The life and work of St. Paul

64 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
statement that Paul was "brought up at the feet of Gamaliel," on tha ground
that Paul calls himself " a zealot " for the traditions of the fathers, and must
therefore have belonged far rather to the school of Shammai. He could not,
according to this writer, have been trained by a Rabbi who was remarkable for
'tis mildness and laxity. He accordingly assumes that the author of the Acts
only invents the relations between St. Paul and Gamaliel in order to confer a
sort of distinction upon the former, when the fame of Gamaliel the Second,
founder of the school of Jabne, kept alive, in the second century, the fame of
his grandfather, Gamaliel the Elder. 1 Now of what value is a criticism which
contemptuously, and I may even say calumniously, contradicts a writer whose
accuracy, in matters where it can be thoroughly tested, receives striking confirmation
from the most opposite sources P It would have been rightly considered
a very trivial blot on St. Luke's accuracy if he had fallen into some
slight confusion about the enrolment of Quirinus, the tetrarchy of Abilene,
the Ethnarch under Aretas, the Asiarchs of Ephesus, the "Praetors" of
Philippi, the " Politarchs " of Thessalonica, the " Protos " of Malta, or the
question whether " Propraetor," or " Pro-consul," was, in the numerous
changes of those days, the exact official title of the Roman Governor of
Cyprus or Corinth. On several of those points he has been triumphantly
and on all those points his minute exacti-
charged with ignorance and error ;
tude has been completely vindicated or rendered extremely probable. In every
historical allusion as, for instance, the characters of Gallic, Felix, Festus,
Agrippa II., Ananias, the famine in the days of Claudius, the decree to expel
Jews from Rome, the death of Agrippa L, the rule of Aretas at Damascus, the
Italian band, &c. he has been shown to be perfectly faithful to facts. Are we
to charge him with fraudulent assertions about Paul's relation to Gamaliel on
the questionable supposition that, after reaching the age of manhood, the pupil
deviated from his teacher's doctrines ? 2 Are we, on similar grounds, to charge
Diogenes Laertius with falsehood when he tells us that Antisthenes, the Cynic,
and Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, were both of them pupils of Socrates ? A remarkable
anecdote, which will be quoted farther on, has recorded the terrible
quarrel between the parties of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua, of whom the
3 former is called a Shammaite, and the latter a Hillelite and ; yet both of them
were pupils of the same Rabbi, the celebrated Hillelite, R. Johanan Ben Zaccai.
Such instances might be indefinitely multiplied. And if so, what becomes of
Hausrath's criticism P Like many of the Tiibingen theories, it crumbles into
dust. 4
1 Ha-zaken, as be is usually called.
2 Turning to Buddaeus, Philos. Hebraeorum (1720), I find that he answered this
objection long ago. An interesting anecdote in BeracMth, f. 16, 2, shows that the
natural kindness of Gamaliel was too strong for the severity of his own teaching.
3 Jer. Shabbath, i. 7.
4 See Excursus V., " Gamaliel and the School of Tubingen."