It is not necessary in this essay to traverse again the familiar field of St. Paul’s missionary journeys.  The first epoch, which embraces about fourteen years, had its scene in Syria and Cilicia, with the short tour in Cyprus and other parts of Asia Minor.  The second period, which ends with the imprisonment in A.D. 58 or 59, is far more important.  St. Paul crosses into Europe; he works in Macedonia and Greece.  Churches are founded in two of the great towns of the ancient world, Corinth and Ephesus.  According to his letters, we must assume that he only once returned to Jerusalem from the great tour in the West, undertaken after the controversy with Peter; and that the object of this visit was to deliver the money which he had promised to collect for the poor ‘saints’ at Jerusalem.  He intended after this to go to Rome, and thence to Spain—­a scheme worthy of the restless genius of an Alexander.  He saw Rome indeed, but as a prisoner.  The rest of his life is lost in obscurity.  The writer of the Acts does not say that the two years’ imprisonment ended in his execution; and if it was so, it is difficult to see why such a fact should be suppressed.  If the charge against him was at last dismissed, because the accusers did not think it worth while to come to Rome to prosecute it, St. Luke’s silence is more explicable.  In any case, we may regard it as almost certain that St. Paul ended his life under a Roman axe during the reign of Nero.

‘There is hardly any fact’ (says Harnack) ’which deserves to be turned over and pondered so much as this, that the religion of Jesus has never been able to root itself in Jewish or even upon Semitic soil.’  This extraordinary result is the judgment of history upon the life and work of St. Paul.  Jewish Christianity rapidly withered and died.  According to Justin, who must have known the facts, Jesus was rejected by the whole Jewish nation ‘with a few exceptions.’  In Galilee especially, few, if any, Christian Churches existed.  There are other examples, of which Buddhism is the most notable, of a religion gaining its widest acceptance outside the borders of the country which gave it birth.  But history oilers no parallel to the complete vindication of St. Paul’s policy in carrying Christianity over into the Graeco-Roman world, where alone, as the event proved, it could live.  This is a complete answer to those who maintain that Christ made no break with Judaism.  Such a statement is only tenable if it is made in the sense of Harnack’s words, that ’what Gentile Christianity did was to carry out a process which had in fact commenced long before in Judaism itself, viz. the process by which the Jewish religion was inwardly emancipated and turned into a religion for the world.’  But the true account would be that Judaism, like other great ideas, had to ‘die to live,’ It died in its old form, in giving birth to the religion of civilised humanity, as the Greek nation perished in giving birth to Hellenism,