Paul and Jesus

This is certainly not all we would want but it is all we have, and considering that we have not a single line written by Jesus or any of his twelve apostles, having seven of Paul’s genuine letters is a poverty of riches.⁸

The book of Acts provides the following independent biographical information not found in the seven genuine letters:

• Paul’s Hebrew name was Saul and he was born in Tarsus, a city in the Roman province of Cilicia, in southern Asia Minor, present-day Turkey (Acts 9:11, 30; 11:25; 21:39; 22:3).

• He came from a family of Pharisees and was educated in Jerusalem under the most famous rabbi of the time, Gamaliel. He also had a sister and a nephew that lived in Jerusalem in the 60s A.D. (Acts 22:3; 23:16).

• He was born a Roman citizen, which means his father also was a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37; 22:27–28; 23:27).

• He had some official status as a witness consenting to the death of Stephen, the first member of the Jesus movement executed after Jesus (Acts 7:54–8:1). He received an official commission from the high priest in Jerusalem to travel to Damascus in Syria to arrest, imprison, and even have executed any members of the Jesus movement who had fled the city under persecution. It was on the road to Damascus that he had his dramatic heavenly vision of Jesus, who commissioned him as the apostle to the Gentiles (Acts 9:1–19; 22:3–11; 26:12–18).

• He worked by trade as a “tentmaker,” though the Greek word used probably refers to a “leather worker” (Acts 18:3).

So what should we make of this material from the book of Acts?

That Paul’s Hebrew name was Saul we have no reason to doubt. Paul says he is of the tribe of Benjamin, and Saul, the first king of Israel, was also a Benjaminite, so one could see why a Jewish family would choose this particular name for a favored son (1 Samuel 9:21). Since Paul reports that he regularly did manual labor to support himself, and Jewish sons were normally taught some trade to supplement their studies, it is possible he was trained as a leather worker. There is an early rabbinic saying that “he who does not teach his son a trade teaches him banditry.”⁹

Whether Paul was born in Tarsus, one has to doubt because Jerome, the fourth-century Christian writer, knew a different tradition. He says that Paul’s parents were from Gischala, in Galilee, a Jewish town about twenty-five miles north of Nazareth, and that Paul was born there.¹⁰ According to Jerome, when revolts broke out throughout Galilee following the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C., Paul and his parents were rounded up and sent to Tarsus in Cilicia as part of a massive exile of the Jewish population by the Romans to rid the area of further potential trouble. Since Jerome certainly knew Paul’s claim, according to the book of Acts, to have been born in Tarsus, it is very unlikely he would have contradicted that source without good evidence. Jerome’s account also provides us with the only indication we have of Paul’s approximate age. Like Jesus, he would have had to have been born before 4 B.C., though how many years earlier we cannot say. This fits rather nicely with Paul’s statement in one of his last letters, to a Christian named Philemon, written around A.D. 60, where he refers to himself as an “old man” (Greek presbytes).¹¹

Jerome’s account casts serious doubt on the claim in Acts that Paul was born a Roman citizen. We have to question whether a native Galilean family, exiled from Gischala as a result of anti-Roman uprisings in the area, would have had Roman citizenship. We know that Gischala was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. John of Gischala was one of the most prominent leaders in the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (A.D. 66–70).¹² Paul also says that he was “beaten three times with rods” (2 Corinthians 11:25). This is a punishment administered by the Romans and was forbidden to one who had citizenship.¹³ The earliest document we have from Paul is his letter 1 Thessalonians. It is intensely apocalyptic, with its entire orientation on preparing his group for the imminent arrival of Jesus in the clouds of heaven (1 Thessalonians 1:10; 2:19; 3:13; 4:13–18; 5:1-5, 23). One might imagine Paul the former Pharisee with no apocalyptic orientation whatsoever, but it is entirely possible, if Jerome is correct about his parents being exiled from Galilee in an effort to pacify the area, that Paul’s apocalyptic orientation might have derived from his family and upbringing. Luke-Acts tends to mute any emphasis on an imminent arrival of the apocalypse, and that author characteristically tones down the apocalyptic themes of Mark, his main narrative source for his gospel.¹⁴

Acts is quite keen on emphasizing Paul’s friendly relations with Roman officials as well as the protection they regularly offered Paul from his Jewish enemies, so claiming that Paul was a Roman citizen, and putting his birth in the Roman senatorial province of Cilicia, serves the author’s purposes.