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For I, O Athenians! never bore any other magisterial office in the city, but have been a senator: and our Antiochean tribe happened to supply the Prytanes when you chose to condemn in a body the ten generals who had not taken off those that perished in the sea-fight, in violation of the law, as you afterward all thought.
It is worth noting in passing that the complete absence of any details as to Paul's work in Tarsus, and the silence concerning his movements from the time he left Jerusalem soon after his conversion, proves that this part of Acts is an Antiochean rather than a Pauline tradition. Soon after this more missionaries arrived from Jerusalem.
The functions attributed to the Son of Man in the gospels still remain attributed to Jesus in the Pauline epistles, though they are scarcely so much emphasised. The Antiochean missionaries seem to have adopted a new word to take the place of the unintelligible "Messiah" and "Son of Man," and called Jesus "Lord."
Here, too, it is possible that the picture presented by it is one-sided, owing to the fact that, at least in many places, Acts reproduces the tradition of Antioch. Doubtless there were other centres equally important. Neither Ephesus nor Rome seems to have been founded by missionaries from Antioch, though Paul and the other Antiochean missionaries came into their history at an early date.
The Antiochean Christians refused to accept it as an obligatory law of conduct; but more and more was it interpreted as prophetic of Jesus, and not only of him but also of the Christian Church. In this way everything that was said of ancient Israel, and all the promises made to it, were transferred to the Christians, who claimed that they, and not the Jews, were the ancient People of God.
Turning from the possibilities and probabilities suggested by the history of religion to the evidence of the early literature critically studied, two points stand out as probable. First, Jesus neither practised nor enjoined baptism of any kind; secondly, the Antiochean missionaries always practised baptism "in the name of the Lord Jesus." The second point is so obviously proved both by Acts and the Pauline epistles that it requires no discussion. The first has the limitations of the argument from silence, for it rests on the fact that there is no trace of Baptism by Jesus, either by practice or precept, in the synoptic gospels, except a single statement in Matt. xxviii. 19, in which the risen Jesus is represented as commanding the disciples to undertake the conversion of the Gentiles (t
It is remarkable that Paul and the other Antiochean missionaries were willing to accept this development, and to make themselves the enthusiastic agents of its propaganda; but they clearly did so, and the point is of extreme importance for the history of Judaism.
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