St. Paul’s education and native bent were strongly Palestinian and Pharisaic. But he could not help acquiring knowledge of the broader Hellenizing theology that had spread from Alexandria amongst the Greek Diaspora, with which Apollos (Ac 18”) and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews were imbued. He used freely the Book of Wisdom, which emanated from this school. In Col 1” (written, however, after Paul had met with Apollos) he shows his mastery of the theosophie specula- tions of the Alexandrian (and Essenic) Jewish teachers; and his langnaee ap s to indicate some literary contact with his elder contemporary Philo (see Lightfoot and Klépper on Col. ad loc. and Jowett’s Essay on ‘St. Paul and Philo’ in his Epp. of St. Paul). Paul’s use of types and allegory may have been learnt from his masters at Jerusalem.
St. Paul’s Tarsian birth and Roman citizenship secured to him an outfit for the Gentile apostleship such as no mere Palestinian Jew could possess. When Krenkel (as referred to above) contests the former point, and Hausrath (op. cit. p. 19), with Renan and others, the latter, they show undeserved distrust of the Acts; and they deny to Paul the status and equipment indispensable for his mission to the Gus onad world (see Lightf. Bid/. ang iv.). Of his Gentile connexions, along with his Jewish antecedents, the apostle was thinking when he spoke of God as ‘having marked me out [for my life-mission] from my mother’s womb’ (Gal 115). The |Rabbinical student of Jerusalem was first a Jewish boy in the streets of a heathen city, and his home continued to be there (he was certainly absent from Jerusalem during the visits of Jesus). St. Paul’s insight into the moral working of idol- atry, and his ready appreciation of Gentile senti- ment, speak for this. He is everywhere at home in the synagogues of the Dispersion. In the Greco- Asiatic Tarsus (see art. TARSUS) the products of East and West met, ships of all countries lay at its wharves—a place to stir in an impressionable child thoughts and dreams of the wide world, and to impart an instinctive aptitude for mixing with allsortsof men. In Saul’s nature Greek versatility was blended with Jewish tenacity.
Tarsus was the capital of Cilicia, then incor- posted in the province of Syria. This city issued
ortunately from the troubles of the Roman civil wars, receiving the title of metropolis and the immunities of an urbs libera (Dio Chrys., Orat. 23 Pliny, ΗΝ v. 27; cf. Ac 21%); it had therefore its ecclesia, its elective magistrates and local jurisdic- tion; and Paul’s father doubtless held the municipal along with the imperial franchise. This environ- ment made Saul a citizen of the world, while he was a Jewish scholar and devotee. His mental image
is not gathered, like that of Jesus, from the fields and the face of nature; where not borrowed from
PAUL THE APOSTLE
the OT, we trace it to the Jewish household and synagogue within doors, and out of doors to the streets, the agora, the stadium, the temples, the traffic of a Greek seaport town. Such cities Paul sought by predilection; their society was his native element. The contact of Jew and Gentile gore the apostle his point of yeni and he ound his main constituency in the large circle of piously disposed men and women of Greek culture attracted to the Hellenistic synagogues. Tarsus was at this period a university town of the highest repute (Strabo, xiv. 10. 13-15; Philos- tratus, Apollonius, i. 7); it sent out distinguished professors of the Stoic philosophy, and afterwards of Roman law. Strict Jewish families held aloof from the Greek schools, and Paul’s style bears scarcely any trace of classical discipline; his Greek is the κοινὴ of the Levantine shores, enriched with Hebraisms of the LXX and the Synagogue and adapted to the new Christian ideas with creative originality. The citations he makes from Greek authors are of a popular, proverbial stamp (Ac 17%, 1Co 15", Tit 113). Passages like 1 Co 1” and Col 25 indicate St. Paul’s contempt for the empty sophistic and meretricious show into which philo- sophy had degenerated. Tarsus was a conspicu- ous arena for such display, and must often have witnessed scenes resembling that in which Paul himself took so ready a part in Athens (Ac 17!"*-), At the same time St. Paul could not but receive intellectual stimulus, if only by way of aversion, from such a theatre of mental activity. His master Gamaliel is said to have encouraged Breck studies. Especially when Saul returned home after his con- version (Ac 9” 11%, Gal 1”), with his mission to the heathen definitely in view, we cannot suppose that he failed to use the facilities afforded by his native city for studying the Gentile thought of the day (see y, St. Paul the Traveller, p. 354).
Hisaddress to the ΑΥΘΟΡΒΕῸΒ shows that the apostle,
when he chose, could become a philosopher to the perro The parallels in thought between
t. Paul’s ethics and those of Seneca and the Stoics (see the Essay ad rem in Lightfoot’s Philip- pians) are, however, scarcely closer than may accounted for by the Stoical ideas in the air and ee ey unconscious sympathy with the nascent
istian faith existing in high-minded Gentile thinkers of the age.
In regard to form and expression, it is likely that Paul learnt something from the schools of _his native town. ‘In general, the Epp. of St. Paul stand much nearer to the forms of the Cynic and Stoic diatribé, as regards their methods and the complexion of their speech, than to the involved Rabbinical dialectic. Recent investigations on the subject (Wendland u. Kern, Beitrdge z. Geschichte εἰ. griech. Philos. u. Relig. pp. 3-75, Philo u. d. kynisch-stoische Diatribe) ai this relationship increasingly into light’: so Heinrici, Vorrede to 1Co in Krit.-exeg. Kommentar® (Meyer); also Canon Hicks’ Paper on ‘St. Paul and Hellenism’ in Stud. Bibl. iv.