Saints Without Halos

SAINTS WITHOUT HALOS Saints Without Halos by ALVIN E. MAGARY ABINGDON-COKESBURY PRESS New York Nashville Preface THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS NOT MEANT TO BE A TEXTUAL puzzle nor a battleground for rival exegetes. Neither was the purpose of its writers to create a standard treatise on system atic theology nor to provide for the theologians a source of proof texts for their contending creeds. Their purpose, like that of their Master, was completely practical. As he spoke to men, not as the scribes, but in the terms of common life, so these men meant to write plainly, for plain people, in the plain language of their time. It was inevitable that with the errors of copyists, the changes that occur in the meaning of words, and the difficulty of translating the speech of one age and nation into the language of another problems should arise, but the book itself is no problem. With all the imperfections that result from the fallibility of men its meanings are clear to any reader who applies to it a reasonable degree of intelligent and unbiased attention. We miss much of its beauty, its truth, and its monumental common sense because we open it with our minds stuffed full of what men have said about it rather than with our minds receptive to what it has to say for itself. It is true that the New Testament writers dealt with the soundless mysteries of God, but they dealt with them as they are present in the lives of ordinary people. The reason their writings are so vital after centuries of change is that they were written with actual, living people in view people whose needs and aspirations, troubles and triumphs, sins and virtues are the same today as they were when Peter threw himself at the 5 - WITHOUT HALOS feet of Christ in remorseful despair, and when Paul called on God te deliver him from the inner conflicts that tore his life apart and to give him peace. It is my hope that these chapters, written amid the duties and distractions of a busy city pastorate, may help the reader to know more intimately the people of the New Testament and to appreciate more fully the unique achievement of its writers. No men have more clearly revealed themselves in their writings none have given so comprehensive a view of the nature of man and the being of God nor, among all the in spired visionaries of history, have any spoken with such po - er to persuade the human heart. In my studies of these people I have taken the New Testa ment, generally, as it has come down to us, without troubling myself too much about such critical questions as have little bearing on the practical purpose and use of the book. Where such questions seem to have interest for the ordinary reader, I have ventured to touch upon them, but as F. W. Farm said in the preface of his famous Life of Christ, written in 1874, Writing as a believer to believers, as a Christian to Christians, surely, after nearly nineteen centuries of Christianity, anyone may be allowed to rest a fact of the Life of Jesus on the testi mony of St. John without stopping to write a volume on the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel. So far as the New Testament is affected by modern criti cism, no one who loves it need be alarmed. It is astonishing that, considering the discoveries that have been made and the searching scholarship that has been devoted to every detail of the text, with its authorship and history, the book comes to us as it came to our fathers, its beauty unmarred and its author ity unshaken. ALVIN E. MAGARY Contents 1. NEW TESTAMENT PEOPLE 9 2. DISREPUTABLE SAINTS 14 3. A MIDDLE-AGED FAILURE 21 4. THE SAINTLY WRANGLERS 29 5. THE EMBARRASSED MESSIAH 38 6. THE MAN WHO MEANT WELL . 44 7. THE COURAGE OF THE COWARD 49 S. THE BACKSLIDING MISSIONARY 55 9. PIETY AND POVERTY 63 10. JUSTICE FOR PONTIUS PILATE 71 11. THE FRIENDLY ROMANS 77 12. SOME SAINTS FROM AFRICA 85 13. THE HYPHENATED HEBREWS 90 14. THE MAN FROM SAMARIA 98 15. THE DOWNRIGHT BROTHER OF JESUS 104 1 6. DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH Ill 17...