Hellenism

Why Did Paul Not Go to Jerusalem?

When Paul encounters the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, he immediately goes to the synagogues in Damascus (Acts 9:19-25).  These are the synagogues which had likely informed the Sanhedrin that Hellenistic Jews were proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah and were expecting Paul to arrive and argue against the Hellenists who have recently arrived from Jerusalem with this new idea that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.

BenTal SignInstead, the content of Paul’s message is that Jesus was in fact the Son of God (Acts 9).  This is a messianic title drawn from Psalm 2.  Jesus was the long awaited son of David, the ultimate heir of the Davidic Covenant.  That Paul preaches Jesus is as the Son of God is significant because it is the first time such language has appeared in Acts; it will appear a second time in Acts 13:3.  This is likely a clue that the synagogue speech in Acts 13 is intended as representative of Paul’s speech before Jews in a synagogue. Paul’s presentation in the synagogue was the exact opposite of expectations – It is little wonder that there was a strong reaction in the synagogues against Paul!

After his encounter with Jesus, we might have thought Paul would have returned to Jerusalem and immediately confronted the Sanhedrin and the High Priest, the very people approved of Paul’s mission to Damascus in the first place. But he does not return to Jerusalem for three years and, according to his own testimony on Gal 1:16-17, when he did go up to Jerusalem, it was only for a short visit of fifteen days.

As Martin Hengel points out, Jerusalem is where the apostles are to be found, not Galilee or elsewhere in Judea.  If Jerusalem was the focal point of the messianic preaching of the apostles, why did Paul not immediately go there and work with Peter and John in the Temple courts.  Rather than go to Jerusalem, Paul goes into “Arabia” for three years.

Hengel and Schwemer suggest three reasons for Paul’s activities immediately after his conversion.  First, Paul was a zealous persecutor of the church and he transferred that zeal into preaching the gospel.  He met a resurrected and glorified Jesus who commissioned him as the apostle to the Gentiles.  It is only natural that he would want to immediately begin this new task, given to him by his Savior.

Second, belief in an imminent return of Jesus meant that evangelistic activity needed to cover as wide an area as possible.  Evangelism in Jerusalem was already underway and the apostles were stationed there to continue their work.  Later in his career Paul will constantly move out into un-reached areas of the world, creating strategic bases in larger cities from which the local churches can continue the work of evangelism.  For Paul, Arabia was an unreached area and he was uniquely suited to the task as a Hellenistic Jew.

Third, it would have been extremely dangerous to return since he has “switched sides” and now was a passionate supported of Jesus as the Messiah.  While Paul is not described as avoiding persecution, he may have thought that it would be better to have success elsewhere rather than go and be executed by his former masters!

Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Paul Between Damascus and Antioch (Louisville: Westminster / John Knox, 1997), 94.

Paul and Gamaliel

I wrote a short note on Paul’s relationship with Gamaliel two years ago and it has been one of the more popular posts on Reading Acts.  It generated a great deal of discussion, some of which was more heat than light. Several people objected that it does not really matter who Paul’s human teachers were, after his conversion experience he was taught by the Holy Spirit.  Human teachers and influences, for some at least, did not matter. Since I am teaching through Paul and his Letters again this fall, I thought I would revisit that older post and provide some additional thoughts on Gamaliel as background for reading Paul.

Rabbi GamalielThere are some good reasons to investigate Paul’s claim to have been educated by Gamaliel.  First, Gamaliel was one of the premier teachers of the Law in the first century. By claiming to have been under the teaching of this particular rabbi, Paul is claiming to have been educated in a most impressive way.  In fact, it almost sounds as if he is name-dropping in order to impress people!  Second, Gamaliel taught between A.D. 22-55, so we can get an approximate early date for Paul’s education. If Paul began study at the latest age of 16, we can guess a birth year of about A.D. 6 at the earliest.  Third, as John Polhill observes, several rulings from Gamaliel appear in the Mishnah, the Jewish commentary on the Law. These mostly have something to do with marriage and divorce. For example, Giṭ. 4:2 Gamaliel forbade husbands from divorcing their wives without their knowledge. Perhaps Gamiliel’s views influenced Paul’s personal comments on marriage in 1 Cor 7 (Polhill, Paul and his Letters, 30).

The rabbi Gamaliel was a Pharisee in the tradition of the great Hillel. A generation before Christ there were two great rabbis, Hillel and Shammai.  While this is a generalization, many of the rabbinic debates of the first century come down to the opinion of Hillel versus Shammai.  With respect to Hellenism, Hillel was more open to Hellenism than Shammai and was therefore more open to cooperation with the Romans.

Evidence for this more accommodating opinion is found in the book of Acts, although some (like Chilton) are not completely convinced Acts portrays Gamaliel accurately. Gamaliel is reported to have offered somewhat lenient advice concerning the early preaching of the apostles (Acts 5:34-39). He states that if the apostolic movement is from God then it cannot be stopped, if it is not form God then it cannot succeed. Gamaliel is reflecting the Hillel tradition of non-violence and allowing God to deal with parties that against the Jews (Polhill, Paul and His Letters, 31).

If Saul is in fact a disciple of Gamaliel, then he seems to have a considerably different opinion on how to handle the apostolic witness when we meet him in Acts 9.  In fact, Paul describes himself as a ruthless persecutor who sought to stop what he saw as an aberration within Judaism.  The people who Paul persecuted were Diaspora Jews who accepted Jesus as Messiah and claimed that God raised Jesus from the dead.  How can we account for this violent reaction in a man trained by Gamaliel?

One possibility is that Paul was not of the Hillel form of Pharasism, but rather the more conservative Shammaite party. N. T. Wright describes the Shammaite Pharisee as a militant “hard-liner” that was not willing to work with Rome as long as they could study the Torah, as Hillel had said (What Saint Paul Really Said, 26).  In Philippians Paul describes himself as a Diaspora Jew who claimed to have been raised in a family which kept the Jewish traditions faultlessly.  But is it correct to characterize Paul as an ultra-conservative reacting to what he perceived as a dangerous liberal view, namely, that Jesus was the Messiah and the High Priest killed him. For Chilton, it was the speech of Stephen that forced Paul to openly break from his teacher by participating in the stoning of Stephen (Rabbi Jesus, 43).

To what extent should we use Paul’s training “at the feet of Gamaliel” as background to understanding his later theology? Is Paul a “Christian Pharisee” who believes in Jesus? Or does he break away from Gamaliel and the Pharisees in other ways?

Bibliography: Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus 28-47; “Gamaliel” in ABD 2:904

Paul and Judaism

John Polhill uses Paul’s testimony in Philippians 3:4-6 to describe Paul’s Jewish heritage.  In this passage Paul says he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, and the Tribe of Benjamin, a ‘Hebrew of the Hebrews.’”  For some readers, this might seem to be a bit of a shock, Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles was born and raised a Jew, and never repudiated that heritage.  Even in Philippians Paul lists his accomplishments with a little bit of pride.

Paul’s claim in Philippians is that he is a proper Jew – circumcised on the eighth day indicates that he comes from a family that is keeping the Jewish traditions despite living in Tarsus.  It is possible that there were Diaspora Jews who did not keep this tradition or even did not circumcise their sons. The reference to being a member of Israel connects Paul to the covenant as a member of Abraham’s family.  Paul was not a Jew pretending to be a Greek, but rather a Jew who was well aware of his heritage as a child of Abraham.

Paul JewishThat Paul claims to be from the tribe of Benjamin is significant since not every Jew in the first century could claim to know they were from a particular tribe.  Paul’s Jewish name “Saul” is taken from the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin, and Paul’s teacher in Jerusalem, Gamaliel, was also from the tribe of Benjamin.

The phrase “Hebrew of the Hebrews” can be taken in several ways.  This phrase may mean that Paul was born of true Jewish blood, that there is no Gentile in his linage. It is sometimes suggested that Paul is referring to his ability to speak and read Hebrew. Not all Jews spoke the language, especially in the home.  If there is an increasing specificity in the list of descriptions, then perhaps Polhill is right and Paul is saying that he is from an extremely Jewish family, one that still speaks the language at home (Pollhill, PAHL, 26).

Paul is, in the words of J. B. Lightfoot, making a progressive argument.  A convert to Judaism may be circumcised, someone with some Gentile in his linage might claim a tribal affiliation, but Paul is a pure-bred true Jew!  Of course, in Philippians 3 Paul is clear that this heritage is of no value now that he is “in Christ,” but it seems obvious that Paul’s Jewish heritage is one of the major factors behind his successful evangelism.

In a recent book, Pamela Eisenbaum claims provocatively, Paul was not a Christian (Harper One, 2009). Her point is to read Paul in a Jewish context for the purpose of defusing anti-Judaistic interpretations of Paul.  As her book argues, Paul’s letters are only Christian because Christians chose to canonize them. According to Eisenbaum, there are not many distinctly “Christian” elements in the books, he is a Jew concerned with how other Jews understand a particular messianic claim (namely, that Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah).  On the one hand, I am not at all persuaded by the book (obviously Paul was a Christian!), but she does make the point well that Paul is not a Christian in the sense that a post-Reformation follower of Jesus is a Christian. I doubt Paul would fit in at a meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society or the Southern Baptist Convention.

Does Paul depart from his heritage?  In some ways his theology is certainly radical, but perhaps not as radical as often assumed.

Paul: A Citizen of Two Cities

When John Polhill calls Paul a “citizen of two cities” he is of course referring to Tarsus and Jerusalem (Paul and his Letters, 5). He has in mind Acts 21:39 where Paul claims both Greco-Roman and Jewish heritage.  In the first chapter of N. T. Wright’s Paul: A Fresh Perspective Paul is described as living in three worlds, Greek, Roman and Jewish.  As a Roman citizen Paul was certainly part of the Greco-Roman world, but he was also educated in Jerusalem and “zealous for the Law.” These two worlds seem incompatible, part of the “secular” world of Rome and yet also a conservative, traditional Jew.

Philo of Alexandria

Philo of Alexandria

Paul is a representative of Diaspora Judaism. Diaspora is a term applied to Jews who were living outside of Palestine, they were dispersed throughout the world, Babylon and Egypt from the captivity, but nearly every major city had a colony of Jews living in it.  Because they lived far from Jerusalem, the temple as no longer the center of their religion, the synagogue was.  It was in the synagogue that the studied the Torah and worshiped on the Sabbath.  The synagogue was the educational center for young Jews and a social support system for the Jewish community in a town.

Jews living in the Second Temple Period struggled with just how far they should go in assimilating into Greek culture.  This process of Hellenization varied from community to community, perhaps even family to family.  There is a difference between speaking Greek in order to do business with Gentiles and eating with them, ignoring food traditions.

All Jews were in some ways Hellenized, even those living in Jerusalem.   John Barclay studied Jewish documents from Diaspora communities developed three areas of Hellenization found in the Diaspora:

  • Assimilation.  How successfully has a Jew become integrated into the dominant culture?  On the low end, someone who stays within a Jewish neighborhood and has no contact with gentiles, in the middle, someone who has daily business contact with gentiles but maintains the “boundary markers”, at the high end Jews who have abandon those markers.  There are relatively few Jews at the high end, although some reversed circumcision or became a part of a pagan cult.
  • Acculturation.  To what degree does a Jew internalize the dominant culture? At the low end, a Jew might have no knowledge of Greek, while in the middle of the scale there is a use of Greek and basic familiarity with Greco-Roman ethics and culture.  At the high end, a Jew who understands and uses the literature and rhetoric of the Greco-Roman world and has a mastery of the Greek language.
  • Accommodation.  This measures the extent to which a Jew puts to use their acculturation. On one end of this scale, a Jew might reject Gentile culture entirely. On the other end of the scale, a Jew might completely embrace the Greco-Roman world and drop all of the markers which set them apart as Jews. Perhaps the Essenes represent the far end of this continuum since they attempted to live separate from any type of uncleanliness. Philo and his brother Alexander might represent the other end of the scale since they participated in every level of society in Alexandria, Egypt. Philo attempted to present his Jewish heritage in categories that would be most acceptable to the Greek philosophical world.

The issues raised here resonate throughout Paul’s letters.  The earliest Gentile believers who were completely Greco-Roman struggled to integrate their new status of “in Christ” into their ethical and moral decisions.  On the other extreme, Jewish converts struggle with Paul’s broadly Hellenized Gospel which did not require the Law for Gentile converts.

Since Paul claimed to be both a Roman citizen and a Jewish Pharisee in Acts 21, where does he fit into this scale? In other words, how “Hellenized” was Paul? Is it at least possible to detect some movement along this scale of Hellenization from “early Paul” to later?

Bibliography: John Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to Trajan Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996.

Background to the Gospels: Part 2 – Hellenism

A second important element for the background of the Gospels is the pervasiveness influence of Hellenism after Alexander the Great. Hellenism refers to Greek language and culture, and as Mark Strauss comments in Four Portraits, “Alexander’s enduring legacy for New Testament background is his promotion of the process of Hellenization” (96). After Alexander everyone in the Near East were in some respects “hellenized.” They spoke Greek, Greek fashions were dominant, certain features were expected in “Greek cities” (gymnasiums, theaters, etc.)  If a city or region rejected these sorts of things, they were considered backwards.  To be “Greek” was be a citizen of the world.

The struggle against Hellenism is the “plot” of the intertestamental period – how will the Jews react to this new culture imposed by foreign occupiers?  How can one keep “Jewish Traditions” in a world which is increasingly Greek (or later, Roman)? There will be some Jews who are as completely hellenized as possible, yet others will resist and cling to Jewish traditions.  These were factors which led to the Maccabean Revolt in 165 B.C. as well as the Jewish Revolt against Rome in A.D.66.

There are several indications that many Jews accepted Greek culture. Jews with Greek names are common. The most obvious example is that of Onias II and his brother Joshua. This priestly family battled for control of the high priesthood in the years leading up to the Maccabean revolt. Joshua took the Greek name Jason and attempted to re-found Jerusalem as a Greek city, complete with a gymnasium near the temple.

In reaction to growing Hellenism, the Hasidim, or “pious people,” did not want to have anything to do with Greek culture.  They believed that Jewish culture was from God and that anyone that adopted Greek ways was committing idolatry and apostasy. This conservative movement will develop into the “parties” of the New Testament period including the Pharisees, Sadducees and the Essenes.

These problems did not end when Rome absorbed Palestine into the empire. Some Jews had no problem with the Romans. Herod the Great, for example, was more Roman than Jewish. The Sadducees could work with the Romans to maintain power in Jerusalem. The question was not “should we Hellenize,” but “how far can we Hellenize and remain loyal to God?” For example, everyone spoke Greek, if you wanted to communicate to the culture around you (sell your goods, travel, etc), Greek was unavoidable. But is it permissible to study the Hebrew Bible in a Greek translation? There were many Jews who did not speak or read Hebrew, the only way to hear God’s word was through the Greek translation (the Septuagint).

In the background of the whole New Testament is a struggle between conforming to a foreign culture (Greek, Roman) and clinging tenaciously to the boundary markers of Judaism (Sabbath, circumcision, food traditions, monotheism). What I find interesting is that Jesus never rejects these boundary markers and they rarely come up in his teaching. He has some rather pointed criticisms of the Pharisees and their Sabbath and cleanliness traditions, but he does not reject Judaism in favor of Hellenism.

There is the same sort of struggle Christians have in a contemporary setting. We cannot avoid the world; even the Amish interact with non-Amish world! But how far that cultural engagement can go without destroying the core values is always one of the main topics of discussion for the Church. Does the background plot of the New Testament help with this struggle?