So the curtain falls for the last time. But Paul's fate is hardly obscure. He himself saw that the charge against him, unrebutted by independent evidence, must bring him to the executioner's sword, the last penalty for a Roman citizen. With this late and century tradition agrees (Tertullian, De praescr. hoer. 36), nam ing the very spot on the Ostian Way, marked by a martyr memorial (tropaion, Caius ap. Euseb. ii. 25), probably at the modern Tre Fontane, some three miles from Rome. But the traditional date (June 29) reaches us only on far later authority.
Acts simply suggests summer A.D. 62 ; and we may perhaps imagine Timothy reaching Rome in time to share Paul's last days. Early Tradition.—This has little to say about Paul, and (apart from one or two early local glosses in the "Western" text of Acts) nothing historical (cf. R. A. Lipsius, Die apokr. Apostel gesch. u.s.w., and C. Clemen, Paulus, i. 331 sqq.). The Acts of Paul, composed not long after A.D. 150 by an Asian presbyter, in order to glorify Paul by supplementing Luke's story, contains no fresh data, unless the episode dealing with Paul and Thekla echoes some original tradition belonging to Iconium. Its descrip tion of Paul as "a man small in size, bald, bow-legged, sturdy, with eyebrows meeting and a slightly prominent nose, full of grace" in expression, may or may not be based on local memories. Personality.—Paul's personality is one of the most striking in history. No character of the distant past is known to us more fully, thanks largely to the self-revealing quality of his letters.
His was a deep, complex, many-sided nature, varying widely in mood, yet so concentrated by moral unity of purpose that the variety of gift and sensibility is apt to escape notice. During his career every faculty comes into play, and we realize how largely human he was. To judge him apart from that vocation which he himself felt to determine all his being, is to fall into unreality.
To view him as a mere individual is vain : further, we must allow for his limited temporal horizon, shut in for practical purposes by a near Parousia hope, conceived as bringing ordinary history to an abrupt close, and foreshortening all issues. Bearing this in mind, we shall wonder, not so much at any other-worldly spirit or peremptoriness of tone, which were often positive duties under such conditions, but rather at the sanity of temper and moral judgment which mark the apostle amid his consuming zeal. He lived in an atmosphere of intense "enthusiasm," in the most literal sense, among those who felt that "the powers of the coming age" were already at work in "the saints," men possessed by the divine afflatus and made as it were but organs of the Spirit of God. Yet with clear and ever-growing emphasis he defined spiritu ality in moral terms, those of the will informed by love like that of Christ. How great this service was, none can say. It was his
balanced attitude to the operations of the Spirit—outwardly the most distinctive thing in Christianity, as compared with Judaism —an attitude at once reverent and reasonable, that saved the Church from fanaticism on the one hand or moralism on the other. His ethical mysticism was his main contribution to Chris tianity ; and as depending on his personal experience, it was bound up closely with his personality—a fact which makes his direct influence, while intense, yet rather limited in its area of appeal.
At the root of Paul's nature lay the Hebrew capacity for per sonal devotion to the Divine as moral perfection, to an unbounded degree. It found its object in a concrete form, stirring both imag ination and affections, in Jesus the Christ, "the image of the invisible God," Whose spiritual glory man was created to reflect. Thus it was through "the love of Christ" constraining him to look at all, as it were, through Christ's eyes, that Paul came to love men even to the point of a self-forgetfulness that seemed to some hardly sane (2 Cor. v. 13-16a). So, too, his proud, strong willed spirit gradually put on "the meekness and conciliatoriness of Christ"; and all along he had a strong sense of the corporate aspect of Christianity, the fellowship of the Church as God's temple, the Divine Commonwealth. Accordingly he was great as an organizer of a new order; and he showed largeness of soul in his exertions to keep in communion the two sections of Christ's people, Jewish and Gentile, risking his life for this end.
In his more personal relations he had the power of feeling and inspiring friendship of the noblest order, a comradeship "in Christ." He was a man of heart, with rapid alternations of mood, with nothing of the Stoic in his self-mastery (Phil. iv. 7, 10-13). Indeed it was in his impetuous, choleric temperament that there lurked "the last infirmity" of his soul, which at times betrayed him into sweeping judgments. As to the charge of egoism, based on the emphasis he lays on his own person as medium of Christ's mind and will, it can hold only so far as Paul can be shown to do this gratuitously, and not in the interests of his vocation. By this latter standard alone can an apostle be judged.
In his Epistles Paul found a fitting vehicle for his personality. For the letter is the most spontaneous form of writing, leaving personality most free. They are the primary data for his Life, and an immovable critical basis for historical Christianity. On the other hand they impose by their very form certain limits to our effort to reduce his thought to system.