CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 5
“A Hebrew Born of Hebrews”
1. Paul’s Jewish heritage
More important by far in paul’s own eyes than his Tarsian birthplace and his Roman citizenship, and more important by far for our understanding of him, was his Jewish heritage. When, from a Christian perspective, he looks back on the natural advantages in which at one time he had taken pride, he begins: “circumcised the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee …” (Philippians 3:6).
Here, to the statement that he came “of the people of Israel”—i.e. that he was a Jew by birth—he adds further details indicating more particularly what kind of Jew he was.
First, he belonged to the tribe of Benjamin (a claim repeated in Romans 11:1). The tribal territory of Benjamin originally lay immediately to the north of the much larger area of Judah: Jerusalem, although formally allocated to Benjamin, actually formed an enclave between the two. When the united monarchy was disrupted after Solomon’s death, Benjamin was drawn by the gravitational pull of Judah and Jerusalem into the southern kingdom. The people of Benjamin naturally tended to lose their tribal identity, but some at least did not allow it to be obliterated, and even after the return from exile there were re-settlements both in Jerusalem and in the adjacent Judaean territory of people who continued to be known distinctively as “the children of Benjamin” (Nehemiah 11:7–9, 31–36). It was probably from some of these that Paul’s family traced its descent.
His parents’ choice of Saul as his Jewish name may be associated with their tribal connexion. The most outstanding Benjaminite in Hebrew history was Saul, the first king of Israel. If this consideration weighed with Paul’s parents, it is possible to recognize an “undesigned coincidence”1 in the fact that it is only from Acts that we know that his Jewish name was Saul, while it is only from his letters that we know that he belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. Early Christian writers loved to trace in Paul’s activity as a persecutor of the infant church the fulfilment of words in the patriarch Jacob’s blessing of his sons: “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf …” (Genesis 49:27)2—but this ingenious fancy has nothing to do with sober exegesis.
In the second place, he describes himself as “a Hebrew born of Hebrews”. In Paul’s writings, as certainly in Luke’s, “Hebrew” is probably a more specialized term than “Israelite” or “Jew”. On another occasion, in a reference to visitors to Corinth who tried to undermine his position in the eyes of his converts there, he says, “Are they Hebrews? So am I”—and the context suggests that “Hebrews” has a more restricted sense than “Israelites” or “descendants of Abraham” (2 Corinthians 11:25). In Acts 6:1 “Hebrews” is used in contradistinction to “Hellenists”, although both Hebrews and Hellenists were Jews (in this instance, Jewish disciples of Jesus, members of the primitive Jerusalem church). The distinction was probably linguistic and cultural: the Hebrews, in that case, attended synagogues where the service was conducted in Hebrew and used Aramaic as their normal mode of speech, while the Hellenists spoke Greek and attended synagogues where the scriptures were read and the prayers recited in that language. Many of the Hellenists in Jerusalem would have roots in the lands of the dispersion, like the Cyrenians, Alexandrians, and people from Cilicia and Asia who attended the synagogue mentioned in Acts 6:9.3 In the dispersion throughout the Graeco-Roman world, on the other hand, the Hellenists would be the majority of resident Jews while the Hebrews would be recent immigrants from Palestine or members of families which made a special point of preserving their Palestinian ways. We know from inscriptions in Rome and Corinth that each of these cities contained a “synagogue of (the) Hebrews”:4 such a designation may point to a meeting-place for Palestinian (and probably Aramaic-speaking) Jews, over against others used by Greek-speaking Jews. Paul’s contemporary, Philo of Alexandria, himself a Hellenistic Jew, employs the word “Hebrews” to denote those who speak Hebrew5 (and in Jewish Greek literature of the first century A.D., including the New Testament writings, “Hebrew” in a linguistic sense is broad enough to embrace Aramaic).
A Jew born in a Greek-speaking city like Tarsus would naturally be expected to be a Hellenist. Paul might be called a Hellenist in that Greek was manifestly no foreign language to him, but the designation on which he insists is not Hellenist but Hebrew. Moreover, this insistence is not based on his upbringing and education in Jerusalem: the phrase “a Hebrew born of Hebrews” indicates that his parents were Hebrews before him. It is difficult to know how much credence to give to Jerome’s statement that Paul’s family came originally from Gischala in Galilee.6 According to the record of Acts, he could address a Jerusalem audience in Aramaic (Acts 21:40; 22:2) and from the fact that the heavenly voice on the Damascus road addressed him in Aramaic—“in the Hebrew language” (Acts 26:14)—it is a fair inference that this was his mother tongue.
It appears, then, that while Paul was born into a Jewish family which enjoyed citizen rights in a Greek-speaking city, Aramaic and not Greek was the language spoken in the home and perhaps also in the synagogue which they attended. Unlike many Jews resident in Anatolia, this family was strictly observant of the Jewish way of life and maintained its links with the home country. Paul would have been given little opportunity of imbibing the culture of Tarsus during his boyhood: indeed, his parents made sure of an orthodox upbringing for him by arranging for him to spend his formative years in Jerusalem.
According to the most probable punctuation of Acts 22:3, the exordium of his Aramaic address to a crowd of hostile Jews in the outer court of the Jerusalem temple, he was (a) “a Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia”, but (b) “brought up in this city” (Jerusalem) and (c) “educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God …”.7 The last part of this account is in essential agreement with his more general statement in Galatians 1:14: “I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of our fathers”. He would have entered the school of Gamaliel at some point in his ‘teens, but his parents saw to it that even his earlier boyhood was spent under wholesome influences in Jerusalem.
Thirdly, by his own account, Paul was “as to the law a Pharisee”. This account is consistent with his statement reported in Acts 22:3 that he was “educated at the feet of Gamaliel”, who was the leading Pharisee of his day, and with his declaration before the younger Agrippa: “according to the strictest party of our religion I have lived as a Pharisee” (Acts 26:5). Even more emphatic is his claim before the Sanhedrin to be “a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees” (Acts 23:6). The natural sense of this is that his father or remoter ancestors were associated with the Pharisees; it is just possible, thought less probable, that “a son of Pharisees” means “a pupil of Pharisees”.
2. The Pharisees
Who, then, were the Pharisees? They first appear by name about the middle of the second century B.C. In his account of the governorship of Jonathan (160–143 B.C.), brother and successor to Judas Maccabaeus, Josephus says that about this time there were three schools of thought among the Jews, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and that while the Essenes were strict predestinarians and the Sadducees insisted that all things happened in accordance with men’s free will, the Pharisees occupied a middle position in which room was afforded for both divine predestination and human choice.8 These in fact were probably not the most important points in which the three groups differed one from another, but Josephus was prone to speak of Jewish religious parties as if they were Greek philosophical schools, and drew attention to those features in which he thought Greek and Roman readers would be interested.
Later on he says that Jonathan’s nephew, John Hyrcanus, who ruled Judaea for about thirty years (134–104 B.C.), was at first a disciple of the Pharisees, but that he took offence at the blunt outspokenness of one of their number and broke with them, allying himself instead with their rivals, the Sadducees.9 The Pharisees thus formed a kind of opposition party for several decades, and suffered harsh repression, especially at the hands of Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 B.C.).10
Josephus does not trace the spiritual ancestry of the Pharisees, but it is very probable that they arose within the ranks of the ḥasîdîm or “godly people”, who are referred to in the books of Maccabees as “Hasidaeans” (1 Maccabees 2:42; 7:14; 2 Maccabees 14:6). The origin of these Hasidaeans is probably to be sought among the godly people in Judaea who, some decades after the return from exile, banded themselves together in order to encourage one another in the study and practice of the sacred law in the midst of what they saw as moral and religious declension. In the book of Malachi we are told that “those who feared Yahweh spoke to one another; Yahweh heeded and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared Yahweh and thought on his name. ‘They shall be mine’, says Yahweh of hosts, ‘my special possession on the day when I act, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him’ ” (Malachi 3:16 f.). And those whose names were entered in the book of remembrance would not only be spared on that coming day but would be the executors of his judgment on the ungodly: “for you who fear my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.… And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says Yahweh of hosts” (Malachi 4:3).
These people’s passionate devotion to the law of their God is well illustrated in Psalm 119, the composition of one who has endured hardship and persecution for his loyalty to the divine “testimonies”, but continues to find them a light to his path and sweeter than honey to his taste. They deplored the inroads of Hellenistic ways into Jewish life under the Ptolemies and Seleucids, and were despised as antiquated spoil-sports by those of the younger generation, even within the priestly families, who ardently welcomed the new fashion. But when Hellenism showed its unacceptable face, in the action of Antiochus Epiphanes which bade fair to extinguish Jewish religious and national identity, it was the Hasidaeans who showed themselves the truest patriots. Some of them offered passive resistance to the Seleucid forces, and won the crown of martyrdom. Others, and these perhaps the majority, made common cause with the Hasmonaean family—Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers—and their followers when they raised the standard of revolt and initiated guerrilla warfare against the Seleucids.
The guerrilla warfare was more successful than could have been expected. The king and his counsellors realized that their Judaean policy had been ill-advised, and by the end of 164 B.C. they reversed it, permitting the Jews once more to practise their ancestral religion and restoring the temple in Jerusalem to the worship of the God of Israel. Many of the Hasidaeans were disposed to be content with this, since the free practice of their religion was the object of their resistance. They did not immediately break off their alliance with the Hasmonaeans, but they no longer collaborated so enthusiastically in the fight for political independence, especially as this fight increasingly involved the aggrandisement of the Hasmonaean power. When Jonathan accepted the high-priesthood in 152 B.C. by the gift of a pretender to the Seleucid throne, one body of Hasidaeans—that which developed into the community of Qumran—was so outraged by this usurpation of the ancestral dignity of the house of Zadok that it not only refused to acknowledge him as high priest but refused to worship in the temple which was polluted by the illegitimate action of Jonathan himself and his heirs and successors.11
When at last political independence was gained, the high-priesthood was confirmed to the Hasmonaean family by the decree of a popular assembly.12 But many of the Hasidaeans who could not go so far as the intransigent minority which opted out of public life because of its objection to the Hasmonaean assumption of the sacred office were not at all happy about it. When Josephus tells of the breach between the Pharisees and John Hyrcanus, he says that what gave John mortal offence was the suggestion that he should be content with political and military leadership and give up the high-priesthood.
Were the Pharisees, then, Hasidaeans? It appears that they were, or at least that they took their rise within the Hasidaeans’ fellowship and should indeed be recognized as their mainstream development. The designation Pharisees is associated with a Hebrew and Aramaic root meaning “separate”. The Greek word Pharisaioi (“Pharisees”) is evidently borrowed from Aramaic perîšayyâ, “the separated ones”. It has been held by some that they received this name because of their separation from the alliance with the Hasmonaeans, but perhaps it has a more general meaning, and denotes their policy of strict separation from everything which might convey moral or ceremonial impurity. Such separation was the negative side of the holiness to which they felt themselves specially called. This is spelled out in a later rabbinical commentary on Leviticus, where the injunction, “You shall therefore be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2), is amplified: “As I am holy, so you also must be holy; as I am separate (Heb. pārûš), so you also must be separate (Heb. perûšîm)”.13
The Pharisees exercised great care in observing the sabbath law and the food restrictions, thus perpetuating the principles of the Jewish martyrs under Antiochus IV, who endured torture and death rather than commit apostasy in these matters. They scrupulously tithed the produce of the soil—not only grain, wine and oil but garden herbs as well—and refused to eat food that was subject to the tithe unless the tithe had actually been paid on it.14
In their study of the law they built up a body of interpretation and application which in due course acquired a validity equal to that of the written law, being treated by a legal fiction as originating with Moses on Sinai along with the written law. The purpose of this oral law—“the tradition of the elders”, as it is called in the Gospels (Mark 7:5)—was to adapt the ancient prescriptions to the changing situations of later days and so guard them from being dismissed as obsolete and impracticable. There were differing schools of interpretation among the Pharisees, but they all agreed on the necessity of applying the written law in terms of the oral law. This distinguished them from their principal theological opponents, the Sadducees, who believed (in theory, at any rate) that the written law should be preserved and applied without modification, no matter how harshly its literal enforcement might bear on people.
We are imperfectly informed about Sadducean theology, because no first-hand account of it has come down to us. What we are told relates only to the points on which they differed from the Pharisees. We learn, for example, that unlike the Pharisees they said that there was “no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit” (Acts 23:8). The belief in bodily resurrection, as the Pharisees held it, is attested among the martyrs under Antiochus; it is to be distinguished from the idea (expressed, for example, by Ben Sira) that the most desirable kind of immortality was posterity’s remembrance of a good man’s virtues, especially when they were reproduced in his descendants.15 The Sadducees may well have thought this idea more consistent with the earlier scriptures—although some of them were surprised one day in Jerusalem about A.D. 30 to hear a visitor from Galilee deduce the hope of resurrection from the divine utterance which came to Moses from the burning bush.16 As for the Sadducees’ disbelief in angels and demons, what they rejected was probably the concept of opposed hierarchies of good and evil spirits, each hierarchy headed by seven named archangels and arch-demons. They may have recognized an affinity between these Pharisaic beliefs and those of the Zoroastrian religion; indeed, one scholar has suggested that “Pharisee” originally meant “Persianizer” and that it was an uncomplimentary designation invented by the Sadducees for their opponents.17 This is improbable, but it is conceivable that the Sadducees satirically reinterpreted “Pharisee” as “Persianizer”. The Sadducees certainly regarded themselves as maintaining the old-time religion and looked on the Pharisees as dangerous innovators—modernists, in fact.
The Pharisees emerged into a position of influence when Alexander Jannaeus was succeeded by his widow Salome Alexandra; her reign of nine years (76–67 B.C.) was remembered in rabbinical tradition as a miniature golden age. Herod paid them respectful attention in the earlier part of his reign; as late as 17 B.C. he exempted them from an oath of allegiance which he exacted from the rest of his subjects.18 But soon afterwards he began to resent their recalcitrance, and when in 7 B.C. he imposed a fresh oath of allegiance, to Augustus and himself, he fined those Pharisees—the great majority—who refused to be sworn.19 When, towards the end of his life, a number of Pharisaic disciples, at the instigation of their teachers, pulled down the great golden eagle which he had placed over the temple gateway, he took an atrocious vengeance on them.20
Under the Roman administration the Pharisees were represented in the Sanhedrin; although they were in a minority, Josephus says, yet their influence with the people was such that the chief-priestly and Sadducean majority was obliged to respect their views.21 Many, perhaps most, of the scribes—the professional expositors of the law and the prophets—were disciples of the Pharisees and gave currency to their interpretations.
The Pharisees organized themselves in local fellowships. Such a fellowship was called a ḥabûrāh; each member of a ḥabûrāh was a ḥābēr to the other members. Josephus, who tells us that from his nineteenth year onwards he regulated his life by the Pharisees’ rule, estimates their number at about 6,000.22
Because of their meticulous concern for the laws of purity and tithing, they could not associate easily with those, even among their fellow-Jews, who were not so particular in this regard as they themselves were. These latter included the great majority of the Jewish population of Palestine, peasants and artisans, who could not devote so much time or interest to the study of those laws as the Pharisees did. The Pharisees therefore tended to hold aloof from the “people of the land”,23 as they called them, for such people, they were convinced, were incapable of true piety.24 On the other hand, the Pharisees themselves were criticized as too half-hearted in their pursuit of holiness by the sectarians of Qumran, who pressed their own “separation” to the point of isolation (not to say insulation) and, with Isaiah 30:10 at the back of their minds, called the Pharisees “seekers after smooth things” or (as the phrase may alternatively be rendered) “givers of smooth interpretations”.25
Although a certain family likeness no doubt characterized the whole Pharisaic movement, there were wide varieties within the movement—varieties associated partly with diverse schools of interpretation and partly with diverse temperaments and motives. One frequently quoted passage in the Talmud, admittedly of much later date, distinguishes seven types of Pharisee, of which only one, the Pharisee who is a Pharisee for the love of God, receives unqualified commendation.26
3. Pharisaism in Paul’s day
At the beginning of the Christian era there were two leading schools of legal interpretation, founded respectively by Shammai and Hillel. The school of Shammai is traditionally credited with a stricter interpretation than the school of Hillel—stricter not only in the application of individual laws but in the approach to the law in its entirety. Whereas the Shammaites regarded the breach of one law (by action or by omission) as a breach of the law as such, the Hillelite attitude was rather that divine judgment had regard to the preponderance of good or bad in a man’s life viewed as a whole.
One of the best known sayings of Hillel was his reply to a man who asked him to summarize the whole law in as few words as possible. “What is hateful to yourself”, said Hillel, “do not to another; that is the whole law, all the rest is commentary.”27 This citing of the negative golden rule as an epitome of the law could be interpreted in ways which many Pharisees would have thought dangerous. Even if this was not Hillel’s intention, it might have encouraged someone to argue, when faced with one particular commandment of the law, that that commandment was binding only in so far as it prevented a neighbour’s suffering ill or promoted his good. This, according to a prevalent view among the rabbis, introduced an illicit subjective criterion; far better that people, when confronted with a commandment of the law, should obey it simply because it was a commandment of the Holy One: theirs not to reason why.28
What kind of Pharisee was Paul? The question is not easily answered. According to Acts 22:3, he was educated in the school of Gamaliel, and later tradition makes Gamaliel the successor of Hillel as head of his school, if not indeed his son or grandson.29 But those earlier traditions which reflect some direct memory of the man and his teaching do not even associate him with the school of Hillel. Instead, they speak of others as belonging to the school of Gamaliel, as though he founded a school of his own.30
There is some difficulty in distinguishing traditions about this Gamaliel from those about a later teacher of the same name (Gamaliel II, c. A.D. 100), but those traditions which presuppose that the temple is still standing certainly relate to the elder Gamaliel. “When Rabban Gamaliel the elder died,” it was said, “the glory of the Torah ceased, and purity and ‘separateness’ died”31—which is almost as much as to say that he was the last of the true Pharisees, since “separateness” (Heb. perîšût) is a formation from the same root as “Pharisee” and might even be translated “Pharisaism”. Among the rulings with which he is credited is one liberalizing the law of remarriage after divorce.32
Both in the rabbinic traditions and in the New Testament Gamaliel appears as a member of the Sanhedrin. At an early stage in the life of the Jerusalem church, Luke relates, the apostles were charged before this court with disobeying its previous directive to them not to teach publicly in the name of Jesus. When some members of the court were for taking extreme measures against them, “a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, held in honour by all the people”, reminded his colleagues of other movements in the recent past which had seemed to be dangerous for a short time, but quickly collapsed, and he added (Acts 5:38 f.):
So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone. If this plan or undertaking is of men, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!
This is certainly sound Pharisaic doctrine. Men might disobey God, but his will would triumph notwithstanding. The will of men was not fettered, but what they willed would be overruled by God for the accomplishment of his own purpose.33 In the words of a later rabbi, Yohanan the sandal-maker, “every assembling together that is for the sake of heaven will in the end be established, but any that is not for the sake of heaven will not in the end be established.”34 That Gamaliel should take the line ascribed to him by Luke is what we might have expected.
But if it was Gamaliel’s line, it was certainly not Paul’s. In most matters indeed, including, for example, the resurrection hope and the techniques of biblical exegesis, Paul was probably an apt pupil and faithful follower of his teacher.35 It has indeed been thought that an unnamed pupil of Gamaliel who manifested “impudence in matters of learning” and tried to refute his master was no other than Paul.36 If this is so (and it is quite uncertain), then the tradition reflects disapproval of Paul’s later departure from the rabbinical path; it preserves no reminiscence of Paul’s actual behaviour while he sat at Gamaliel’s feet. But in one respect Paul did deviate from his master’s example: he repudiated the idea that a temporizing policy was the proper one to adopt towards the disciples of Jesus. To his mind, this new movement posed a more deadly threat to all that he had learned to hold dear than Gamaliel seemed able to appreciate. Moreover, Paul’s temperament appears to have been quite different from Gamaliel’s: as against Gamaliel’s statesmanlike patience and tolerance, Paul was characterized, on his own confession, by a superabundance of zeal37—which, indeed, he never entirely lost.
Since the cherished object of his zeal was the ancestral traditions—the ancient law of Israel and its interpretation as taught in the school of Gamaliel—we should not be surprised to learn that he was dissatisfied with the Hillelite view that a bare preponderance of good over bad in a man’s life was sufficient to win him a favourable verdict on the day of judgment. On this point at least he seems to have inclined rather to the Shammaite view that the law was to be kept in its totality. That this was Paul’s attitude is implied at a later date when he tells his converts in Galatia, who were being pressed to adopt certain legal requirements of Judaism, that they need not imagine that, if they chose this way of acceptance with God, they could pick and choose among the divine commandments: “I testify … to every man who receives circumcision that he is bound to keep the whole law” (Galatians 5:3). Such an attitude to the law determined Paul’s hostile assessment of the followers of Jesus and their teaching.