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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 601. Gamaliel
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Literature
Conybeare, W. J., and J. S. Howson, The Life and Epistles of St. Paul (1870), 47.
Deane, A., Friends and Fellow Labourers of St. Paul (1906), 6.
Farrar, F. W., The Life and Work of St. Paul (1897), 23, 59.
Fürst, A., Christ The Way (1883), 127.
Gibbon, B. J., The True Ritual (1902), 31.
Luckock, H. M., Footprints of the Apostles as traced by Saint Luke in the Acts, i. (1905) 151.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: The Acts of the Apostles i.-xii. (1907), 196.
Maurice, F. D., The Acts of the Apostles (1894), 61.
Sabatier, A., The Apostle Paul (1891), 48.
Stokes, G. T., The Acts of the Apostles (Expositor's Bible), i. (1891) 229; ii. (1892) 13.
Taylor, W. M., Peter the Apostle (1891), 213.
Tead, E. S., in Sermons by the Monday Club, 17th Ser. (1891), 266.
Thackeray, H. St. J., The Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought (1900), 10.
Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, i. (1915) 440 (W. F. Boyd).
Dictionary of the Bible, ii. (1899) 106 (G. Milligan).
Good Words, 1870, p. 856 (C. J. Vaughan).
1. It is strange how a single name here and there out of the great multitude of perished and forgotten names secures remembrance. It is almost as when one stands upon the seashore and looks out across the sea, and here and there upon the surface of the great ocean, all grey and monotonous, there comes one flash of silver; one single wave all by itself leaps up as if it were alive, and burns with a lustre which compels the eye to look at it. You ask yourself why that special wave should have such peculiar privilege, and there is only one answer you can give. It is no larger a wave than the rest, and it is made of no different water from them; it is simply that that wave happened to leap just where the sun was smiting, and so the sun smote it, and it became illustrious. So it is with illustrious men. The sun of history shines on this great sea of human life; and the special career which happens to leap just where the sun is striking catches his glory and seizes men's notice and remembrance. If the man's life is larger than other lives, so much the better-it catches so much more of sunshine. If it is of special fineness, made of more lustrous stuff than other men's, so much the better still-it turns the sunshine into a peculiar radiance. But still the essential thing is that it should leap at the right moment and should be turned the right way. With those conditions even a very common life becomes illustrious; and without them the largest and the finest character melts back into the bosom of the humanity out of which it sprung, unknown, unnoticed, unremembered.
To the judges, philosophers, princelings-these shadows and players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage-of the New Testament age it would have seemed the dream of a disordered brain to forecast their fame and name to after ages as due to one brief moment's meeting with a Galilean carpenter, or a wandering Jewish tent-maker. Yet in this reflected light only do they live, pilloried for ever, some in a sentence, as “Crucified under Pontius Pilate,” others set like Felix and Agrippa as the foil and contrast of spurious honour and authority with the true majesty and power of life.1 [Note: A. Rudman.]
2. Let us turn to the story of a man whose name flashes for a moment as the light of the New Testament history falls upon the life of Jerusalem at the beginning of the Christian Church. The flash is only for a moment, and yet the impression which it leaves is very clear. Gamaliel is peculiarly a representative man, and the nature which he represents is one which appeals peculiarly to our modern life
In the New Testament Gamaliel appears twice, and each time in a most interesting way. First, he is the teacher of St. Paul, and so we are constantly led to speculate as to what part of the training of his great pupil's character is due to him. In the second place he is the wise counsellor who, when the Apostles were brought for trial before the Sanhedrin, uttered a memorable plea for toleration and delay of judgment.
Let us look at him in each of these roles.