Paul Was No Nice Jewish Boy

It is conventional academic opinion today that the apostle Paul was an authentic, committed Jew, before and after his conversion on the Damascus road. The tenor of the reception that other Jews of his time gave him is, however, striking -- literally. He himself recounts in a letter that, "Five times I have at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned" (2 Cor. 11:24-25). Maybe he wasn't such a faithful or authentic Jew after all.

After his conversion, Paul was in the habit of insistently trumpeting his Jewish credentials. He told a crowd of Jews gathered against him, "I am a Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God as you all are this day" (Acts 22:3). As the author of Acts mentions twice, the Jews were momentarily impressed and silenced when Paul addressed them in the holy tongue, Hebrew.

In his letters he often boasts of his grasp of the highest levels of Jewish learning: "I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers" (Gal 1:14). The emphasis on his own Jewish authenticity is so insistent that you start to wonder.

Consider the apostle's boast that his family came from the tribe of Benjamin. This is hard to believe simply because sometime after the return from the Babylonian exile in 536 BCE such tribal distinctions were lost.

Then there is the doubtful assertion that he knew Hebrew. When he cites the Bible, it is evident that he was consulting the Greek translation, the Septuagint, which does not always adhere to an accurate rendering of the original meaning.

If Paul was not sufficiently fluent to read the Bible in Hebrew, then the notion that he was ever a student of the great Gamaliel is called into question. Gamaliel was not a children's Sunday school teacher, but rather the leading sage of his day. Anyone who had studied "at his feet" would by definition also be among the foremost Jewish scholars. That such a person would be able to understand the Bible in its original language should go without saying.

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