are compatible with the letters,[1] as our only strictly contemporary documents. If our results to-day are far more positive than those of the Tübingen critics, this is due partly to the larger number of letters now generally acknowledged as Paul’s (some eight or ten), and partly to a fuller knowledge both of Judaism and the Graeco-Roman world. These are seen to have embraced more varieties of religious thought and feeling than used to be assumed. The “particularist” tendency in Judaism was more limited than Baur supposed; while there was even a pre-Christian gnosticism, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Albrecht Ritschl in his Altkath. Kirche (2nd ed., 1857) did much to break through the hard-and-fast categories of the school in which he was trained, and in particular showed that Gentile Christians generally were far from Pauline in their modes of conceiving either Law or Gospel.
Chronology.—This has been discussed by Sir W. M. Ramsay in Pauline and Other Studies (1907), and by C. H. Turner in Hastings’s Dict. of the Bible (article “Chronology of New Test.”). Their results agree in the main for the period when precision first becomes possible, viz. between Paul’s first missionary journey and his arrival in Rome. Here Turner antedates Ramsay by a year throughout. C. Clemen, in his Paulus i. 349–410, reaches rather different results. The pivot of the whole is Festus’s succession to Felix as procurator, which Turner places in 58 and Ramsay in 59, while they agree in excluding 56 (Blass and Harnack), 57 (Bacon), 60 (Lightfoot, Zahn), as well as yet earlier and later extremes (Clemen argues for 61). On the chronology from Paul’s conversion down to the Relief visit (Acts xi. 30), c. 45–47, hardly two scholars agree; but on the whole the tendency is to put his conversion rather earlier than was formerly usual.
I. Paul’s Life.—“Saul, who is also Paul,” was “a Hebrew, of Hebrews” born, i.e. of strict Jewish origin, and of the tribe of Benjamin (Phil. iii. 5; cf. 2 Cor. xi. 22). Yet, as his double name suggests, he was not reared on Jewish soil but amid the Dispersion, at Tarsus in Cilicia, the son of a Roman citizen (Acts xxii. 28; cf. xvi. 37, xxiii. 27). “Saul,” his Jewish name, was a natural one for a Benjamite to bear, in memory of Israel’s first king. “Paul” was his name for the non-Jewish world, according to a usage seen also in John Mark, Simeon Niger, &c. Paulus was not an uncommon name in Syria and eastern Asia Minor (see the Index nominum in Boeckh’s Corp. inscr. graec.), and was a natural one for the son of a Roman citizen. Ramsey develops this point suggestively (Pauline and Other Studies, p. 65). “It is as certain that he had a Roman name and spoke the Latin language as it is that he was a Roman citizen. If, for example’s sake, we could think of him sometimes as Gaius Julius Paulus—to give him a possible and even not improbable name—how completely would our view of him be transformed. Much of what has been written about him [as a narrow, one-sided Jew] would never have been written In Tarsus. if Luke had mentioned his full name.” Nor would much of the same sort have been written, if the influences due to his Tarsian citizenship[2] (xxi. 39), viewed in the light of the habits of Jewish life in Asian cities, had been kept in mind. Tarsus, it seems, was peculiarly successful “in producing an amalgamated society in which the Oriental and Occidental spirit in unison attained in some degree to a higher plane of thought and action” (id., The Cities of St. Paul, 89). Accordingly it is natural that Paul’s letters should bear traces of Hellenic culture up to the level of a man of liberal education. Whether he went beyond this to a first-hand study of philosophy, particularly of the Stoic type for which Tarsus as a university was famous, is open to question.[3] In any case Paul had learnt, when he wrote his epistles, to value Greek “wisdom” at its true worth—the suggestiveness and sanity of its best thoughts, but at the same time its inadequacy to meet the deeper longings of the human spirit. Above all he felt the mental and moral shallowness of the verbal “show of wisdom” which marked current philosophical rhetoric.
Thanks to his letters, we can form some idea of the character and strength of the element in Paul’s early life due to Judaism. Looking back, he says (Phil. iii. 4–7), “If any other man thinketh to have confidence in the flesh, I yet more. Circumcised the eighth day, . . . a Hebrew of Hebrews; as touching the Law, a Pharisee; as touching Jewish Training. the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless. Howbeit what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ.” He came indeed to regard such inherited advantages as in themselves things of “the flesh,” natural rather than spiritual (vv. 4, 9). Yet as advantages, tending to awaken the spirit’s thirst for God, he did esteem them, seeing in them part of the preparation vouchsafed by divine providence to himself (Gal. 1, 15). Upon the “advantage of the Jew,” as “entrusted with the oracles of God” (Rom. iii. 1 seq.), he dwells in Rom. ii. 17 in a way suggestive of his own youthful attitude to “the name of a Jew.” Thus we may imagine the eager boy in Tarsus, as developing, under the instructions of a father strictly loyal to the Law, and under the teaching of the synagogue, a typical Jewish consciousness of the more serious and sensitive order.
A good deal depends on the age at which the young Saul passed from Tarsus to Jerusalem and the school of Gamaliel. If he felt his vocation as teacher of the Law at the earliest possible age, this great change may have come soon after his fifteenth year, when Rabbinic studies might begin. This would well accord with the likelihood In Jerusalem. that he never married. But in any case we must not exaggerate the contrast involved, since he came from a Pharisaic home and passed to sit at the feet of the leader of the more liberal Palestinian Rabbinism. The transition would simply accentuate the legal element in his religious life and outlook. Nor was it mere personal acceptance with God that floated before his soul as the prize of such earnestness. The end of ends was a righteous nation, worthy the fulfilment of the divine promises. But this too could come only by obedience to the Law. Thus all that the young Pharisee cared for most hung upon the Law of his fathers.
Outwardly he obtained the goal of legal blamelessness as few attained it; and for a time he may have felt a measure of self-satisfaction. But if so, a day came when the inner meaning of the Law, as extending to the sphere of desire and motive, came home to him in stern power, and his peace fled (Rom. vii. 9). For sin in his inner, real life was unsubdued; nay, it seemed to grow ever stronger, standing out more clearly and defiantly as insight into the moral life grew by means of the Law. To the Law he had been taught to look for righteousness. In his experience it proved but the means to “knowledge of sin,” without a corresponding impulse towards obedience. Not only did it make him realize the latent possibilities of evil desire (“the evil heart,” Yetzer hara), it also made him aware of a subtler evil, the reaction of self-will against the demands of the Law. While one element was in abiding harmony with the will of God, the other was in equal sympathy with “the law of sin.” Could the Law achieve the separation, making the moral person “die” to “the flesh” and so escape its sway? No, answered Saul’s experience: the Law rather adds power to sin as self-will (1 Cor. xv. 56; Rom. vii. 11, 13). Whence then is deliverance to come? It can only come with the Messianic age and through Messiah. The Law would reign inwardly as outwardly, being “written on the heart” as promised in prophecy.
So may we conceive the position reached by Saul, though
not with full consciousness, before he came into contact with
Christianity. But as yet he did not realize that
“through the Law he had died to the Law” (Gal.
ii. 19), much less the logical bearing of this fact upon
the nature and function of the Law. How then
First impressions
as to Jesus.
would the message, “Jesus is the Messiah,” strike such a
- ↑ The method which reverses this relation, using the “we” passages of Acts to discredit the epistles of Paul (as well as the rest of Acts), is a mere tour de force, which has received artificial vogue by incorporation in the Encyclopaedia Biblica, and to a less degree in the external and partial article “Saul of Tarsus” in the Jewish Encyclopaedia. The essential harmony of the epistles and Acts has been shown afresh by A. Harnack, Die Apostelgeschichte (1908).
- ↑ Probably as member of the Jewish “tribe” dating from the Seleucid colony planted there in 171 B.C. (Ramsay).
- ↑ The main difficulty in deciding on this, as on other points of contact between Paul and Hellenism, is the fact that he certainly got many of his Greek ideas through the medium of Judaeo-Greek or Hellenistic literature, like the Wisdom of Solomon (cf. Romans i. 18–ii. fin.). It is clear from the way in which he uses the Greek Bible, even where it diverges wrongly from the original, that he was reared on it rather than on the Hebrew text.
