ST. PAUL THE MAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 796, 22 October 1954, Page 23

ST. PAUL THE MAN

F many New Testament characters, says Professor Harold Mattingly, we catch only a few glimpses and they are gone. St. Paul is one of the exceptions. "It is possible to get to know him as one would an old friend, so that you would not miss him if you ;

met him in the street. That is not to say that he is altogether easy to know ... but we have much the same chance of knowing him as his contempories had." Professor Mattingly, who is at present Williams

Evans Visiting Professor in Classics at Otago University (see page 28) will be heard during the next few weeks from 4YC, and later from other National stations, in four talks about St. Paul. In the first, to be broadcast at 10.0 p.m. on Tuesday, October 26, he will discuss St. Paul the Man, starting with a note on the reasons we know him so well-his achievement, which has stamped itseff on the memory of the Church, and the existence of documents relating to his life and work. Paul was converted in A.D. 33. The vision on the road to Damascus was the beginning of a new life for him, but even after that he spent many years in his native Tarsus, where Barnabas went to fetch him about A.D. 45. Two years later these two, with John Mark, set out on their first missionary journey-the first of many journeys Paul was to make, by land and sea, on foot, by packhorse or mule, and in small cargo boats. Professor Mattingly describes these journeys in his second talk, and in his third goes on to St. Paul the letter writer. A great Greek scholar, he recalls, once declared that the main reason for learning Greek was to be able to read two men in the original-Plato and St. Paul. This, Professor Mattingly says, is a remarkable tribute to the apostle, for his Greek was hardly a literary language and was not native to him. "But there is a spirit in Paul that triumphs over the deficiencies of the tongue." Professor Mattingly’s last talk is about St. Paul’s teaching, which he describes in fresh and simple terms. His conclusion is that the Gospel was to St. Paul primarily a way of life-he will not have it lost in a maze of speculation. "It is natural," he says, "for us today to select those elements in the teaching of Paul that most appeal to us and to claim special value for them. Such a process of selection is natural and not blameworthy. But we must remember that we are not perfect judges of significance and value. We shall do better to try to see the whole picture and let the question of what is more. what less valuable sort itself out afterwards."