The life and work of St. Paul

BOYHOOD IN A HEATHEN OITT. 21
of Tarsus sent them in hundreds to die, sword in hand, amid the carnage of
captured Jerusalem, and to shed their last blood to slake, if might be, the very
embers of the conflagration which destroyed the Temple of their love. Tho
same patriotism burned in the spirit, the same blood flowed in the veins, not
only of Saul the Pharisee, but of Paul the prisoner of the Lord.
It will be seen from all that we have said that we wholly disagree with
those who have made it their favourite thesis to maintain for St. Paul the early
acquisition of an advanced Hellenic culture. His style and his dialectic method
have been appealed to in order to support this view. 1 His style, however, is
that of a man who wrote in a peculiar and provincial Greek, but thought in
Syriac ; and his dialectical method is purely Rabbinic. As for his deep know-
ledge of heathen life, we may be sure that it was not derived from books, but
from the fatal wickedness of which he had been a daily witness. A Jew in a
heathen city needed no books to reveal to him the " depths of Satan." In this
respect how startling a revelation to the modern world was the indisputable
evidence of the ruins of Pompeii I Who would have expected to find the
infamies of the Dead Sea cities paraded with such infinite shamelessness in
every street of a little provincial town P What innocent snow could over hide
the guilty front of a life so unspeakably abominabie P Could auything short
of the earthquake have engulfed it, or of the volcano have burnt it up ? And
if Pompeii was like this, we may judge, from the works of Aristophanes and
Athenaeus, of Juvenal and Martial, of Petronius and Apuleius, of Strato and
Meleager which may be regarded as the " pieces justificative " of St. Paul's
estimate of heathendom what Tarsus and Ephesus, what Corinth and Miletus,
were likely to have been. In days and countries when the darkness was so
deep that the very deeds of darkness did not need to hide themselves in days
and cities where the worst vileuesses of idolatry were trumpeted in its streets,
and sculptured in its market-places, and consecrated in its worship, and stamped
upon its coins did Paul need Greek study to tell him the characteristics of a
godless civilisation ? The notion of Baumgarten that, after his conversion,
St. Paul earnestly studied Greek literature at Tarsus, with a view to his mission
among the heathen or that the " books " and parchments which he asked to
be sent to him from the house of Carpus at Troas, 2 were of this description
is as precarious as the fancy that his parents sent him to be educated at Jeru-
salem in order to counteract the commencing sorcery exercised over his
imagination by Hellenic studies. Gamaliel, it is true, was one of the few
Rabbis who took the liberal and enlightened view about the permissibility of
the Chokmah Jovanith, or "wisdom of the Greeks "
one of the few who held
the desirability of not wholly dissevering the white tallitJi of Shein from the
stained pallium of Japhet. 3
But, on the one hand, neither would Gamaliel
1 See J
Schaff, Hid. of Anct. Christianity, I. 68.
2 Tim. iv. 13.
3 See Life of Chmt, Exc. IV. vol. ii. 461. The study of Greek literature by the
House of Gamaliel ia said to have been connived at by the Kabbis, on the plea that they
needed a knowledge of Greek in civil and diplomatic intercourse on behalf of their
countrymen (see Etheridge, Heb. Lit. p. 45). Rabban Shimon Ben Gamaliel is said to
have remarked that there were 1,000 children in his father's house, of whom 500 studied