4.
And St. John said to her: How shall I alone perform thy funeral rites, unless my brethren and fellow-apostles of my Lord Jesus Christ come to pay honour to thy body? And, behold, on a sudden, by the command of God, all the apostles were snatched up, raised on a cloud, from the places in which they were preaching the word of God, and set down before the door of the house in which Mary dwelt. And, saluting each other, they wondered, saying: What is the cause for which the Lord hath assembled us here? 1
The otherms. here adds: And there came with them Paul, converted from the circumcision, who had been selected along with Barnabas for the ministry of the Gentiles. And when there was a pious contention among them as to which of them should be the first to pray to the Lord to show them the reason, and Peter was urging Paul to pray first, Paul answered and said: That is thy duty, to begin first, especially seeing that thou hast been chosen by God a pillar (Gal. ii. 9) of the Church, and thou hast precedence of all in the apostleship; but it is by no means mine, for I am the least of you all, and Christ was seen by me as one born out of due time (1 Cor. xv. 8); nor do I presume to make myself equal to you: nevertheless by the grace of God I am what I am (1 Cor. xv. 10). ↩
