Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/495

 *ments to this selection of a foreign field for his unrighteous work, may be reasonably placed, the circumstance that Damascus was at this time under the government of Aretas, an Arabian prince, into whose hands it fell for a short time, during which the equitable principles of Roman tolerance no longer operated as a check on the murderous spite of the Jews; for the new ruler, anxious to secure his dominion by ingratiating himself with the subjects of it, would not be disposed to neglect any opportunity for pleasing so powerful and influential a portion of the population of Damascus as the Jews were,—who lived there in such numbers, that in some disturbances which arose a few years after, between them and the other inhabitants, ten thousand Jews were slain unarmed, while in the public baths, enjoying themselves after the fatigues of the day, without any expectation of violence. So large a Jewish population would be secure of the support of Aretas in any favorite measure. Saul, well knowing these circumstances, must have been greatly influenced by this motive, to seek a commission to labor in a field where the firm tolerance of Roman sway was displaced by the baser rule of a petty prince, whose weakness rendered him subservient to the tyrannical wishes of his subjects. In Jerusalem the Roman government would not suffer anything like a systematic destruction of its subjects, nor authorize the taking of life by any religious tribunal, though it might pass over, unpunished, a solitary act of mob violence, like the murder of Stephen. It is perfectly incontestable therefore, that the persecution in Jerusalem could not have extended to the repeated destruction of life, and that passage in Paul's discourse to Agrippa; which has been supposed to prove a plurality of capital punishments, has accordingly been construed in a more limited sense, by the ablest modern commentators.

Kuinoel on Acts xxv. 1, 10, maintains this fully, and quotes other authorities.

"It seems to some a strange business, that Paul should have had the Christians whipped through the synagogues. Why, in a house consecrated to prayer and religion, were sentences of a criminal court passed, and the punishment executed on the criminal? This difficulty seemed so great, even to the learned and judicious Beza, that in the face of the testimony of all manuscripts, he would have us suspect the genuineness of the passage in Matt. x. 17, where Christ uses the same expression. Such a liberty as he would thus take with the sacred text, is of course against all modern rules of sacred criticism. For what should we do then with Matt. xxiii. 34, where the same passage occurs again? Grotius, to explain the difficulty, would have the word synagogues understood, not in the sense of houses of prayer, but of civil courts of justice; since such a meaning may be drawn from the etymology of the Greek word thus translated. ([Greek: sunagôgê], a gathering together, or assembling for any purpose.) But that too is a forced construction, for no instance can be brought out of the New Testament, where the word is used in that sense, or any other than the common one. What then? We cannot be allowed to set up the speculations which we