Understanding Paul

     I was watching a recently released episode of a deconstructionist/New Age podcast that I occasionally throw up on YouTube because I have respected the host’s insights and Biblical knowledge in previous episodes. I don’t always agree with her, but I do respect her and the love and non-judgment she has tried to convey over the last several years. This last episode however I had to turn off within a minute, maybe two of it starting because the guest, a person she described as her spiritual mentor, described the Apostle Paul as being a heretic and in schism from the other apostles, and rejected by them. This is something which is a blatant falsehood, as anyone familiar with the New Testament should recognize. This person clearly didn’t understand Paul, who he was and what he thought and wrote, as many today demonstrate that they don’t.
      For me, Paul is like an old friend. I’ve gone through both his story in the book of Acts and his letters in the New Testament in the original Greek so many times over the last thirty years that I can’t help but feel like I knew him personally as someone very dear to me. So, I want to tell you about my dear old friend, Paul.
      Where do I start?
      We first get introduced to him as “a young man named Saul” in the book of Acts. This is clarified as “Saul of Tarsus.” Saul, or “Saulos” was a Hellenization of the Hebrew name, “Sha’ul.” Tarsus was a city in Asia Minor, what is now Turkiye, though I’m not convinced this is actually where he was born or raised. We are introduced to the name Paul or “Paulus” later on. Being a Roman, he likely would have had three names, a praenomen, a paterfamilias, and a cognomen. I tend to think he went by Sha’ul in Judea to hide or minimize his troublesome and somewhat dangerous Roman heritage from his Judean Pharisee peers. In this case, Paulus (meaning “short” in Latin) was likely his cognomen, that is, the Roman name by which everyone knew him. Paul was first and foremost a man of his time period, raised in a distinctly multicultural society as both an educated Roman and an educated Judean.
     He describes himself as being raised at the feet of Gamaliel, a well known and incredibly wise, respected, and celebrated Jewish Rabbi and Sanhedrin member in the first century according to history. According to his own account, he was a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, and describes himself as a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” strictly adhering to the Jewish Torah as a Pharisee. I tend to get the sense that he outdid his peers in his sheer Jewishness as almost a means of protecting himself from them as a young man. It was dangerous to be Roman in Judea in the first century, and he likely would have felt like he had to prove himself as Jewish as possible in order to just survive and not be seen as a foreigner and an outsider.
     But a Roman citizen he was, and by birth at that. So much so that the Roman soldiers and city leaders who mistakenly beat him later in life were terrified upon learning that fact. He demonstrates that he could not only read and write in Greek, but also had a good grasp of both the classical Greek poetry as well as incorporating Greco-Roman Stoic philosophy into his worldview. The wide Greek vocabulary he uses in his writings bears this literary education out. Although, according to his own admission, he wasn’t the best of rhetoricians, he did know how to build an argument (a cornerstone of Greco-Roman philosophy training) as was demonstrated in his letter to the Romans as well as his other letters. It stands to reason, given his knowledge of philosophy and Greek writings and the culture and society of the first century, that Paul likely attended a grammaticus, a Roman “elementary school”, or had a private tutor as a boy until the age of twelve or thirteen, and him so doing suggest that his early nuclear family was likely financially secure or even well off. This coupled with his Roman birthright citizenship might suggest that his father was a wealthy Roman proselyte to Judaism who married a woman either native to Judea or descended from family native to Judea.
     This suggestion might further be strengthened by his very familiar address in his letter addressed to the Christian community at Rome to a man named Rufus (a distinctly Latin name) where he warmly greets both him and “his mother and mine.” Indeed, none of his warm addresses to individual people mentioned in the letter would make any sense if he had never been to Rome and didn’t already know them like he did Priscilla and Aquila, whom he also greeted and whom he clearly already knew well from Corinth and Ephesus according to the book of Acts. It is not then a stretch to suggest that, while he never mentions his father (possibly out of habit for his own safety while training with Gamaliel in Judea, or possibly because he died while Paul was still young), the man and his mother Paul greets are actually Paul’s surviving nuclear family and he spent at least some time in Rome, probably as a boy, prior to where his story begins in the book of Acts. This would give further personal reasons as to why he was so keen on reaching, or possibly returning to Rome as he expresses in his letters. In his letters, he was also keen on reaching Spain, a heavily Romanized region, as well with no explanation really given except that he wanted to go there. It isn’t out of the question that his reasons were personal here as well. Significantly, he makes no mention of having family members in Tarsus of Asia Minor.
     Paul was likely quadrilingual, being fluent in Greek (the language of education and philosophy in the first century), probably knowing Latin through his father as well as being trained in Hebrew by Gamaliel, and also probably having at least a passing familiarity with Aramaic from being educated in Judea.
      My dear friend Paul was a man with a brilliant mind, but he had a deep insecurity about himself and being accepted by others from the time he was young and for most of his life. As I mentioned before, this is what drove him to excel in his studies and his practice of the Torah, but even if he didn’t let it show, it also hurt him deeply when his world was shattered by what happened on the road to Damascus. He couldn’t go back to “his people” in Jerusalem, and joining the Christian communities was a non-starter at first because they all knew his name and feared him. It was the most alone he’d ever felt in his life. He took off for the desert of Arabia where he knew no one and no one knew him not knowing what would happen or where he would end up, only returning to Damascus a few years later resolving to follow what he knew to be true, regardless of what else it might cost him. He was eventually accepted by the Christian community in Damascus after he began preaching about Jesus as the Christ in the synagogues there and putting himself on the hit lists of his former comrades, but he always wondered if they really trusted him or not. When he came to see the Apostles in Jerusalem, he had been expecting them to distrust him at first, but it still bit at his insecurity and he resolved to earn their trust by doing the same thing in Jerusalem that he did in Damascus, plunging into the synagogues of his former colleagues and peers and telling them in no uncertain terms that Jesus was the Christ and their leaders were responsible for His death. He became a man marked for death by every Judean zealot and extremist from the border of Egypt to the border of Syria, and nearly caused riots in his quest to redeem himself in the eyes of the twelve and the Christian communities. Just when he thought he had, they sent him out of the region altogether north into Asia Minor and Tarsus where everyone knew he was from. And there he sat for almost ten years with no one, no friends or family, and no Christian community. There’s no record he tried to start one there either. It’s likely that it was here he learned tent making as a trade. Left to his own devices, there’s every chance he would have stayed there had Barnabas not come to find him and bring him to Antioch where he was given the chance to heal a bit as part of that Christian community.
     By his own admission, Paul was never trained as a disciple by the twelve, or really by anyone. As he himself says he wasn’t taught the Gospel by human beings, and his teaching didn’t come through a human being. He didn’t stay with Ananias in Damascus for long after he baptized him and his sight was restored, and he didn’t meet any of the other apostles until years after his conversion. They had heard about what had happened to him, but they hadn’t met him. As far as he was concerned, he received his teaching from Jesus Christ Himself, and he implies that it was largely during his three years in Arabia that this occurred.
     Consider for a moment what happened to him on the road to Damascus and how it might have impacted him. His experience might have been similar to many stories of people with Near Death Experiences who encounter Jesus in the afterlife and have their entire belief system upended. When they return, they are profoundly changed and are never the same people they were. Many who talk about it with friends and family are ostracized. Many leave their religious communities because they no longer fit in and can no longer go along with what is taught because it doesn’t line up with what they experienced and were taught during their NDE. Atheists become devoutly religious or spiritual. Paul’s account of his experiences and how he descibes learning what he taught follows this pattern very well. While Luke’s account never says Paul literally died and was resuscitated on the road, metaphorically speaking, the man he was died the minute he fell off his donkey and was struck blind, and the man who received his sight after being baptized was someone new entirely.
      There was never any doubt in Paul’s mind as to what he had experienced or who had given him his teaching, but it was still another thing that set him apart as an outsider from the other apostles. While they eventually did accept him as both the book of Acts and his own letter to the Galatians confirms, it was something that was used as a constant attack against him and his insecurities about being accepted, and it sometimes incited his own defensiveness when he was questioned on this account. In spite of this, Paul felt absolutely compelled to preach the Gospel which he was taught during his extraordinary experiences with Jesus Christ. These were the two things that drove him especially in the beginning, the teaching he received and experience he had with Jesus Christ, and his insecurities about never doing or being enough for people.
     My friend Paul could build an argument. He could preach, but he wasn’t trained in rhetoric. He didn’t really have any skill with speech or speaking, and was secretly terrified of doing so to groups of people every time he did it. He tended to “infodump” on people, and could talk for hours on the same subject, and sometimes didn’t know when to stop talking. He had a brilliant mind, but his people skills were distinctly lacking, and he often didn’t understand his mistakes with people until it was too late. He could honestly be very awkward around people. In spite of this he had a deep affection for those friends he had (seeing them as the only real family in his life for a long time), and other people in general, and felt deeply, deeply hurt when they appeared to leave or betray him. His falling out with his dear friend and sometimes mentor, Barnabas, sent him into a depression that took a while for him to come out of, especially when he realized it was his own fault. You wouldn’t know it most of the time, but Paul was a deeply vulnerable man, and occasionally you would see the little boy underneath everything else in him needing to be mothered but afraid to reach out. It’s not that much of a stretch to suggest that he had what we would call “Asperger’s Syndrome” today to some degree.
     I’m not sure the twelve or James the Elder knew what to do with Paul, to be honest. They heard what he taught and couldn’t add to or take away anything from it, but he hadn’t been with them for those three years being taught by Jesus. There was no denying that he too had been called and gifted as one of His apostles, displaying the same supernatural powers that they did confirming it, but they couldn’t really explain that. In their judgment, it was best that he keep doing what he was doing up in the north, in Asia Minor and Europe, while they tended to things there in Judea and the south, and he left them with their blessing to do so, whether others understood that or not. Jesus Himself had taught them not to reject someone performing miracles in His name if they weren’t a part of their group. They remembered that lesson with Paul. Paul himself understood that lesson very well, denouncing schism of any kind and praising those who preached Jesus’ Gospel regardless of who they were or why they did it.
      My dear friend Paul was doing the best he could with what he was given. When he realized he was wrong on something, he did his best to change course and correct it. The man he became towards the end of his life was not the young man who held the coats for those who stoned Stephen. He wasn’t even the man who had been thrown off his animal on the road to Damascus, or the man who had to escape Damascus and run for his life from assassins intent on his blood. He couldn’t fix the mistakes he had made, but he did his best to never make them again once he recognized them.
      This is the Paul I have gotten to know and care about over my years of interacting with him in the pages of his letters and Luke’s history. Anyone who accuses him of heresy or schism needs to point the fingers at themselves first.