VI. The Childhood and Youth of Paul
Just a few words more with regard to the Hellenism of Paul in response to Principal Garvie’s courteous and friendly paper! (Expositor, November, 1911, p. 470 f.) The character of the great Apostle was far too complex to be conceived and expressed in exactly the same way by two students who approach him on independent and different lines. Principal Garvie and I will doubtless continue to study, and to differ in certain matters, and, as I believe, each to respect the other’s opinion.
There are just two points on which we might perhaps approximate without much difficulty to a common view through clearer conception of the meaning of Paul’s own words.
(1) Principal Garvie quotes the Apostle’s account, as given in Acts 22:3, of his training, “brought up in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel”; and says that, while “the exact age at which Paul came to Jerusalem” is uncertain, “yet surely it must have been as a boy of twelve or thirteen at the very latest, if the words are not to be emptied of all meaning”. As to this I am compelled to differ. (I am glad to be in agreement with De Deissmann, St. Paul, p. 92.) This estimate of age would suit Acts 22:3 quite well; but would it suit Acts 26:4, where Paul defines “my manner of life from my youth up, . . . among mine own nation and at Jerusalem”? (I need not here go into the question of reading. The true text which certainly has “and at Jerusalem” (τε), only makes clearer the fact that Paul did not come to Jerusalem and Gamaliel until he could be called aνέος.) What meaning are we to gather out of the words “from my youth up”? I see nothing in Acts 22:3 to prove that Paul came to Jerusalem at thirteen years of age or earlier. I see everything in Acts 26:4 to prove that he came later than thirteen. One who had come to Jerusalem as a young boy under thirteen would not have said “from my youth up,” but rather “from my childhood up”. Paul was a young man, Neos, when he came to Jerusalem to study, or even before he came. A Neos was a grown man, not a child of thirteen. (Even though, as I think, neos (strictly, a fully-grown man of military age) encroached on and displaced ephebos (Latin adulescens, a youth approaching full growth, about seventeen or eighteen) in Anatolian usage, still a boy of thirteen would hardly be even an ephebos.) So far as concerns his studying in the rhetorical schools at Tarsus (which may for want of a more exact term be called the “University” of Tarsus), we have no reason to think that an able boy might not attend these schools at an early age. We have no exact statistics on the subject, and no knowledge. In such matters the age of entering on higher study varies widely. My wife’s father was fully ready for the University of Glasgow at eleven years of age, and was kept at home for a year until he was more mature physically. Two of the best classical scholars I have come in contact with entered the University of Aberdeen at fourteen; and I have known several who would have done much better to come a year or two earlier than they did. Yet seventeen has been the most common age in my experience, although the average is raised by a certain number of much older students. In such matters averages are quite valueless as a standard to apply to an individual case.
Moreover, it always remains an open question how much Paul learned from the educated atmosphere in which he was brought up as a boy, how much from formal instruction in public classes, and how much from training by individual teachers in his own home. There is a general tendency, of which I find numberless examples in my own circle of acquaintance, to set down to the credit of schooling much which is due simply to the natural growth of the intellectual and physical powers of the boy or girl. One attributes to the influence of the school a good deal which would have been learned apart from school. I do not intend or wish to depreciate school training: unless the school is very poorly managed, its influence is powerful and beneficent. Especially in cases where custom or carelessness entrusts the education of a child mainly to schoolteachers and frees the parents largely from the onerous duty of training the child, the importance of the school and the school-teachers is incalculable. Yet, even taking all this into account, I have nothing to retract from the above sentences. This extra-scholastic training Paul received in abundance and in impressive and judicious form, as I should be inclined to gather from Php 3:5. Such training has always been characteristic of Jewish home life, and its central point and main force lay in the family festival of the Passover with its religious and historical lessons.
Probably Principal Garvie has built more than I should be ready to accept upon the single word “brought up” in Acts 22:3, (ἀνατεθπραμμένος.) as if it necessarily implied the rearing of a child. This, however, is too much to infer. The simple and the compound verb are not used solely of children, a point on which we need not here enter. The two passages, Acts 26:4 and Acts 22:3, taken together, seem to me to be perfectly satisfied by the interpretation that Paul, when he became old enough to choose for himself — an age which varies greatly in different persons — deliberately selected and devoted himself to the Divine service in his own land among his own people at the Holy City, and went up to Jerusalem to learn at the feet of Gamaliel. Other passages in his letters, especially Php 3:15 and the Apologia pro vita sua in 1 Corinthians 7:25 f., (Expositor, October, 1900, p. 288 f.) seem to me to require the interpretation that Paul was brought up to a certain stage at Tarsus in the fashion needed for a Jewish boy who was born in the local aristocracy as a Roman citizen and a burgess of Tarsus, and that with full knowledge and conscious choice he selected, like Moses, the life of serving God and his people through training in the Law at Jerusalem. That Paul spoke the “Hebrew” language fluently seems in no way inconsistent with the upbringing in a Pharisaic household of Jews who were Roman citizens. In modern times I have known Jews who learned Hebrew early in life, though living in western European lands, far removed from many of the influences which were acting on a strict Jewish household in Tarsus, such as the visits to Jerusalem for the feasts and the easy free connexion with the Holy City. That a household of Graeco-Roman citizens should at once remain strictly Jewish and yet be learned in all the wisdom and the subtlety of the Roman Imperial world of the East, seems to me quite natural and in perfect accordance with previous and subsequent Hebrew history.
(2) Principal Garvie says that “Paul’s familiarity with Greek and Roman life as shown in his metaphors, the last argument which Sir William Ramsay offers, seems to me adequately accounted for by what I have freely conceded of Gentile influence on Paul in his early years, in his travels, in his visits to his native city”. As to Paul’s “early years,” that is the point in discussion; and the Principal seems to concede at one time what he refuses at another. According to his own expression on p. 472, “Jewish exclusiveness would have prevented what” he here concedes. If it was allowed by his parents and the national Jewish feeling in Tarsus that Paul should mix so freely in childhood with the Greeks, that he learned to speak with wonderfully sympathetic insight (The sympathetic feeling which breathes through the words of Paul in several cases can be appreciated only by those who have competed with the enjoyment of childhood in such athletic games.) regarding the intensity of effort in sports (which were abhorred by the strict Palestinian Jews), and to compare this intensity of effort needed in athletic sports with the spirit needed for living the truly religious life, why should he be debarred from coming into any relation with the Greek education, which was absolutely necessary to enable his father to play his part as a Roman citizen and a Greek burgess? As a boy under fourteen he was, on that theory, allowed to come during his most impressionable age into a position of complete familiarity with the spirit of Greek athletic and municipal life, so that words and ideas taken from it suggest themselves to him in the mood and at the moment when he is most inspired with the beauty and character of the true life. When he rises to the most sublime utterance regarding the magnificence and perfection and glory of the Saviour’s victory on the cross, he expresses his glowing thought in metaphor from a Roman triumph, which of course he could never have seen and about which he could have learned only in the course of a Roman education in the duties and dignity of Roman citizenship.
All this implies, so far as I can judge, a deep and hearty comprehension of Graeco-Roman life, and remains wholly inexplicable without that comprehension. Who can comprehend without sympathy? The idea is unthinkable. Nor does later Gentile influence on Paul “in his travels and in his visits to his native city,” seem to me to furnish any adequate explanation. Either the visits took place during the years when he was still young and impressionable — the very point under discussion — or they were too late to meet the facts of the case. I do not think that he went to Jerusalem to study there during some months of each year, and returned to Tarsus to spend his holidays at home, like a modern University undergraduate. He went to Jerusalem to devote his life to his people and his God and the Law of God. The experiences of his travels, after he became a Christian, when he was over thirty, or perhaps over forty, do not mould the inmost spirit in such a way that metaphors from those experiences rise to the mind in moments of deep feeling, as is the case with a number of the athletic metaphors used by Paul to express the ideas that he thought most holy and Divine. Principal Garvie, as I think, is in some places thinking of the Tarsian-Roman Paul, while in other places he attributes to him the feelings of a narrow Palestinian Jew.
There is not the shadow of a trace of evidence that either Paul or the Hellenistic Jews considered Greek philosophy to be in itself “a corrupting influence”. Nor does Principal Garvie adduce any evidence to that effect: he only speaks on p. 472 of Greek philosophy as a thing which Paul “must have regarded as a corrupting influence”. Certainly Paul was in the last degree unlikely to spend any time after he became a Christian in studying philosophy. So far every one will agree. Paul had already gone through it and come out on the other side (as the Oxford undergraduate said about Jowett and Hegelianism). It was not necessary for a mind like Paul’s to spend long years in studying Greek philosophy, as the ordinary modern College pupil does. He caught up its ideas and traversed the philosophy of his time as a great mathematician sweeps over a new treatise in his subject, making himself master of it all in the time that an ordinary person would spend in failing to comprehend the first few pages: the mathematical genius recognises much that is already half consciously outlined in his own mind.
Let us take an analogous case from the character of the legislation of Moses (if, for the sake of illustration, and without any disrespect to some great modern scholars who deny that an individual corresponding to the name Moses ever existed, we may assume for the moment the reality of his life and work): one might argue that he was a highly educated man, familiar with all the wisdom of his time. It is probable that this inference would be controverted on the ground that Moses was too characteristic and patriotic and enthusiastic a Jew to have studied extraneous literature deeply, were it not for the recorded fact that Moses was educated mainly in that non-Jewish wisdom. So it was and must be with Paul. We know about Moses from the record. We know about Paul only from his writings; and they show him to be not only a typical “Hebrew sprung from Hebrews,” but also a man capable of mixing on equal terms with the educated men of the Graeco-Roman world. Similarly, Luke describes him as discussing philosophy with the Athenian Stoics and Epicureans, giving a specimen of his philosophic teaching before the Court of Areopagus, a friend of the educated Asiarchs in Ephesus, and astonishing the Roman governor in Cyprus by his exposition of moral principles.
It was the wideness of Paul’s early experiences and training that made him the one Apostle able to appreciate fully, to lay special emphasis on, and to make clear to the world the spirit of freedom and the universalism in the teaching and life and death of Jesus. (It is in my view necessary to hold closely together in thought the three: the teaching was of small value without the life and the death. So Paul held, and such is the fact. That is the one answer to those who maintain that the historical truth of the life and the death of Jesus is unimportant, and that what is really important for the world is His teaching.)
It is sometimes asserted that it was not Paul’s previous education, but his present experience of Christ as Saviour and Lord, which so vitalised for him those features of the teaching of Jesus that others had failed to appreciate. (Quoted from Principal Garvie.) But this “present experience of Christ as Saviour” was as vividly and vitally present to the other Apostles as to Paul; and the question is, why at first they “failed to appreciate” the side which Paul appreciated. It was the individuality, the nature, the character of Paul which, after he had been laid hold of by Jesus, “vitalised for him features . . . which others had failed to appreciate”; and Paul, in his whole nature, had been made by his entire education and previous experience. The rest did not catch this feature as Paul did; but as soon as Paul caught it and stated it clearly, the other Apostles as a body appreciated it, and accepted Paul’s position. The only Christian who seemed to be on the point of catching the Pauline view before Paul was Stephen, the great Hellenist Jew. The experience of a higher teacher is always the same. Let him state his view as clearly as he can to a class, and he is fortunate if even one catches immediately the spirit, and what the teacher deems the fundamental truth of the teaching. The rest, however devoted and in a sense appreciative, are Wagners to this Faustus.
Principal Garvie and I are so far in agreement that we regard the Jewish inheritance and nature and home training as the fundamental and dominant factor in the thought and life of Paul. First of all, at all times, in all situations, we feel in him the Jew. But I incline to lay more emphasis on the fact that in Paul we feel always the educated Jew, trained to life as a Roman citizen in the most aristocratic position among the population of the great Hellenised, yet more than half Asiatic, city of Tarsus. Principal Garvie would lay less stress on this side of Paul’s complex individuality. I can understand the philosophic position of Paul only on the theory that the expression of his views was influenced by Greek philosophy, whereas the Principal (if I rightly apprehend him) thinks that it was not so influenced. The difference is, in a sense, slight; yet it implies considerable difference in our estimate of Paul’s cast of thought and his early training. In the following sections I shall attempt to put my own conception from my own point of view.
Only in regard to one sentence of Principal Garvie’s last article (In the Expositor, November, 1911.) must I wholly and absolutely disagree. He says on p. 471, “to me it seems more probable that Paul was more affected by the Tarsian environment on his visit after his conversion than during his early years”. On the contrary the influence which I seem to see in Paul is one that lies too deep to belong to his mature life, and one that depends on circumstances too inharmonious with Paul’s mental attitude after he became a Christian to be assigned to that period. Only in childhood and the earliest youth is such an influence possible. That Paul during his long residence in Cilicia and Syria, after he fled from Jerusalem, was still engaged in thinking out the philosophic basis of his religious position I would fully concede, though probably the most important part of that work had already been done in the Arabian solitude; but nothing seems to be more unlikely than that during even the final stage of this process he should be studying Greek philosophy or Hellenic manners and customs. In recasting his religious and philosophical position, his whole previous education served to mould the definition of his new thought, as it gradually took clear form in his mind, and his entire past life was an infinitely more important influence in determining that form than the circumstances of the present moment in Cilician society.
