SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3830, 6 November 1936, Page 4

SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

(By

H. V. Morton)

THE MISSION TO CYPRUS. About A.D. 45 three men set out from Syria to change the faith of the world. They were Barnabas, Paul, and Mark. They did not go to Rome, the administrative centre of the world, or to Athens, the cultural centre, or to Alexandria, the New York of ancient times: they began—and in this there is surely a lesson for all reformers—as near home as possible. They set sail for the lovely island of Cyprus, which you can see on a clear day from the mountains of Syria. I have described Tarsus, where Paul was born; Damascus, where he was converted to Christianity; and Antioch, in Syria, where he helped to found the first Gentile Church. Before I go to Cyprus to follow in the steps of the first Christian mission, I would like to examine the characters and the personalities of the three missionaries, and also to indicate the motives which led them to choose Cyprus as the scene of their first labours.

Three important factors in the spreading of Christianity were: the Greek language, which was then the common language of the civilized world, the language which Paul spoke and in which he wrote; the Roman roads over which he travelled to the great centres of population; and the Jewish synagogues in which he carried out his campaign. It is wrong to imagine, as some people do, that Paul wandered haphazardly about the world, addressing crowds of Romans and Greeks. He did nothing of the kind. He rarely addressed himself in the first place to pagans; he went, as a wandering Jew preacher, from synagogue to synagogue, and only when the Jews turned him down did he draw away his converts. Therefore the first missions were not missions to the heathens but missions to the Jews. The germ of Christianity sprang up in the countless Jewish trading settlements which were scattered far and wide all over the world. It is quite wrong to think that the Jews did not break away from their native land until Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.' Centuries before Christ the Jews began to cover the world. They were taken away as captives. They emigrated as traders. As early as 586 8.C., and from that time until to-day, there were more Jews outside Palestine than inside it.

The conquests of Alexander the Great, which established new cities and made roads safe, loosed a great flood of Jews on the world. The city of Alexandria—after Rome the largest city of the ancient world—had five quarters, two of which were Jewish. There were enormous Jewish colonies in Rome, Antioch, Athens, and Babylon. Scholars estimate that in New Testament times the Jews outside Palestine numbered four and a half millions, and that they formed seven per cent, of the total population of the Roman Empire. These Jews were universally disliked. People detested them for their exclusiveness, their religious peculiarities, and their business acumen. While' they made money in hundreds of cities they refused to worship the dieties of those cities or eat with their fellow citizens. They looked only over seas to Jerusalem and to the Temple worship and periodic feasts, such as the Passover, to which they would converge from -’.very part of the world. The importance of the Jews outside Palestine is clearly indicated in the Acts of the Apostles, where we read that on Pentecost there were present in Jerusalem Jews from Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Cappodocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Cyrene, Crete, Arabia, and Rome; with others from the Orient and Italy. Strabo, speaking of the world 85 years before Christ, said that the Jewish people had come into every city, and that it was not easy to find a place in the world which had not received this race and was not occupied by them. Therefore, when Paul turned his steps towards the Roman world, he saw his journey as a progress from synagogue to synagogue, for there was not a city of any size in the world that did not contain a settlement that would welcome him as a fellow Jew.

Cyprus was probably chosen by the first missionaries because Barnabas was a Cypriot and knew the island well. Also, Cyprus had been already prepared for the Gospel. We learn that Christians driven from Jerusalem after the martyrdom of S. Stephen “ travelled as far as Phenice, and Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only.” Is it not possible that, as news spread of the growth of the Church in Antioch, some converts in the synagogues of Cyprus sent a message inviting the missionaries to go there ? The Jews of Cyprus were a power-

ful community. This island, which enjoys an exquisite climate, but which does not, however, induce energy or initiative, had from earliest times been subject to whatever power controlled the Mediterranean. For centuries Jews had been settled there as traders, dealing in corn, wine, olive oil, and metals. When Rome took the island she farmed out the copper mines to Herod the Great; and a firm link between Palestine and Cyprus was, no doubt, established. Who were these three men whose voyage to Cyprus has become a landmark in the spiritual history of the world ? Barnabas was the oldest of the three and the leader. He was a Levite of Cyprus, a man of means, who, in the first years of the infant Church at Jerusalem, sold a property and gave the proceeds to the faithful. He was a man whose saintly character shines throughout the narrative. He understood Paul’s greatness. When others doubted the reality of Paul’s conversion Barnabas guaranteed his good faith and introduced him to the disciples who had known Christ. When Barnabas was ordered to organise the Church in Antioch, he thought instantly of Paul as his helper, and it was to Tarsus he went to summon Paul to his life’s work.

Any student of the Acts of the Apostles will agree that at first Barnabas is the leader; then, as Paul’s missionary fervour' takes him out of Cyprus into Asia Minor, Barnabas takes second place. Who was John Mark ? It is agreed that he was the writer of the Gospel of St. Mark. If so, he may, as a child, have seen Jesus. There is an interesting theory that the young man with a linen cloth cast about him who watched the arrest of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and escaped arrest himself only by leaving his linen cloth in the hands of the guards, was John Mark. It seems to be the only theory that explains this peculiarly personal, and apparently irrelevant, incident. Mark’s mother was called Mary, and was in her house at Jerusalem after the Crucifixion. She is thought to have been the sister or aunt of Barnabas; thus John Mark would have been either his nephew or his cousin.

At the time of the journey to Cyprus Mark was a young man, and he accompanied the two missionaries as a helper, and not, as one gathers, as an evangelist. From the fact that he turned back from Cyprus and refused to go with Paul and Barnabas into Asia Minor, it is clear that Paul and Mark did not get on well together. There is additional evidence of this in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles when Paul and Barnabas propose a second missionary journey. Barnabas wishes to take Mark with them as on the first occasion, but Paul objects because Mark “ departed from them from Jamphylia, and went not with them to the work.” “ And the contention was so sharp between them that they departed asunder one from the other; and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus; and Paul chose Silas and departed. ...” There is, happily, a reference to Mark in the Epistle to the Colossians, which proves that this quarrel, however it arose, was eventually settled, and that Paul and Mark became friends again. And Paul ? What kind of a man was he who set out to conquer the world ? What did he look like! ? We know that Paul must have had physical stamina. But what was his “ thorn in the flesh ” ? We do not know. Epilepsy, stammering, eye trouble, shattering headaches, and malaria have all been put forward by various scholars. But these suggestions are, and will remain, pure guesswork. We do pot know that Paul seems to have been as sensitive of his infirmity as Byron was of his limp. He wrote to the Church at Corinth that his enemies said “ his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.” A curious document called “ The Acts of Paul and Thecla,” written in Asia Minor a century after Paul’s death, gives what may be an authentic portrait of the Apostle. He is described as a small man with meeting eyebrows, a bald head, a large nose, and bow legs; but strongly built and full of grace. It has also been suggested, because a group of pagans in Asia Minor once mistook Barnabas for Jupiter, King of the gods, and Paul for Mercury, the messenger of the gods, that Barnabas was a fine-looking man and Paul was of no particular account. But is this quite fair ? It proves that Barnabas was older than Paul, possibly more majestic in appearance and less talkative, but surely no pagans familiar with the physically-per-fect gods of Greece would have mistaken a small, bow-legged man with a large nose for Mercury, the splendid, fleet-footed messenj er of Olympus "

Again, when Paul was arrested in Jerusalem and saved from the fury of a Jewish mob by a body of Roman soldiers, he surprised the commander, Claudias Lysias, by speaking Greek. “ Canst thou speak Greek ? ” asked Lysias in astonishment. “ Art not thou that Egyptian which before these days madest an uproar, and ledcst out into the wilderness four thousand men that were murderers ? ” And then Paul made his famous reply: “ I am a man which am a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city.” But the point 1 would like to make is this: Would a Roman soldier in Jerusalem, familiar with political riots, and bandits, mistake a small, bow-legged man with a bald head for a dangerous Egyptian agitator who had captained a band of four thousand outlaws ? I know there can be no answer to such problems. But it seems fair to point out that if a writer of fiction a century after Paul’s death described him as small and insignificant, someone who actually saw him and talked to him considered that he looked like t‘ dangerous man of action. However, let us be content to imagine three men, one tall and old, another middle-aged, “ strongly built and full of grace,” and the third still in early manhood. Let us imagine the cargo ship leaving the great docks of Seleucia, near Antioch (whose silent ruins I have described), and, as the sail fills with wind, a man named Saul, who in Cyprus is to become the immortal Paul, stands gazing to the west. “ And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake; but he that endureth to the end shall be saved. Bit when they persecute you in this city flee ye into another. ...” Perhaps he heard this voice crying in the sea wind.

“ FROM WHENCE THEY SAILED.” After unloading two hundred goats on the sunny dock at Haifa, the cargo boat moved off to sea. She was small, smelly, but interesting. There were twelve cabin passengers, chiefly Syrians and Jews. The cabins were small, hot cells in a dark passage. The doors opened to views of the ship’s intimate domestic life: the Greek cook bent with malicious enthusiasm over a cauldron of soup, his assistant walking about with a dead chicken, the engineer descended the steel ladder to his thumping, rhythmic engines. About thirty miserable-looking Arabs, with their shrouded wives, occupied the third-class deck aft, where, as the ship gracefully rose and sank in the white thrash of her propeller, a veiled woman would now and then totter to the side and shamelessly uncover her features to the heaving deep. Nobody cared. The husband, who normally would have divorced her had she done this in public, lay with closed eyes, moistening his lips from time to time and automatically telling the amber beads of his kombologion. In the dark hatchway under the fo’c’sle lay a number of Syrian eows on their way to Egypt. They chewed the cud philosophically, and allowed turkeys and hens to walk round, and even over, them. In the small saloon I encountered the only English passenger drinking z glass of beer while the Greek steward hit out at flies with a table napkin. He was a large, cheerful, mid-dle-aged man who had been settled in Palestine since the war. “ I came out and stayed out,” he said. “ No, I never get homesick. I like the climate. Dash it all, man, we’ve a short enough life. Why should We spend half of it in fog and rain ? ” He told me he was going to Cyprus to inquire about orange-growing. “ It’s a wonderful climate and a wonderful soil,” he said. I asked him why so many Arabs were travelling to Cyprus. “ You mean the fellows who are being sea-sick ? Oh, they’re going to Cyprus to buy wives. There’s a big trade with wives between Cyprus and the mainland. Not only are they highly esteemed—Cyprus was always famous for love, you know—but they are much cheaper than in Syria and Palestine. An Arab can get married far cheaper in Cyprus than in Syria or Palestine. . . .” All that afternoon I sat in the hot sunlight of the deck watching the coast of Palestine fade to a brown line on the sky. I was at last really off in the steps of St. Paul, to Cyprus first, and then, I hoped, back again to Turkey and across Asia Minor to

Macedonia. As I looked at the small cargo boat I thought that, although the great harbours of the Roman age are now ruined and desolate, the commerce of the Mediterranean is much the same as in St. Paul’s time. There was little difference between this ship going to Cyprus in the year 1936 and the cargo-passenger vessels - on which the Apostle sailed from place to place in the years A.D. 45-66. He must have been familiar with the same odd mixture of men and beasts at sea; the huddled forms of unhappy Jews, Greeks, and Syrians, lying wrapped in their cloaks or stretched like dead men on the deck. He must have heard the lowing and stamping of cattle at sea. He must have seen deck hands moving the cargo, just as I saw all these sights on a sunny afternoon as the ship went over a blue sea to Cyprus. I think one of the things that impresses a student of the Acts of the Apostles is the ease and certainty with which Paul travelled about the world. He set out without the slightest fuss, or the feeling that he was doing anything out of the ordinary, on the most ambitious journeys.

The background of his wandering is the enormous, peaceful background of the Roman Empire, when ships so far as possible in of sail, reached their destination in time; wheye magnificent roads, for which to-day a man looks in vain, crossed the mighty territory of the Near East —all leading, like the spokes of a wheel, to the hub and centre of the world—Rome.

It is true that the danger of shipwreck was greater in Paul’s time han in ours. He was three times shipwrecked and once adrift for a day and a night on a raft.

We know details of only one shipwreck. the Malta shipwreck, and of the others only from a casual reference in Paul’s heated Second Epistle to,, the Corinthians. How interesting it would be if we had full details of all these disasters. It was the practice in ancient times tc lay up ships in the winter so that traffic practically ceased in the Mediterranean from November to March. Even in good weather only big vessels, such as the Alexandrian cornships, were fond of the open sea. The average merchant ship preferred when possible to hug the coast, often landing her passengers for the night and sailing on in the morning. It is clear that many of Paul’s voyages must have been conducted in this way. I watched the sun go down, and al bedtime went to my cabin heavy with sleep. When I touched the pillow three fat and glistening cockroaches ran from under it and disappeared between the bunk and the ship’s side. Once you get cockroaches in a ship in a hot climate you can never get rid of them. I don’t mind fleas, and I can train myself to endure other things, but cockroaches I loathe. I cannot stand their long, bent legs, the speed they achieve, and the feeling that they are just about to lift horrible black-brown wings and fly. Therefore, shaking out a couple of blankets, I went up and spent the night on deck.

I shall never forget that night. The moon was not full, but for an hour or so an intense silver light lay over the sea, and there was no sound but the soft hiss of water against the ship. In the middle of the night I awakened to find myself gazing up at a moonless sky covered with stars. Ou? riding light moved against them like n little moon. I watched grey light come to the world. The ship swung on a sea the colour of lead, and the stars faded. In this queer between-time I saw a shadow on the sea and knew that it was the long, eastward thrust o(f Cyprus. Then, with a feeling of relief and happiness, I saw the east streaked with uneasy lines of pink that grew stronger second by second until, with a burst of yellow light, the sun jumped out of the sea. And I saw a long, brown and green coast with great mountains rising inland. and, with the sun shining on it, the little white town of Larnaka, with its feet in blue water.