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maintained the latter. Faithful to the teaching of our Lord, who laid on no Gentile the necessity of adopting Judaism, the Church decided that Gentile converts need not be circumcised.
In A.D. 49, soon after the Council at Jerusalem, St. Paul began a second missionary journey, and crossed over into Europe, where he founded several Churches, including those of Philippi and Thessalonica. At Athens he seems to have made {121} but little impression, but at Corinth, the busy and profligate centre of Greek commerce, he was more successful. He stayed there for eighteen months, and during this stay he wrote the Epistles to the Thessalonians. They are marked by the attention given to eschatology, or doctrine of "the last things"--the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of mankind, and the judgment.
This second journey closed with a visit to Jerusalem, and was followed by an incident which shows that the apostle's long warfare with Judaism was not over. The Judaizers had been defeated at the Council of Jerusalem, and they were aware that the Gentiles were pouring into the Church. So they attempted a new and artful plan for securing their own predominance. They no longer denied that uncircumcised Christians were Christians, but they tried to gain a higher status for the circumcised. They asserted that special prerogatives belonged to the Messiah's own people, and to the apostles whom He had chosen while He was on earth. When St. Paul went from Jerusalem to Antioch in A.D. 52, St. Peter, fearing to offend these Judaizers, was guilty of pretending to believe that he agreed with them.[1] He refused to eat with Gentile (uncircumcised) Christians. He thereby tried to compel the Gentiles to "Judaize" (Gal. ii. 14), treating them as if they were an inferior caste. St. Barnabas was carried away by St. Peter's example. St. Paul then openly rebuked the leader of the apostles. It is on this incident that F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school founded their fictitious history of a doctrinal struggle between St. Paul and the original apostles. The fundamental falsehood of this history lies in the fact that there was no real difference of opinion between St. Peter and St. Paul. The latter rebuked the former for "dissembling," i.e. for acting on a special occasion in a {122} manner contrary to his convictions and openly professed principles.