Saul of Tarsus was head in whatever circle he moved, whether as Saul the persecuting Pharisee, or Paul the laboring missionary. If he was chief of sinners, he became chief of saints. If he was the man of action whirling over the Roman Empire, he was doing it with constructive statesmanship with no less a purpose than to bring the Roman Empire to the feet of Christ. He was the very type of missionary statesman demanded today. It is a curious turn of the wheel of history that the very scenes of Paul’s struggles and triumphs for Christ are now the hardest spots on earth to reach with the message of the Cross. We need a new Paul for the new situation.
Paul stands the ablest exponent of Christianity, its most constructive genius, its dominant spirit from the merely human side, its most fearless champion, its most illustrious and influential missionary, preacher, teacher, and its most distinguished martyr.
Saul’s Ancestry
Saul loved his people with intense patriotism. Few things gave him keener anguish of heart than the refusal of his Jewish brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh, to take Jesus as the Messiah (Rom. 9:2). He was almost ready to be cut off from Christ himself if that would win them. He had once boasted, as other Jews did, of descent from Abraham (2 Cor. 11:22). Indeed, he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews and set much store by the stock of Israel. His blood went back to the tribe of Benjamin (Phil. 3:5) whose glory was another Saul, the first king of the Hebrew people. He probably once took a keen interest in the “endless genealogies” (1 Tim. 1:4) of the Jews of his time. He knew what pride of race was, the heritage of a long and noble ancestry that reached far back into the distant centuries. The Jew had enough in his history to give him some right to be proud. His was the chosen people “whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers” (Rom. 9:4). It mattered little with a story like that if the hated Roman yoke was on the neck of the Jews. The day of the Roman would pass as had that of the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, Alexander the Great, the Persian, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Hittite, the Egyptian. Kingdoms came and went, but the Jew remained, proud, isolated, defiant, conscious that he was to fulfill a unique mission in the world. True, the Messianic hope was trailing now in the dust of a deliverer from Rome who would establish a Jewish empire in Jerusalem, yet it was to come. All this and more ran in the blood of Saul’s ancestors.
His Family
One can draw a closer picture yet of the home in Tarsus into which Saul was born, though many details are lacking. We do not know the name of either his father or mother. And yet the picture is not wholly blank. We know that his father was a strict Jew, for his son was “instructed according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers” (Acts 22:3). He was not merely a Pharisee himself but the son of a Pharisee (Acts 23:6). Hence we know that, though his father lived in Tarsus when Saul was born (22:3), he was not a Hellenizer. His father lived in one of the great Greek cities of the world, but he was loyal to the traditions of Palestine and was at heart a real Jew, though actually one of the Dispersion.
One other detail is known about Saul’s father. He was a Roman citizen. The time came when Paul would take great pleasure in saying: “But I am a Roman born” (Acts 22:28). Whether his father was also Roman born or was made a Roman citizen for some deed of valor or for money is not known.
Saul’s father was a man of position in the Jewish community and was able to send his son later to Jerusalem to school. He may have been a man of some wealth. The fact that he was a tent-maker and taught his trade to his son does not prove anything, since Jews generally knew a trade. This stood Paul in good stead later.
The mother must have been a woman of force to have reared such a son. We catch a faint glimpse of her when Paul mentions Timothy’s mother, Eunice, and grandmother, Lois (1:5); it is not difficult to catch the reflection of Saul’s own fireside. When Paul reminds Timothy of whom he had learned the Holy Scriptures even from a babe (3:14) he was echoing his own experience in the home in Tarsus.
When we ask for the other members of that family we can only bring up the picture of a sister whose son did Paul a good turn in Jerusalem in a time of trouble (Acts 23:16). This nephew was worthy of his uncle, and that is enough to say for his shrewdness and courage. There may have been others in the family. We simply do not know. The curtain refuses to rise on this point. But we have caught some conception of the home in the city of which Saul was proud.
The Boyhood of Saul of Tarsus
Unlike John, Saul lived in a city. Unlike Jesus, his home was in one of the great Greek cities of the world. Nathanael could sneer at Nazareth (Jn. 1:46), but Paul could brook no reproach on Tarsus. He was proud to hail from “no mean city” (Acts 21:39). Tarsus was the city of all the world best adapted for the youth of the Apostle to the Gentiles. In Tarsus was accomplished most perfectly that union between east and west that Alexander the Great attempted everywhere. The city remained Asiatic in character while it appropriated Greek qualities.
Under the Romans it was a “free city” and the Jewish element was a positive force in the life of the community. There was a great university here also. It would be difficult to imagine a city of that era more thoroughly cosmopolitan and representative of life in the empire. The absence of intense hatred of the Jews would open the way for more sympathy on the part of the Jews toward the best things in the Greco-Roman civilization. In common with the Hellenists in general, Saul spoke Greek in addition to his Aramaic, and seemed to find it not inconsistent with his Jewish scruples to witness the public games which he afterwards used so effectively as illustrations (1 Cor. 9:24).
It was in the matter of education that the Pharisee would be more particular. As a boy he would learn the Old Testament story from his mother and from the synagogue teaching, which had become a great institution in Jewish life. Saul would not have been quite the same man if he had been reared wholly in Alexandria or Jerusalem. Both of these centers of culture left their impress on Paul, as is seen in the allegory about Hagar and Sarah (Gal. 4:24) and the rabbinic refinement in the use of words (Gal. 3) and traditional interpretation (1 Cor. 10:4). But it is easy to see that Saul was not cut out to be Philo, nor, indeed, Shammai. Tarsus left its mark on him and made possible the more generous sympathies of his later life.
From one point of view it seems a pity for a boy to have to live in a city and miss the joy and freedom of the country. But Saul had some compensations. His life was to be in the great cities of the empire, and he had a natural bond of sympathy with city life and had less to learn in that respect.
So gifted a boy was bound to feel a call to higher service. He doubtless sympathized with the desire of his parents that he should become a Jewish rabbi, perhaps another Gamaliel. As a Jew, no higher glory was open to him than this, since the prophetic voice had ceased from Israel and the kingly scepter was no longer in Jewish hands. The heel of Rome was on the world, the Mediterranean world, Saul’s world. Long afterwards he will look back on God’s plan in his life and see that God had “separated” him even from his mother’s womb (Gal. 1:15) to make him a separate one for the Gentiles, not from the Gentiles. But it will take a revolution in his nature before he can see that foreordination.
At the Feet of Gamaliel
It was no mean ambition that Saul’s parents had for him to receive his theological education in Jerusalem. That city was the goal of Jews all over the world. Here was concentrated the history of the nation. Every hill and valley teemed with holy associations. Saul had learned the outlines of that story, and he was coming to his own when he came to the Holy City. He was probably, according to Jewish custom, about thirteen when he came to Jerusalem, so that he could speak of his being “brought up” there (Acts 22:3). One cannot help thinking of the brief visit of the boy Jesus to the temple at the age of twelve. Each was full of zest in the problems of his people and his time. Saul probably did not astonish his teachers by the penetration of his questions in the same measure that Jesus did, but one cannot doubt the keenness of his interest in the new world that he had entered.
Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel, was the glory of the law. His school was more liberal in some fine points than the rival rabbinical school of Shammai (contemporary of Hillel). For one thing, Gamaliel was willing to read the Greek authors, and his pupil Paul will later show some knowledge of Greek literature. Paul says, he was “instructed according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers” (Acts 22:3), but he does not say that he was brought up in the more rigid of the Pharisaic schools.
One can see how Christianity gained by having this man of theological training, even though much of his knowledge was rabbinical rubbish. The Talmud itself, though written down later, gives us a fair specimen of the theological hair-splitting indulged in by the grave doctors of the law. Paul did have much to unlearn, much that he came to count only as “refuse” (Phil. 3:8), but great blessings resulted to him and the cause of Christ. These more than made up for the loss, and may console men who have spent time at a modern school of merely rabbinical points of view, provided he gets over them.
For one thing, Paul gained a thoroughly trained mind. He was all in all the most gifted man of his time, leaving out of view, of course, Jesus of Nazareth. He learned how to distinguish things that differ (Phil. 1:10), a mark of the justly educated mind. His ambition led him to surpass his fellow pupils (Gal. 1:14), and the result was that his brilliant intellect had received magnificent training.
He won familiarity with the letter of Scripture, a point about which some brilliant modern scholars are gloriously indifferent. He was to learn the spirit of Scripture teaching later, but there was some good in the letter, provided it was not allowed to kill.
He gained, likewise, the art of disputation which stood him in good stead on many important occasions as on Mars’ Hill, on the steps of the Tower of Antonia, before the Jewish Sanhedrin, before Felix, Festus, Agrippa, and perhaps Nero himself. Being well versed in rabbinical theology, he knew how to parry the points of his old friends, the rabbis. He knew the strength and weakness of Pharisaism and could speak as an expert on that point. He knew only too well “the weak and beggarly rudiments” of bondage to the law (Gal. 4:9), and his biting sarcasm will later sting his Jewish enemies to fury.
When Saul left Jerusalem, he was to all intents and purposes the one young Jew in all the world who had most in prospect. He had been educated as a rabbi and the career of a rabbi lay before him. But that was not all. Many a rabbi lived in comparative obscurity. This young rabbi had great friends at Jerusalem who could help him to the highest places if he proved worthy. We may imagine the joy of his parents as he returned home full of honor, the hope of Gamaliel, and the pride of his home.
If Christianity only possessed one so well equipped as this young rabbi! No one of the twelve apostles was his equal in mental gifts and culture. But he is far from any thought of Christ. Brilliant, accomplished, masterful, ambitious, he is eager to be in the midst of the stirring events in Judea. He appears in Jerusalem again, possibly drawn there by the attacks of Stephen on the citadel of Pharisaism. It is not improbable that he measured words in debate with Stephen in the Cilician synagogue, where Saul would naturally go (Acts 6:9). But, if so, he had a new experience. He could not stand against this tornado of the Spirit. Few things annoy a man of culture quite so much as to be overcome in public discussion whether by ridicule or weight of argument. An unanswerable argument is a hard thing to forgive. Stephen was all ablaze with passion. Before him Saul’s critical acumen and theological subtleties vanished. Saul was beaten and his defeat rankled within him. Such in brief is the picture that we may form of Saul in Jerusalem before the Lord would defeat him on the Damascus road and commission him into His own army.