The life and work of St. Paul

82 THE LIFE AND WOES OF ST. PAUL,
not know. It may have been the same missionary zeal which afterwards
carried to so many regions the young man of Tarsus who at this time was
among his ablest opponents. All that wo are told is that " there arose some
of the synagogue which is called the synagogue of the Libertines and Cyrenians,
and Alexandrians, and those of CUicia and Asia disputing with Stephen."
The form of the sentence is so obscure that it is impossible to tell whether we
are meant to understand that the opponents of Stephen were the members of
one synagogue which united these widely-scattered elements ;
of five separate
synagogues ; of three synagogues namely, that of the Freedmen, that of the
or of two distinct synagogues, of
African, and that of the Asiatic Hellenists ;
which one was frequented by the Hellenists of Rome, Greece, and Alexandria ;
the other by those of Cilicia and Proconsular Asia. The number of synagogues
in Jerusalem was (as I have already mentioned) so large that there is no diffi-
culty in believing that each of these bodies had their own separate place of
religious meeting, 1 just as at this day in Jerusalem there are separate synagogues
for the Spanish Sephardim, the Dutch Anshe hod, and the German and
Polish Ashkenazim. 2 The freedmen may have been the descendants of those
Jews whom Pompey had sent captive to Italy, and Jews were to be counted by
myriads in Greece, in Alexandria, and in tho cities of Asia. But to us the
most interesting of all these Greek-speaking Jews was Saul of Tarsus, who,
beyond all reasonable doubt, was a member of tho synagogue of tho Cilicians.a
and who hi that case must not only have taken his part in the disputes which
followed the exhortations of the fervid deacon,* but as a scholar of Gamaliel
and a zealous Pharisee, must have occupied a prominent position as an uncom-
promising champion of the traditions of the fathers.
Though the Saul of this period must have differed widely from that Paul,
the slave of Jesus Christ, whom we know so well, yet the main features of his
personality must have been tho same. He could not have failed to recognise
the moral beauty, the dauntless courage, the burning passion latent in the
tenderness of Stephen's character. The white ashes of a religion which had
smouldered into formalism lay thickly scattered over his own heart, but the fire
of a genuine sincerity burned below. Trained as he had been for years in
Rabbinic minutiae, he had not yet so far grown old in a deadening system as to
mistake the painted cere-cloths of the mummy for the grace and flush of healthy
life. While he listened to St. Stephen, he must surely have felt the contrast
between a dead theology and a living faith ; between a kindling inspiration and
a barren exegesis ;
between a minute analysis of unimportant ceremonials and
a preaching that stirred tho inmost depths of tho troubled heart. Even the
1 The assertion of the Talmud (cf. Sanhedr. f . 58, 1) that there wore 480 synagogues
in Jerusalem is indeed valueless, because the remarks of the Kabbis about Jerusalem,
Bethyr, and indeed Palestine generally, are mere hyperbole ; but, as Kenan remarks (Les
ApCtres, p. 109), it does not seem at all impossible to those who are familiar with the
innumerable mosques of Mahommedan cities. We are informed in the Talmud that each
synagogue had not only a school for the teaching of Scripture, but also for the teaching
of traditions (nittJDb TiDbn m, Megillah, f . 73, 4).
2 Seo Frankl, Jews in the East, ii. 21, E. T.
' He may have been a Libtrtimus also.
* Acts vi. 9,