Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600 -- Fiction
Who were “the friends in Cæsar’s household” of whom Paul wrote? Bishop
Lightfoot shows of the forty-three Christianized Jews and Greeks, who
met Paul when he reached Rome, and whose names may be found in the
letter to the Romans; many were in Roman governmental positions of
trust. Their names can be found scattered through the _Acts_ and the
apostolic letters to Rome and Asia.
There seems almost no reason to doubt that the great Epaphroditus, the
Greek lover of learning, to whom Josephus dedicated his volume, was the
same benevolent Greek of Philippi who supplied Paul with money for his
needs in Rome, and who carried Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and who
seems to have been under surveillance with Paul in Rome; for in Rome,
even if his eyesight would have permitted Paul to follow his mechanical
means of supporting himself by tentmaking, there was not the same demand
as in the East for tents for desert travel, or in Greece for maritime
sailcloth. Aquila and Priscilla, who came later in the Apollos story,
like Paul, were tentmakers. Paul’s knowledge of seafaring was gained as
sailcloth maker.
Always when religious faith wanes, necromancy, clairvoyance, sorcery
thrive. The Old World with its dying faiths both Roman and Grecian, was
now overrun with sorcerers of every description, practising
wonder-working and miracles by methods variously known as Black Magic
and White Magic. The knowledge of the methods underlying these powers
was undoubtedly drawn from India and Persia. Some workers were good and
some were bad. Some miracles were fraudulent and some were undoubtedly
genuine—using the word “miracle” in the sense of wonder-working; only
the Christians, the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Nazarenes refused to work
these wonders for profit. For some reason or other, probably because
they had lost faith in God, and learned magic from the Persians and the
Babylonians, the Jews had become great sorcerers in Paul’s day. More
will be given of this in the chapter on Apollos. It is given also in the
Acts.
The reference of Onesimus to the luminous look, or radiance round Paul
in the half dark, and the old Idumean’s legend of Antioch’s invading
soldiers finding nothing in the Holy of Holies of the Temple between the
Cherubim and Seraphim but a little thin blue flame, would have been
laughed out of any court of evidence by science ten years ago. Not so
to-day. The study of wireless waves is opening the door to the
wonder-world of these waves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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