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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 648. His Preparation
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His Preparation
1. Now we know what Alexandria was. Even in the Acts of the Apostles we see it in its relations to the religious life of the Jews in Jerusalem, and to the world-wide commerce of heathen Italy. This city was a most remarkable meeting-place of East and West, and was characterized alike by mercantile and by mental activity. Even the memory of Alexander, its great founder, would tend to produce breadth of view among the Alexandrians, to make them tolerant and less disposed than others to lay stress on national distinctions. Moreover, there was no place where greater advantages of education were enjoyed in the age of the Apostles, among which may be reckoned the greatest library of the ancient world.
Alexandria was founded by the wise foresight of the great conqueror of the ancient world, as the place where his Greek power could be brought to bear most easily on Egypt, and which, therefore, was best suited for the Greek capital of that land of mystery and wonder. It is not probable he had in view any especial adaptation of the city as that centre of the world's intellectual life which it afterwards became; and yet its admirable facilities for communication with every part of the then known world, and the impress he left upon it by the munificence and wisdom of his dispositions in reference to its structure, were the conditions which gave it the possibility of this future eminence.1 [Note: J. F. Garrison.]
In America there is a Yankee type everywhere visible; in Russia there is a Muscovite type; and everywhere, from the Mississippi to the Volga, there is a certain uniformity of face, or at all events of dress. But here, in Alexandria, each face seems to stand alone. There are eyes and foreheads, noses and beards, colours of skin, peculiarities of expression-the sly, the dignified, the rascally, the ignorant, the savage, the refined, the contented, the miserable,-giving each face its own distinct place in the globe. And there is, if possible, a greater variety in costume. Every man seems to have studied his own taste, or his own whim, or, possibly, his own religion, in the shape, colour, and number of his garments. The arms, whether dirk or dagger, single pistols or half a dozen, modern or as old as the invention of gunpowder, sword, gun, or spear-all have their own peculiar form and arrangement, so that every Eastern has to a Western a novelty and picturesqueness that is indescribable. And the motley crowd presses along: fat, contented, oily Greek merchants, or majestic Turks, on fine horses splendidly caparisoned, or on aristocratic donkeys, who would despise to acknowledge as of the same race the miserable creatures who bray in our coal-carts; bare-legged donkey boys, driving their more plebeian animals before them; Arabs from the desert, with long guns and gipsy-like coverings, stalking on in silence; beggars, such as one sees in the pictures of the old masters-verily “poor and needy, blind and naked”; insane persons, with idiotic look, and a few rags covering their bronzed bodies, seeking alms; Greek priests, Coptic priests, and Latin priests; doctors of divinity and dervishes.2 [Note: N. Macleod, in Good Words, 1865, p. 37.]
2. A Jew born in Alexandria at that time would find himself living in the midst of a community of his own countrymen in a separate quarter of the city, and yet subject to the manifold influences of Greek culture. If he belonged to the class that set a high value on that culture, he would learn grammar and rhetoric from Greek teachers; he would become acquainted with at least the terms and main ideas of the forms of Greek philosophy then dominant, and would read at least selected portions of Greek dramatists and poets. Even as a Jew, his education and his worship would differ materially from that of his brethren in Jerusalem. Though still exulting in the old name of Hebrew, the speech of his fathers would be comparatively strange to him. A few etymologies of proper names, more or less accurate, often glaringly inaccurate, would be impressed upon him by his teachers, and, in proportion to his ignorance of the language as a whole, would be treasured up by him as precious. But when he read the Sacred Books of his fathers, it would be in what we have learnt to call the Version of the Seventy. His ignorance of the speech of Palestine would render him unable to correct its numerous errors. It would keep him also from studying the traditions of the elders, the casuistic disputes of Pharisees and Sadducees, of Hillel and of Shammai, in the schools of Jerusalem. The temple at Leontopolis would probably for him take the place of that at Jerusalem.
3. Pre-eminent among the influences at work on the mind of a young and thoughtful Alexandrian Jew at this period would be that of the teaching of Philo. We know but little of the personal history of that illustrious teacher, but it is clear that he must have been the leader of Jewish thought in that city, the founder of a new school of interpretation. He was, so far, the forerunner of the great masters of the Catechetical school for which the Church of Alexandria was afterwards famous. Clement and Origen would hardly have been what they were if Philo had not preceded them. While Paul was sitting at the feet of Gamaliel, growing into the strictest Pharisaism, we may think of Apollos as drinking in new knowledge and wider thoughts from the lips of Philo. Every page of the Sacred Records became full of new meanings. The arithmetic, geometry, astronomy of the Greeks were brought to bear upon the history of the Creation in Gen_1:1-31., till it was made to read like a page from the Timœus of Plato. The literal meaning disappears, and an allegory is found at every step. Paradise is no garden upon earth, but the supreme element of the soul; the trees of which it was full were the ten thousand thoughts that fill the mind of man; the tree of life was godliness, that of the knowledge of good and evil was the “neutral understanding” which hovers on the border-land of vice and virtue. The serpent was but the symbol of pleasure, with its grovelling lusts, crawling on the ground and eating dirt. The four rivers were but the four great virtues of the Greek schools-Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice. With a winning eloquence, he leads his hearers on to these and a thousand like interpretations, as that which would complete their training and raise them out of the state of children, in which they had been governed by rule and precept taken in their literal meaning, to that of full-grown men, who were capable of a higher knowledge. It was obvious that this attempt to make the records of the remote past of the patriarchal age speak the thoughts of the schools of Greece involved the risk of the obliteration of what had been most characteristic in them. The Messianic hopes, which among the Jews of Palestine were growing into ever-clearer distinctness, were almost, if not altogether, absent from those of Alexandria.
Such mutual relations of Jews and Gentiles in this place were among the providential preparations for the spread of Christianity. In the midst of these influences Apollos was brought up; and the accomplishments thus acquired were of essential service to him in his future work. Even if we consider Alexandria only as a school of high education, a resort of learned men, and a place affording opportunities, if rightly used, for the training of the mind, it is instructive to observe how God made use of such opportunities in preparing His servant for his appointed task.
It was to Emerson that Lowell's debt was particularly great. This he has himself acknowledged in his essay on “Emerson the Lecturer”: “To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life; yet there are some of us who would hardly consent to be young again, if it were at the cost of our recollection of Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the country to the Masonic Temple (I think it was), through the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, as ship-wrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might say what they liked.… At any rate, he brought us life, which, on the whole, is no bad thing.… The delight and the benefit were that he put us in communication with a larger style of thought, sharpened our wits with a more pungent phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the dry husk of our New England; made us conscious of the supreme and everlasting originality of whatever bit of soul might be in any of us; freed us, in short, from the stocks of prose in which we had sat so long that we had grown well-nigh contented in our cramps.… To some of us that long-past experience remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of Chevy Chase, and we in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of victory.”1 [Note: W. H. Hudson, Lowell and his Poetry, 30.]