I. On the one side is _the writer_: "Paul, an Apostle." In his earliest Letters (to Thessalonica) the title is wanting; so also in Philippians and Philemon. The last instance explains the other two. To the Macedonian Churches Paul writes more in the style of friendship than authority: "for love's sake he rather entreats." With the Galatians it is different. He proceeds to define his apostleship in terms that should leave no possible doubt respecting its character and rights: "not from men," he adds, "nor through man; but through Jesus Christ, and God the Father, that raised Him from the dead." This reads like a contradiction of some statement made by Paul's opposers. Had they insinuated that he _was_ "an apostle from men," that his office was derived, like their own, only from the mother Church in Jerusalem? Such insinuations would very well serve their purpose; and if they were made, Paul would be sure not to lose a moment in meeting them. The word _apostle_ had a certain latitude of meaning.[2] It was already, there is reason to believe, a term of Jewish official usage when our Lord applied it to His chosen Twelve. It signified a _delegate_ or _envoy_, accredited by some public authority, and charged with a special message. We can understand therefore its application to the emissaries of particular Churches--of Jerusalem or Antioch, for example--despatched as their messengers to other Churches, or with a general commission to proclaim the Gospel. The recently discovered "Teaching of the Apostles" shows that this use of the title continued in Jewish-Christian circles to the end of the first century, alongside of the restricted and higher use. The lower apostleship belonged to Paul in common with Barnabas and Silas and many others. [2] Compare Acts xiv. 4, 14 (_Barnabas and Paul_); 1 Thess. ii. 6 (_Paul and his comrades_); Rom. xvi. 7 (_Andronicus and Junias_); 2 Cor. viii. 23 (_Titus and others_, "apostles of the churches"); 2 Cor. xi. 13 ("false apostles": _Judean emissaries_); also Rev. ii. 2; Heb. iii. 1; John xiii. 16. On the N.T. use of _apostle_, see Lightfoot's Galatians, pp. 92-101; but especially Huxtable's _Dissertation_ in the Pulpit Commentary (Galatians), pp. xxiii.-l., the most satisfactory elucidation of the subject we have met with. Prebendary Huxtable however presses his argument too far, when he insists that St. Paul held his higher commission entirely in abeyance until the crisis of the Judaic controversy.