Who Was Saul of Tarsus Before Damascus? (1 of 12)

Three worlds met in one man, and every one of them turned out to be necessary.

He was a Hebrew of Hebrews trained under the most respected rabbi of the age. He was a Greek-speaking native of a university city. And he was a Roman citizen from birth, which is the credential that eventually put him in front of Caesar.

None of that was arranged by him.

Where Was Paul From?

Tarsus in Cilicia, born somewhere around AD 5 to 10.

Tarsus was not a backwater. It was a centre of learning with a serious philosophical reputation, and growing up there meant Greek as a first language and constant contact with the intellectual currents of the eastern empire.

He tells the tribune in Acts 21:39 that he is a citizen of no ordinary city, which is a Roman speaking to a Roman about status, and it lands.

What Was Paul’s Education?

Jerusalem, under Gamaliel.

Acts 22:3 has him saying he was born in Tarsus but brought up in Jerusalem, thoroughly trained under Gamaliel in the law of his ancestors. That is not a generic claim. Gamaliel appears in Acts 5:34 as the Pharisee whose counsel the Sanhedrin took, described as a teacher of the law honoured by all the people.

So Paul studied under the leading rabbinic authority of his generation. When he argues from the Hebrew Scriptures later, in letter after letter, that is where the equipment came from.

He did not take his teacher’s line. Gamaliel’s advice to the Sanhedrin in Acts 5 is to leave the movement alone, on the grounds that if it is not from God it will collapse on its own. That is broadly the position of Hillel’s school. Wright’s reading is that Saul went with the rival school of Shammai instead, which held that anyone serious about God’s reign should be ready to act, against compromising Jews as much as against pagans.

The student took the harder line and then proved his teacher’s point from the wrong end of it.

He also learned a trade, as every rabbi did. Acts 18:3 makes him a tentmaker, and that trade funds missionary journeys for the next thirty years.

Was Paul a Roman Citizen?

By birth, and the detail matters more than it looks.

In Acts 22:28 a Roman commander mentions that he paid a great sum for his citizenship, and Paul answers that he was born to it. Inherited citizenship outranked purchased citizenship socially, and the exchange has an edge to it.

Practically, that status shapes everything downstream. It protects him from flogging at Jerusalem. It forces an apology out of the magistrates at Philippi. It gives him the right of appeal that eventually carries him to Rome at imperial expense.

A Jewish Pharisee with Roman citizenship and Greek as a mother tongue was an unusual combination, and it is the exact combination the mission required.

What Kind of Pharisee Was Paul?

By his own account, an exceptional one, and he lists the résumé precisely so he can call it loss.

Phil 3:5-6 gives it in order: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee as to the law, a persecutor of the church as to zeal, faultless as to legal righteousness.

Read that list carefully. Zeal is measured by persecution. In the world he came from that was a credential rather than an embarrassment, and N. T. Wright argues the models behind it were specific rather than general.

Phinehas is the first. In Num 25, with Israel intermarrying and worshipping Moabite gods and a plague running through the camp, he follows a couple into a tent and kills them both with one thrust. The plague stops. He is given a covenant of perpetual priesthood, and Ps 106 says of the act that it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

That last phrase should stop you. It is the sentence Gen 15:6 uses of Abraham’s faith, and 1 Maccabees quotes both texts together when Mattathias commissions his sons for holy violence. In Saul’s world, reckoned as righteousness was a zeal slogan.

Elijah is the second model, killing the prophets of Baal after the contest on Carmel. Wright notes that later tradition pairs him with Phinehas precisely on zeal.

So the young man who held the coats at Stephen’s execution was not improvising. He had scriptural precedent, and he had a phrase that certified it.

He is not describing a man who felt guilty and was looking for relief. He is describing a man who was succeeding at what he had set out to do.

What Was Paul’s Role in the Death of Stephen?

He was there, he approved, and he did not soften it afterward.

Acts 7:58 places the coats of the witnesses at the feet of a young man named Saul. Acts 8:1 says he approved of the killing. Then Acts 8:3 has him beginning to destroy the church, going house to house, dragging off men and women and putting them in prison.

His own testimony years later, in Acts 26:10-11, is more damning than Luke’s narrative. He says he cast his vote against them, that he tried to force them to blaspheme, and that he was so obsessed that he hunted them in foreign cities.

Nothing about that is minimised in the New Testament. The man who wrote most of it is the man who is on record as having presided at an execution.

Did the Persecution Work?

It did the opposite, and Luke says so almost immediately.

Acts 8:1 has the persecution scattering the believers throughout Judea and Samaria. Acts 8:4 then says that those who were scattered preached the word wherever they went.

The campaign designed to contain the movement distributed it. That is worth noticing because it happens repeatedly in this story and because Paul, who ran the campaign, later spent his life as its beneficiary.

Why Does Paul’s Background Matter?

Because the man who carried the message to three worlds had been formed in all three before he had any use for the message.

Rabbinic training under Gamaliel gave him the Scriptures. Greek as a native language and a Hellenistic education gave him Athens and Corinth and Ephesus. Roman citizenship gave him legal standing and, eventually, the road to the capital.

Whatever one makes of the theology, the preparation is remarkable and none of it was aimed at what it ended up being used for. He was building a career as a defender of the tradition, and every tool he acquired doing that turned out to serve the movement he was trying to destroy.

Part of a series following the Apostle Paul timeline.

Footnotes2

1. That Paul was trained under Gamaliel is worth holding alongside Acts 5:34-39, where Gamaliel advises the Sanhedrin to leave the movement alone on the grounds that if it is of God they cannot stop it. His student took the opposite approach and then proved his teacher's point from the other direction.
2. The exchange about citizenship in Acts 22:28 is one of the few places where Paul's social standing is visible. Purchased citizenship was common among provincial officials. Inherited citizenship implied a family with standing going back at least a generation, which tells us something about Tarsus that Paul never states directly.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Acts 5:34, 7:58, 8:1-4, 18:3, 21:39, 22:3, 22:28, 26:10-11, and Phil 3:5-6.

N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (HarperOne, 2018), chapter 1. Supports the Phinehas and Elijah models behind first-century zeal, the use of the reckoned-as-righteousness formula in 1 Maccabees, and the reading of Saul as taking the Shammaite line against his own teacher. Supplied in full.

Where the sourcing stops: the birth range of AD 5 to 10 is an estimate standard in Pauline chronology rather than a datable fact. The reading of zeal as a credential in the Phinehas and Maccabean tradition is background covered in the Simon the Zealot post and is not a claim particular to Paul.