THE APOSTLE PAUL

CHAPTER IV

EDUCATION: JEWISH INFLUENCE

It is time to turn from the possible Greek culture of Saul-Paul of Tarsus-which after all must remain problematical to the Jewish side of his education, where we stand on surer ground. That he was a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee, he himself testifies; that he was a pupil of the famous head of the Pharisaic school, Gamaliel, is asserted in Acts, and I see no valid reason for doubting the statement. Nay more, it has in its favour the wellestablished fact that Gamaliel had among his scholars many Hellenistic Jews, and was himself more favourably inclined than the other Palestinian teachers towards the Hellenistic tendency in Jewish theology. If Paul, therefore, sat as a pupil at the feet of Gamaliel it is all the easier to explain his familiarity with the Alexandrian Book of Wisdom, and with the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture which was more usual in Hellenistic than in Palestinian circles. But however that may be, whether Paul received his Jewish education only in his parents' house and in the synagogue at Tarsus, or whether he studied also in the school of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, it is in any

case certain that he was brought up in the strict spirit of the Jewish faith, and in the form of theological tradition which was represented by the Palestinian teachers of his time. That this religion and theology was not identical with that of the prophets and Psalms is so manifest a fact that no serious religious historian can ignore it. It is impossible really to understand the Apostle Paul without knowing the presuppositions of his Jewish faith as determined by the theology of the Pharisaic school. The best source for this is Weber's book, Die AltSynagogale Palästinensische Theologie, which has not been superseded even by Dalman's more recent Worte Jesu. Besides these we may refer to Schürer's well-known work Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte,1and to Holtzmann's Neutestamentliche Theologie (i. 42–85). I must limit myself here to the following sketch.2

The doctrine of God as it developed in post-exilic Judaism and became fixed in the Pharisaic theology, differs in two directions from that of the Old Testament prophets. It is, on the one side, more spiritual; anthropomorphisms are eliminated, the transcendence above the world is more strictly carried through; but, on the other side, the religious relationship is conceived in a narrower and more external fashion. God's will is completely set forth in the book of the

1 Eng. trans., A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ.

2 of the development of the religion of Israel down to the time when Pharisaism arose, I have given a comprehensive survey in my Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage, third edition, pp. 46-96. [The corresponding section in the English translation, The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of its History-made from the second edition-is vol. iii. pp. 127-176.]

Law (the Torah), and as He has given the Law to the Jewish People only, it is to them alone that He has a positive relationship: there is not even the expectation of a later extension of it to all nations, as the prophets had held. According to the Pharisaic view the Jews are for ever the sole People of God, while the heathen, as such, of whatever kind their moral character may be, are enemies of God, and are destined to eternal damnation. In regard to Israel, God's relationship is completely defined by the Law, which He has given to that People for the very purpose that they may by fulfilling it win for themselves merit and a claim to reward in this world and the next. In the requital of human action the Divine will is as absolutely bound to the Law as the human will. Thus the Law is exalted as a higher power above God, and became indeed the veritable idol of Pharisaic Judaism; indeed the Rabbis did not hesitate to represent God Himself as studying the Torah!

The more God was conceived as removed into an inaccessible elevation above the world, the more pressing became the need to fill the gulf between God and the world by interposing intermediate beings. Divine attributes and activities, Wisdom, Word, Spirit, Glory of God, were hypostatised into personal beings who acted as representatives of God and carried out His will, especially in connection with the revelation to Israel. In particular, the old conception of angels and demons (originally the friendly and hostile spirits of the animistic religion which had maintained itself in the popular belief alongside of the belief in Jahwe) now received an extension and application which were foreign to the prophetic

religion. Various ranks were distinguished among the angels, names were given to the most exalted of them, and definite functions in the administration of the world were assigned to them. Nations and individuals had guardian-spirits allotted to them (in which we may perhaps see an imitation of the Persian Fravashis) and even the different phenomena of Nature were placed under the direction of special angels, a proceeding which restored the heathen nature-gods, though under the limitations demanded by the monotheistic principle. The demons again (originally malevolent ghosts) were now set over against the heavenly "messengers of God" as "fallen angels" and were organised under a leader, Satan, who is now first conceived as the adversary of God. This was not originally his essential character; in the didactive poem of Job he still belongs to the heavenly retinue of God, and plays the part of a Crown-prosecutor who comes before God as the “accuser” of sinners, though even here, it must be admitted, not without an obvious satisfaction in raising suspicion and causing injury. But as early as the (post-exilic) Book of Chronicles Satan is represented as tempting David to sin (1 Chron. xxi. 1), whereas the earlier historian (2 Sam. xxiv. 1) represented the same action of David, the numbering of the people, as directly caused by God. It is evident, therefore, that the theological necessity of exonerating God from responsibility for the wickedness and evil which is in the world favoured the transformation of Satan from a servant of God into an adversary. Another contributory cause was, that, since the Maccabean war of liberation, the opposition, in the

mind of pious Jews, between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdoms of this world had reached that extreme tension of which we find the typical expression in the apocalypse of Daniel; consequently the Guardian-Spirits or Angel-Princes, which according to the earlier view (Deut. iv. 19) were placed by God as regents over the nations, came to be looked on more and more as rebel vassals hostile to God, who, under their head, Satan, are at war with the Kingdom of God - a similar conception is implied by the description of Satan as "the Prince of this World." The demons under his command fill the earth and the air and make themselves felt by men as scourges in sickness and misfortune of every kind. The fear of them brought to the surface again many of the hobgoblin-superstitions which the prophetic Jahwereligion had forced out of sight, and the official Jewish theology did not, like the old healthy prophetism, ban this belief in all manner of spirits working upon men and taking possession of them, which had survived from the animistic nature-religion, but rather sanctioned it and found a place for it in its own system; just as the Stoic and Platonic philosophies had done with the Greek belief in gods and demons. If we consider, on the one hand, what a large space the belief in angels and demons occupied at that time in the Jewish consciousness, in spite of the monotheism of the Bible, and on the other, that for educated pagans the multiplicity of the mythological divinities had no longer any real significance (since the one-ness of the deity that rules the world was generally recognised either in a pantheistic or monotheistic sense, while the other gods were reduced to