Verse 17
17. Neither Paul has thus far shown how incapable a mind like his was, from its intense Judaism, of originating the gospel. He now shows that he had no intercourse with apostles or with Jerusalem to derive it thence.
Up See note, Acts 11:2.
Arabia Strictly, the ancient land lying between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, including the Peninsula of Sinai. At different periods, however, it stretched into very different extensions, even to a bordering eastward upon Damascus itself, and including it. Prof. Lightfoot suggests, without fully avowing, a theory that Paul prosecuted a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai itself. There, where Moses gave the law, and where Elijah’s soul was strengthened to restore it. Paul receives from Christ the sublime apocalypse of his gospel. Arabia, then, will be here, as it should be, identical with Arabia in Galatians 4:25. We thereby see how the conception of that allegory arose to his mind. That meditation, the process of the forming of the true conception of the gospel, and not, as the early Christian writers assumed, preaching, was his business in the desert we may readily believe.
Returned again His stay in Arabia appears to have been brief.
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