Free The Life and Prayers of Saint Paul the Apostle by Wyatt North Page B

home in the Greek world and often made references to elements of a wholly Greek culture.
     
    He was also a Jew. In Philippians 3 he tells us that he was of the Tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the 8th day after his birth as per Jewish law. The multiple layers of cultural identity can seem positively modern, but in the same way that Polish Jews might have banded together in the United States after the Holocaust or Italian Americans may long have stayed true to their culture and language while also being Americans, so was the ancient world full diasporic communities with several simultaneous cultures.
     
    In addition to being a culturally Greek Jew, Paul might have been a Roman citizen. In Acts, he calls upon his Roman birthright twice, but many historians doubt the veracity of these passages. However, there are several problems with the idea that Paul was a Roman citizen.
     
    First, the way this is presented in Acts appears to be a literary device to add suspense; many readers find it improbable that Paul should wait until after he has been mistreated, even brutally beaten, for a long time to mention to anyone that he is a Roman citizen, and then even more unlikely that everyone should then believe him and fall over themselves to do him right.
     
    Second, Paul's Roman identity appears to be used in an attempt to aggrandize Paul; he is very clearly made out to be more legitimately Roman than even the Romans themselves. Third, it is very unlikely historically speaking that Paul should be a Roman; less than 1% of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were in fact citizens and Paul was a Jew from merely a formerly Roman fringe area.
     
    Finally, Paul himself never mentions this improbable citizenship in any of his own writings. This, of course, does not mean that Paul could not have been a Roman. Improbable things do happen, and truths too can be unveiled at opportune moments.
     
    More certain is Paul's identity as a Pharisee, which he tells us of himself in Philippians 3. The Pharisees were a school of thought, as well as a social and political movement, that, among other things, wished to expand observance of the Torah into the daily lives of common people, not merely the priests, and believed in the bodily resurrection of the righteous dead in the age of the Messiah. Acts 22 tells us that Paul received his Pharisaic education from Gamaliel the Elder, a highly celebrated scholar of Jewish Law in Jerusalem. Most likely, this education started when Paul became a Bar Mitzvah, a son of the law, at the age of 13.
     
    With these many different identities in mind, we will consider one of the best known ideas of Paul's young life: his name was Saul. There is an old tradition that maintains that Saint Paul was originally Saul the Jew, and on the fateful day that he converted to Christianity he became Paul the Apostle. This is not really supported by the Bible. In Acts we find that Paul is called Saul even after his rebirth as a Christian. Having considered already his many identities, it is perhaps possible that Saul and Paul were two names that co-existed and were used both within different contexts. This was certainly the case of many immigrants in the Greek and Roman world, and it is certainly the case of many people in the Bible.
     
    The only direct reference to Paul's family comes from Saint Jerome, who tells us that there was a tradition among Christians in Jerusalem that Paul's parents came from the city of Gischala in Galilee, but were forced to flee to Tarsus when Gischala was devastated by the Romans. If Paul were indeed a Roman citizen, this tradition cannot be true. A Roman citizen would not need to flee a Roman invasion. Curiosity also raises the question: which devastation of Gischala did the parents of Paul flee from? Gischala was still one of the last Jewish strongholds during the First Jewish Revolt, after Paul's death.
     
    Paul's education, both his studies with Gamaliel the Elder and his apparent studies of