PAUL'S LIFE Early Life.—"Saul, who is also Paul," was "a Hebrew, of He brews" born, i.e., of strict Jewish origin (Phil. iii. 5). Yet, as his double name suggests, he was reared amid the Dispersion, at Tarsus in Cilicia, the son of a Roman citizen (Acts xxii. 28). Paulus was not an uncommon name in Syria and eastern Asia Minor and was a natural one for a Roman citizen. Ramsay de velops this point suggestively (Pauline and Other Studies, p. 65). "If we could think of him sometimes as Gaius Julius Paulus—to give him a possible and even not improbable name—how com pletely 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 if Luke had mentioned his full name." Nor would it have been written, if the influences due to his Tarsian citizenship (xxi. 39) had been kept in mind. Tarsus 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 Paul's letters 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, particu larly of the Stoic type for which Tarsus as a university was famous, is open to question. 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.
By a careful study of his letters, we can form some idea of the element in Paul's early life due to Jewish birth (Phil. iii. 4-7). Upon the "advantage" of the Jew, as "entrusted with the oracles of God" (Rom. iii. i seq.), he dwells in Rom. ii. 17 (seq.) in a way suggesting his own youthful attitude to "the name of a Jew." Something depends on the age at which the young Saul passed from Tarsus to Jerusalem and the school of Gama liel; the transition would not much affect the legal element in his religious life and outlook. Nor was personal acceptance with God the sole prize that floated before his soul. The end of ends was a righteous nation, deserving 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 attained 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. 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 possibili ties 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 impulse was in harmony with the will of God, the other was in sympathy with "the law of sin." Could the Law achieve the separation, making the whole person "die" to "the flesh" and so escape its sway? No, answered Saul's experience : the Law rather adds power to sin as egoism (I Cor. xv. 56; Rom. vii. II, 13). Whence then is deliverance to come? It can only come with the Messianic age and through Messiah. Then the Law would reign inwardly as outwardly, being "written on the heart," as promised in prophecy.
So may we conceive Saul's position, though not with full con sciousness, before contact with Christianity. How then would the message, "Jesus is the Messiah," strike such a man? It would seem a blasphemous caricature of things most sacred. If the sim ple message of the first witnesses, that One whose life and preach ing were largely out of harmony with the Law, as Saul under stood it, had in fact been raised from the dead by Israel's God and so vindicated—to the condemnation of that generation of God's people—if this seemed to Saul mere madness, what was he to say to Stephen's views as to the Law and the people of Law, both past and present (see STEPHEN) ? Stephen could not be right. Perish the thought ! Perish, too, all those who upheld the crucified Nazarene, the accursed of the Law ! For His death could mean but one of two things. Either He was, as "hung on a tree," accursed of God, or—awful alternative, yet inevitable to Saul's logical mind—the Law relative to which He was accursed was itself set aside. Saul turned from the suggestion as too shock ing to his pride, alike in his people and in its divine Law, for him seriously to consider its alleged credentials—the Resurrection, and the supernatural power and goodness of Him whose claims it was held to confirm. Why stay to weigh the evidence of Galilean common folk (Am-ha-aretz), when over against it stood immemorial prescription, and the deliberate judgment of the custodians of the Law as to this man as "a deceiver"? The logic of the movement had declared itself through the mouth of Stephen ; and now weak toleration must be abandoned.