to give you some sidelights uponimportant things in the New Testament, and I amgoing to give them, not as things which everybodyknows already, or as things about which there is noquestion. They come from recent opinion, andsome are speculation. Sometimes speculation may bewrong, but at least it may possibly prove stimulating.The documents about which I am going to speak

this morning are documents which have beenknown to a certain extent for over a hundredyears ; but it is a very strange thing to reflectthat, although known, although actually published,they were not in the hands of scholars likely toread them, and practically nobody paid any atten-tion to them. Indeed, so far was the oppositetrue that one of the three greatest biblical scholarsEngland produced in the nineteenth century.Bishop Lightfoot, remarked as early as 1863 thatif we could only get hold of a large number_ofprivate letters Jrom individuals who never thoughtthat their writings would be read by after ages.


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12 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps

we should have a unique way of learning themeaning of Biblical Greek. And all the time therewere two or three volumes of such documentswhich Lightfoot might have read. If he had onlyread them, I believe he would have anticipatedby fifty years the discovery made in our time.

I have said that from the sands of Egypt havecome to us vast numbers of documents fromantiquity. The excavations that have been madein Egypt, especially during the last twenty yearsor so, have brought these documents to light bythe hundred thousand. We have now a largelibrary of books in which these old papers aremade available for our study. All nations haveco-operated in this fruitful work. Among yourown American scholars I would especially mentionmy friend Professor Goodspeed, of Chicago. InGreat Britain the foremost place belongs to thosefamous Oxford pioneers Drs. Grenfell and Hunt,Then there have been the busy investigators fromParis, Lille, Leipzig, Berlin, and many anotherplace, who have all been at work gathering togetherthese documents from antiquity, reading them,translating them, annotating and indexing them.What is the nature of them and where do theycome from ? Well, to begin with, they come

from rubbish-heaps. It seems to have been thecustom in Egypt in the olden days not jto_burn


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And the Study of the New Testament 13waste paper, but to dump it outside of the town,and then let the sand of the desert sweep over it.iigypt, you remember, is the country where ithardly ever rains. ^ It is out of this sand that weget these documents, perfectly fresh after thousandsof years. How many thousands of years is bestillustrated by the fact that some accounts havebeen found which belong, they say, to the thirty-sixth century before Christ.

These documents are written upon the paperof antiquity. Our word -paper is, as you know,taken from the word papyrus, which word I shalluse during these lectures. I might tell you theway in which this writing material was made.They used the papyrus plant, a plant with a verylong straight stem filled with pith. It grew inthe marshes of the River Nile. We are all familiarwith the word from the story of Moses. The httlebasket that contained the baby Moses was putamong the ' papyri ' in the Nile. These reeds weregathered, cut open, the strips of pith taken out,laid upon a flat table and soaked with clayey water.On top of them another layer of strips was laidcrosswise. Then it was rolled with a heavy roller,put out in the sun to dry, and the paper was readyto be written upon.

*I said 'never' in my lecture. Then in October, 1915, I hadmy first gUmpse of Egyptand we landed at Port Said in a shower


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Now this paper when it was done with was, asI have said, simply thrown away. The sand cameup and covered it. Another layer of paper accu-mulated, and the sand covered that also. Theexcavators are able to-day to show us where weare most likely to find this paper. Drs. Grenfelland Hunt have been for many winters carryingon researches in some specially favoured spots,where they have been very careful to preserveeverything they have found. When documentsare found in pieces, these pieces must be carefullyput together, so that the investigators can studythem.These papyri have their characteristic difficulties.Papyrus is very brittle, and a great many of thesedocuments are remarkably Uke the Irishrnan'scoat, of which it was said that it mostly consistedof fresh air. When you have documents consistingmainly of holeswhen you have a few holes andthen a few words and then more holes, it takesa great deal of skill to be able to read them;but it is perfectly marvellous how highly trainedobservers can read things not therecalculate howmany letters must be put into a space in orderto fill it up, and do it so carefully that there islittle danger of a mistake. All this labour goesto the composition of the volumes I am describing ;and when the transcripts are complete there is


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And the Study of the New Testament 15still the commentary to write and the indispensabletoil of the indexing. 't^.v^b\But I must tell you that these documents come

from other places as well, and particularly fromtombs. The tombs of ancient Egypt are_jtheplaces from which in all ages men have been recover-ing relics of antiquity. The ancient Egyptians,as you know, had a very strong belief in the con-tinued existence of the soul ; and they thoughtthat when the man was put in the grave it wasnecessary for him to be provided for in every way.Especially it seems to have been thought necessarythat he should have his favourite reading ; sothey buried with him copies of the books heloved to read. I am afraid we have very unkindlytaken away large numbers of these books, whichrepose in our libraries to-day. On one occasionDrs. Grenfell and Hunt excavated a tomb whichgave them a great deal of trouble. What wastheir disgust when at last they found that a tombwhich promised so richly contained only mum-mified crocodiles ! The crocodile was, you remember,a god in ancient Egypt. I rather think that thatwas politic, for it clearly might be wise to keepsuch a dangerous beast in good humour by deifyinghim. When orders were given that the tombbe abandoned, one of the workmen, vexed at somany hours of useless digging, broke with his


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i6 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps

spade the back of one of the crocodiles, and behold !from the interior of the beast there came rolls androlls of paper. The explorers found this was mostlymaterial written in the third century B.C. ; and thewaste paper which came out of the crocodiles in thattomb was enough to make almost two big books full.There is one other kind of writing materialwhich you would not think of. The ancient pottery

was generally not glazed, an_dJ.tJ:ook writing verywell. That was convenient, for although the potterywas not so nice to look at or to use, at the sametime it had advantages. Suppose a pieceof itdropped and smashed Jntq a dozen fragments.These fragments wereâAêd, andjA^n the mis^ôf the house wanted to send a note to a_ friend,or when the master wanted to send a receipt, ora bUl, or a cheque, a fragment of broken potterywas used for the writing ; and we have to-daymultitudes of these ostraca' treasure ' veritably' in earthen vessels,' as Paul puts it. Such, then,are the materials about which I am speaking.Now what is there written upon them ? Some-times the documents contained in these old papersare literary. We have a very large number ofnew literary finds. We have classical writings,some that we have had before and some quitenew. Not only so, but we have a great manydocuments bearing directly upon the New Testament.


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And the Study o! the New Testament 17We have, for instance, a precious fragment manu-script of the first page of the Greek New Testamentof the third century A.D., a good hundred yearsolder than the oldest manuscript we possess. Thereis also a manuscript of the fourth century, of theEpistle to the Hebrews. That is a great find forus, because it happens to have some parts completein that portion of the Epistle where the greatestof all manuscripts, the Vatican manuscript, comesto an end.But there is one precious half-sheet of paper,

very tattered and torn, which must have givenits discoverers a thrill of deHght when theyread thereon, half a dozen times repeated, thetwo words : ' Jesus saith.' Some of the sayingsthus introduced we have in our Gospels already.There is our Lord's word about the mote andthe beam, and (in an expanded form) thatabout the city set upon the hill. Then thereare other sayings not found in our Gospelsat all, about which we have no informationoutside. I myself believe that they are real andgenuine fragments from the teachings of Jesus,possibly changed and damaged in the process oftransmission, but at the same time beginningfrom Him. For, when you come to think aboutit, to invent a saying which anybody could possiblyattribute to Him who spake as never man spake,

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i8 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps

is an almost impossible task to set even thosewho have made the closest study of the GreatTeacher's style. One of these new sapngs runsthus : ' Jesus saith, Wherever there are two, theyare not without God ; and where there is one only,I say I am with him. Raise the stone, and therethou shalt find Me ; cleave the wood, and theream I.' There is the characteristic parabolic form ;there is also the surface obscurity which makesone feel that if it had been forged the inventorwould have made the meaning of the pregnantaphorism more obxaous. The depth of meaningwhich rewards a little study of it makes it highlyprobable that the words fell from the Master's lips.

I might say more about these discoveries ofliterary and biblical material, but I want to talkto you of some things that at first sight seementirely secular and utterly uninteresting. But theyprove to be full of valuable information with regardto the language and meaning of the New Testament.In these rubbish-heaps you find all the kinds ofwriting you would expect to find in sacks of wastepaper collected down street nowadays. In onehouse there is a lawyer's office ; lower down thereis a shep ; next door a private house. Fartheron we pass a school, a church, a court-house, thegovernment offices, and so on. Suppose wastepaper collected from aXl these, you can picture


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And the Study of the New Testament 19the very large variety of documents included,and willsee how many characteristics of our modernhfe they would illustrate, especially if amon^ t^emthere are many private letters, from people_oi_allages and degrees of culture. Now that is exactlywhat we have got in these Egyptian rubbish-heaps.We have official documents, some of them verymuch elaborated. Petitions to officials accountfor a good many papyri. Procedure in whatseem to us decidedly urgent matters was verydeliberate in ancient Egypt. Thus before a house-holder could get a burglar arrested he had to addressa formal petition to the proper official, settingforth his grievance in detail.^ The waste paperof a government office accordingly presents uswith various pictures of private life in documentsof this kind.Now let me mention in a word or two what we

may get from the more definitely official formsand papers. I want to speak especially of onepoint. A large number of the papyri are census,papers. You will remember how there has beenfor many years past serious difficulty about a

' I noticed a good illustration of this in a street in Bombay, wherea signboard gave a man's calhng as ' Authorized Petition-writer.'The sameness of the petitions shows that this calling flourished inancient Egypt. By the way, those who want to read specimens ofthese and other papyrus documents should get the excellent selection(in Greek and English) entitled Greek Papyri, by my friend and fellowlabourer, Prof. George MiUigan (Cambridge University Press).


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noteworthy verse in the Gospel of Luke, in thesecond chapter. That chapter begins, as youknow, with the statement that in those days therewent forth a decree from Caesar Augustus thatall the inhabitants of the worldthat is, of theRoman Empireshould be enrolled in a census.* This was the first enrolment made when Quiriniuswas governor of Syria.' Fifty years ago historianswho read those words were forced to saythat they contained almost as many mistakes asit was possible to get into two lines. Even thosewho were most unwilling to admit that Luke hadmade such mistakes found themselves obliged tohave recourse to conjectures which, I am afraid,sounded much like special pleading. But theexplanation some of us kept hoping for has come,and come mainly through the papyri. First camethe proof, from the masses of census papers foundamong our new sources, that every fourteen yearsthere was a general enrolment. For, fortunately,the papers are dated. This is their normal style :' In the year so and so of the Emperor so and so 'then would follow the whole string of his titles' I, A. B., son of C. D., aged x years, with a straightnose, black hair, scar on my right shin, enrollmyself, together with E. F., my wife, aged y years,'and so on, with name and description of eachperson. The census paper would proceed further


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And the Study of the New Testament 21with a statement of effects. They had twentysheep, two camels, and their house faced a particularstreet on the south, and adjoined somebody'sgarden on the west, and so forth. It is reasonableto assume that as Egypt was under the ImperialRoman Government at that time, there was asimilar fourteen years' census taken in otherparts of the world. Now we know that there wasa census taken in the year a.d. 6. We actuallypossess a census paper from the census of a.d. 34,and probably one from a.d. 20. The only thing wehave to conjectureand it becomes highly reason-able to conjecture nowis that not only wasthere one in the year a.d. 6, but that there wasalso one in the year 8 B.C., which on othergrounds has become a more and more probabledate for the birth of Jesus.Now for Luke's second ' blunder,' for there

were three chief blunders attributed to him. Itwas regarded as certain that if there was a censuspeople did not have to go up to any ancestraltown for it. Well, but we have now got two orthree pages from a Roman official's letter-book,dated a.d. 104, and in it we read a rescript fromthe prefect of Egypt ordering that all people areto go back to the county in which they five withinthe next ^ix weeks in order to be ready for thecensus. Exit blunder number two !


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What about blunder number three ? Quiriniuswas governor of Syria in the year a.d. 6. Weknow that, and he carried out the census in thatyear. Therefore, it is a blunder when Luke tellsus that he was looking after a census somewhereabout 8 B.C. Moreover, we actually know thename of the man who was governor of Syria inthat year, and it is not Quirinius. But about acouple of years ago Sir William Ramsay dug upa stone which shows that Quirinius was in Syriaat that time after all. He had been sent thereespecially, as an extraordinary commissioner, tolook after the census, which was a new thing andlikely to be unpopular. I suppose it was becausehe did such good work that he was sent to the jobagain when the next fourteen years were over.So you see how with the aid of these rubbish-heapsof Egypt and the stones of Asia Minor we canshow what an excellent historian Luke was afterall.

Let me spend the remaining part of this hourin showing you how the non-literary papyri ofall sorts help in the interpretation of the NewTestament. I proceed to describe a memorablediscovery made by a great scholar, a dear personalfriend of mine, Adolf Deissmann, of the Universityof Berlin. I hope many of you have read hisbooks. There is no more absolutely fascinating


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And the Study of the New Testament 23book than his Light from the Ancient East.Adolf Deissmann, who is still under fifty, madetwenty years ago a great discovery. He wasonly a young pastor when, in a Ubrary one day,he saw on the table a book that had just come in,a new section of the Berlin Greek papyri. TheBerlin collection now makes four splendid volumes,in which the sheets are lithographed and signedby the scholars who had deciphered them. Deiss-mann picked up this book casually and turnedover the pages till he came to the name of a friendof his at the bottom of a page. This stimulatedhis curiosity. He read the page through, and ashe read the thought flashed across his mind : ' Why,this is just like the Greek^f the New Testament.'You may imagine that he immediately began toread other papyri. So it was that in the year1895 there came out a little unpretentious bookwith the plain title Bible Studies. Two yearslater there was a sequel. More Bible Studies, andthe two books are now put together in an Englishvolume.

Let me show the precise nature of this discovery.Scholars who have studied the Greek Testamentthrough generations past have always been struckby the strange difference between the Greek ofthis little Book and all the other Greek, not onlyof previous ages, but of its own age. It is very


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natural that the Greek of the first century a.d.should differ much from the Greek of the Atticperiod of the fourth or fifth centuries B.C. Why,just think of the difference between the Englishof Chaucer and the English of to-day. Let merepeat, in the pronunciation of the time, the firstfew lines from the Prologue of Chaucer's CanterburyTales :

Whan that Aprille with hise shoures sooteThe droghte of March hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veyne in swich UcourOf which vertu engendred is the flourWhan Zephirus eek with his swete breethInspired hath in every holt and heethThe tendre croppes, and the yonge sonneHath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne.

I daresay few in this audience have known whatI was saying. Some might even question whetherI was speaking English at all. Yet many of thesewords are the same now as they were five hundredyears ago, except that they were pronounceddifferently and have different grammar. Well,if this is the case with our language, we can easilyunderstand that it might be the case with theGreek language, and that the Greek of the firstcentury a.d. would be different from the Greekof the fourth or the fifth century B.C. Of course,we have plenty of Greek that comes from thatvery first century. There is the great Plutarch,


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And the Study of the New Testament 25whose Lives, translated in a famous Elizabethanversion, supplied material for Shakespeare's JuliusCaesar and other plays, Plutarch wrote in thesame century as the New Testament. But youcan come nearer still. Everybody here knowssomething about Josephus. Josephus was a Jew,a man of the same nationality as Paul and Peterand the rest, and he was a man who wrote Greekjust as they wrote it. But if you were to lookinto Josephus's Greek you would say that it wasnot the same language as the Greek Testament.The words are the same and the grammar is moreor less the same, but there is all the difference inthe world. Take two samples of English. Oneis a full-blooded page from Samuel Johnson, withwords half a foot long, and elaborate grammarand style to match. The other is from a letterwritten home by a schoolboy in the earlier stagesof his education. There is an amusing passageI quote from memoryin Macaulay's Johnson,in which he calls attention to Johnson's literarypose. In his own private diary he wrote somethingto this effect : ' When we got in, a dirty fellowjumped up from the bed in which we were to lie.'Then when he put it down in his published bookhe wrote : ' There emerged from the chamberin which we were to repose a man as black as aCyclops from the forge.' We need not further


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prove that there is a difference between EngHshand English. I can assure you there is a differencebetween Greek and Greek. There is a differencebetween Josephus and the New Testament. TheNew Testament is written in plain, unadornedlanguage which everybody can understand.A German theologian a generation or two agosaid the Greek Testament was unique because it

was written in the ' language of the Holy Ghost.'It was written in a language that never professedto be in common use, fit therefore for a Book sosacred. Yes, it was the language of the HolyGhost ; there is no mistake about that. But wecan give a better reason to-day for that assertion.Deissmann's discovery gives me a thrill which Ishould like to pass on to you. It proves nothingelse than this : that the Book is the only bookwritten in the language of daily life, in the verylanguage in which the p2opl_e_talked at home, in_the very language in which they communicatedtheir deepest thoughts one to another. The HolyGhost inspiring those who wrote this little volumeinspired them with the common sense to avoidthe literary, archaic, old-fashioned, out-of-datelanguage in which the literary men jwere writing.And, mind you, they are using it still. If youwere to read a modern Greek newspaper, you wouldfind it is mostly writtenallo^\ing for blundersin


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delivered in a previous litigation, and a full statementof her claim is sent with this to the prefect of Egypt.In the course of that document there occurs thisGreek word hypostasis. Drs. Grenfell and Hunttell us it was a technical legal word, and meanta collection of papers bearing upon the possessionof a piece of property. When anybody boughta piece of land there were always some papersconnected with it. There would be old censuspapers in which the owner and his land were regis-tered, bills of sale, correspondence about itinfact, any sort of thing that might be put in asevidence if any question should arise as to thetitle of the land. All this was carefully collectedin a docket and then put into the public archivesoiiftce. Each large town had a special keeper ofthe archives to look after the papers and producethem when demanded in order to help the securityof property. In other words, this word may betranslated ' the title-deeds.' Can we not see whata depth of meaning that puts into the word ? ' Faithis the title-deeds of things hoped for.'Now do not forget what hope means in the New

Testament. The ' hope ' of the New Testamentmeans absolute certainty about the future. Thingshoped for are things not yet seen, but things whichGod guarantees to us as something that absolutelybelongs to us. Faith is the ' title-deeds of things


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And the Study of the New Testament 29

hoped for.' Suppose I go to a real estate agentand buy a piece of land in Canada. I have nottime to go and see it ; but if I buy that land I havecertain papers put into my hands, title-deedsof that property. I take these home with me,and if ever I want to realize on that land I can goto an office and say : ' I have some land to sell.Here are the title-deeds.' I present the paper, andthat paper is accepted as being the equivalent ofthe land. Even if I never saw my property, thatpaper represents it for me. And if you look atthe eleventh chapter of Hebrews you will findthat this is just what faith is there. Men andwomen who received a promise from God countedthat promise as being the title-deeds to somethingthey could not see yet, but which they were goingto see some day. They were so sure of it, becauseGod had promised it to them, that they acted uponthe beb'ef, treated it as their estate, as somethingabsolutely theirs. We are told that Abrahamso treated the son that was to be born to him, andwe remember that the birth of that son was anabsurdity, a wild impossibility. But God hadsaid that he should be born, and Abraham behavedas if that child were there in the cradle at homealready. That is the nature of faith as describedin the eleventh chapter of Hebrews.Take another word, this time from Paul. You


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will remember a verse which includes the phrase' us upon whom the ends of the ages are come.'Some years ago in reading papyri I came upon awhole series of wills, and I noticed how frequentlythis very Greek word came in an obviously technicalsense. It is a legal word in documents dealingwith property, which has ' come ' to a man from hisfather. We remember Tennyson's great line :

We the heirs of all the ages.I was speaking with Dr. Rendel Harris about it,and he asked why we should not translate theword ' ends ' tolla meaning it bears elsewherein the New Testament. That seems to fit themetaphor still better. ' To us the toll of all ageshas come as our inheritance.' We are the heirs of thespiritual wealth of all the ages past, the wealth ofGreece and Rome and Israel, the wealth of theMiddle Ages, the wealth of all times and of allcountries, of all the accumulated experience ofmankindall this has come down to us to-day inorder to teach us the wonderful works of God, andmake us realize better than ever before what isthe wealth that God has for those who put theirtrust in Him,


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II

A SHEAF OF OLD LETTERS FROM EGYPTYesterday I was talking to you about words.This morning I am going to begin with lettersletters, that is, in the way in wliich they were usedamong the Greeks. It is a way unfamiliar to us,because we use letters for one purpose only. Incountingone, two, three, four, and so onweuse a separate set of symbols, the Arabic numeralswhich enable us to represent these numbers inde-pendently. But the Greeks lacked numerals, sothey had to use letters for the purpose, and a verydefinite and elaborate system theirs was. They hadfour series of letters : the first. Alpha, Beta, Gamma,Delta, Epsilon, and so on, until the letters ran up tonine ; then they went on, ten, twenty, thirty, forty,and so on, up to ninety ; then on again, one hundred,two hundred, three hundred, and up to nine hundredand then they used the first nine of these symbolsover again with a little point on the end of theletter in order to represent the thousands. Theresult was, you see, that any sum up to 9,999could be represented in Greek letters. But that

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32 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egyptwas not getting very far. So in order to get furtherthey would write a very big M, and in the topangle of that M they repeated the symbols usedbefore. Now they were worth a Myriad, tenthousand times as much as before. By thatnotation the old Greek could represent any numberup to 99,999,999.Now, if we add one to 99,999,999 we get100,000,000, otherwise ' ten thousand times tenthousand,' which you will remember in the Bookof the Revelation, where it describes ' a multitudewhich no man can number.' It is one beyond thebiggest sum that can be represented by the Greeknotation.

There is another curious and much-discussedpassage in the Apocalypse which gets light from thissubject of Greek notation. On the walls of Pompeii,when that city, buried by the terrible eruption ofVesuvius in the year a.d. 79, was uncovered, wasfound a vast number of graffiti, or scribblings, whichtell much of the life and customs of that ancienttime, when the people of Pompeii going about theirdaily life were suddenly overwhelmed by the streamsof boiling lava. These scribblings give us a pictureof the shamelessness of some of the ancient life,such as we shall hardly get from any other placeyet among them are many things beautiful anddeeply interesting.


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 33One runs thus : ' I love her the number of whose

honourable name is five hundred and forty-seven.'Now you see the bearing of that. Since the lettersof the Greek alphabet had their numerical value,there was a tendency to add up the number of theletters of one's name. Take, for a simple illustra-tion, the name Ada. A is one, D is four, so that thenumber of that ' honourable name ' comes to six.Well, the number of some other honourable lady'sname totalled up to five hundred and forty-seven.And that lady, going by and seeing this graffito onthe wall, mentally adds up her own letters, andshould they come to five hundred and forty-sevenwell, she might find it quite interesting.So much for the number of Beauty. Let us turn

now to the number of the Beast, which naturallycomes in association with it. In the thirteenthchapter of the Book of the Revelation we read :' Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understandingcount the number of the beast ; for it is the numberof a man ; and his number is six hundred andsixteen 'for such probably is the most ancientreading. We must try to find a name that addsup to six hundred and sixteen. People all throughthe ages have put in answers to the puzzle. Abso-lutely everything has been tried. If anybody has aparticular objection to some particular person, hesets to work to fit the number of the beast

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34 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egyptto him; and if only he takes fair latitude and isnot too particular about the spelling, he usuallysucceeds.

If I take another line this morning, it is notbecause I think we can say positively that this isthe right exposition. But I myself am very muchhelped by what my friend Professor Deissmann haspointed out. He claims that the Greek wordsKaisar theos, whose letters add up to 6i6, representbest the idea that is behind John's enigma. MostBritons to-day would entirely agree that ' Kaiser isdivine ' suits the number of the Beast remarkablywell ! Possibly such a view is not unknown inAmerica also. Whether Deissmann's theory isright or wrong, there can be no question that thebattle-cry of that tremendous conflict, which beganat the end of the first century and went onunintermittently until the fourth, was, on theone side, ' Caesar is god,' while on the other sidewere the people who proclaimed that there was' another Emperor, one Jesus.' There was thegreatest fight that the world has ever seenonein which all the kilhng was done on one side, andall the dying on the other side, and that was theside that won 1 This strife, which we may recallto-day, had as the watchword on the side of theprince of this world, ' Caesar is god.'Then what happened to the number six hundred


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 35and sixteen ? It was altered to the more sym-metrical number ' six hundred and sixty-six,'the reason being, Deissmann suggests, that it is acaricature of another name, the ' name that isabove every name 'Jesus. For the Greek lettersof the name Jesus come to just eight hundred andeighty-eight, each digit one above the perfect' seven ' ; and ' six hundred and sixty-six ' Deissmannthinks is the hellish caricature of it. These thingsmay seem very fanciful to you and to me, but theywere extremely interesting to people who had to docontinuously with letters all of which had a numericalvalue.

Yesterday, if I had had time, I was going to takeup a few additional words. I will mention oneof them now, as it is very closely connected withour subject this morning. Our Lord in speaking ofHis coming again uses the word parousia, which inthe later parts of the New Testament becomesalmost a technical term. Now that word so used,denoting ' advent ' or ' presence,' had somethingvery much deeper in its meaning. Egyptian papyriof the third and second centuries B.C. give someallusions which utterly puzzled the first editors. Iremember one phrase in which even the acutenessof Grenfell and Hunt seemed to be baffled. Twowords came together, stephanouparousias, which


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36 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egyptwe have now learned how to read. The Ptolemies,kings of Egypt after Alexander's time, were notpopular, generally speaking, and I must say I donot think they deserved popularity. Our Britishsovereign, King George, has lately been up inLancashire, riding all around the country, going intothe cottages and talking with the people, and leavingbehind him the most gracious memories. That isone sort of a royal visit. But the royal visits of thePtolemies were quite different. When they came todistant parts of the country there were appropriatemanifestations of enthusiasm, but it was all workedup beforehand. The tax-collector came round andextracted from people's pockets money for whatwas called a ' crown tax.' A free-will offering of agolden crown was made to the king on such occasions,to represent the spontaneous loyalty of the people.That was the type of thing that gives the setting forthis word parousia. By getting the meaning of' royal visit,' unconsciously the word was preparedbeforehand for the time when the King of kingscame in great humility, and they called His comingthe Parousia. And we are relying faithfully uponthe promise of another visit, the last and greatest,some day, we know not when.But now let me go on to my sheaf of old letters.

This first letter, dating from the second or third


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 37century a.d., is written by a schoolboy, and isspelt most atrociously. Both spelling and grammarare, however, highly instructive to us who areconcerned with New Testament Greek. I wish weknew more about this young man. He has evidentlykept his father and mother in extremely good order.But ' even a worm will turn,' and the father hasdecided that he will go away and get a holidayfrom this enfant terrible. He has therefore slippedaway to Alexandria, whereupon the young rascalwrites his father the scathing letter which I amgoing to read to you. I will translate it into theEnglish which represents his style most nearly

' Theon to his father : So good of you not totake me with you to town ! H you won't takeme with you to Alexandria, I won't write you aletter or speak to you or wish you health no more,and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your handor greet you back ever again. H you won't takeme, that's what's up. And mother said to Arche-laus, " He quite upsets me. Off with him ! "Oh, it was good of you to send me a presentSuch a beautyhusks ! 'You see the circumstances. He had expected ahamper of good things to eat ; and when he openedit he did not find the cake he liked. So he calledit an opprobrious name' husks I


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38 A Sheaf of Old Letters from EgyptThen follows some more :

' They fooled us there on the 12th when yousailed. But send for me, do ! If you won't send,I won't eat, I won't drink. There now ! I prayyou may be well.'Now that is a specimen of the vernacular. There

is nothing cultivated about that letter, nothingartificial. I can assure you it is not in the Greekof ancient Athens in her prime. But the letjtermeans more for the student of New Testament Greekthan any other piece of Greek of equal length any-where, not only in grammar^ but also in vocabulary.I turn your attention to one of the sentences I readjust now. The young rascal declares that there isan excellent reason why he should go to Alexandriawith his father. His mother had said : ' He quiteupsets me.' Well, if he went to Alexandria he wouldbe out of her way. Now do you remember whatis said in the Book of Acts about the visit ofPaul and Silas to Thessalonica : ' These jthat haveturned the world upside down are come hither also ' ?It is the same word.

I might recall to your minds that word as it wasused of Wesley's early ministry. It was said that hewas turning the world upside down. You know thesermon preached by some of Wesley's men on thosewords. The main heads of the sermon were


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 39* First, the world is the wrong way up ; second, ithas got to be turned upside down ; third, we's themen to do it.' I am rather indined to think theywere, and that they did their job uncommonly well.Now that is a specimen of the vernacular, which

is not brought in merely for a story's sake. I thinkyou will be able to see that that word ' upset ' has,even in English, a popular nuance about it. It isnot a refined literary word at all. Nor was it in theGreek. If you turn to the great New TestamentGreek dictionary of your countryman J. H. Thayer,you will find this word anastato described asoccurring ' nowhere in profane writers.' The sug-gestion is that it is a purely bibhcal word. Whybiblical writers should want to invent a word of thatkind is not very obvious. I think the letter I havejust read will show you that it is not taken out ofthis classical literature; that it is just a common,ordinary word from common, ordinary life, and inthe letter of this young man we findit just wherewe should expect it. So there it is, a word out of thepopular vocabulary, having just that rough-and-ready vivid touch to it that we like.And that is not all we get out of this letter. ' Off

with him ! ' Put that into literary English/ Away with him ! ' Does not that suggest anythingto you ? Why, it is the very phrase that camefrom those hoarse, savage throats on Good Friday


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40 A Sheaf o Old Letters from Egyptmorning. Here we have it again in the rude school-boy's letter. I think that will illustrate the closecontact there is between the language of the NewTestainent and the language of daily life as wehave picked it up from under the sands of Egypt.

Let me read one or two more of these letters.Here is part of a letter from a husband to his wife.The wife is away on a visit, and has prolonged herstay more than he thinks she should, and he hasbeen trying very hard to get her to come home.Apparently she was not as appreciative of hiscompany as he was of hers. He says, among otherthings

* I want you to know that since you went awayfrom me I have kept lamenting by night andwailing by day. Since you and I went to thebaths together on July 12, I never bathed noranointed until August 12. And you sent meletters that could shake a stone, so much haveyou moved me.'You will remember what our Lord says about

fasting in the Sermon on the Mount. He isspeaking of the way in which the hypocrites fast.Note what He says. He does not say that they shallfast ; He does not say that they shall not fast.What He says is, that if they fast they are to takecare that it is absolutely sincere, like every otherpart of their Ufe. Do not be like the hypocrites,


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 41for they parade their fasting that they may be seenof men ; * but thou, when thou fastest, anoint thinehead, and wash thy face.' That was just what thehypocrite did not dohe did not anoint his head, hedid not wash his face. Our Egyptian husbandgives us a sample of this kind of ' fasting.' Wehave another letter in which the writer, who is ingreat trouble because he has just had the news thathis house has been robbed while he was in Alexandria,uses much the same expression : ' I shall not evenwash myself until I hear the news.'Here is another letter which I will read entire :

' Antonius, son of Ptolemaeus, invites you todine with him at the table of the Lord Sarapisin the house of Claudius Serapion on the i6th atthree o'clock.'

I could comment on that letter for the rest ofthis hour. Brief though it is, it has a number ofpoints of contact with the New Testament. In thefirst place, in this invitation to dinner, though it is anormal and ordinary invitation, we have the state-ment that the dinner is to be in a private house, but* at the table of Lord Sarapis,' the most widelyworshipped god of the Egyptians, If the nameSarapis had been left out, one might think this aChristian letter. How well that illustrates whatBishop Lightfoot says in his Historical Essays


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42 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egyptin the passage in which he describes ' the intru-siveness, the obtrusiveness, and the ubiquity ofPaganism ' ! You can understand how it was thatChristians were so unpopular in those early days.For a Christian could not accept an invitation togo out to dinner without compromising his faith.If he went he had to join in the worship. The tableat which he sat was the table of a ' Lord 'notJesus, but another. And for that reason the Chris-tians had to keep out of social intercourse. Whenthey were called ' haters of the human race ' andhad all manner of other bad things said about themin those days, we can quite understand it, for theheathen simply saw in them people who, becauseof religious prejudices, kept away from their kind.The next point in the letter is in that word

' house.' You remember that the first reportedwords of Jesuswhen found as a boy in the temple,in answer to His mother, who said to Him, ' Don'tyou know that your father and I have been lookingfor you with distress ? 'are given in our AuthorizedVersion as : ' How is it that ye sought Me ? Wistye not that I must be about My Father's business ? 'That is quite a natural translation, but it is abso-lutely wrong. To prove that it is wrong we haveto take not a literal rendering of the words, but therendering of them as it comes from usage. Ithappens that the phrase in this letter is one among


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 43a good many examples we have of this very idiomin which there is no question whatever that themeaning is ' in the house.' So this document, andthose hke it, clearly prove that the Revisers wereright when they changed the translation to ' inMy Father's house.'

Next, let us notice the time-table. The man,you observe, is invited to dine at three o'clock in theafternoon. If that hour of dining was in vogue inPalestine as well, we are reminded of that parableof our Lord in which He talks about the great' supper.' The point in question is that it begins indaylight and it ends in the night. The people,you remember, who are invited to it, instead ofcoming at once, go on with the day's work, and thenthe king comes in to see his guests in the evening. Itmust be evening, because the man who had nowedding garment was taken by the hands and feet(so we should read) and thrown out into ' thedarkness outside.'Now we come to a letter of a prodigal son. It

illustrates in some way the matchless parablewhich we always think of as containing the verymarrow of the gospel

' Antonius Longus to Nilous, his mother : Manygreetings. I continually pray that you are ingood health, and make supplication for youbefore our Lord Serapis.'


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44 A Sheaf of Old Letters from EgyptLet me state, in passing, that here we have anotherexample of the formulae of letter-writing. Allletters were dominated by formula to a very largeextent, just as young people's letters from schoolare still. The formula with which this letter startsis one that is extremely common. You will noticeat once that it is one which the Apostle Paul himselfis able to take up. A great many things in Paul'sletters are things found in this way in the formulaeof the heathen letters. ' Making continuous men-tion of you in my prayers ' is one that you will findin a so-called heathen letter. The god to whomthese prayers were made was not by name thesame ; but when the prayer was earnest, and whenit came from one who knew no better, I fancy thatthe fact that the address was wrong did not causethe letter to go into the dead-letter office. It wassafely delivered in the place where prayer is heard.Then the prodigal goes on :

' I would have you know that I never expectedyou were coming up to the city. This was whyI never came into it. But I was ashamed to comeup to Karanis, for I am going about in rags.'The word ' in rags ' is the word which, if it wereclassical Greek, would be rottenly. The word in theNew Testament Greek has lost that sense. ' Everybad tree brings forth bad fruit.' That does not


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 45mean a rotten tree. The word has the same sortof history as the word ' rotten ' has in Enghsh slang.If a schoolboy wants to say that he does not like thefood at school, he says it is ' rotten.'But let us get back to our prodigal.

' I write to tell you that I have not any clothes.I entreat you, mother, to be reconciled to me. ButI know what I have brought on myself. I have beenchastised as I have been because I have sinned.'

It is very interesting to gather together the wordsin as it appears in the papyri and similar documents.We have made as complete a collection as we canof it, and it gives us quite a vivid idea of what thepeople to whom Paul wrote meant by it. This letterparticularly shows that it implies a very definitepicture of wrong-doing. There are onl}^ a few wordsmore of continuous sense, and then the letterrelapses into fragments :

' I heard from Postumus, who found you inArsinoe county, and he has unseasonably told youall. Don't you know I would rather become acripple than know that I owed anybody twopence ? '

After that we have only the ends of lines left, withmore of this abject entreaty :

fail . . .Antoniu:

come yourself . . . I beseech . . . don't' and then : ' . . . mother, from her son; Longus.'


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46 A Sheaf of Old Letters from EgyptOf course, we don't know what the result was, anymore than we know whether there was any realpenitence behind all this fine show.Here is another letter that instructs us very much

as to the manners and customs of the times :' To Alls, his sister.'

Sister here means wife. Even in the New Testa-ment the term meant that sometimes ; you remem-ber Paul said it was his right to lead about a* sister/

' Let me tell you that we are still in Alexandria.Do not fret even though they do start, and I stayon in Alexandria. I beg and beseech you to lookafter the child, and as soon as ever we get wagesI will send you up something. If you have achildgood luck to you !if it is a boy, let italone. If it is a girl, throw it away.'Now remember that that was one of the great pointsupon which the early Christians had something tosay to the heathen. Justin Martyr, who turnedChristian before the middle of the second centuryA.D., has a scathing paragraph in which he talksabout the habits prevailing in the heathen world.When a child was born it was taken and laid at thefeet of the father. He, if he desired to keep it,


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 47stepped out and picked it up in his arms. If he didnot want to keep it, he let it He. Then the childwas taken away and put in some public place whereit would be sure to be seen, and it was picked up bypeople who made a regular trade of collecting derelictbabies. This was a very cheap way of gettingslaves, and they were reared often for unspeakablelives. We have a great sheaf of documents fromAlexandria, dating very closely around the appearingof Christ, which are contracts with women for actingas nurses of little children picked off the rubbish-heap and kept for slave purposes. And so here thisman with absolute hard-heartedness says to hiswife : ' If it is a boy, let it alone. If it is a girl,throw it away.'

Listen again

' You say, " Do not forget me." How can Iforget you ? I beg you not to worry. In thetwenty-ninth year of Caesar [i.e. i B.C.], June 17.'

Next we have a budget of letters from an educatedfamily of Egypt of the middle of the second centuryB.C. They are evidently a family bound togetherby very close and affectionate ties. The fatheris an ' architect,' though in a much wider sensethan we use that word. He is in charge of canalworks and irrigation. His sons and his wife write


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48 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egyptto him, and he writes to them. We have quitea bundle of their letters. Here is one :

' Polycrates to his father, greeting : It is goodif you are well and everything else is to your mind.We are well ourselves. I have often wTitten toyou to introduce me to the King

'

The word ' introduce ' is the same word thatthe Apostle Paul uses in 2 Cor. iii. i.

' that I may get myself released from the businessI am now engaged upon. And now if it is possible,and none of your duties keeps you, try to comeup for the Arsinoe festival, for if you do come I amsure I shall easily be introduced to the King. Letme tell you that I have seventy shillings fromPhilonides, of which I have kept half for necessaries,and paid the rest as an instalment of interest. Thisis because we don't get our money in a lump sum,but only in small amounts. Write us yourselfthat we may know how you are and may not worry ;and take care of yourself to keep well and cometo us in good health. Yours dutifully,

' Polycrates.'

Here is another letter from Polycrates to hisfather. It begins with the same formulae as thelast. He goes on :


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A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 49* Let me tell you I have now carried throughmy religious duties and am now apprenticed at the

surveyor's.'

The word is geometer, for geometry was originallysimply land survey.

' I have sent into the customs office a reportof the siteThe word used here for ' customs office ' is the

same as ' receipt of custom ' at which the ApostleMatthew was found.' as bearing a house duty of sixteen shillings, thatwe may pay the five per cent, tax on this assess-ment and not on thirty as heretofore.'To us in England who are greatly interested inthe taxation of land values that passage suggeststhe old lesson that there is nothing new under thesun. But it is time to close my mailbag and begone.


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Ill

SOME SIDELIGHTS UPON PAULIt is a daring thing to announce a lecture uponPaul, whose myriad-sided character and workcould not be exhausted in a series of courses byvery different students of his personality. I offeronly a few stray suggestions, mostly connectedmore or less with that new field of illustrationwith which these lectures are specially concerned.An early traditional account of the personal

appearance of Paul comes down to us from theapocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. Here thereis a description which Sir WiUiam Ramsay regardsas authentic. Perhaps the best thing to be saidfor it is that it is hardly likely to have been invented ;but this is hardly sufficient attestation shouldany strong objection arise. The general line ofthis description is that Paul was a little man, withmeeting eyebrows, with a large nose and baldhead and bow legs, but strongly built and full ofgrace. Well, Paul himself tells us that his enemiessaid he was not much to look at, and he certainlydid not mind. The story went on to say that

50


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 51when Paul spoke he looked like an angel. That, atleast, is all right. But there are two considerationsas to this description of Paul, both of which comeout of the Book of Acts. In the first place, youremember that wonderful fourteenth chapter, inwhich Paul and Barnabas go to the little townof Lycaonia, Lystra. There they performed amiracle, healing a man all his life lame. As soonas the people saw this miracle they were immenselyexcited, and immediately dropped into their nativetongue. They had been listening to Paul in Greek,and Paul did not understand the Lycaonian dialect.The people were saying : ' Gods have come downto us in the likeness of men.' Now it happenedthat the local legend told how Zeus, the king ofthe gods, and Hermes, the messenger of the gods,had come down to the earth and people had notrecognized them. They sought for lodging, andat last came to the house of an old couple, Philemonand Baucis, who entertained them generously,and received a blessing when they went away.The Lystra folk were determined not to be againcaught napping, and when they saw these twodeities in their midst they prepared for a sacrificeto them. Now I have just to ask one question :Be it granted that in Lycaonia the conception ofthese deities would be different from that of peoplein Athens, yet one always has to remember that


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52 Some Sidelights Upon Paul

these names of the Greek gods were associatedwith the very highest ideals of beauty. Theprinciple, ' Handsome is that handsome does,'did not always work ; but in all history, so faras outward beauty went, one could never beatthe Greek gods. Surely for the Lystrans to callupon the name of Hermes, even if it did carrywith it less than it did in Greece, when they sawa little bald, bow-legged man with a big nose, wasa most unlikely thing, was it not ? One maysay that the magnitude of the miracle overweightedthe mere aesthetic consideration. Perhaps, but itmay stand just as an initial difficulty.

I take another part of the Book of Acts. Youwill remember Paul's thrilling escape from theJewish mob, when the Roman soldiers came downjust in the nick of time and got hold of him whenhe was being battered to death by the infuriatedJews. When, by main force, the soldiers haddragged him away out of the crowd and got himinto the citadel, it appeared that he had onlyescaped being tortured to death by the mob tobe tortured to death in a more systematic way bythe Roman soldiers. They began to prepare himto be flogged, and he only got his breath in timeto protest. But as soon as he began to speakthere was a great difference. It seems that ClaudiusLysias, who thought he was the leader of a band


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 53of brigands at the head of an army of wildcut-throats, was quite astonished to hear himtalking in Greek. Now here again is a difficulty.It is not often we hear of a horde of brigands fol-lowing a little, bald man with bow legs. Mustnot these two improbabilities combine to put theevidence of the apocryphal Acts out of court ?The reason of my bringing in all this is that

I want to ask a question which, oddly enough,I have never heard put. What on earth wasClaudius Lysias doing when he thought Paul wasa brigand leader ? What suggested it ? I thinkwe can get an answer out of the papyri. We haveamong them a multitude of official papers, con-taining with a man's name his eikon, his personaldescription. A man writing a census return orother such document describes himself thusFirst comes his name and his father's name ; thenhe will put in such additional points as straighthair, long nose, with a scar on his shin or someother part of him. An extraordinary thing isthat in every kind of description that scar seemsto be necessitated. If a man has not a convenientkind of a scar somewhere, he has to put to hisname the word asemos, ' without distinguishingmark.' (You know where Paul says he is of thecity of Tarsus, no meanno ' undistinguishedcity, a city with many marks, though not necessarily


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54 Some Sidelights Upon Paulscars.) Accordingly, we should expect to findin any personal description the needed scar bywhich a man might be recognized. Now I fancythat we may be safe in saying that this brigandwas badly 'wanted by the police.' All over certainparts of the Roman Empire there were descriptionstelling how he might be found. Every Romangovernor was looking out for him. It would beworth his while to capture that man, living ordead. It is perfectly clear that Claudius Lysiason this occasion thought he had got hold of thebrigand. Why? Why, surely because Paul'sappearance answered pretty closely to the circulateddescription of the brigand. And you may becertain that the scar was very prominent there.What about the scar ? As to the brigand, thatis easy. He had been in many a scrimmage, andhe had come out with the marks of themlikeGerman students with marks of duelling on theirfaces. We may safely speculate that there wasa mark so conspicuous that as soon as ClaudiusLysias saw his man he recognized by this theman on whose head there was a price. And prob-ably that is why he took so much trouble to getPaul out of the hands of those wild Jews Buthow do we know that Paul had a scar anywhere ?Let us go back to that fourteenth chapter. Isometimes think the most splendid thing we hear


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 55

about him is recorded there. Look at the pictureof those fickle Galatians, how they turned rightover when the Jews came from the next city and' persuaded the multitudes ' ; and those very multi-tudes who had been regarding Paul as a deitycome down from heaven are now prepared to stonehim. Soon the jagged stones are flying, aimed,naturally, at his head, and he lies senseless andbleeding upon the ground. His disciples, of onlya few hours' standing, are there around him. Howsoon, they think, has their discipleship been ter-minated ! And while they sadly look on him wherehe Hes, after the mob has dragged him over therough ground out of the town, he regains conscious-ness and staggers to his feet. He must have been* strongly built ' after all to stand such an ordeal

!

What does he do then ? Slinks away to hidetill he can recover strength again, of course. Nothe ! He goes right back, back into the city wherehe has just been stoned, in order to exhort thosenew-made disciples to continue steadfast in thefaith. And he says, pointing to his face, all coveredwith ugly wounds, ' Through many tribulationswe must enter into the kingdom of God.'We have, then, a possible explanation for the

scar by which Paul was recognized as a brigand.But does he make any other allusion to it ? Why,yes. He is writingas we believe who hold to


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56 Some Sidelights Upon Paulthe * South Galatian theory 'to these very peoplehere at Lystra, Derbe, and Iconium the Letter tothe Galatians, and he says at the end : ' Fromhenceforth let no man trouble me ; for I bearbranded on my body the marks of Jesus.' Themarks, as Deissmann puts it, were a talismanwhich should protect him, surely, in Lystra ! Hebears about with him until his dying day the scarswhich told how he had been a partaker of theafflictions of Christ, how he for that dear Name'ssake had come so near to death. They are hisidentification marks, which will tell the churcheswherever he goes how he has fought the battleof his Saviour.

Naturally, while we are talking about Paul'sexterior you will be recalling that problem abouthis health referred to in his own words at the end of2 Corinthians. You remember those pathetic wordsabout his ' thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satanto buffet ' him. On this famous problem I haveno new suggestions. I cannot choose even betweenthose suggested already. The only thing I wantto say is that the Revised Version, going uponthe knowledge accessible thirty years ago, putin the margin the suggestion that we ought toread, instead of ' thorn,' the word stake. Nowthis word skolops in the classical Greek does meana stake ; and since, in the barbarous East, death


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 57by impaling was common, the suggestion of it isthat the man has had the stake thrust right throughhis body. But this suggestion we are now ableto deny with confidence, and the margin had betterdisappear. We have a very illiterate papyrusin which the word most clearly means splinter.In medical writers we find the word used for atiny lancet. You can see that it must have lostany connexion with size. However, a thorn inthe flesh can sometimes be painful enough to destroyone's peace of mind or body, and Paul's descriptionof his ailment as a thorn fits the conditions extremelywell. Satan is allowed to inflict on Paul whatwould never let him rest, something which alwaysreminded him that he was still in the body ; butas he bore it he also realized that He who allowedit to remain was Himself abundant compensation.We hear Paul saying, ' Concerning this thing Ibesought the Lord thrice, that it might departfrom me. And He hath said unto me, My graceis sufficient for thee : for power is made perfectin weakness.' Sometimes I think that one littlechange' He hath said 'is one of the gems amongthe innumerable beauties of the Revised Version,suggesting, as it does, a message realized once forall, but repeating itself daily as the ' thorn ' prickshim, and bringing a new joy with every stab ofpain.


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58 Some Sidelights Upon PaulI pass to something quite different, without

attempting to be very orderly. I want now tomake a short incursion into the hterary criticismof the PauKne letters and get some help out of ourpapyri. I am not proposing to go over the writingsof the Apostle Paul in this New Testament of ours.I can only remind you that in this matter criticism isvery favourable indeed to the views which probablymost of us here would like to hold. There was atime when only four letters of Paul were allowedby the more advanced critics ; while now there isnobody with a reputation to lose who would dreamof allowing us less than eight, and, as to the rest,even they are in a better position than in times past.But there is one of Paul's most precious lettersthe position of which has raised a great deal oldifficulty, and about which I want to make asuggestion. That is the letter called the Letterto the Ephesians. There is very good reason tobelieve that this was not a letter especially to theEphesians. The words ' in Ephesus ' are leftout in our very best authorities, and the explanationadvanced two hundred years ago by ArchbishopUssher, that the letter was a circular letter addressedto various churches in Roman Asia, holds thefield still. That is to say, it was a letter to Ephesus,but it was also a letter to the Laodiceans. InColossians Paul speaks about a letter sent to the


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 59Laodiceans, which would come on to Colossae tobe exchanged for that which they have just got.That letter of which he speaks was almost certainlywhat we call Ephesians.But then there comes another question. Was

this letter to the Ephesians really written by Paul ?There are a number of difficulties about it. Thestyle is unmistakably different in many waysand, though one does not want to lay too muchstress upon this fact, it must count for something.A few months ago I was reading a paper atOxford, and I had a curious experience. I wasreading on quite a technical subject, the questionof the ' Semitisms ' of New Testament Greekthat is, traces of very close translations fromSemitic language so that the translation was reallynot, properly speaking, Greek. I was discussingwhether there were really such things as ' Semitisms

'

in the language of Paul. I examined two or threeidioms which are rather test cases, and was ex-tremely surprised to find that I could say aboutthese particular uses that they were not to befound in Paul except in Ephesians ; two or threeinstances appeared in that Epistle not to be foundelsewhere.The question immediately raised, of course,

is whether this must be added to the argumentsurged against Paul's authorship. I have been


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6o Some Sidelights Upon Paulthinking about it, and venture a suggestion bywhich we may conclude this letter to be Paul'sin every sense of the word except one, and thatis that the actual writing down of it was done byanother man.Let me try to restore by sheer conjecture the

conditions under which Ephesians may have beenwritten. Paul, Timothy, and others have a longand anxious conversation as to the religious condi-tion of the churches in Roman Asia. Paul deter-mines to write to them. He has not time to dictatea letter to every one of them, but arranges to writeone letter for them all, to be sent on its way fromone church to another. But, then, there arespecial conditions in the church at Colossae. Thechurch at Colossae is being harassed by perils thatneed special treatment, and nothing else than thevery careful handling of Paul himself could ade-quately meet the situation. So Paul must composea special letter to Colossae. But he will not leavethe other churches without a message. So ina long talk with his companions and friends hegoes right over the whole ground ; he tells themwhat he wants said, and then commissions oneshall we say Timothy ?to draft a letter. I suggestTimothy especially because we read of him that' from a babe ' he was steeped in the sacred writings ;and he is the one of whom we can easily believe


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 6i

biblical phraseology would come naturally fromhis lips, so that he would easily drop into ' Semi-tisms.' Paul was equally steeped in these sacredwritings, but it does not follow that every manwho knows his Bible wUl use biblical phrasesin his writings. Paul quoted the Bible, but hedid not let it mould his style to any appreciableextent ; while Timothy may well have let biblicalphraseology colour his ordinary writing. Theletter, then, as we conceive it becomes simplya written report of exhortations which Paul hasjust been giving orallyas if, for example, some-body were here engaged in writing out a reportof what was said to us last hour. The thoughtswould be those of the speaker ; but the languagewould tend to be the language of the writer.

This, then, is what I take it Timothy had to do.He took Paul's thoughts and Paul's words, so faras he could reproduce them, and brought the draftto Paul. Paul then proceeded to amend his letter,striking out a phrase there and putting in a phrasehere. He turned it inside out quite freely, andat the end that letter was Paul's absolutely. Itstarted from him and it ended with him ; butthere was the trace of another hand in it which,I think, is quite enough to account for those differ-ences of style which have given some people nota little trouble as to the authorship


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62 Some Sidelights Upon PaulThis conjectural account explains, I think,

the close resemblances between the letter to theEphesians, so-called, and that to the Colossians.I have still to illustrate from the papyri, as I prom-ised, the combination of resemblances and differencesof style between these two Epistles. I have beenassuming, you see, that the reason why Ephesiansand Colossians are so much like each other is thatthey were written at the same time, Colossiansby Paul himself, and Ephesians by a friend whoreported from memory an oral discourse of theapostle. Now among the papyri we have twoletters which I may read, as interesting in them-selves and for the light which they throw uponthe New Testament. The situation of the two,and the date, viz. i68 B.C., is identical. A manhaving a wife and child had been in very seriousmoney difficulties, and, to save himself from furthertrouble, he promptly went into ' retreat ' in amonastery. Perhaps you may think that themonastery suggests Christianity, but the date isB.C., and monasticism is in fact not a Christianinstitution at all, but much older. (Some of usthink that there is not much Christianity in it atthe best of times !) In the Serapeum, the templeof the god Serapis, at Memphis, there used to befrom time to time companies of temporary monks,who went there into retreat and stayed for a fixed


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 63period. These letters are written after the re-treat has come to an end. Most of the peoplehave gone home, but this man has not. He knowsthat he will find things uncomfortable at home,and so he determines to be very religious andstay. When his poor wife knew the retreat wasover, she wrote this touching letter :

' Isias to Hephaestion her brother, greeting : '

Brother here means husband.' If you are well and everything else goes with youreasonably, it would be as I perpetually pray thegods. I myself am in good health, and the childand all in the house.'And then the good woman adds words between

the lines, ' making mention of you continually.'You will find that phrase in Rom. i. g, in Eph.

i. 16, and so on. It was a formula of writing whichwas used, you see, among the heathen, and whichPaul took up.And then her letter proceeds :

' When I received from Horus your letter inwhich you explained that you were in retreatin the Serapeum at Memphis, I immediately gavethanks to the gods that you were well, but thatyou did not return when all the others who wereshut up returned distresses me ; for in view of


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64 Some Sidelights Upon Paulhaving piloted myself and your child through such acrisis, and having come to the last extremitybecause of the high price of corn, thinking that nowat last your return would give me some relief, youhave never even thought of returning nor sparinga look for our helpless state. While you werestill at home I went altogether short, not tomention how long time has passed since, and suchhard times, and you having sent nothing. Butnow that Horus, who has delivered your letter,has told us about your having been set free fromthe retreat, I am altogether distressed. And yourmother, too, is in great trouble about it. Ientreat you for her sake and for ours to return tothe city, unless, indeed, something most importantis keeping you. Remember to take good careof yourself and be in good health. Good-bye.July 24, 168 B.C.'

This letter was found in the temple. No doubthe left it behind in his hurry when he went home !From the same place comes this second letter,dated on the same dayfrom his brother. Ithink you will agree as you hear it that the wifeand the brother-in-law had been having a conversa-tion in which they have made up together the pleasthey will urge in separate letters.

' Dionysius to his brother Hephaestion, greeting :If you are well and other things suit you reasonably.


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 65it would be as I perpetually pray to the gods. Imyself am well, also Eudaemonis and the childrenand Isias and your children, and all in the house.When I received your letter explaining that youhad been brought safely out of great dangers andwere in retreat, I rendered thanks to the gods thatyou were well, but I wished you had returned andcome to town as Conon and all the others who wereshut up, that Isias, who when your child had beenin the utmost danger had done everything to pullhim safely through, and had suffered such hardtimes in addition, might at last get a little breathingspace by seeing you. For it is altogether needlessfor you to stay in seclusion until you can makesomething and bring it. Every one when he haspulled safely out of danger tries to get home quicklyand greet his wife and his children and his friends.So please try quickly to return, unless somethingmost important is keeping you. Take good careof your bodily health. Good-bye. July 24.'

The similarity of these letters comes from thesame reason as the similarityto compare smallthings with greatof Ephesians and Colossians.

I am going to say something now about Paul'sposition as a Greek, and why, incidentally, we cansuppose that Paul was really familiar with theGreek life. In the first place, there are his quota-tions from Greek literature. A few years agoDr. Rendel Harris discovered a passage in one of

E


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66 Some Sidelights Upon Paulhis Syriac manuscripts, a passage in which wasembedded one of Paul's well-known quotationsfrom classical literature. The passage consistedof four lines which were translated very easilyinto Greek hexameter verse. They ran thus

' A grave have they fashioned for thee, O Zeus,highest and greatest, the Cretans, always liars,evil beasts, idle gluttons. But thou art notdead, for everlastingly thou livest and standestfor in thee we live, and move, and have our being.'The allusion is to the fact that in Crete there

was shown a tomb of Zeus, the supreme deity ofthe Greeks, a fact which always roused the indig-nation of orthodox Greek religion, where, of course,Zeus was immortal.Now you have already recognized the bearing

of the striking quotation unearthed for us by Dr.Harris. We begin with learning the reason whythe Cretans were called liars, in words which becameproverbial. But we have seen the familiar linefrom Titus brought into close connexion with onemuch more familiar, which has now to be referredto the same author, traditionally said to be theCretan poet-philosopher Epimenides, who livedin the sixth century before Christ. There weretwo contributions from Greek poets, then, in thatwonderful speechor, rather, exordium of a speech


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 67

that Paul addressed to the Areopagites in Athens.Not only ' For we are also His offspring/ but also' In Him we live, and move, and have our being,'is a gem from Greek thought. How far thesequotations prove Paul's reading in Greek literatureis not easy to say. If you found an Englishmansaying, ' To be or not to be : that is the question,'you could not inevitably prove he had read Hamlet.It might be he got the tag out of a newspaper.If, however, he continued the speech beyond thatline, it would be a little better evidence that heknew his Shakespeare. But I think, on the whole,Paul was not unfamiliar with some of the thingsthat had been said about the gods by Greek poets.He was just the sort of a man to search the literaturefor traces of these higher things.We have a striking parallel especially urgedby Sir William Ramsay. We know how constantlyPaul referred to the Greek games, which, let usnot forget, were religious ceremonials. Greekathletics were clean in comparison with somemodern sports, and brought out the very best therewas in the Greek character. They always seemedto have a great attraction for Paul. ' Whatsoeverthings are manly, whatsoever things are of goodreport 'Paul was always very sympathetic towardssuch things wherever he found them. And ifsome one had come to him and said, ' These Greek


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68 Some Sidelights Upon Paulgames are in honour of heathen gods,' what wouldhe have said ? ' Yes,' we may hear him reply,' suppose they are ! Whether you eat or whetheryou drink, or whatever you do, do it all to theglory of God ; and if you do not know my God,then I have come to tell you about Him. Mean-while, if you know anything about God it is some-thing if you dedicate the best part of life to Him.'I am quite sure Paul's mind was so large and sotolerant that he would not stick at the fact thatthey were ' heathen ' deities. What he saw wasa groping after God, and he saw that men whogroped after God had some of them found Him.

There was a very beautiful fact brought outby a friend of mine, a great archaeologist, at Cam-bridge. He told me something new about themost famous of all statues ever graven by art ordevice of manthe wonderful ' Olympian Zeus 'of Phidias, which looked down the race-courseat Olympia. Phidias was an innovator in a verystartling way. His predecessors always portrayedZeus as majestic and terrible, brandishing thethunderbolt before he hurled it to work havocamong men. The new Zeus had a face of unspeak-able majesty, but the majesty of benevolence andfatherliness. Five centuries before Christ thatgreat sculptor, that deeply religious man, hadrealized the idea that God was good. I think if


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 69Paul ever saw that figure he must have caughtits meaning. The glorious figure disappeared some-where during the Dark Ages, but the face lived on.It was actually taken over by the Church to becomein Christian art the traditional face of Christ. Sotrue it is, to quote that text that I was explainingin a former lecture, that ' unto us the toll of theages has come as our inheritance.'One other question about Paul I should like to

examine before I have done. What was hiseducation and what his social position ? Noless a scholar than Professor Deissmann hasregarded him as a plain, working man, like mostof the Twelve. But would an artisan have hada chance to study at the feet of Gamaliel ? Wouldhe have been charged by the priestly aristocracyto carry out that mission in Damascus ? I greatlyprefer Ramsay's view that Paul's father was aRoman citizen, and presumably, therefore, a manof wealth and of importance in Tarsus. Moreover,as Ramsay most persuasively argues, there wasa time in Paul's life when he was in possessionof a good deal of money, which must have cometo him by the death of his father. Since menamong the Jews did not have wills, when a mandied his money descended automatically to hissons, and Paul would thus get money which cer-tainly never would come to him by his father's


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70 Some Sidelights Upon Paulconsent. The father, who gave his brilHant sona costly training under the greatest of the Rabbis,was not Hkely to take cheerfully his defection to' the sect of the Nazarenes,' and we might safelyassume that he cut him off with, or without, ashilling. I wonder if we can see in Acts xi. 25 ahint that Barnabas had some trouble in findingPaul, who was not at his father's well-knownaddress, but in an obscure corner, living as best hecould ? Whether that is so or not, we can at leastrecognize what new meaning Ramsay's suggestiongives to Paul's own record that for Christ's sake he' suffered the loss of all things ' (Phil. iii. 8).

In favour of Paul's lowly origin it is urged thathis vocabulary is that of the common people. Thatis quite true. A German scholar, Dr. Nageli, whohas made a very careful study of Paul's vocabularyas far as the first five letters of the alphabet, hasshown that Paul's words can all of them be paralleledfrom quite vernacular sources, and that none ofthem are out-of-the-way words, but such as thecommon people could understand. Quite so ; butthat does not make us believe that Paul could nothave used philosophic and out-of-the-way wordsif he liked. The reason why he did not use themwas because it was of first importance to him tospeak so that he could be understood by everybody.If you read John Wesley's sermons, you will find


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 71exactly the same thing. John Wesley was alearned man, a man of refinement, a man who couldhave gone in for polysyllables with the best ofthem if he had cared to ; but he meant to be under-stood. And so, surely, did PaulOne rather interesting example of this has struck

me quite lately. In going over the record of theGreek word Hades, I was rather surprised to findthat it occurs only once in the innumerable papyrithat Professor Milligan and I have been searching, andthat in a document very far from the normal style.What is the reason ? I am satisfied that this wordhad dropped out of the ordinary vernacular. But,you say, surely the word occurs in the New Testa-ment, and very often in the Greek of the Old.Quite so; but that was, I believe, only becausethe Septuagint translators found it an exactrendering to represent the Hebrew Sheol. Theytook it for this purpose from the technical languageof Greek religion, but as a word in ordinary lifeit was apparently no longer in use. We seem tohave at once an explanation of what has alwaysrather puzzled me. You will remember that atthe end of one of Paul's greatest chapters, thefifteenth chapter of i Corinthians, he brings itinto that subHme apostrophe : ' Where, O death,is thy sting? Where, O grave, is thy victory? 'as the Authorized Version has it. That is a


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72 Some Sidelights Upon Paulquotation from Hosea, and in the original youhave both death and Sheol mentioned. And Ithink we all agree that the phraseology is muchmore impressive than this that Paul uses. Howdoes Paul quote it ? ' Where, O death, is thysting ? Where, O death, is thy victory ? ' Whydid Paul use the same word twice, and spoil therhetorical effect from Hosea? The reason wasthat the word was not in common, ordinary use,and so, even if it were to spoil the literary effect,Paul put the word that everybody knew into thepassage.While I can only briefly put it before you, I do

not want to talk about Paul this morning withoutmentioning something which has a great deal to dowith the whole of the history of his life. Had Paulever seen the Lord Jesus in the flesh ? Had heseen Him before that great day when, in the cloudsoutside of Damascus, he saw that wondrous Facewhich changed his life ? There is a very able dis-cussion by a brilliant German theologian, JohannesWeiss, translated into English in an Americanseries published by Harpers, and called Paul andJesus. Johannes Weiss argues, I think with con-clusive force, that that text in 2 Corinthians, ' Evenif we have known Christ in the flesh, yet now weknow Him so no more,' necessarily implies thatPaul really had seen Jesus. Now, after all, that


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Some Sidelights Upon Paul 73is very natural. We know that Paul was in Jerusa-lem before the Passion, when he studied underGamaliel ; he was there very soon after, for thestory of Acts implies it. The ordinary theoryassumes that Paul had gone back to Tarsus whenJesus was exercising His ministry. It is at least aseasy to believe that Paul never left at all. There aresome indications in Paul's language that Paul reallywas in Jerusalem at the time when the Lord Jesuswas there. And the most significant suggestion Ifind of that kind is in the Passion st

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