The Eloquence Of St Paul PDF Download

Excerpt from The Eloquence of St. Paul Greek with entire accuracy, fluency and purity. There may have been an inelegant brogue, upon his tongue, and this would no doubt be sufficient to condemn him in Corinth as a contemptible orator. His deficiency in this respect, may have been, at least in part, the reason for his reference to his speech in his letter to this people. But his reference is made in the style of an apology, which, whilst it serves to relieve him, comes very near turning back upon his critics the charge that, in his judgment, their speech is contempti ble. Besides, we must remember that this judgment of-paul is pronounced by enemies, and hence does not prove him a bad speaker anymore than some other charges from the same class prove (him a bad man. Mfrom the criticism last nociced, ' and a passage from hisfilet ter to the Galatians, and a few others of kindred type, a great mass of tradition and conjecture has been manufactured, tend ing to depreciate both the' person and the oratory of St. Paul. That the apostle confesses some physical infirmity which was obvious to the eyes of men; and which subjected him to se: vere trial, seems to be evident from the following: Ye know new through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first, and of my temptation which is in the flesh, ye despised not, nor rejected, but received me even as an angel of God; even as Jesus Christ. This, together with the enig smati'cal thorn in the flesh, which has been such a thorn to curious commentators; is the small stock in trade with which a class of ingenious and mostly minute critics have carried on such a various business in the way of manufacturing like nesses of St. Paul. It is fair to say that not one of those who has drawn his conception of Paul from the allusions made to his' infi rmities, without the corrections and quali fications necessarily implied in his laborious and long life, has given us anything more than a contemptible caricature. If we accept the figure made of St. Paul by early taadition'and ingenious Speculation, it will be next to impossible, with such a weak bodily presence, to make a speaker who will not be contemptible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.