The life and work of St. Paul

BOYHOOD IN A HEATHEN CITT. 15
just as the real name of Paul was Saul.1 However this may be, the thorough
Hebraism of the family appears in many ways. Paul's father and grandfather
had been Pharisees, 2 and were, therefore, most strict observers of the Mosaic
law. They had so little forgotten their extraction from the tribe of Benjamin
one of the two tribes which had remained faithful to the covenant that they
called their son Saul, 3
partly perhaps because the name, like Thesetetus, means
" "
asked (of God), and partly because it was the name of that unfortunate
hero-king of their native tribe, whose sad fate seems for many ages to have
4
rendered his very name unpopular. They sent him, probably not later than
the age of thirteen, to bo trained at the feet of Gamaliel. They seem to have
had a married daughter in Jerusalem, whose son, on one memorable occasion,
saved Paul's life. 6
Though they must have ordinarily used the Septuagint
version of the Bible, from which the great majority of the Apostle's quotations
are taken, 6 and from which nearly his whole theological phraseology is derived,
and to read the
they yet trained him to use Aramaic as his native tongue,
Scriptures an accomplishment not possessed by many learned Jewish
Hellenists in their own venerable original Hebrew. 7
That St. Paul was a " Hebraist " in the fullest sense of the word is clear
from almost every verse of his Epistles. He reckons time by the Hebrew
calendar. He makes constant allusion to Jewish customs, Jewish laws, and
Jewish festivals. His metaphors and turns of expression are derived with
great frequency from that quiet family life for which the Jews have been in
all ages distinguished. Though he writes in Greek, it is not by any means in
the Greek of the schools, 8 or the Greek which, in spite of its occasional
antitheses and paronomasias, would have been found tolerable by the
rhetoricians of his native city. The famous critic Longinus does indeed, if
the passage be genuine, praise him as the master of a dogmatic style ; but
certainly a Tarsian professor or a philosopher of Athens would have been
inclined to ridicule his Hebraic peculiarities, awkward anakolutha, harshlymingled
metaphors, strange forms, and irregular constructions. 9
St. Jerome,
1 When a Greek or Roman name bore any resemblance in sound to a Jewish, one, it;
was obviously convenient for the Jew to make so slight a change. Thus Dosthai became,
Dositheus ; Tarphon, Tryphon ; Eliakim, Alkimos, &c.
Acts xxiii. 6.
'
ViNtf, Shaft!.
4 It is found as a Hebrew name in the Pentateuch (Gen. xxnd. 37 ; xlvi. 10 ; Ex. vi.
15 ; Numb, xxvi 13 ; but after the death of King Saul it does not occur till the time of
the Apostle, and again later in Joscphua (Antt. xjs. 9, 4; B. J. ii. 17, 4; Kreukel,
Paulus, p. 217).
5 Acts Trriii. 16.
6 There are about 278 quotations from the Old Testament hi the New. Of these 53
we identical in the Hebrew, Septuagiut, and New Testament in 10 ; the Septuagint is
correctly altered; in 76 it is altered.incorrectly i.e., into greater divergence from the
Hebrew ; in 37 it is accepted where it differs from the Hebrew in ; 99 all three differ ;
*nd there are 3 doubtful allusions. (See Turpie, The Old Testament in the New, p. 267,
and passim.)
1 V. supra, p. 9.
8
Among numerous explanations of the >n|Xiicotj ypanftewrtv of GaL vi. 11, one Is that hur
Greek letters were so ill-formed, from want of practice, as to look almost laughable.
9 See infra, Excursus L, "The Style of St. Paul; "and Excursus IL, "Ehetorio