Saul of Tarsus

Before he was the Apostle Paul he was Saul, a Jew of the diaspora born at Tarsus in Cilicia, trained in the Pharisaic interpretation of the Law, a Roman citizen by birth, a worker in tents and leather, and — by his own confession — a violent persecutor of the Church of God. This file gathers what the letters and the Acts of the Apostles allow us to say of the man before the Damascus road, distinguishing the firm data from the uncertain and pinning the traditional details to their sources.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

Name, Birthplace, and Origins

The apostle bore two names. In his own letters he is always Paulos (Paul), the Roman cognomen by which he was known in the Greco-Roman world; in the Acts of the Apostles he is first Saul (Saulos, Heb. Sha’ul, after Israel’s first king, of the same tribe of Benjamin), the Acts narrative noting the transition almost in passing at Acts 13:9, “Saul, who also is called Paul.” The two names are not a conversion-name and a former name — the change at Acts 13:9 coincides with the turn to the Gentile mission, not with the Damascus event — but the ordinary double nomenclature of a diaspora Jew who was also a Roman citizen (Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life, 1996; Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul, 1991).

He was born at Tarsus in Cilicia, in south-eastern Asia Minor, which he calls “no mean city” (Acts 21:39) — a real Hellenistic metropolis, a seat of Stoic learning and a center of the trade in cilicium, the goat-hair cloth from which his trade took its material. By his own testimony he was “circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee” (Phil. 3:5). In Acts he describes himself as “a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city [Jerusalem] at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers” (Acts 22:3). His birth-date is not given and is inferred: he is called “a young man” (neanias) at the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:58), and a date around A.D. 5 is the common estimate, with a range from roughly A.D. 1 to 10 [Disputed: no source fixes Paul’s birth-year; estimates cluster around A.D. 5–10 (Murphy-O’Connor 1996) but rest on inference from “young man” at Acts 7:58 and the chronology of his career, not on any datum].

Pharisaic Training

Paul’s formation was that of a Pharisee, and he insisted on it after his conversion as much as before. “I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus… brought up… at the feet of Gamaliel” (Acts 22:3); “after the most straitest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee” (Acts 26:5); “concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:6). The notice that he studied under Gamaliel — the elder Gamaliel, grandson of Hillel and one of the most revered teachers of the age (cf. Acts 5:34) — is given only by Acts, not by the letters, and some scholars have questioned it on the grounds that Paul’s argumentation, though learned, is not distinctively Gamaliel’s; but the report is early and coheres with Paul’s evident rabbinic skill [Disputed: the Gamaliel notice is firm in Acts 22:3 but absent from the letters; Murphy-O’Connor (1996) accepts it, while others treat it cautiously since Acts alone attests it]. What is not in doubt is the Pharisaic substance: Paul reasons from the Scriptures, deploys rabbinic techniques of interpretation, and even on trial before the Sanhedrin claims the name still — “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question” (Acts 23:6).

Roman Citizenship

A datum of the first importance for Paul’s whole career is his Roman citizenship, which Acts presents as his by birth. When a tribune at Jerusalem prepares to scourge him, Paul asks whether it is lawful to scourge a Roman uncondemned; the tribune says, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom,” and Paul answers, “But I was free born” (Acts 22:25–28). The citizenship is what allows him to be spared the rod, to demand redress at Philippi (Acts 16:37–38), and finally to appeal to Caesar (Acts 25:11), the appeal that carries him to Rome. The letters never mention the citizenship, and a minority of scholars have doubted it, since a provincial Jew’s possession of it would be unusual; but the consistent and circumstantial use Acts makes of it, and its decisive role in the narrative, weigh in its favor [Disputed: Paul’s Roman citizenship is attested only by Acts (16:37–38; 22:25–28; 25:11) and never by the letters; most scholars accept it as historical and load-bearing for the narrative (Murphy-O’Connor 1996), a minority regard it as a Lukan construction].

Trade

Paul worked with his hands, and made a point of it. Acts identifies his trade as tentmaking (skēnopoios, Acts 18:3), by which he supported himself alongside Aquila and Priscilla at Corinth; the term is usually understood of work in leather and the goat-hair cloth of his native Cilicia. The letters confirm the practice from the inside: Paul boasts that he preached the gospel “without charge” and labored “night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you” (1 Thess. 2:9; cf. 1 Cor. 9:6–18; 2 Cor. 11:7–9). The manual trade is not incidental — it is part of his apostolic self-understanding, a refusal to burden his converts and a sign of the freedom of the gospel he preached (1 Cor. 9:15–18). St. John Chrysostom dwells repeatedly on Paul’s labor at the bench as a model of apostolic humility and self-denial (Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 40; Homilies on First Corinthians 21; trans. NPNF I/11–12).

The Persecutor

The single most insisted-upon fact of Paul’s life before Damascus, in his own letters, is that he persecuted the Church. “Ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it” (Gal. 1:13); “I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9); “as concerning zeal, persecuting the church” (Phil. 3:6). Acts gives the persecution narrative shape: Saul stands consenting at the stoning of Stephen, holding the witnesses’ garments (Acts 7:58; 8:1); he “made havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3); and he is on the road to Damascus, “yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1), when the encounter that undoes him occurs. The memory of having been “a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious” (1 Tim. 1:13) is, in the Pauline corpus, the dark ground against which the grace of his call is measured (see The Damascus Road).

What Can and Cannot Be Known

Beyond these data the early life of Saul is largely silent. The letters and Acts give us his Jewishness, his Pharisaism, his citizenship, his trade, and his persecuting zeal, and little else with security: we do not know whether he was ever married (his unmarried state in 1 Cor. 7:7–8 may be lifelong or widowed), whether he saw the earthly Jesus (2 Cor. 5:16 is debated), or the precise span of his Jerusalem schooling. The honest position is that the man before Damascus is known in outline and in his own self-description, and that the outline — the zealous Pharisee of the diaspora, Roman and Greek as well as Jewish — is exactly what makes his subsequent vocation as apostle to the nations intelligible (Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul, 1991; on the world that formed him, see The World of Paul).

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, King James Version. The Acts of the Apostles; the Epistles to the Philippians, Galatians, First Corinthians, First Thessalonians, First Timothy.
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles and Homilies on First Corinthians. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vols. 11–12. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1889.
  • Hengel, Martin. The Pre-Christian Paul. Trans. John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1991.
  • Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Riesner, Rainer. Paul’s Early Period: Chronology, Mission Strategy, Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.