Romans 1:1. PAUL – Who was he?
Saul the Man
To help us understand this great “gem” we have to have a working knowledge of the man who wrote it as he was inspired by God. This Saul of Tarsus was a man with feelings and joys and heartache much like you and I. He was also a man that had keen insights into the very nature of God. Insights that came from early religious teaching, a fanatical grasp of the scripture and a membership in a religious sect that upheld the Words of God as Law. For Saul perfection was only in keeping every tenant, every distinction, and every nuance of the law.
Throughout Paul’s writings is a dark overtone or shadow that darkens his path. His life was a struggle caused by a physical problem. It is alluded to as “a thorn in the flesh,” and as a heavy stroke by “a messenger of Satan.” It caused within him a heavy tug toward the serious. It has been speculated that this detractor of life was what the Greeks called the “holy disease” or in today’s medical parlance, epilepsy. Epilepsy is a group of neurologic disorders characterized by recurrent episodes of convulsive seizures, sensory disturbances, abnormal behavior, or a loss of consciousness. Dostoyevsky, Vincent van Gogh, Isaac Newton, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Alfred Nobel, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Poe, Theodore Roosevelt and Dickens all suffered from this disorder. But what is important here is it caused him to realize his utter helplessness. It made him an object of pity and criticism. And in this malady he was always trying to overcome, to adapt, and to become worthy. He was never the most popular, he was always seen as different. Special care had to be made that this pitiful person might not hurt himself. In the literature of the time he was described as, “a man of moderate stature, with scanty hair, cooked legs, blue eyes, large knit brows and a long nose.”
The general population of Tarsus in Paul’s day was over a quarter of a million people. People came to Tarsus from all over the Roman Empire to live and work in this prosperous city. Tarsus had become a rich city mainly because of trade. Merchants from Tarsus were well known throughout the Roman Empire. Tarsian merchants were noted for their love of their craft, and their almost fanatic zeal in their monetary investments in their city’s infrastructure. The merchants of Tarsus invested in good roads, education, public health and city beautification projects. One of the largest sources of income for merchants was the Tarsus mountains, about twenty-five miles north of the city. The Tarsus Mountains were rich in minerals and lumber. The mountain slopes were populated by huge herds of black goats. From the hair of the goats a strong cloth was woven, called cilicium. Cilicium was used for many purposes, such as cloaks, floor coverings, house partitions, bags to transport corpses, and tents.
Tarsus was a city saturated with Greek culture. The predominant Greek influence was Stoicism. Stoic logic was the logic of Aristotle.
All knowledge, they said, enters the mind through the senses. The mind is a blank slate, upon which sense-impressions are inscribed. The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgement about things. Further they taught, “A sage, or person of moral and intellectual perfections, would not suffer these emotions.” Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason.
Paul was a man of extremes. A fiery temper, impulsive and impassioned in the extreme, of ever-changing moods, one moment exulting in boundless joy and the next moment sorely depressed and gloomy. Unrestrained and excessive alike in his love and in his hatred, in his blessing and in his cursing, he possessed a marvelous power over men; and he had unbounded confidence in himself. He speaks or writes as a man who is conscious of a great providential mission, as the servant and herald of a high and unique cause. Both the philosopher and the Jew will greatly differ from him with regard to every argument and view of his; but both will admit that he is a mighty battler for truth, and that his view of life, of man, and of God is a profoundly serious one. The entire conception of religion has certainly been deepened by him, because his mental grasp was wide and comprehensive, and his thinking bold, aggressive, searching, and at the same time systematic. Indeed, he molded the thought and the belief of millions.
In the early years of his Life, Paul was a man of little joy. He was all business. Life was too serious to spend on trivial things like a family, or the poor, or mercy, or love, or even caring. Every energy, every moment of his existence was funneled into keeping the Law. Nothing was as important as keeping and interpreting that great code of ethics which was the Law. He lived and breathed the Law. He kept every tenant of the Law as Moses had directed, but he had to go further because it did not satisfy his need to be perfect before his God. He had to become clear of mind and spirit in order to overcome his inner struggle. To the Law of Moses, Paul added all the interpretations of that Law that were given by the scribes. Life was too serious for anything that even resembled fun.
For Judaism, religion is the hallowing of this life by the fulfilment of its manifold duties. Paul shrank from life as the domain of Satan and all his hosts of evil; he longed for redemption by the deadening of all desires for and in life, and strove for another world which he saw in his ecstatic visions. As in II Corinthians 12 Paul talks about himself in the third person and says, “I know this man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. And I know that this man –whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows- was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, thinks that no one is permitted to tell.” Jewish Law prescribed that a boy would begin the study of the Scriptures as codified in the Torah at five years of age and the study of the legal traditions at ten. Josephus relates that both the Scriptures and the traditions were taught in every city to Jewish boys from their first consciousness. Paul or Saul as he was called in the Synagogue, was completely immersed in the law from the earliest years. He seemed to have promise, an aptitude far beyond all the other boys of his age. The best of the Rabbis or teachers were found to teach this young, and promising Jew of Jews. He was destined for greatness.
Early in his studies he made the decision to follow the teaching of one of the three factions of the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees. It was into this tradition Saul poured himself.
There were three major Judaic factions in Saul’s world: Pharisees, Sadducees and the Essenes. The most important of the three were the Pharisees. Their main distinguishing characteristic was an unyielding belief in an Oral Law that God gave to Moses at Sinai along with the Torah. The Torah, or Written Law, was the rule book. It set down a series of laws that were open to interpretation. The Pharisees believed that God also gave Moses the knowledge of what these laws meant and how they should be applied. This oral tradition was codified and written down roughly three centuries later in what is known as the Talmud.
The Pharisees also maintained that an after-life existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a messiah who would herald an era of world peace. Pharisees were in a sense blue-collar Jews who adhered to the tenets developed after the Law was written and included individual prayer and assembly in synagogues.
The Sadducees were elitists who wanted to maintain the priestly caste, but they were also liberal in their willingness to incorporate Greek tradition into their lives, something the Pharisees opposed. The Sadducees rejected the idea of the Oral Law and insisted on a literal interpretation of the Written Law; consequently, they did not believe in an afterlife, since it is not mentioned in the Torah. For a Sadducee life was rituals associated with the Temple. It was all about doing the right thing and the right time. They were the rule keepers.
These two “parties” served in the Great Sanhedrin, a kind of Jewish Supreme Court made up of 71 members whose responsibility was to interpret civil and religious laws.
The Essenes were the rejectionist party of the day. They were so disgusted with the other two groups they moved out of Jerusalem and lived a monastic life in the desert.
At thirty Saul was accepted as a Pharisee. His mentor, Gamaliel, was the most renowned Pharisee teacher in all Israel. Saul lived with Gamaliel as if he was Gamaliel’s own son. Where ever the great Rabbi went, along trailed Saul constantly listening, constantly attentive to each of the teachings and traditions. The entirety of this young man’s life was enveloped with the Law.
But even in all the teaching, there was something missing. In the seventh chapter of the Book of Romans we see the turmoil that went along with all his efforts to keep the Law. The desire of his heart was to be justified before his God. To feel the Great Jehovah’s light of favor upon his head. To be holy and righteous before God. He received all kinds of recognition. He was a young man on the way up. He was accepted by a group of men that were the most awed and feared men in all of Israel. He was the personal pupil of the great Gamaliel and along with this position came respect and fear of lesser men. But the harder he worked, the more he learned, the further he seemed, from the goal he was trying to attain. The very things that he wanted to attain, he could not have, and they seemed to slip through his fingers like sand. The things that he thought would bring him closer to God seemed to push him further away, they would seem become walls between himself and God. And worst of all the things that he knew were not pleasing to God he could not stop from doing.