his readers as it was to himself. Ignatius writing to the Romans (c. 4) says incidentally "I do not command you, as Peter and Paul might do," but it is a precarious inference from this that he names them because they had suffered martyrdom at Rome. Papias (circ. A.D. 150) is referred to but not quoted, by Eusebius (H. E. II. 15) as stating that Peter's teaching was the basis of St Mark's Gospel, and that it was written for the disciples at Rome. Clement of Alexandria (to whom Eusebius also refers as an authority for the same statement) names Peter's parting counsel to his wife but says nothing as to the time or place of their martyrdom (Strom. VII. 11). The earliest statement with any approach to definiteness is that of Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth (quoted by Eusebius (H. E. 11. 25), in his letter to the Roman Church in which he speaks of it as having, as the Corinthians had, a common interest in the teaching both of Peter and of Paul. "Both came to our Corinth and planted us as a Church there, both taught in Italy, and bore their witness at the same time." Irenæus, in like manner (III. 1. 3), speaks of the Church at Rome as having been founded by both Apostles and of both taking part in the appointment of Linus. Caius a presbyter of Rome (circ. A.D. 210) is quoted by Eusebius as speaking of the monuments (rроraîα) of the Apostles as being one in the Vatican and the other on the Ostian Way, which agrees with the popular tradition. Tertullian (circ. A.D. 210, de Praescr. c. 36) assumes as a known fact that Peter and Paul had both suffered at Rome. He also assumes that St John had been there and had escaped unhurt from a caldron of boiling oil, In a passage not found in his extant writings but quoted by Eusebius (H. E. II. 25) he, like Caius, appeals to the inscription on their tombs (coemeteria) as shewing the manner of their deaths. Origen and Cyprian are silent on the matter. The "Domine quo vadis?" story appears first in Ambrose (Serm. 68, but it is doubtful whether it is really by Ambrose and is not included in the Benedictine edition of his works).

The most that can be said of this evidence is that it leaves it fairly probable that St Peter ended his life at Rome. Of the twenty-five years of his Episcopate and of his having thus been

the first of the long line of Pontiffs there is not the shadow of any evidence till we come to Eusebius himself, who states (H. E. II. 14) that Peter followed Simon Magus to Rome in the reign of Claudius (A.D. 41) and there defeated him. He does not give the details of the defeat but wraps them in a vague rhetoric. The true sources of the Petrine legend are accordingly not to be found in the early Fathers of the Church, nor in any local tradition of an earlier date than the latter part of the second century. We find their starting-point, however, elsewhere, in the elaborate Apocrypha of the Ebionite heretics, the successors of the Judaising, Cephas-party of the Apostolic age. There, in the Clementine Homilies, we find him journeying to Cæsarea and Tyre and Sidon and Byblus and Tripolis and Laodicea and Antioch, and at well-nigh every place entering into elaborate discussions with Simon the Sorcerer. There, in the romance known as the Recognitions (practically a replica of the Homilies), we have Simon's journey to Rome (III. 74, 75) and Peter's intention to follow on his track and defeat him. In the still later Acts of Peter and Paul, the narrative opens with Peter's residence at Rome, tells how he sent messengers to meet Paul, and gives in full the legend of Simon's flight and fall, of Peter's downward crucifixion, of the Domine quo vadis vision, of the burial in the Vatican, near the spot where naval combats used to be exhibited. It is, of course, difficult to say how far the last-named book embodied and embellished a pre-existent tradition, how far it was the basis of a new tradition, but it is not without significance that the claims of the Bishops of Rome as heirs of the supremacy of Peter, and the legends on which those claims rest, are an inheritance not from the authentic teaching of the Apostles or the Apostolic Church, but from the Ebionite heretics whom she condemned.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST PETER.

A glance at the map of Asia Minor will shew that the provinces which are named in the first verse of the Epistle occupied the greater part of the region popularly so described, leaving out only the Southern provinces of Cilicia, Pamphylia, Pisidia and Lycia. Pontus had not come within the recorded work of St Paul or any of the Apostles, but there are indications that it had attracted a considerable Jewish population. Jews of Pontus were present at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost (Acts ii. 9). Aquila the tent-maker came from that country (Acts xviii. 2). So also did the Aquila (probably identical with Onkelos) the translator of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Polemon, its titular king, married the Berenice of Acts xxv. 23, the sister of Herod Agrippa II., and became a proselyte to Judaism by accepting the badge of circumcision (Jos. Ant. xx. 7). How the Gospel had been preached there we can only conjecture. It may have been carried by the unknown pilgrims from Jerusalem. Aquila or Paul may have embraced it in their mission work during the two years in which the latter made Ephesus the centre of his activity, or Luke, whom we find at Troas doing the work of an Evangelist in Acts xvi. 8— 10, may have included it in the sphere of his labours. The fact that Marcion, the heretic of the second century, confined his recognition of the Gospel history to a mutilated text of St Luke (Tertull. adv. Marcion. IV. 2), gives a certain confirmation to the last conjecture which is wanting for the other. Of Galatia we know, of course, much more. Most students of the New Testament are now familiar with the story of the settlement of the Gauls in that region in the 2nd century B.C., of their adoption of the orgiastic cultus of Cybele, the earth-goddess, with her eunuch priests, of the illness which led St Paul to prolong his stay among them (Gal. iv. 13), of their loving and

loyal devotion to him, of the impetuosity and fickleness which they inherited from their Keltic forefathers (Gal. i. 6), of the success of the Judaizing teachers in bewitching and perverting them (Gal. iii. 1), of St Paul's indignant, sorrowful, tenderly passionate Epistle to them. We have, however, to remember that it was not to these, the Galatians properly so called, that St Peter wrote, but to those of the Dispersion who were sojourning among them (1 Pet. i. 1). They also, however, probably received the Gospel from St Paul, and as being Jews were less likely to be the object of the proselytising intrigues of the Judaizers. Of Cappadocia we again note that it had sent pilgrims to the Pentecostal feast of Acts ii. 9. The Jewish settlers whom they represented had probably been brought into the region after the removal by Antiochus the Great of two thousand families from Mesopotamia and Babylon to Phrygia. The Western region of the province bordered so closely on Lycaonia that Lystra and Derbe were sometimes reckoned as belonging to it, and the Gospel may have penetrated to it from those cities. Little as it is prominent in the New Testament records, it numbered among its cities many that were afterwards famous in the history of the Church, Tyana the birthplace of the impostor Apollonius, and Nyssa the see of Gregory, and Cæsarea, that of his brother Basil, and Nazianzus, of the other Gregory.

The name of Asia, the proconsular province of that name, of which Ephesus was the capital, recalls to our memory the history of St Paul's three years work there (Acts xx. 31). The Churches there must have been planted by him and his companions Aquila and Priscilla, and Apollos also had been active as a preacher (Acts xviii. 24). The Temple of Artemis made it one of the head-quarters of heathen worship. The Jews of Ephesus were among St Paul's bitterest enemies. Among the believers in that city, however, among the elders who were his fellow-workers he had found those on whom his thoughts dwelt with the most entire thankfulness and satisfaction. He had not shrunk from declaring to them the whole counsel of God (Acts xx. 27). They were able to understand his knowledge in the mystery of God (Eph. iii. 4).

We have no record of any work of St Paul's in Bithynia, but we know that when he was on his second mission journey his thoughts had turned to it as a promising field for his labours (Acts xvi. 7), and that but for the overpowering intimations in which he recognised the guidance of the Spirit of God, he would have turned his footsteps thither. What has been said above as to the probability of St Luke having extended his labours as a preacher of the Gospel from Troas to Pontus holds good also of this nearer region. The report made by Pliny in his official letter, as Proconsul of Bithynia, to the Emperor Trajan (circ. A.D. 110) shews that it must have manifested a singular receptivity for the Truth. He describes (Epp. x. 96) multitudes, both men and women, of every age and rank, as embracing the new religion, the temples almost deserted, and the market for sacrifices finding scarcely a single purchaser.

We are able without much risk of error to determine both the occasion and the date of the First Epistle which St Peter addressed to the Jewish Christians of these Churches. Silvanus had come to him bringing tidings that they were exposed to a fiery trial of persecution (1 Pet. iv. 12). They were accused of being evil-doers, preaching revolutionary doctrines (1 Pet. ii. 15, 16). The very name of Christian then, as afterwards under Pliny's régime, exposed them to odium and outrage (1 Pet. iv. 16). The teachers to whom they owed so much, Paul and Aquila and Luke, were no longer with them. The state of things described in the First, and yet more in the Second Epistle, exactly answers to that which we find in St Paul's Epistles to Timothy, and we can scarcely be wrong in assigning them to the same period. When a wave of fanatic hatred directed against the name of Christian was flowing well-nigh over the length and breadth of the Empire, rulers in the provinces were but too likely to follow the example which Nero had set them in the capital. The Apostle felt that he could not withhold his words of comfort and counsel from those who were thus suffering, and though, in scrupulous conformity with the partition treaty to which St Paul refers in Gal. ii. 9, he addresses himself primarily, if not exclusively, to