Paul

"For the Hebrews ask for signs," as the Apostle says, "and the Greeks seek wisdom.

"For not only for the Hebrews and those under the Law," according to the Apostle, "is it reasonable to become a Jew, but also, for the sake of the Greeks, a Greek, that we may gain all.

With reason, then, the Apostle has called the wisdom of God "manifold," showing forth its own power "in many parts and in many ways" — through art, through knowledge, through faith, through prophecy — for our benefit, "since all wisdom is from the Lord, and is with him for ever," as the wisdom of Jesus says.

A widow enrolled in the number of widows — that is, one supported by the Church — the Apostle judged should be overlooked if she marries.

The woman who in her widowhood has authority over herself is without blame in living with a man, if there is no one to break up the union;

Let us see, then, what is written to Timothy by Paul:

In this sense the Apostle Paul has said, that it is naturally disgraceful for a man to wear long hair;

But there have been some, who have asserted the rights of the church over unknown parts of the world, though the Apostle Paul himself has expressly said that Christians were not to judge those who were without the pale of their own community.

Whenever therefore the condition of servitude, either personal or political, subsists, from lawful causes, men should be contented with that state, according to the injunction of the Apostle, “Art thou called being a servant, let not that be an anxious concern?

For they bring forward also that Peter himself and the rest, pillars of the apostolate, were rebuked by Paul because they did not walk with straight foot toward the truth of the Gospel — by that very Paul, mind you, who, still raw in grace, trembling at last lest he had run or were running in vain, was then for the first time conferring with the apostles who went before him.

After these things, or before these, when you have said that he too has his own creation and his own world and his own heaven — concerning that third heaven indeed we shall see, if we come also to the examination of your apostle — meanwhile, whatever substance it is, it ought certainly to have appeared together with its own god.

And surely, if another god were preached by Paul, there would be no dispute whether the Law were to be kept or not — the Law not pertaining, of course, to a new lord and rival of the Law.

Is not Paul said to have circumcised Timothy for the sake of a better dispensation?

For faithful is the word and worthy of all acceptance, as the divine Paul cries:

Thus, ever forgetting the things behind, and reaching out toward the things before, watching, pursue the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus, as the divine Apostle exhorts, saying, 'Let us not lose heart;

And to this state the blessed Būlus pointed in his word to his disciple, that he should govern (2) his body well (3).

[22] 6) The Epistle of Saint Būlus to the Romans 1:

[22] 8) The Epistle of Saint Būlus to the Romans 2:

"But the world too," you say, "is God's work, and yet the fashion of this world passes away — the apostle himself being witness;

Hence the apostle too, calling circumcision a stripping-off of the flesh, affirmed the skin to be a tunic.

" The apostle too — do not know him by one pen only, with which he often pricks the flesh.

The holy apostle of the Lord, charging the Greeks, will explain to you:

Let the philosophers, then, confess that their teachers are the Persians or the Sauromatae or the magi, from whom they have learned the godlessness of the principles they reverence, ignorant of the ruler who is the maker of all things and the fashioner of those principles themselves — the God without beginning — while they turn to those poor and weak elements, as the apostle says, made for the service of men.

This teaching the apostle, knowing it to be truly divine, "you, O Timothy," he says, "from a babe have known the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith in Christ.

But to what point concerning Paul, when even John seems to applaud, I know not how, the other party?

Recognize too in what follows Paul, the immovable column of disciplines:

Even if for certain the Apostle had forgiven that Corinthian his fornication, it would be another matter — something he once did against his own institution, by reason of the time.

"For who knows the things that are in God except the Spirit that is in him?

" This is surely he who, being established in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.

And, "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound wisdom.

For if truths are apprehended through images — that is, invisible things are known through visible — since the apostle too writes to us, ‘For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,’ and Plato says to the heretics, ‘The face of hidden things is the things which appear,’ and it is altogether necessary that this wor …

And the apostle erred in writing, ‘You too were once darkness,’ and, ‘We too were once by nature children of wrath,’ and, ‘In these you too once were, but you have been washed.

if David too says, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’ and Paul says that one believes with the heart unto righteousness, and John says that each one is reproved by his own heart;

Falsely, then, did Paul determine to know nothing among us but Jesus crucified;

But Paul too, being both disciple and master and witness of the same gospel, in that he is the apostle of that same Christ, confirms that Christ is "of the seed of David according to the flesh" — surely his own flesh.

not the substance, but the fault — according to the authority of the apostle, who says, "He voided sin in the flesh.

Therefore neither shall a woman be more laboriously adorned, by the Apostle's foresight, so as not even to be crowned with the artifice of her hair.

" Be you too faithful unto death, and contend you too the good contest, whose crown the Apostle too rightly trusts is laid up for him.

For if the creation is polluted by a bare word, as the Apostle teaches—"But if anyone shall say, This is offered to an idol, touch it not"—much more when it is contaminated by the garb and rite and apparatus of things offered to idols.

And whether the Apostle too knew Xerophagies—he who had celebrated greater things, thirst and hunger and "many fastings," who had refused "drunkennesses and revellings"—the case of his disciple Timothy is proof enough;

And I think the Apostle too in the second to the Corinthians, among his labours and perils and discomforts, after hunger and thirst, reckons "many fastings" as well.

As for Xerophagies, they call it a newfangled name for an affected observance, and one closely akin to pagan superstition, such as the abstinences by which they purify Apis, Isis and the Great Mother by excepting certain foods—whereas faith, free in Christ, owes the abstinence from certain foods not even to the Jewish Law, the whole shambles having been once for all permitted by the Apostle, who d …

But when the latter end of the times did away with "Increase and abound," the apostle bringing in, "It remains that those also who have wives should be as though they had none, because the time is contracted," and the sour grape eaten by the fathers ceased to set the children's teeth on edge—"for each shall die in his own sin"—and eunuchs not only lacked dishonour but even earned grace, being invi …

For if we are reckoned sons of Abraham by faith, as the apostle teaches, saying to the Galatians, "You know surely that they who are of faith, these are the sons of Abraham," when did Abraham believe God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness?

" The apostle too, writing to the Ephesians, says that God proposed in himself, for the dispensation of the fulfilment of the times, to gather up again all things in Christ to the head, that is, to the beginning, both the things that are above the heavens and those upon the earth, in him.

Nor longer on this, since it is the same Paul who elsewhere too numbers heresies among carnal crimes, writing to the Galatians, and who suggests to Titus that a heretical man, after a first correction, is to be refused, because such a one is perverse and offends, being self-condemned.

They propound, then, to brand some ignorance upon the apostles, that Peter, and those who were with him, were rebuked by Paul.

Rather let us be mindful both of the Lord's pronouncements and of the apostolic letters, which both foretold to us that there would be heresies, and prescribed beforehand that they should be fled;

Then Paul attains the birthright of Roman citizenship, when he is born again there by the nobility of martyrdom.

To whom rather would he have declared the figure of his own voice than to those to whom he revealed the effigy of his glory — to Peter, John, James, and afterward to Paul, whom he made a partaker of paradise too before his martyrdom?

But Paul the apostle, of a persecutor — who first shed the blood of the Church — afterwards changing the sword for the pen and turning the falchion into a ploughshare, "a ravening wolf of Benjamin," thereafter himself bringing food, according to Jacob — how does he commend martyrdoms as now even to be desired by himself!

or else we must cling to it only so far—as Plato says—as we win from it a service for philosophy, speaking somewhat like Paul, who exhorts that we should take no forethought for the body unto the occasion of lusts.

But do thou learn the more excellent way, which Paul points out, unto salvation:

For God loveth a cheerful giver—one who rejoices in giving and sows not sparingly, that he may not so also reap, but shares without grumblings and without distinctions and without grief, which is pure beneficence.

Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians may perhaps allude to the peculiarity of their law:

” There can be no doubt, I imagine, that modern ideas on the subject of crime are based upon two assumptions contended for by the Church in the Dark Ages—first, that each feudal ruler, in his degree, might be assimilated to the Roman Magistrates spoken of by Saint Paul;

The reference in the misleading phrase ‘law of nature,’ is not to the memorable combination of words familiar to the Roman lawyers, but to the text of St.

What in our times is become inveterate practice, is stigmatized as a species of iniquity without a precedent, by Saint Paul.

How much second marriages detract from faith, how much they clamour against holiness, the discipline of the church and the apostle's ruling declare, since it does not allow the twice-married to preside, and does not grant that a widow be enrolled in the order unless she has been the wife of one husband.

If these things are so, it is established that believers who undergo marriages with the heathen are guilty of fornication and are to be barred from all communion of the brotherhood, by the letters of the apostle, who says that with such a one we must not even take food.

Pursue companionship and conversations worthy of God, mindful of that little verse sanctified by the apostle: