4. The Martyr

“Do your best to come to me soon,” runs the doubtful second letter to Timothy,

for Demas has deserted me for love of the present world . . . Crescens has gone, and Titus; no one but Luke is with me. ... At my first appearance in court no one came to help me; everybody deserted me. . . . But the Lord stood by me, and gave me strength, so that I might make a full presentation of the message and let all the heathen hear it. So I was saved from the jaws of the lion. . . . My life is already being poured out, and the time has come for my departure. I have had a part in the great contest. I have run my race, I have preserved the faith.^66a

He spoke bravely, but he was desolate. One ancient tradition said that he was freed, went to Asia and Spain, preached again, and once more found himself a prisoner in Rome; probably he was never freed. Without wife or children to comfort him, with all friends gone but one, only his faith could support him; and perhaps that too was shaken. Like the other Christians of his age, he had lived on the hope of seeing Christ return. He had written to the Philippians: “We are eagerly awaiting the coming of a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . The Lord is coming soon.”⁶⁷ And to the Corinthians: “The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, those who have wives should live as though they had none . . . and those who buy anything as if they did not own it. . . . For the present shape of the world is passing away . . . Maranatha! Lord, come quickly!”⁶⁸ But in his second epistle to the Thessalonians he reproved them for neglecting the affairs of this world in expectation of Christ’s early advent; the coming will be delayed until the “Adversary”—Satan—“makes his appearance and proclaims himself to be God.”⁶⁹ We surmise from his last letters that he had struggled, during his imprisonment, to reconcile his early faith with the long delay in the Parousia or Second Appearance. More and more he put his hope beyond the grave, and made for his own solace the great adjustment that saved Christianity—the transformation of the belief in Christ’s earthly return into the hope of union with him in heaven after death. Apparently he was tried again, and convicted; Caesar and Christ came face to face, and Caesar won for a day. We do not know the precise charge; probably now, as at Thessalonica, Paul was accused of “disobeying the emperor’s decrees, and claiming that someone else called Jesus is king.”⁷⁰ This was a crime of maiestas, punishable with death. We have no ancient record of the trial; but Tertullian, writing about 200, reports that Paul was beheaded at Rome; and Origen, about 220, writes that “Paul suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nero.”⁷¹ Probably, as a Roman citizen, he had the honor of a distinct execution, and was not mingled with the Christians crucified after the fire of 64. Tradition united him with Peter in a simultaneous, though separate, martyrdom; and a touching legend pictured the great rivals meeting in friendship on the road to death. Over the place on the Via Ostia, where the Church believed that Paul had found peace, a shrine was raised in the third century. Remade in ever fairer form, it stands today as the basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura—St. Paul beyond the Walls.

It is a fit symbol of his victory. The emperor who condemned him died a coward’s death, and soon nothing survived of his inordinate works. But from the defeated Paul came the theological structure of Christianity, as from Paul and Peter the astonishing organization of the Church. Paul had found a dream of Jewish eschatology, confined in Judaic Law; he had freed and broadened it into a faith that could move the world. With the patience of a statesman he had interwoven the ethics of the Jews with the metaphysics of the Greeks, and had transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into the Christ of theology. He had created a new mystery, a new form of the resurrection drama, which would absorb and survive all the rest. He had replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue, and in that sense had begun the Middle Ages. It was a tragic change, but perhaps humanity had willed it so; only a few saints could achieve the imitation of Christ, but many souls could rise to faith and courage in the hope of eternal life.

The influence of Paul was not immediately felt. The communities that he had established were tiny isles in a pagan sea. The church at Rome was Peter’s, and remained faithful to his memory. For a century after Paul’s death he was almost forgotten. But when the first generations of Christianity had passed away, and the oral tradition of the apostles began to fade, and a hundred heresies disordered the Christian mind, the epistles of Paul provided the framework for a stabilizing system of belief that united the scattered congregations into a powerful Church.

Even so, the man who had detached Christianity from Judaism was still so essentially Jewish in intensity of character and sternness of morality that the Middle Ages, adopting paganism into a colorful Catholicism, saw no kindred spirit in him, built few churches to him, seldom sculptured his figure or used his name. Fifteen centuries went by before Luther made Paul the Apostle of the Reformation, and Calvin found in him the somber texts of the predestinarian creed. Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter; Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.