We shall have opportunity to consider this claim to revelation when dealing with

Gal. 1: 16. Meanwhile let us rejoice that we are counted worthy to inherit so glorious a

message, and pray that we may be in our small degree as faithful to the trust as was Paul

the apostle of Jesus Christ.

Paul has now asserted in unmistakable terms his independent Apostleship and Gospel,

and his assertions have been supported by very strong proof derived from the manner of

his upbringing and the moral impossibility that from such soil there should grow, without

Divine intervention, such a plant as the Gospel of the Grace of God proved to be. The

apostle might have left the matter there, and proceeded forthwith to the great theme of his

epistle, but he knew the kind of antagonists these Judaizing preachers were, and how any

unexplained association that he may have had with the apostles at Jerusalem could easily

be distorted into a tacit acknowledgment of his indebtedness to that body. He therefore

uses the words  "not . . . neither . . . but"  once more, and shows his complete

independence of all human authority especially the authority vested in the apostles at

We shall find him therefore meticulously going over the ground he traversed after his

conversion on the road to Damascus, how he resolved "immediately" that this was a case

for a clean cut with "flesh and blood", how he avoided both "Jerusalem" and those who

were "apostles" before him, but that on the contrary he went away from all human

contacts into "Arabia", and returned to Damascus.

Three years elapsed before he paid a friendly visit to Jerusalem "to see Peter", but

even on that occasion he declared on oath that he saw no other apostle save James the

Lord's brother. After that visit he traversed the regions of Syria and Cilicia, but was

personally unknown to the churches of Judæa. All they knew of him and his activities

were to the effect that the Persecutor had now turned Preacher, and they had glorified

God in Him and on this account.