IN THE STEPS OF ST. PAUL

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20509, 29 August 1936, Page 9

IN THE STEPS OF ST. PAUL

MAGAZINE SECTION

BY

H. V. MORTON

(Last week’s instalment concluded with:—“ln Damdeus, ’’ wrote St. Paul to the Christians of Corinth, “the governor under Aretas the King kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me. And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.” This mention of Arctas, the King, is the only indication in ancient literature that at the time of Paul’s visit Damascus was under Nabataean government, a fact borne out by a study of Syrian coins.)

THE Aretas mentioned by Paul was the father of the first wife of Herod Antipas. In order to marry Herodias, the mother of Salome, Herod divorced the daughter of Aretas and brought down on his head the famous rebuke of John the Baptist: “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.” Aretas died about A.D. 40. I have no idea whether this stretch of the wall of Damascus is that from which the Apostle was lowered, neither does it matter very much.

What is interesting, however, is that houses are still built on the wall as they must have been in the time of Paul. There is one house whose upper story projects over the wall, and whose windows look out to the country beyond.

It is not difficult to imagine that night, nineteen centuries ago, when, from just such a window, the eager hands of the disciples in Damascus lowered Paul to safety.

And if the city were still surrounded by a full circuit of its wall, and if guards were set at the gates, it is from one of these windows that you or I would choose to make our escape to-day if we were in danger of arrest and persecution.

A few paces from the wall is the cemetery of the Orthodox Greeks, where, beneath an erection like a wooden summerhouse, is the tomb of St. George of Abyssinia, venerated by all sects of Christians in Damascus. A legend of untold antiquity says that when Paul eseaped from Damascus, one of the officers set to guard the towers was an Abyssinian. This man, having become a Christian, either helped Paul to escape or looked the other way, for which he was put to death.

The Greeks always keep a lamp burning before the ikon of St. George of Abyssinia, and I am told that even Moslems revere the tomb as a place of unusual sanctity.

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. f 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 Cypus 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 civilised 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 rearely addressed himself in the first place to pagans; he went, as a wandering Jewish 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 heathen but missions to the Jews.

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. f 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 Cypus 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 tin? 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 civilised world, the language which Paul spoke anil in

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 deities of those cities or eat with their fellow citizens. They looked only overseas to Jerusalem and to the Temple worship and periodic feasts, such as the Passover, to which they would converge from every 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, Gyrene, Crete, Arabia, and Rome; with others from the Orient and Italy . Strabo, speaking of the world eightyfive 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 w as 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 St. 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 powerful 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 Jew's 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? Barnabus 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 io 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 Baranbas 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 W’ill 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 it was in her house at Jerusalem that the Apostles assembled 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, one gathers, as an evangelist. From the fact that he turned back from Cyprus and refused to go with Paul and Barnabus 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 Baranabas 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 Pamphylia, 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 not 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 Theda, 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 perfect gods of Greece would have mistaken a small, bow-legged man with a large nose for Mercury, the splendid, fleet-footed messenger 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 ledest 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 I would like to make is this. Would a Roman soldier in Jerusalem, familiar with political riots and bandits, mistake a small, bowlegged 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 a 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 rescribed), 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 he hated of all men for my name's sake; but he, that endureth, to the, end shall be saved. Hut when they persecute you, in this city flee ye into another. . . .” Perhaps lie heard this voice crying in the sea wind.

TV “From Thence They Sailed , * ,

After unloading two hundred goats on the sunny dock at Hiafa, the cargo boat moved off to sea. She was small, smelly, but interesting. There were twelve cabin passengers,

(COPYRIGHT)

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 Egyptian 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 automatcally telling the amber beads of his kombolofjion. In the dark hatchway under the fo’c’sle lay a number of Syrian cows on their way to Egypt. They chewed the cud philosophically, and allowed turkeys and hens to walk round, and even over, them. KIn the small saloon I encountered the only English passenger drinking a glass of beer, while the Greek steward hit out at flies with a table napkin. He was a large, cheerful middle-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 over 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. 45-00.

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. lie must have heard the lowing and stamping of cattle at sea. He must have seen Negro 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, where ships, so far as possible in days of sail, reached their destination in time: where 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 than iu 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 w.as the practice in ancient times to lav 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 corn ships, were fond of the open seas. 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 at bed-lime went to my cabin heavy with sleep. When I touched the pillow three fat and glistening cockroaches ran from under it and disappeared between rhe bunk and the ship's side. Once you get cockroaches in a ship in a hot climate you can never ged 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 io 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 of so an intense silver light lay over the sea, and there was no sound but the soft hiss “ water against the ship. In the middle of the night I awakened to find myself gazing up at a moonless sky covered with stars. Our riding light moved against them like a 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 of Cyprus. More light came, but still the sun did not rise. 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.

Salamis, Port of Qhosts

The cargo boat lay in Larnaka Bay waiting for the shore officials. It was

not quite 7 a.m.,.but the sun was warmer than on a summer’s afternoon at home.

I thought Cyprus looked exquisite that morning, with the mists moving from her mountains and on her shores a white town set about with palm-trees, lapped by blue water.

Although anxious to get ashore. I was content to stand gazing over the rail towards the land where long ago the copper breastplate of Agamemnon was hammered, where Aphrodite rose from the sea, and where Mount Olympus housed the gods of Greece. A motor-launch came out to ns flying the British flag: for Cyprus has been under British rule since 1878, and has been a British colony since 1925. The port doctor and other officials stepped aboard. The crew lined up on the fo’c’sle. The doctor walked along, examining eyes, throats, chests, and feeling under arm-pits. When he had finished, we were free to go ashore. I sat in a small rowing-boat. Before the oars cut the water, I looked down into clear, green depths and saw huge twisted shells lying fathoms deep, and strange fish swimming. On the hot sea front of Larnaka a number of one-horsed Victorias converged on me while the drivers cracking their whips tried to attract my attention in a bewildering mixture of Greek and English. Although Cyprus has been British for over half a century, the English language has not made much progress there. But at least one inhabitant can speak American. I went up to a saloon car that stood for hire under a line of date palms. “I want to go to Salamis,” I said to the driver. “Sure,” he replied. “Step in, boss.” “How far is it?” I asked. “I guess it’s about thirty-five miles.” “Well, don't step on the gas,” I said. “Take it easy, for on mornings like this I have a great prejudice in favour of living.”

“I'm the best driver in Cyprus.” he replied. * We went off over a flat road into a luscious district of green fields of broad beans. Oxer, yoked to ploughs were turning the rich earth. Oxen in the shafts of cumbersome country carts swayed towards us over the road. Now and then we passed through mud-coloured villages, where houses with fiat roofs ami wooden balconies stood huddled in narrow lanes set about with sesame fields, pomegranate groves ami orange gardens. For nearly ten miles we ran beside a sea as blue as the most improbable seascape, then, turning inland, we mounted inlo.low, brown hills.

It is almost with a shock that you recognise the profile of Victoria and of George V. on Cyprian money and Cyprian stamps. There is little to show that Cyprus has been British for half a century except the admirable roads, the neatness and tidiness of the country, and the fact that policemen do not smoke cigarettes while on duty. But this, of course, is only a superficial impression. The island is a curious phenomenon. Those ancient enemies, the Turkish lion and the Greek lamb, lie down together in apparent contentment under British rule. The Greeks in Cyprus number 247,000. The educated Cypriots speak modern Greek, but the peasantry speak a dialect in which many French, Italian and Turkish words remain as a relic of the various occupants of the island since the Crusades. The Turks, who number 60,000, speak a pure Turkish comparatively free from Arabic or Persian words. The Greeks are, of course, Christians, and their domed churches dot the island. The Turks worship in mosques which were once Christian churches. These churches were captured centuries ago from the Crusaders. Christian church and mosque stand side by side in the island, and the Greek priest and the Moslem imam seemed to be on excellent terms. You will see one thing in Cyprus that you will see nowhere else to-day: you will see the old-fashioned Turk in his pleated trousers and his fez. He sits smoking a chibouk, or hubble-bubble, outside the cafes as if Kemal had never been born! We went through the ancient walled town of Famagusta, and in about five miles came to all that is left of Salamis, the port where Paul, Barnabas and Mark disembarked on their first missionary journey from Seleucia. “So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, wrnnt down to Seleucia and from thence they sailed to Cyprus. And when they were at Salamis they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews.” That is all we are told in the Acts about the visit to Salamis. But we know from Josephus, and other ancient writers, that this port was at that time one of the most important in the Mediterranean. It was the commercial capital of Roman Cyprus: Paphos, at the other end of the island, was the Government headquarters. We may be sure that any town which included more than one synagogue was a thriving commercial centre, for the Jews in the first century were never found in poor places. As I mentioned in a previous article, this race had settled in Cyprus centuries before Christ, and they were, no doubt, interested in the oil, fruit, wine and copper trade. They had been there long enough to become very rich. I left the car and plunged into a dense wood growing on sand-hills near the sea, I followed the path, as I had been tol dto do; but of the ruins of Salamis I could see at first nothing. Then I came to the marble stump of a pillar, and then another. They stood in the shade of acacia and eucalyptus-trees, and brambles grew over them. I came to a flight of marble steps half-covered with grass and brambles; and I realised that the whole wood w T as haunted by the ghost of Salamis.

A ruin on a hill is stark and sad, but a ruined city in a wood is terrifying. I half expected some ghosts to step from the shadow of a tree, and point and beckon. And my heart was saddened by the utter loneliness of a wrecked city and of the ease with which weeds and brambles can conceal the most ambitious works of Man. I found the remains of three marketplaces in those woods: three enormous squares ,which were once lined with marble pillars and proud with marble temples. I found the remains of a splendid Roman house with many bathrooms in it and a complete system of central heating. Here and there in the undergrowth were broken pillars and scraps of Greek inscriptions on which it was possible to make out that “the City of Salamis” gave this or decreed that. And when I looked for the once splendid harbour where Paul stepped dunes. In ancient times an earthquake

wrecked both city and harbour, and brought proud Salamis crashing to the ground. “When I was in Noo Yark,” said the driver, as we drove off, “I saved a bit and came back here, but they are a lazy bunch in this island. They don't know how to work. I wish I was back in the States. . . But I scarcely heard him: I was thinking of the ruin in the acacia wood, and the mournful whisper of wind moving through tre>« that had grown out of the bones of Salamis. (Seventh Instalment Ne.rt Week.)