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You May Also Like. I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Bethany Pyle is the editor for BibleStudyTools. Share this. How Did the Apostle Paul Die? His Story and Significance Today. Today on Christianity. Only Luke, the beloved physician, is with Paul 2Timothy , and such faithful ones as live in Rome still in hiding 2Timothy Apparently Timothy did come and was put into prison Hebrews Paul is not afraid.
He knows that he will die. He has escaped the mouth of the lion 2Timothy , but he will die 2Timothy The Lord Jesus stood by him, perhaps in visible presence 2Timothy Nero died June, 68 A.
Perhaps Luke and Timothy were with him. It is fitting, as Findlay suggests, to let Paul's words in 2Timothy - 8 serve for his own epitaph. He was ready to go to be with Jesus, as he had long wished to be Philippians ". Paul, brings us, it may well be presumed, close to the end of his life. It is a great event when such a man as Paul dies;— when a mind sagacious to plan, wise to impart counsel, vigorous to execute great designs, is withdrawn from the earth; when lips, once eloquent in the cause of truth, become silent; when he who guided the young, warned the wicked, strengthened the feeble, comforted the sorrowful, animated the desponding, is seen no more; when he who brought the richness of his experience, and the maturity of his judgment, to aid the great interests of truth and humanity, has passed away.
Influence is of slow growth, and is of inestimable value. The world has no wealth to be compared with this, when employed in the cause of righteousness. Influence is that in a man's known talents, learning, character, experience, and position, on which a presumption is based that what he holds is true; that what he proposes is wise.
And as there is nothing more valuable in society than this, so there is nothing more difficult to replace. A city burned may be built again; the rubbish will be cleared away; the streets will be widened and straightened; long lines of private dwellings and public warehouses will rise from the ruins; and a busy population will soon again drive on the affairs of commerce, of manufacture, of trade. Lands which have been visited with drought are soon fresh and green again; the hills and valleys are clothed with verdure and flocks, the yellow harvest falls before the reaper, and the wains groan heavily-laden with sheaves.
From the fields where armies have encamped or fought, where the harvest has been trodden down by the passing and repassing legions, where the torch of war has made everything desolate, all traces of conflict are soon removed ; for trees are planted, and the earth is rendered fertile by blood, and the little mounds of earth which marked the place where brave men fell and died are levelled, and the plough passes over Marathon and Waterloo, as it did before the battle.
But not so, when a great man dies. His place cannot soon be supplied. The world has never been able to find one who could fill the place of the Apostle Paul. Of the actual manner of his death, we know only what may be stated in few words. Tradition says that it was by being beheaded; and all the circumstances of the case render that probable. The fact that he was a Roman citizen would exempt him, under Roman laws, from death by lingering torture, in the forms in which it was inflicted on many of his Christian brethren.
It would save him from the ignominy of crucifixion, and would thus distinguish his death from that of Peter, who had no claims to Roman citizenship, and who, wherever he died, was probably put to death, like his Master, on a cross comp. John xxi. There were two modes of beheading among the Romans:—the one by the lictor's ax; the other by military execution with the sword. In the former case, the criminal was tied to a stake, scourged with rods, and then beheaded; 1 in the latter case, the executioner was commonly one of the Imperial bodyguards, and the execution was performed in presence of a centurion, whose duty it was to see the sentence carried out.
It is every way probable that Paul was executed in this latter mode. The place where he was put to death is fixed with some degree of certainty. That road was a great thoroughfare when Rome had some commerce; and though outside of the metropolis, and thus free from the dangers of popular tumult and excitement, it would be the most public and conspicuous of all the places in the vicinity of the great city.
The traveller now as he goes out of Rome in the south-western quarter, through the gate which opens to the ancient road leading to Ostia, passes at the gate the tomb of Caius Cestus.
A pyramid to mark that tomb, the only pyramid in Europe, had been erected in the time of Augustus Caesar, and consequently not long before the time when Paul was beheaded. Around that pyramid is now the Protestant burial-ground,—" unconsecrated ground," in the estimation of the inhabitants of Rome. Outside that gate, and in sight of that pyramid,—the only thing still there which it is certain was in existence at that time,— Paul probably suffered martyrdom. Not far from that spot now rises a magnificent structure,—the unfinished church of St.
Paul; and near to it the small and ancient church of the "Three Fountains,"—the church erected on the spot where tradition says he was beheaded. One legend says that a noble matron. Paolo alle tre fontane. The head of the apostle, say the monks, bounded three times, and the three fountains of water sprang up where it struck the earth.
We have none of the dying words of the apostle Paul; we have no account of the melancholy procession to the place of death; we know not whether he was attended by any of his friends, or whether there were any Christians present to witness the closing scene, and to sustain him by their presence and their prayers.
It would, indeed, be interesting if we could know that when the time came, and he saw the ax about to descend, he repeated his own triumphant language, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Paul, in his own writings, never refers to such dying expressions as proofs of personal piety.
Those proofs he found in the lives of believers, not in their feelings or their expressions on a bed of death. To the apostle Paul, we know that "to die" would be "gain" Phil. He esteemed it as such, not indeed for all men, as if the mere fact of dying necessarily introduces them into a better state; but for himself he regarded it as a gain or advantage 1cfpSoe.
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