Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Paul. A Critical Life.
Chapter 2: Growing Up in Tarsus, p. 32-51

(Detailed summary)

Paul gives us very little information about his origins.

I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. (Rom 11:1)

Circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews (Phil 3:5)

His emphasis on his Hebrew origins is typical of a Diaspora Jew who feels compelled to highlight his heritage. This is precisely what he does in 2 Cor 11:22: “Are they Hebrews? So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I!” If he is indeed a Diaspora Jew, where was he born?

Gal 1:21 perhaps offers a clue when Paul refers to his departure during his first visit to Jerusalem: “Then I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia.” We can understand the mention of Syria, whose capital was Antioch, one of the major cities of the time. But why Cilicia? We suspect there is a personal connection here.

Luke confirms our intuition by stating that Paul was from Tarsus.

The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying (Acts 9:11)

When the brothers and sisters learned of it, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus (Acts 9:30)

Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul (Acts 11:25)

“I am a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of an important city; I beg you, let me speak to the people.” (Acts 21:39)

“I am a Jew born in Tarsus in Cilicia but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just as all of you are today” (Acts 22:3)

There is no reason to doubt this information which comes to us from Luke.

1. The City of Tarsus

   Dion Chrysostom writes the following about the people of Tarsus:

   Your home is in a great city, and you live on fertile land, for there you find everything you need to live in abundance and plenty, thanks to the river that flows through the heart of your city; moreover, Tarsus is the capital of all the inhabitants of Cilicia (Discourses 33.17)

   Tarsus occupied a strategic position on the trade route that ran from Syria in the east to Asia Minor and the Aegean Sea in the west, passing through the Taurus Mountains in present-day Turkey. The city is built on a fertile plain where grain and grapes are grown, but above all flax, the quality of which gave rise to an industry that made it famous.

   Tarsus had a long history before Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 BC) granted it, in the year 171, the status of a Greek city-state governed by its own elected magistrates and minting its own currency. Its colonization by Jews and Greeks was encouraged to increase the productivity of its eastern population. With Pompey’s conquest, the city was integrated into the Roman system of Asia Minor in 66 BC. Furthermore, since the city opposed Cassius, one of the conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar, it was rewarded in 42 BC by Mark Antony with the privilege of freedom and immunity, a privilege renewed by Augustus after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. This privilege was likely accompanied by the granting of Roman citizenship to a number of citizens, which contributed greatly to the city’s rise.

   Even though the Greeks made up part of the population, the culture remained Eastern. This is revealed by Dion Chrysostom, who complains of hearing Phoenician melodies and rhythms in the music there, and writes the following regarding women’s attire:

   Among these [customs of old] is the convention regarding women’s attire, which prescribes that they must be dressed and conduct themselves in such a way in the street that no one can see their faces or the rest of their bodies, and that they themselves cannot see anything in the distance (Discourses 33.48).

   Despite its Eastern roots, Tarsus has a thoroughly Hellenistic respect for education and possesses the resources to afford a good education. Strabo notes that “the inhabitants of Tarsus have devoted themselves with such zeal, not only to philosophy but also to the entire field of education in general, that they have surpassed Athens, Alexandria, or any other place where one might find schools and lectures by philosophers” (Geography 14.5.13). At the same time, he notes the peculiarity of this city, where the inhabitants are so passionate about education that they leave their city to study abroad and, upon completing their studies, tend to stay there and not return home.

   It was thus in a city at the crossroads of Eastern and Greek culture that Paul was born.

2. The Family of Paul

   Paul tells us almost nothing about himself, except that he was a Hebrew (Phil 3:5). Luke adds that he was a Roman citizen by birth (Acts 22:27–28) and a citizen of the city of Tarsus (Acts 21:39), and that he had a sister and a nephew in Jerusalem (Acts 23:16).

   1. A Hebrew

      What does the term “Hebrew” mean? According to the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, in most cases it refers to a member of the Jewish people, either by birth or by conversion. But when he compares translations into various languages, he contrasts Greek and Hebrew. Thus, the term refers not only to a religious or ethnic group, but also to a language. This is confirmed by the Letter of Aristeas, which recounts the request of King Ptolemy of Egypt asking the high priest Eleazar of Jerusalem to send him experts because “We have therefore decided that your law should be translated into Greek letters from what you call Hebrew letters, so that they too may take their place among us in our library alongside the other royal books” (Letter of Aristeas, 38); this is said to be the origin of the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, known as the Septuagint. Finding these experts was a challenge, because on the one hand few Jews in the Diaspora knew Hebrew, and on the other hand few Jews in Palestine knew Greek.

      All of this helps us understand the context of Acts 6:1: “In those days, the number of disciples was increasing, and the Hellenists began to complain against the Hebrews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution”; some spoke Greek, others Hebrew. Thus, even though both groups were Jewish, language fostered a form of chauvinism among those who spoke Hebrew, a sense that Palestine was first and foremost their home. It is significant to note the ascending order of the attributes used by Paul in Phil 3:5: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews.”

      Thus, Paul came from a family that, even though it lived in the diaspora, had preserved Hebrew, its ancestral language. It is also likely that Paul’s ancestors had emigrated from Palestine not so long ago. This is what St. Jerome affirms:

      We know this story. It is said that the parents of the Apostle Paul were originally from Gischala, a region of Judea, and that when the entire province was devastated by Rome and the Jews were scattered throughout the world, they were displaced to Tarsus, a city in Cilicia; the young Paul inherited his parents’ personal status (Commentarii in Epistolam ad Philemonem, v. 23–24).

      Biblical scholars have wondered where Jerome obtained this information. It is thought that he derived it from Origen in his commentary on the Epistle to Philemon. But this merely shifts the question: where did Origen obtain this information? Since Gischala does not appear in the Old Testament and has no connection to the tribe of Benjamin, to the ministry of Jesus, or to any Christian community from the Byzantine period, it is difficult to understand why Origen or Christians would have invented this piece of information. It would therefore seem that Origen relied on an oral tradition that he accepted as plausible.

      We know that the Romans took control of Palestine in 63 BC, and subsequently, there were a number of occasions (61, 55, 52, 4 BC, 6 AD) when Jews from various parts of the country were enslaved and deported abroad. This is what is said to have happened to Paul’s parents. Philo informs us that “The vast district of Rome situated beyond the Tiber was owned by Jews and inhabited by them. Most were Roman freedmen, brought to Rome as prisoners of war and freed by their former masters” (Legatio ad Gaium, 155). This is how Paul’s father was able to obtain Roman citizenship in Tarsus, which he passed on to his son.

   2. Roman Citizenship

      This detail comes from Luke (Acts 25:11–12; 26:32; 28:19), and there is no real reason to think that Luke would have made it up, since it plays no role in Paul’s ministry other than to justify the privilege of being tried in Rome. And in Rome, nothing significant happens there.

      On the other hand, Paul never makes any reference to his Roman citizenship in his letters. And some of his personal accounts even lead biblical scholars to doubt that he was a Roman citizen, such as the one in 2 Cor 11:25: “Three times I was beaten with rods,” a treatment forbidden to a Roman citizen. But in reality, this law was far from always being respected, and only the wealthy and prestigious, even while being Roman citizens, enjoyed its legal benefits. Other biblical scholars have pointed out that Roman citizens in the East were part of the provincial aristocracy, which does not seem to fit with the tentmaker. But this overlooks Paul’s level of education, which suggests a social background far superior to that of the average artisan, as well as his rather bourgeois view of manual labor, which he describes as “slavery ” (1 Cor 9:19) and “degrading.” This attitude suggests that it was the demands of his missionary strategy that led Paul to learn a trade.

      But why does Paul never mention his Roman citizenship? In fact, Paul had no reason to mention his Roman citizenship in his letters, especially since he would have had to provide documentary proof. And in reality, obtaining Roman citizenship was neither a complicated nor a rare occurrence. Competition among Roman generals to secure support during the civil wars after 49 BC led to generous offers of individual emancipation in the East. It is therefore far from impossible that certain prominent members of the Jewish community in Tarsus were enticed by the prospect of obtaining Roman citizenship and rallied to Antony. The simplest hypothesis is that Paul’s father was a slave freed by a Roman citizen of Tarsus, and that he thus acquired a certain degree of Roman citizenship that increased with each generation. And this Roman citizenship was not incompatible with the Jewish faith, for, under Roman law—codified in this regard by Julius Caesar—Jews were exempt from any obligation that conflicted with the requirements of their faith.

      In short, there is nothing to suggest that Luke invented Paul’s Roman citizenship out of thin air, and there is nothing in the epistles to contradict this.

   3. A Roman Name

      As a Roman citizen, Paul had a three-part Roman name, consisting of a given name (praenomen), a family name (nomen, referring to the founder of the Roman family), and a cognomen (surname), for example, Marcus Tullius Cicero. When a slave or a foreigner obtained citizenship, it was customary for them to retain their own name as the cognomen and adopt the given name and family name of the Roman who had granted them citizenship. Thus, Tiro, Cicero’s freedman, became Marcus Tullius Tiro. Paulos is the Greek form of the Latin Paul(l)us, attested in Paul’s time both as a praenomen, e.g., Paullus Fabius Maximus and Paullus Aemilius Lepidus, and as a cognomen, e.g., L. Sergius Paullus (Acts 13:8). The former is as rare as the latter is common, and in the Roman world, the cognomen was the most frequently used name because it was the most precise. These observations tend to suggest that Paul(l)us was Paul’s cognomen.

      But, since Paul(l)us is a typically Roman name, borne by great senatorial families such as the Aemilii, the Vettenii, and the Sergii, how could it be the cognomen of a Jew who had only recently acquired Roman citizenship? One possible explanation is that the name Paul(l)us was chosen because it was the closest to the Hebrew name Saulos or Sa(o)ulos, the Hebrew name that Luke presents as Paul’s (Acts 9:4, 17; 22:7, 13; 26:14). Moreover, the name Silas also appears, via Aramaic, as the Greek version of a Hebrew name. And there is no reason why Luke would have invented the name “Saul.” Furthermore, this name belongs to the most famous figure of the tribe of Benjamin, to which Paul claims to belong. Thus, we may assume that this was his Hebrew name, but as was often the case, especially in Cilicia within the Jewish diaspora, people were given nicknames. This nickname may have been used within the family and among friends before Paul’s birth and subsequently became an integral part of his identity. A fine example is provided by an undated inscription found in Naples where someone has a nickname, Neon:

      To the spirits of the dead. Lucius Antonius Leo, also called Neon, son of Zoilus, by nation a Cilician, a soldier of the praetorian fleet at Misenum, from the century the trireme ‘Aesclepius’, lived 27 years, served 9 years. Gaius Julius Paulus his heir undertook the work [of his burial] (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 10.3377).

   4. A Description of Paul

      Saint Augustine believed that Paul had chosen his name based on the Latin adjective paulus, meaning “small,” to reflect what he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:9: “For I am the least of the apostles.” The phenomenon of a proper name derived from an adjective exists in several languages. But there is no historical evidence that could give us an idea of Paul’s physical appearance. Even the Acts of Paul, a work from the 2nd century CE, provides a description of Paul that is based on his name and certain associations made at the time between physical features and a person’s character:

      He saw Paul coming, a man small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and a nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness; for now he appeared like a man, and now he had the face of an angel (3:1).

      According to the standards of the time, eyebrows that met in the middle were considered a sign of beauty, and a person with a hooked nose was perceived as likely having a regal or magnanimous character. Short men had poorer blood circulation and were believed to be quick-witted. Bow legs indicated that a man was firmly grounded, that is, very down-to-earth. Baldness was a specifically human trait; no animal went bald. In short, the high likelihood of idealization in the portrait of the Apostle Paul in the Acts of Paul casts doubt on its historical value.

   5. Paul’s Relative

      In Acts 23:16–17, Luke writes: “But Paul’s sister’s son heard about the plot; he went to the fortress, entered it, and warned Paul. Calling one of the centurions, Paul said to him, ‘Take this young man (neanias) to the tribune; he has something to tell him.’” The term neanias refers to someone over the age of 20. Thus, according to Luke, Paul would have had at least one sister and one nephew. Even though it is likely he had brothers and sisters, and the presence of a sister in Jerusalem can be explained—whether for business or a pilgrimage—it is difficult to assess the historical value of this information. And the fact that this nephew not only appears at this time but may have influence over a Roman officer leaves us skeptical.

      Some have sought to glean information about Paul’s family from the greetings in the Epistle to the Romans, such as Rom 16:13: “Greet Rufus, the one chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who is also mine.” Unfortunately, the term “mother” is often used metaphorically to refer to a person who commands respect; if she were his biological mother, Paul would have named her first. The same applies to the term “relative” (syngenēs) in Rom 16:7, 11, 20: the meaning Paul gives it is very clear as early as Rom 9:3, where he is referring to his fellow Jews.

3. Education

   Luke mentions only Paul’s training in Jerusalem under Gamaliel. But this is part of Luke’s theological framework, in which everything begins in Jerusalem. There is no doubt that when Paul left Tarsus, he had already received a solid foundation in his education. Unfortunately, Paul tells us nothing about his education. We must therefore rely on the general practices of the time.

   1. Early Formation

      Children from both secular and Jewish backgrounds started elementary school at age six. There, they learned basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as social organization and respect for institutions. In addition to these skills, Jewish children had to learn all the religious observances that defined their identity.

      All men are eager to preserve their own customs and laws, and the Jewish nation above all others; for looking upon theirs as oracles directly given to them by God himself, and having been instructed in this doctrine from their earliest infancy they bear in their souls the images of the commandments. (Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Gaium 210)

      It was in this context that Paul likely became familiar with the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. For the Bible was regarded as a textbook for learning to read, and students were required to memorize large portions of it (2 Tim 3:15: “From childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures…”). Paul’s letters contain nearly 90 explicit quotations from Scripture. Like Hebrew, Paul also had to learn Hebrew and/or Aramaic. For Aramaic was common among the Semitic population of Syria and eastern Asia Minor.

      On the other hand, Jewish children had to learn to function effectively in the Hellenistic world to which they belonged. They thus developed their knowledge of the Greek language and literature, reading Euripides and Homer. This is what Paul must have learned, in addition to learning to count up to a million.

      Secondary education began as soon as the child could read and write easily, usually around the age of 11. The emphasis was not on developing critical thinking, but on transmitting an entire culture through the works of authors such as Homer, Euripides, Menander, and Demosthenes. In a school possessing multiple manuscripts by a classical author, the first step involved rudimentary textual criticism in cases of discrepancies. Next came the reading of the text, a task far more complex than one might imagine. It required meticulous preparation, as words were not separated and the text lacked punctuation. This rigorous analysis laid the foundation for a sound interpretation of the text, intended to contribute to the students’ moral development. As their knowledge grew, they practiced literary composition. Although varied, all types of compositions had to adhere to the four essential qualities of conciseness, clarity, plausibility, and grammatical correctness, while incorporating the agent, action, time, place, mode, and cause.

   2. Rhetorical Training

      A Jewish boy in first-century Palestine completed his compulsory education at the age of 12 or 13, when he technically became an adult. Greek secondary school lasted one or two more years. This was followed by the equivalent of an undergraduate degree program as we know it today. Philostratus’ account of Apollonius is typical: “At the age of fourteen, his father took him to Tarsus, to Euthydemus, a Phoenician tutor” (Life of Apollonius 1:7). In Tarsus, there was a gymnasium. The Jewish attitude toward gymnasiums varied depending on individuals and communities. Here is what Philo writes on the subject:

      For who can be more completely the benefactors of their children than parents, who have not only caused them to exist, but have afterwards thought them worthy of food, and after that again of education both in body and soul, and have enabled them not only to live, but also to live well, training their body by gymnastic and athletic rules so as to bring it into a vigorous and healthy state, and giving it an easy way of standing and moving not without elegance and becoming grace, and educating the soul by letters, and numbers, and geometry, and music and every kind of philosophy (De specialibus legibus 2:229-230).

      Tarsus, however, boasted “all manner of schools of rhetoric,” according to Strabo, who also noted the result: “the ease with which the people of Tarsus spoke, enabling them to discuss any given subject instantly, casually, and at length” (Geography 14.5.13–14). In an essentially verbal culture, the art of oratory was the key to success. Its acquisition was divided into three stages.

      1. The first consisted of the theory of discourse, including letter writing. Techniques, rules, formulas, etc., were discussed at length. As divisions and subdivisions multiplied, the complexity of the theory rendered it increasingly obsolete.

      2. The second, more practical stage consisted of studying the speeches of the great masters of rhetoric: what techniques were employed, how did they produce their effects, and could they have been perfected?

      3. The final stage involved writing practice speeches, most of which dealt with topics that were more fanciful than useful.

      This is likely the training Paul received. Although he chose not to rely on eloquent wisdom in proclaiming the Gospel (1 Cor 1:17; 2:4), his letters demonstrate the skill of a well-trained writer. An analysis of his writings suggests a mastery and confidence that he is unlikely to have acquired without extensive practice, and perhaps also extensive study. It was within the framework of the school of rhetoric that Paul was introduced to the various schools of Greek philosophy, which were an integral part of the general culture of any educated person. The presence of Stoic teachers in Tarsus is mentioned by Strabo. It should also be remembered that during his formative years (around the age of 15 to 20), Paul would have attended the synagogue in Tarsus, where he was exposed to the Hellenistic Jewish tradition, whose leading representative was Philo of Alexandria. Through his letters, parallels can be drawn with the Jewish philosopher, even though his personality was very different.