Transcription
It is a blessing to gather again together as brothers in Christ for prayer, fellowship, and the study of God's word. So, last month we wrapped up our study on the life of Moses. And tonight marks the beginning of a brand new study as we begin our study on the life of St. Paul the Apostle.
Oh heavenly king, the comforter of the spirit of truth, who art in all places and fill us all things, treasury of good things and giver of life, come and dwell in us. Cleanse us of every stain and save our souls, oh gracious Lord. Amen.
It's been it's been a long time since we started a new study. We've been with Moses for a long time now. Um literally years. Uh so uh many of you here may not have been here the last time we started a new study. So uh as is typical the first sort of the first session of a new study uh I do a lot by way of introduction. Uh we may actually dip into the text of text of Acts just a little bit right at the end or if I start rambling that may have to wait until uh the very beginning of the next one. Um, but um it's I I think it's really important to uh sort of set the stage in terms of the context in which the man who we're talking about and whose life we're studying lived. Um, and so we did that with David in the first study and then we did that with Abraham and then we did that with Moses. Uh, all three of those uh even though Abraham and David are literally a thousand years apart, all of those are in the Old Testament. Uh, all of those uh people lived their lives in uh the ancient near east in generally the same part of the world. Um, St. Paul is going to spend um a significant part of his life, shall we say, in in Judea in the same part of the world, but he's also going to travel all over the known world at the time. Uh, and he is another thousand years past David. So when we meet uh Saul of Tarsus in uh the Roman Empire in the first century AD, uh he's in a very different context certainly than Moses was, who we've been talking about for the last couple of years, but then also than Abraham or or David was.
And especially with St. Paul. A lot of what separates bad interpretations and bad readings of St. Paul and his works from correct ones, namely the way the the church has read St. Paul's writings, the way the church has understood St. Paul in his life, is uh missing context uh is a lack of understanding of the world that St. Paul lived in of the religious life of that world of his own religious formation uh and his own cultural formation um and the the the culture and the formation of the people to whom he is writing when he writes his epistles. Uh when you remove that context, you could take what St. Paul says and read it any number of ways that sort of make internal logical sense. Um, looking at you Calvinists, uh, but that don't fit when you try to take those interpretations and put them in the first century. They don't make sense as interpretations of what the actual Saul of Tarsus who lived in the first century AD would have thought and taught and written. Um, and so that's why tonight we're going to we're going to talk a lot about background. And a lot of this background though is not just going to be totally general. I mean, I'm not I'm not about to give you a class in the history of the early Roman Empire or anything, right? But it's it's going to be focused on St. Paul's life. Because, of course, when we meet him, St. Paul is already in his 30s when he first appears in the book of Acts. So, he has lived a significant amount of his life before we meet him. And then of course, you know, it's not spoilers. We're familiar at least with the broadstrokes. There's going to be this radical change in his life at that point, right? But we have to understand who he was and where he's coming from before that change if we want to really understand that change as well. Um, and so, uh, that's where we're going to sort of begin tonight. So, we're going to be talking about uh who is Saul of Tarsus by the time we meet him, how did he become that person, uh and some information about the world uh that uh he lived in. Um, so a lot of the uh tidbits that are going to be our jumping off point tonight, right? Um, little details that we know about St. Paul's early life before we actually meet him in the book of Acts are things that come out of things he either says later on in the book of Acts about his past or uh things he says in his epistles about his past, right? And then uh us placing that into sort of historical context.
So we start with he is of course identified everywhere as Saul of Tarsus. uh he tells us that he is uh from the tribe of Benjamin which makes sense. Um remember uh that uh before the exile in the 8th century BC the Assyrians wiped out the northern tribes of Israel. Uh those effectively ceased to exist as tribes. Right? Not all the people were killed but those people were taken into captivity and intermarried and so the tribes as such uh ceased to exist. But the southern kingdom of Judah which was made up of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin and then the Levite families who were serving at the temple in Jerusalem. They continued to dwell there for another uh almost 150 years, not quite 150 years um before the Babylonian invasion and they were taken into exile. 70 years after that they were allowed to return from exile but not all of the Jewish people. And Jewish is just an English shortening of Judahite or Judeian, right? Um, not all of them did return. So there is at first the uh Persian province of Judea in the Levant that many of the exiles return to that then becomes a Greek and then a Roman province. Uh but in the wake of the Babylonian invasion, we read in the book of Jeremiah that a large number of Jewish people fled from the Babylonians and went to Egypt. So there remained a large Jewish community in Egypt. There were also large Jewish communities that did not return to Judea and remained in Mesopotamia. So and and that group would later few centuries later produce what's called the Babylonian Talmud. And that's why we call it the Babylonian Talmud because these are Jewish communities that stayed there. And then within the Roman Empire once Judea becomes a Roman province uh Judea people were free to travel all over the Roman Empire using the Roman roads. uh those Roman roads were going to come in very handy later for St. Paul when he began to travel on his missionary journeys. But so we end up with Jewish communities set up all over the Roman world in all different cities. U so St. Paul being from the tribe of Benjamin, he's from one of the tribes that made it uh through the exile. Uh remember Saul the king who preceded David uh was from the tribe of Benjamin. So the fact that Saul would be a given name to someone from that tribe makes a whole lot of sense uh in Saul of Tarsus' case.
And as Saul of Tarsus suggests, uh, he grew up, he was born and grew up in Tarsus. And Tarsus, which was known appears a couple of times in the Old Testament as Tarses, uh, was an ancient city that had become a Roman city. Uh and it's uh if you think about on a map modern-day Turkey and then the Middle East, right? Like Lebanon and Syria, right? And then modern Turkey. Tarsus was right in the corner, right at the bend where you go from southern Turkey to western Syria, right? Right at that sort of the point of that curve, the point of the right angle there. Um that's where uh Tarsus was. And so this made Tarsus a large and important city because it was not only along the trade routes that ran through Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, and then down through what's now western Syria and Lebanon and Judea at the time and then down toward Egypt. Uh so it's on that trade route. It's on the trade route that continues east across the fertile crescent. And it also had a port. And so at this time in history, and this will become important later on in the book of Acts and St. Paul's life when we talk about him getting shipwrecked, which happens to him multiple times, uh the ships were not of a quality where they could sail straight across the Mediterranean. So you couldn't sort of leave Alexandria and Egypt and go straight across to Rome or straight from a port in Judea to Rome. Uh the ships weren't up to spending that long out at sea. And if you ran into weather events, they weren't sturdy enough to survive most of them. And so uh ship travel at this point took place along the coast. You would sort of hop along the coast. Think of the way a cruise ship, you know, that's taking you to scenic destinations sort of follows the coast and makes port at all of those destinations. And so ships would travel along the rim of the Mediterranean. And Tarsus being where it was made an important stop, right, for ships going either in either direction.
Um, it's from being in Tarsus that St. Paul got his Roman citizenship. And the fact that St. Paul is a Roman citizen becomes important at various points in the book of Acts. And Roman citizenship didn't work the way citizenship works today. Right? Citizenship today. Uh you're born in a country or you're born to citizens of a country and that sort of makes you a citizen of that country just automatically. Uh that was not the case in the Roman Empire. So citizenship in the Roman Empire is something that normally you had to achieve um and you had to be eligible for. So there were vast swaths of people who weren't eligible for Roman citizenship. Notably slaves in the Roman Empire were not eligible for Roman citizenship. Uh some of the uh conquered groups, groups of people that Rome had conquered were not immediately eligible for citizenship. But for those who were eligible and wanted to gain citizenship, the most common way to do that was to serve in the military. If you conscripted in the Roman military and served a period of service, what we would call a tour of duty now in our modern military, but for them it was a period of service of years and survived, right, the wars and everything that you went through. Uh, you were then considered a veteran. That's where the word veteran comes from. You had completed that time and that meant you were given Roman citizenship and you were given land. And what the Romans would do is they would give new citizens land out at the edge of the Roman Empire. That way these new Roman citizens would go, they'd move there, they'd settle, they'd work that land, they'd work in the villages, and they could help sort of romanize the culture. Um, that was the most common way. Okay. And once you had Roman citizenship, you could pass it on to your sons. So, it was not just about personally having this status and getting this land. It was about establishing your family, right? If you served in wars, you survived. You now had land that you could pass on to your sons. you had citizenship that you could pass on to your sons. Right? So this this was the goal.
Now uh very few Jewish people in the Roman Empire were Roman citizens. So none of the other apostles for example are Roman citizens. Christ was not a Roman citizen. And if you are a a non-citizen and not what we would call ethnically Roman, not part of the Roman people, then you are categorized as non-persona uh in the uh Roman legal system, a non-person. And so we see things about this in the gospels. First of all, not being a Roman citizen made you eligible for crucifixion as punishment. Roman citizens could not be crucified because crucifixion was considered this well wasn't just considered. It was a uh horribly painful uh uh shameful uh degrading way to kill to kill a person. And so you were not allowed to do that to a Roman citizen. But more than that, someone who wasn't a citizen could be uh beaten, could be uh punished by Roman magistrates essentially any way they wanted to. Um and we see references in the gospels like Christ talks about if someone forces you to go one mile to uh go a second one, right? where we get the phrase going the extra mile. What that's about is that uh Romans could just randomly grab say a Jewish person, someone who's not a Roman citizen, a Roman soldier, and make him carry his pack for a mile if he wanted to. Uh, Roman soldiers also frequently uh would randomly decide they liked the looks of a uh a Jewish person or another person considered a non-person by the Romans, but a Jewish person, a Jewish woman, a Jewish child, and take them for a concubine at will. and there was nothing the husband or father or anyone could could do about it because they weren't Roman citizens. Um, the reason I'm bringing that up, as gross as it is, is we're going to need to lay a little groundwork a little bit here for why the Jews hated the Romans so much and why they were willing to resort to violence, right, to try to overthrow them because that's going to factor into St. Paul's story as well. Um, so, uh, that was that was the status of most Jewish people.
So, how how did the St. Paul end up being a Roman citizen? Well, it's because he's from Tarsus. And so uh in the in the '40s BC uh in the early phases of the Roman Republic becoming the Roman Empire, there was a clash between Julius Caesar and another Roman general named Pompy uh after whom the city of Pompei was later named the one that was destroyed uh by Mount Vuvius. Um and both of them both Caesar and Pompy were trying to basically make themselves emperor. They were trying to establish a claim to take control of the entire uh Roman uh state. Uh Pompy was mainly active in the east. So it is Pompy who annexed Judea and made it a Roman province. And at the time he did that, he famously or infamously uh shoved his way with soldiers into the Holy of Holies in the temple uh in Jerusalem and then was astonished when he found that there was nothing there because the ark of the covenant was already gone. So he went in there and found it empty. Um but that shows you the level of respect that Romans had for Jewish institutions. That's another piece. Um Caesar meanwhile uh started off in uh Gaul in what's now France. Uh so he was active in the west consolidating Roman power. And so I told you where Tarsus is. As you can imagine, when the two are coming together and going to end up colliding, you can imagine who controls the port at Tarsus is going to be a very strategic thing. And Tarsus as a city and in particular, believe it or not, the Jewish community in Tarsus, which was very large, there was a very large and influential Jewish community there that was involved in trade and other things. They sided with Julius Caesar uh over against uh Pompy probably in part because of what Pompy had done in uh in Judea. And so when Julius Caesar was victorious over Pompy, he rewarded the people of Tarsus. So he made Tarsus a free city which in the ro in Roman law meant the people of Tarsus were exempt from certain taxes. Tax exempt status always a good thing, right? Uh but he also gave a grant of citizenship uh not just to Tarsus in general but specifically to the Jewish community in Tarsus for having supported him as a way of thanking them. And like anyone else who received a Roman citizenship, they could pass that on uh to their sons. So St. Paul's father or possibly grandfather, we don't know the exact date of St. Paul's birth, but father probably possibly father, possibly grandfather, would have been one of those people in the Jewish community at Tarsus who supported Julius Caesar and therefore received citizenship. Uh that support of Julius Caesar is also why Caesar had it put into Roman law that there was at least tacitly a toleration of Judaism within the Roman Empire. Now that toleration of Judaism meant they would let Jewish communities like the Jewish community at Tarsus not worship the Roman gods. Right? Normally if someone refused to worship the Roman gods of a city, they'd be put to death. This happens to Christians later as we know, right? And part of that is because the Jewish community expelled the Christians. The Jewish community very con uh very uh deliberately did not allow their exemptions to be extended to early Christians. Um but they had this sort of exemption. Now, that doesn't mean there weren't Roman persecutions against the Jews. There certainly were. There would be outbreaks of violence, ethnic violence, and things like things happened. And particularly in Judea, where there was an anti-Roman resistance that developed, anti-Roman resistance was not tolerated, right? Um, the toleration was more, okay, you want to go worship your god in your synagogue and not worship our gods, fine, we'll we'll let that be, right? As long as you don't cause any further trouble. So, there was kind of a a a broad tolerance there um because of Tarsus.
So, uh St. Paul inherited his Roman citizenship. Uh the way you knew you were a Roman citizen. You may be wondering how do you know, right? They didn't have driver's licenses or passports, right? Um you were actually given a little token. It was a little metal token that you had that was stamped with the imperial uh uh sign that granted you citizenship. And most people who had Roman citizenship who would weren't obviously Roman, right? If you looked Roman, right, you could count on people, you know, believing you. But if you were a Jewish person like St. Paul, uh, who didn't look Roman, uh, then, uh, you would carry it with you, usually in a little leather pouch that you wore around your neck on a leather strap. So, you'd sort of always have it with you. So, there are going to be places in the book of Acts where St. Paul is going to people are going to assume because he's Jewish that he's not a Roman citizen. He's going to say he is. And you might wonder, well, how could they know for sure? Couldn't anybody just claim? Well, you had to have that, right? So, there was this token that you would have that you could show in order to prove that.
Um, so St. Paul grows up in this pagan city uh that has a large Jewish community. And so within the city itself there was sort of this toleration right this sort of broad tolerance um that in normal times people sort of did a live and let live thing right um they accepted that that uh the ways of the Jews were ancient and so for the Romans they kind of respected that like they let the Egyp Egyptians keep traditional Egyptian religion and this kind of thing because they saw it as ancient. So they said, "Well, okay, those people, their religion is ancient. That's okay for those people to go off in their corner and do their thing, right?" Um, but St. Paul shows clear signs that he was also broadly educated in Tarsus, meaning uh he didn't just obviously by living it by living as a Jewish man, right? And and keeping Torah with his family, right? Meaning following the food laws and and the way of dress and all of these things, right? Um he he learned that sort of in his bones, that tradition at least at that level, right? But he also clearly because in his letters he will for example in first Corinthians quote manander. So Manander was a Greek playwright >> who wrote comedies, right? So this is not um Manander's comedies while well it's sort of like Shakespeare's comedies today or Charles Dickens novels today like he's considered a great writer but it's not considered the deepest and most profound literature in the world right but someone who if if you've been to school if you've been to college if you've taken some literature classes you'll be at least vaguely familiar with some of Shakespeare's comedies or some of Charles Dickens works, right? And that's the kind of familiarity that that St. Paul shows with Greek and Roman literature, right? So, he very clearly had education in Tarsus beyond just what he got at home in sort of the ways of of Judaism.
Um, so, uh, he also while he's there he learned a trade, right? And that trade is you the trade he learned is usually translated in acts as tentmaking. Uh and what that primarily involved was in Tarsus where there was this is a thing that happened in Tarsus historically verifiably uh a lot of this involved leather working. So curing leather and preparing leather, preparing a few other fabrics that were used in the process and then actually constructing, sewing, hemming, right, tent panels. Uh, and the reason this was a big business in Tarsus is as we mentioned it lies on these caravan routes, right, that are crossing pretty great distances. So there were caravans that would come from Rome in Italy uh would leave Rome and Italy and go all the way to what's now Afghanistan and back at this time in history. Uh so you have this caravan traffic. You also, as we mentioned, have caravans that are are looping around from one of those directions and heading down to Egypt, also passing through Tarsus. And so this caravan is going to have a lot of tents, right? A lot of shelters for the people, shelters where they're going to store dry goods and things that they're carrying, shelters for the animals in case of weather, right? All of these things involved in these caravans, they're going to and those are going to require repair, replacement, right? All of these things along the way. So that is a major business in um in Tarsus. Uh and so it was very common regardless of what a uh a person was going to pursue, right? It wasn't like today where you know you ask a little kid, oh what do you want to be when you grow up, right? Um and somebody like aspired, you know, I want to make tents. I love tents, right? it was uh your your options were sort of limited, right? You learned a trade by which you could support yourself in the place where you lived. So he would have been apprenticed in his early teen years. So remember, Sol of Tarsus would have been considered an adult at age 13, right? Meaning at age 13, he was expected to be able to earn a living and support a wife, right? and start having children. So there was not there was no adolescence for St. Paul uh in St. Paul's time there this is is not a thing right that happened.
Now I mentioned being married at 13. Um we will talk more about this in a few in a few Bible studies when we come to a certain part of his of his life story in the book of acts. But it is very likely that St. Paul was married in his early life. Um because this was this was not a a choice that you made. You didn't go and you you met a cute girl in downtown Tarsus one night and you know you started dating or courting. Uh this was when you're coming you know when you're 12 and approaching age 13. uh your parents contract with the parents of a young lady right in the in the Jewish community there and make the requisite agreements that their children are going to be married to each other and that's what happens. Um so uh when St. Paul talks about and as I said we'll delve into this more but for now uh you may because you may be thinking that St. Paul talks about that how he considers it better to remain unmarried as he himself had right um but if you read that in context and we'll talk about it more but if you read that in context he's talking in the context of someone getting remarried after being widowed or divorced. So what he's actually talking about there is because again culture people didn't have a choice in that first marriage. A 13-year-old cannot be like you know what I think I don't want to get married. Right? So uh and that was long before Christ revealed himself to St. Paul. So he wouldn't have been at age 13 deciding not to get married to pursue the gospel. Right? He hadn't heard it yet. Um so that's talking about why he decided not to remarry but we'll get into more about this as I said uh a little later in the study.
So um we also know St. Paul had uh siblings because he mentions in a couple of his letters a nephew and a cousin. So, we know that there are that he had not just, you know, he was most likely married to a woman, but that he had an extended family in the Jewish community.
At Tarsus, we have one very early physical description of what St. Paul looked like, and that's in a text called the Acts of Paul and Thela. And Thea in the Acts of Paul and Thela is St. Thelcka who was commemorated in the church. It's one of our that text is one of our earliest sources not not the only one but one of the earliest sources we have about the life of St. Thela. Um so uh and that description uh is I think believable for a couple of reasons. Number one, uh, it matches the earliest iconography we have of St. Paul. And number two, that description is very unflattering. So if you're writing a saint's life and you're talking about how wonderful this saint was and what a wonderful person they were they were and you described them physically. I don't think you would describe them this way if you were trying to make something up and make them look better. Right? So I think they were just being honest is the most likely understanding. And that is that St. Paul was very short. He had very large eyes. His eyes were often cloudy and watering because of an eye condition he had. We'll talk about that more uh later on. Uh he had a very large nose. Uh he was almost bald. Um and uh he walked sort of hunched over and he was uh bendylegged uh meaning kind of bow-legged. Uh that description also fits with we know and we're going to see as we go through the book of Acts. in his life story. St. Paul is the recipient of a lot of physical abuse over the course of his life. And so the the being hunched over and the bow-legged and these descriptors are probably related to that suffering he endured because of course there were no hospitals yet to go to to have bones set or to have right to to no physical therapy right and these kind of things. So when he says later on that he bore in his flesh the marks right of what he had what he had suffered he was being very literal. Um and so all of that is to say this is not to belittle or make fun of of St. Paul's appearance, but is to say that he's he's very serious when he says and he's being honest and humble about himself when he says there was nothing about him, right? He was not this incredibly charismatic, attractive, you know, man who came and lured all these people into following his new religious movement, right? He was not uh compelling in that way, right? that the reason people were becoming Christians through the preaching of St. Paul is because of the message he was preaching and the power of that message, not something about himself, right, that that that won them over.
So, at some point when St. Paul is in his teens, right? Uh which would have been a young adult from their perspective, a likely married young adult. Uh the determination was made that he would go for further study particularly in Judaism. So he is going to study the ways of his people and the Torah and the other scriptures more deeply. And to do that at this time in history, you went to Jerusalem and you would have to find a teacher to accept you. And of course, rabbi is the word is the uh Aramaic word for teacher, right? So you would find a respected teacher of the scriptures and of your people, a sage in Jerusalem. You would ask them and they would have to accept you as a student. And so in uh St. Paul's case that was Gamaliel who is actually in our terms Gamaliel Jr. So there were two rabbis in the first century in Jerusalem named Gamaliel and what there's a father and a son. So sort of Gamaliel senior and Gamaliel Jr. and St. Paul became a student of of Rabbi Gamaliel Jr. And Gamalio later according to uh Christian tradition was baptized and he is a saint in the Orthodox church. St. Gamalio he is also considered a sage and a saint by uh Orthodox Jews today. So, Gumalio is this interesting figure in that as far as I've been able to discern, he is the last person to be considered a saint by both Christians and Jews. Now, the Jews of course deny that he was baptized and became a Christian, right? But um and he is he's going to come into our story here very early. He actually appears in acts once before St. Paul does and that's uh he is with the Sanhedrin sort of the governing body of elders of which he was one in Jerusalem and they're trying to decide what to do about the Christian movement particularly with St. Peter's preaching in Jerusalem and uh the wisdom that Gamaliel offered at that time that's recorded in the book of acts is that they should just leave it alone. Uh because Kamal said if this is from God there's nothing we can do to stop it and if it's not from God then it will die out on its own. Right? So uh that wisdom from him is recorded before St. Paul his uh student actually appears.
St. Paul had a couple of fellow students of Gamaliel who are also prominent people in the book of acts uh who we're going to meet very quickly when in St. Paul's life one of them is St. Steven who becomes one of the first deacons in the church was a fellow student of Galileo of St. Paul and one of them is St. Barnabas who we're also going to meet is going to be important in the book of acts and in St. Paul's life story. And so all three of them were among the students of Galileo at the same time. Now what does it mean to be a student? Well, what they didn't have an established like school building. It's not like he taught seminars, you know, show up Tuesday and Thursday nights at 7:00 p.m. to 9:30, you know, and we're going to do the Torah seminar or something. um when you were someone's student or disciple, it's the same word. The word that we translate uh as disciple in the gospels is really the word for student. And so that's how we should uh think about it. Um you would actually follow the p you would you would follow the person around in their day-to-day life in all their activities. You would live with them or near them, right? Uh maybe all jumbled together in a student house, right? Near the near the person's house. Uh you would spend time with them. You would watch them because you're not just learning from what they say to you. You're learning from their example. You're learning from watching how they deal with other people, how they address and solve problems, right? And then what they say to you directly. So think about the relationship that the disciples had with Jesus that we see in the Gospels. Right? It would have been a similar thing with Galileo and his students. So this means that St. Paul and St. Steven and St. Barnabas as these young men, right? These teenage young men are basically living together, eating their meals together, right? Traveling around together, spending all their time together, right? Um even it's even closer than they lived in the same dorm, right? Is they're they're all sharing their lives with each other and with with Kamalio. And there going to be certain ways that we see that St. Paul patterns himself and what he's going to do, how he conducts himself in the Christian community after the way that Gamaliel operated within the Jewish community at that time. So here's exhibit A of that. Uh gumal we have from him several letters that he sent. So different synagogues in different parts of the Roman world would write letters to Gamalio about problems they were having in their community or questions they had about the scriptures or about theology. Right? They would write and ask him questions and uh Gamaliel would write a letter back to them answering their questions or resolving the issues they brought to him right and doing things that was a common part of what Gamaliel did as sort of a teacher and scholar and we could obviously see St. Paul was about writing letters, right, and and writing them to these communities to resolve issues and help them solve problems and work through difficulties, right? Um so, uh, this is this is St. Paul's early life there in Jerusalem.
But Jerusalem at this time is a very different city than Tarsus, right? So Tarsus was a pagan city now become a Roman city that had a large Jewish community sort of dwelling within it in in a certain lowgrade tension with the way of life of the rest of the city. Jerusalem is almost the opposite. Jerusalem is a Jewish city where the temple is right. Is the center. You know, even though there's this diaspora, there's this scattering of of Jewish people all over the world, no matter where they live, Jerusalem is the center of their life, right? Jerusalem is the place where they make pilgrimages, right? As a religious duty. Uh it's the one place where sacrifices are offered. Uh it's the place they literally pray toward Jerusalem wherever they are in the world. Right? When they pray they face toward Jerusalem. So it is this Jewish center that is under Roman occupation. And so that is a very different dynamic than uh where where St. Paul was in Tarsus where he got his earliest education. And so uh within Jerusalem there are a lot of factions of Jewish people. Uh there's not really a division between politics and theology and philosophy you know which we consider these separate things right so what do we do about this Roman occupation is as much a religious question for them as it is a political question right those two things aren't separate how do we understand it why is this happening to us and then what what do we do about it uh And so there are a number of factions.
So Gamaliel uh and the the other sages who who St. Paul was around was being discipled by were Pharisees. And St. Paul will continue to identify even in his later epistles St. Paul refers to himself as a Pharisee in the present tense. Um so the the Pharisees are one of these factions. The word Pharisee comes from a verb that means to separate. So Pharisees means something like the separate ones or the separated ones, right? And the idea was that they sort of held themselves apart from Roman, Gentile, pagan and those all meant the same thing. Those are all synonyms for them, right? Held themselves apart from that society and they devoted themselves to studying the scriptures, the ways of their people because they believed. They read their Old Testament and they said, "Well, why are we under this Roman yoke? Why are we being oppressed and brutalized by the Romans uh dayto day? How did this happen?" While they're they're reading their scriptures and they say it's because we were disobedient. God gave us commandments, right? He gave us the Torah. He gave us a law that we were to live by. Told us how we should live. We didn't do it. We sinned against him. And we not only sinned, but we sinned unrepentantly, right? And so God was just in bringing this oppression on us, right? So then how do we solve this? Well, the Pharisees said, "Well, if disobeying brought this upon us then what will fix it will be us obeying." But just as it wasn't one person, right, who uh disobeyed that caused it. It was collectively right Israel collectively Judah disobeying that caused it. They believed that they had to collectively obey. When all of us come together, when all of us separate ourselves from the world and all of us are obeying the commandments, then God will send the Messiah and the Messiah will deliver us from the Romans. That was their belief.
Now and and they had other coordinate beliefs from that, right? So, for example, they said, "Well, wait a minute. Not everyone was disobedient, right? Yes, as a whole, they're disobedient, but there were righteous people, and those righteous people suffered just like the unrighteous people, right? When when the Babylonians invaded, they didn't stop and ask whether someone was a sinner or not, right? They it was everyone, the righteous and the wicked together all suffered. And so the Pharisees said, this is why the Pharisees were so firm in their belief about the bodily resurrection. They said, "No, a day will come, the day of the Lord comes, he will raise everyone from the dead." And so those people who were righteous and who suffered, they will get to live with God forever, right? And that's that's justice. And wicked people out there who sort of got away with it, right? Who lived wickedly and died without receiving any kind of justice for their sins, well, they will receive that justice in the resurrection. They will be condemned eternally. Right? So Pharisees had this understanding and the phariseaic understanding is not all wrong. Right? We have as Christians believe in the bodily resurrection. We believe will be raised from the dead. We believe that people will be judged according to what they have done when the resurrection happens. Right? Uh we do believe that the reason all of those things happen to Israel is because of their disobedience. Right? Um, and so, you know, broadly the Pharisees are not totally wrong. And compared to some of the other groups that we're going to mention here in a minute in Jerusalem, they're doing pretty good, right? They're a lot less wrong than some of these other groups, right? Um, they're kind of on the right track at least, but there are problems with how this played out. The biggest problem with the Pharisees, what we hear from Christ over and over and over again in the Gospels, is that they're hypocrites. They talk a really good game, right? To the point that Jesus can say to his disciples, the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, so do whatever they do or or so so do whatever they say. Do whatever they tell you to do, but don't do what they do because they're hypocrites, right? They would they would preach all the right things but not actually practice them. So that's a huge issue with the Pharisees as Christ points out repeatedly.
Uh but another issue is uh because they believed that the way out that the solution to the suffering they were experiencing was the collective obedience of the people. That means that they looked at someone they identified as a sinner like a tax collector or a prostitute, right? Or any of the other notorious sinners who get mentioned in the gospels, right, by the Pharisees. Those people aren't just, oh well, they're a sinner. They're going to get theirs on the day of judgment. But by living that way, by living disobediently, by being a notorious sinner in Judea at that time, they were the reason why the Roman oppression continued. And that's why we see, for example, sometimes the Pharisees forming mobs to stone someone to death who is committing some sin, right? And this is the second major place aside from their hypocrisy. The other major place that Christ is always correcting the Pharisees is you shouldn't be trying to get rid of these people who are sinners. You should be trying to bring them to repentance. Right? Instead of condemning them, you should be trying to minister forgiveness to them. Right? And get them to repent of their sins. So those are the two big flaws, right? The big gaping flaws in the Pharisees.
The other two major groups in Jerusalem at this time in the city of Jerusalem are the Sadducees. And the Sadducees are essentially the high priest and his extended family. So this is the extended family that controls the temple, controls the priesthood, controls the temple. They are not the family that was supposed to control the temple. In the prophecies of the Old Testament, the the new temple was supposed to be under the authority of the descendants of Zadok, the high priest. And that's where Sadducee comes from. Sadducee means Zadakite. So they just called themselves, we're the Zetakites, we're the descendants of Zadok, even though they weren't to try to justify their claim. And they had they were incredibly corrupt to the point that 70% of the land in Judea that was not owned by the Romans, 70% of it was owned by the high priest family. So what they would do is they had the authority under the Romans because they collaborated with the Romans. They collaborated with the Romans. They adopted the Roman calendar. Uh they in every way were willing to work with the Romans. Um they had the authority under the Romans to levy a temple tax. So in addition to all the taxes the Romans would take from the people, the high priest's family could come and say, "We want this much to support the upkeep of the temple." And they could set any amount they wanted. And so what they would do is they would set these really high amounts and then when people couldn't pay them, they would say, "Well, we'll put a lean on your farmland essentially, right?" And eventually when after a few years of unpaid temple taxes, that lean became the whole value of the property, they would just take it. And what makes this especially bad is that remember in the Torah, we read about this when we were going through the life of Moses. Each family had received a piece of land from God as their inheritance that was supposed to stay in their family forever. But the Sadducees and the high priest family had out of greed extorted it out of them and now we're paying pennies to that family to work what used to be their own land. and exploit them. So they become incredibly wealthy and had incredible amounts of power under the Romans and were collaborating with the Romans. And so it's not coincidental that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection because if there was one, they would have been in a lot of trouble, right? Uh they viewed this life as it. So you just do what you got to do and and get your bag now, right? Like that was that was it. So they were corrupt, right? Beyond belief. And we see Christ criticizing that corruption uh over and over again.
The third group were different zealot groups. And zealot groups were groups that basically looked to figures in the Old Testament like Phineas who we talked about during the life of Moses like the judges in the book of Judges and some other figures and said uh this is how we're going to get rid of the Romans, right? Yes, the Romans are coming and oppressing the people because of their sins, but now the people are crying out to God to deliver them. And so their view of the Messiah was God is going to raise up a man, right, who is going to lead us in battle and we're going to violently defeat like kill massacre the Roman authorities, right? And and drive them away. Uh this had been done with the Greeks. This is what the book of first Mcabes is about, right? When when the Greek kings, this El Saluca Greek monarchs had become oppressive over Judea, uh the Makabe family, Judas Mccabius and his brothers had risen up, had this violent revolt and there had been an independent Judea for about a hundred years, a little over 100 years, close to 150, right? Where it had been independent. Uh now they cooked their own goose because Judas Mccabius after they became independent signed a peace treaty with Rome and that's how they ended up getting annexed. Uh but but they also had that vision in mind, right? We're going to become independent again. This person's going to rise up. And so more than one of Jesus disciples were from zealot groups. So St. Simon the Zealot is the obvious one uh was from some kind of zealot group. Less obvious is Judas uh Escariat uh a lot of people have tried to tie to the word red and it's kind of related to the word red but it's actually identifying him as a member of a group that was active in Judea at the time called the Sakari who are an extremely militant Zealot group and by extremely militant I mean they were assassins essentially they would seek opportunities to murder Roman public officials officials and Jewish collaborators with the Romans. Uh so they were violent.
Revolutionaries. Now, why do I bring up these other groups? Well, if you think about what I just said about one of the flaws with the Pharisees, this idea that the sinner, the Roman collaborator, right, the tax collector, this person is the problem who needs to be removed. And what I just said about the Zealot groups, you can kind of imagine why ideologically, and this is something we know happened all through the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, a lot of the students of the Pharisees in Jerusalem who came there to study, the young men who came there to study got radicalized by Zealot groups. There was sort of a pipeline there, right? Um, where, uh, there wasn't a clean, there wasn't a clean reason that the Pharisaic teachers could give of why not resort to violence at a certain point. And that sort of failure led to lots of students leaving their teachers and joining these militant Zealot revolutionary groups, right? And you know, we can think about this is not totally foreign to our day, right? In the 1960s, how many college students joined weird revolutionary groups, right, in the US and in other places, right? Or, or radicalization in the Middle East today, right? Uh, we, we could see this pattern unfolding a lot. And this is the pattern that unfolded there. And this is the pattern that St. Paul fell into before we first meet him.
So when we first meet St. Paul, he is participating in Zealot activity. He is ginning up a mob to murder St. Stephen, one of his fellow students who St. Paul has come to believe is a heretic. And this heresy that his former fellow student is teaching, in St. Paul's mind, right? These kind of heresies, this is part of the reason why the Roman oppression is still going on. And so the people of Jerusalem, the people of the Jewish community, need to be purified of these heretics. And so this is the place we're going to meet St. Paul. He has essentially dropped out of his discipleship with Gamaliel, now pursuing Zealotry, right? Even though he still considers himself, in terms of his thinking, to be a Pharisee. When we first see him, he's going to have letters from the high priest, who's a Sadducee, who the Pharisees hate and consider part of the problem, right? So the, the, the hatred of Christianity is going to make strange bedfellows, right? Uh, and so he, he is going to be in this place where he is undertaking radical violence, thinking he's doing it in service of God. Remember Christ prophesied this in St. John's Gospel in his parting discourse to the, to his disciples who had become his apostles. He said, "The day is coming soon when the person who kills you will think he's doing a service to God by doing it, right?" And so that prophecy of Christ has, has come true here, right? That, that these radical elements, right, are now turning on, right, the immediate, the immediate follower of Christ, even someone like St. Stephen, who he ate with, lived with, worked with, right, knows personally, once they become a heretic, they have to be, right, expunged. And so he is a young man who is in the throes of sort of a violent ideology that he has been radicalized toward, uh, away from the higher order learning, right, that he has of his youth, though he still has that, though he still has that to, to draw on. And so he's in this place. There's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance there. All of his learning, both worldly learning and learning in the ways of his people and the scriptures and all of this on one hand, and then on the other hand, this zeal, right? This righteous anger, right? Where he thinks that doing violence is a way now of, of, uh, serving God as a young man.
And so already, we're not going to get into the text tonight, as I kind of predicted, right? Right? We'll do some questions here in a minute. But already, I think hopefully, what I've done in this introduction, what I wanted to do is start the process of humanizing St. Paul, right? Giving us an idea of who he is as a man, right? Now, when we first meet him, right? Saul of Tarsus. Okay? Um, and it is not that his name gets changed from Saul to Paul when he has this experience that we'll get to. Uh, Saul is his Jewish name. Um, most Jewish people in the first century also had a Greek or a Roman name that they used. In his case, it's Pavlos in Greek. Um, which sounds similar, actually means small or short, right? Um, but that's common, right? We, we see this with several other disciples and several other figures. You can think about it like, um, a lot of, uh, a lot of Asian people who come to the United States, uh, because people in the United States have trouble pronouncing Asian names, they will have some American name they go by, right, among their American friends, that isn't really their real name, but it's sort of similar, right? Um, right. And so it's a similar thing. Romans and Greeks couldn't really pronounce Aramaic. And it has a lot of weird sounds, a lot of weird sounds in different parts of your throat, right? Like Arabic, like Arabic today, that you know aren't, aren't sounds that Romans and Greeks were used to making. So, um, this was, uh, Paul was his sort of other name, uh, for, for Greeks and Romans. But to give an idea of him as a person, right? And, and I think where we meet him now as this radicalized young man, I think this is, this is a figure we've seen, right? Maybe in ourselves at a certain point in our life when we were very zealous, right, about certain things. Uh, and certainly in other people we've seen, right? This is, this is sort of where he's at at the moment we meet him. And he's going to be a participant because of that zeal in some kind of horrible things. Uh, but that's, this isn't the end of his story. This is the very beginning. This is where we meet him, right? It's a highly educated young man who has now been radicalized, right? And pushed even toward, uh, violence by the ideology, right, that he has, uh, in his head, uh, thinking he's serving God by doing it.
So, we have 15 minutes or so for questions. I think there are some in the chat already. So, let me take a look. Get my cheaters and take a look. Uh, so, O2, this is not directly related, but O2 is missing from all the canons. Uh, and no one, no one knows why. I've asked bishops, I've asked monastics, I've asked liturgical scholars, and my conclusion is no one actually knows the real reason. But the second Odes to most canons were never written. It's not that we stopped using them. They were never written. Um, it just got skipped. Uh, yes. So, the Silk Roads were some of those caravan routes. Uh, so in terms of how St. Paul understood his Pharisaic background after his encounter with Christ, we're going to be talking about that along the way, uh, when we get there. Um, uh, Pharisee, meaning set apart, is closer to the idea of holiness than the idea of being elect. It's closer to the idea of being set apart and holy than being chosen, per se. Um, Herod didn't levy the temple tax. Herod could levy other taxes for his building projects. Uh, and you have to keep in mind that taxes in the first century were not like taxes now, where it was like a percent of your income or something. It was someone usually with people with weapons showed up at your door and demanded a certain amount of money and had the ability to basically shake you down for it. It was more like protection money from the mob than like modern taxation. Um, it was extracted under, under sort of threat of violence. Um, and Jason gave an example of himself as, uh, someone who has an American name that they use to help Americans pronounce it. Um, we're going to talk more about Saul and St. Stephen. That's where we're going to start next time. Is we're going to start with the story of St. Stephen and Saul's involvement in that. Uh, this is going to get posted on YouTube. Uh, we're going to talk about how St. Paul understood his vision on the road to Damascus when we get there. Uh, which may be next time or may not be until the Bible study after that. Uh, okay. So now live questions.
>> Eric, go ahead. Who's asking? Eric or Eric?
>> Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me?
>> Yes.
>> Nice. Yeah. Father Bless, thank you so much, uh, for the study. Uh, I just wanted to clarify with as far as the the life of Paul in your research with his life. Did you say the Acts of Paul and Thecla was a, a pretty big source? Because I actually did read about that recently and I wanted to look into that. So is that, that's like an apocryphal work?
>> Yeah.
>> That shows Paul's life. Okay.
>> So, yeah, and it's from the, the first part of the second century, so it's very early.
>> Cool.
>> Um, and as it so happens, we, we went through it a little bit on the last episode of Lord of Spirits, uh, which was two weeks ago now. So that's on YouTube. Uh, you can listen to that. That'll give you kind of an orient, or orientation in terms of what's in it. Um, and then you can read it for yourself.
>> Was that one of your main, was that one of your main sources for the life of Paul, or was it like, you see BS, like, what, what were some other, what were some of some of your other main sources for the life of Paul?
>> Yeah. So a lot of, a lot of it, right, we get these details, right? Like he's from Tarsus, he's from, right, from the scriptures themselves, right? And then you can go and do further research about first-century Tarsus and about, right, or that he was a tent maker. So a lot of it is develop, following out those threads. Um, the physical description of him comes from the Acts of, of Paul and Thecla. Uh, that's where that is. Uh, and then later on in his life, and we'll talk about this more when we get to the other end of his life, because the book of Acts doesn't end with St. Paul's death. So there's, there's St. Paul has some life before we meet him in Acts, and he has some life after, right, after the end of the book of Acts. And so on that side, there are church traditions and traditional documents and local traditions and places where he went, like Spain, about what happened about a fourth missionary journey and a second imprisonment, and those kind of details come out of some of those texts. Um, so for example, there, there are churches in Spain that trace themselves back to St. Paul and record the names of, like, the bishop that he put over the city, right, when he left, right, and then the succession of bishops since then. So there, there are local traditions like that that come into play in the, the later part of, of St. Paul's life.
>> So like him, um, patterning himself after Gamaliel, like you said. Yeah. Um, I feel like that's also, you see that a lot with just the early church of patterning, patterning itself after, it's the fulfill, the fulfillment of the law, right? From the Old Testament to the New.
>> So he's pretty at the, he's, he's very much at the center of that fulfillment and patterning after of Old Testament Judaism and of the church, the church becoming,
>> the church.
>> Right. Right. Yeah. So the, the early church doesn't just throw all that in the trash can and start from scratch,
>> right?
>> But there are these structures and understandings that they carry over. So the idea that like, even though there are these synagogues all over the world, Jerusalem is still sort of Jerusalem, right? Like, um, you get the understanding of the idea of a mother church, right? And then daughter churches, like in a region, right? Um, it's, the, the way Antioch was like the Jewish center for Syria, and Alexandria was the Jewish center for Egypt, right? And, and those kind of things, right? These understandings get taken over and fulfilled in, in Christianity, right? But it's not sort of, you know, okay, no more Judaism, we got us a new religion here, right? With all new authority structures and all new patterns of how we do things. Yeah.
>> Father, I've got a a question for you.
>> Yes, sir.
>> Um, you know, tonight when you were explaining, um, about St. Paul became a Zealot, I found that fascinating. And I guess I'd never really realized that or heard it explained in that way that he was, you know, I just assumed, I mean, I knew that he was a Pharisee, but he, or, or that he was, I thought that maybe he was just ultra-orthodox, you know, Pharisee, right? Um, and, and but to think that he had been or had become a Zealot, it's fascinating and how you tied that together with his letters from the high priest, which were Sadducees. Like that's kind of the evidence, that's the exhibit A that he actually became,
>> uh, a Zealot and becoming radicalized in that way and literally blinded, um, you know, and just a total lack of compassion and love. I mean, it, it's just, it's amazing, especially to think that he sat there basically and participated in the stoning of a classmate that he had spent so much time with. Um, you know, when we think about in our daily lives as Orthodox Christian men, you know, what lesson do we can we take from that, you know, so that we're not, kind of in our zeal, you know, not that we're going to be going out and stoning anybody, but we can also, um, you know, our actions and how we act with others who may not necessarily be Orthodox, who may not necessarily be Christian, you know, how can, what can we learn from that and take from that in our everyday life?
>> Yeah. Well, so St. Paul, I mean, St. Paul's going to use those terms when talking about himself, right? He's going to talk about how he had zeal, but not according to knowledge, right? He's going to use the word zeal to describe it, right? And well, yes, you're right. Like physically, we don't have a lot of, you know, most of us are not going around ginning up mobs to do actual violence, right? Physical violence. But I mean, the, the internet is just a swamp of zeal not according to knowledge, of just people who are very angry and very committed, very ideologically committed, right? And, and, uh, it's, it's very easy to slip into the enemy is the person who I defeat and I destroy, as opposed to the enemy is the person who I love and have compassion for and try to make a friend, right? Um, so the, the person who's who calls themselves a Christian of some kind but is not an Orthodox Christian online is not a person to be humiliated and embarrassed and defeated, right? And held up for public mockery, right? This is a person who we want to see come to Christ and to his church, right? And become one of us. And attack is probably not the way that is going to bring that about, right? Uh, the person who disagrees with you politically is not the enemy to be defeated and destroyed, right? It's, it's a person who is in some way deluded or doesn't understand things, right? Uh, as well as they could, right? And who, so this is, this is a, a basic thing that Christ is trying to hammer on over and over again, and, and we kind of miss, I think, in part because of a lack of a cultural sensitivity. Like one of the highest virtues in Roman life was victory, like in the person of the goddess Nike, they literally worshiped victory. That's what it was about, right? It was like Conan, right? To to crush your enemy, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women. Right? That is the best thing in life, right? If you're a Roman. And Christ comes and says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, not blessed are those who fight and win, right? Blessed are those who make peace." So there isn't a fight and there isn't a winner and a loser. And that, that is a very different idea, right? And what St. Paul fell into was this is the enemy. I have to defeat them. I have to destroy them. And they're not just my enemy. They're God's enemy, and they have to be defeated. And what God wants is for them to be defeated and destroyed. Despite even the Old Testament scriptures telling us over and over again, God, God does not delight in the death of a wicked man, but that he turn and live, meaning repent and live. Right? So I, I think that's something that plays out in our own lives every day in a whole bunch of different ways, and how we treat the person who with whom there's a disagreement, or with whom there's some animosity, or with whom there's friction, right? Is our goal to win, to defeat them, to put them down, right? To humiliate them, to get revenge if they've wronged us in some way, right? Or is it to find a way to be reconciled with them and remove the, the friction and the, the disagreement and the,
>> Yeah.
>> Thank you. Thank you, Father. Uh, Deacon Mark, you, you had your hand raised.
>> Oh, I was just curious, Father, uh, about the, doesn't St. Paul in one of his letters in referring to himself and, uh, uh, talking about his physical appearance, refer to himself as sort of the afterbirth?
>> Yeah. Well, that's, yeah, he uses that term and it seems that that's something, yeah, it actually literally in Greek means the abortion, and apparently that's something that his opponents called him.
>> And so he just kind of takes it in that one place and owns it, right? He says, "Yeah, okay. All that stuff they say about me, fine. It's true." Right? So don't worry about me. Worry, you know, focus on Christ.
>> Thank you.
>> Andrew.
>> Father Bless. Thank you for this. Um, uh, also thank you for explaining the Pharisaic understanding of why they wanted to stone people because I never really put that together that it was because they thought that one bad apple spoils the bunch, essentially. I never understood that. So, thank you for that. Um, but I'm, I was just curious, and maybe this might be an obvious question, not as well read on the Acts of the Apostles, and maybe I should be. But how is it that you know that Stephen was a student of Paul, or that they were once colleagues? Where is it that you get that?
>> Yeah. So there's a whole series of traditions and there's a whole bunch of documents he's come from about once St. Stephen was stoned to death, he was actually buried by Gamaliel, uh, and St. Nicodemus in, in Rabbi Gamaliel's, St. Gamaliel's family tomb. And that's where his relics were later found. And there's a feast day in August that actually celebrates that the finding of, of his relics. Um, and they were labeled there and St. Gamaliel's relics, and, uh, the rest of the, the family there, uh, in Judea. Um, and if you, if you do a quick Google search of the bur, burial of St. Stephen, there's iconography and Christian art of St. Gamaliel burying St. Stephen in his tomb as his former disciple all through church history. Um, so, and there are a bunch of then written texts from different times, right? Uh, talking about that, like surrounding the finding of his relics, um, and all of those things. So that's, that's where I'm getting.
>> Did Gamaliel ever become a follower of Christ?
>> Yes, he is St. Gamaliel. He's a saint.
>> St. Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> He is on the calendar. Yeah. So he's the last person that I could tell who was considered a saint by both Jews and Christians.
>> And at that point it splits.
>> Ian, you have a question.
>> Father Bless. Thank you. Um, I might be jumping the gun, but I heard on one of your lectures about Paul. It was likely he was doing the Shema prayer of the,
>> the, I was wondering if you could speak to that. I have one more other question, but he, it was pretty likely he was doing that, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one."
>> Yeah.
>> When he had his vision, right? We'll, we'll talk about that more next time, but just to say now, that prayer, uh, that's translated to English, usually most English versions from Deuteronomy is, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one." That was prayed meditatively, uh, by, uh, in Pharisaic practice by Jews in the first century, sort of in the way that we use the Jesus Prayer, well,
>> today as Orthodox Christians. Um, and the idea was similar, right? We call the Jesus Prayer the prayer of a single thought that's focusing our mind on Christ. For them, it was focusing their mind on God, right? And so if someone was on a long trip, like say they're riding to Damascus, right, on a horse from Jerusalem, it's going to take days, right? And you're sitting on a horse. That would be a way of meditatively praying, right? Would be to repeat the Shema if you were like a Pharisee from St. Paul's background.
>> Wow. Uh, thank you. My other question was, did you, could you speak to what, so Paul, it was likely Paul was married before when he was 13 or 14?
>> Yes. Yes.
>> And what, what maybe happened to his wife? Do we know?
>> We're going to, we're going to talk about that more.
>> There's a point, I mean, I don't mind spoilers. There's a point in, in the book of Acts where he goes back to Tarsus for two years, right? And the text itself doesn't immediately say like why, right? It's just he, he does a missionary journey and then he just sort of retires for a couple of years. And then, and so when we get there, we'll talk more about why there are things in the text and things in some of his letters that indicate that he was doing that to kind of take care of some family business. So that may have been when his wife passed away, or when he was taking care of things with his wife's family. Um, because there are some things surrounding that in his letters with his nephew and, and other family people. Um, but so it would, it would be extremely strange, like kind of beyond belief, that he wouldn't have been married to someone at age 13.
>> Right. But it's also very true that
>> people dying in childbirth, the mortality rate in general in the first century was very high.
>> M.
>> Right. And so, and when you read contextually, when St. Paul is talking about him not having a wife with him, he's talking about it in the context of remarriage, of if something happens to your spouse, should you remarry? And St. Paul is saying it's better at that point, right? If, if you can not remarry, right, to devote, just devote the rest of your life to, to serving God. And that gets into, he talks about the office of widow in one of the pastoral epistles, like widow was an office in, in the early church. Um, you were enrolled among the widows, and there are canons like at Nicaea and Constantinople I that talk about how old you have to be to be registered as a widow, like formally, right? Um, so yeah, but we'll, we'll get into that some more when we get there.
>> Okay, thank you.
>> Father, uh, want to be respectful of your time. We're already gone past our allotted time.
>> I can, I could, I'll do it if somebody already has their hand up. I'll do it, but then we'll, we'll call it after that.
>> Okay. So, we'll, uh, Jordan, go ahead.
>> Thank you, Father.
>> Hi, Father. I, I'm, uh, struggling to wrap my head around how Paul and the early Christians would relate to the temple, if, like, knowing that the Sadducees were illegitimate or not Levites. What I mean, cuz, you know, Paul still went to do sacrifices and, and maybe that was evangelical in a way. But, I mean, would he use the same logic he uses about, uh, secular authorities being put in authority by God? Would he use the same to say the Sadducees too?
>> Yeah. So, um, the, the Pharisees in general had this very ambivalent relationship with the temple. It wasn't just this, I mean, the Sadducees are a big enough problem, but also the actual physical temple there had been mostly built, the complex by Herod, who if anything was, was as bad or worse than, right, the Sadducees, right? So the whole thing was kind of tainted on the one hand by that. And there are groups like Qumran, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were groups who because of that declared the temple was not valid, right? And completely left. The Pharisees, they didn't go that far, because the Pharisees also were reading their scriptures and saying, well, no, this is the place where God chose to put his name, right? So they were saying, they were sort of treating it like, think about David with Saul. Right? Saul is a deeply evil man, he's literally demon-possessed, he's chasing David to try to kill him, but David's like, he's still the king, he's still the Lord's anointed, right? Despite all, right? And so that's sort of the Pharisees' view, like the person who is the high priest is a corrupt and evil man, right? But he's the office of high priest, right? Is an office that God established, right? And so we need to respect that office, right? And yes, this building was built by a horrible person, but it is the building, right? And so that sort of, and, and that gets carried over a little bit into Christianity, right? Uh, we don't have that enough, maybe in the modern day, especially online, but traditionally in Orthodoxy, right? Regardless of what you think of a bishop as a person, they're still a bishop, right? And so you show them respect, right? And, and treat them with respect, the office, right? Regardless of the person. And there have been plenty of corrupt bishops and priests and, and evil bishops and priests in the history of the church, right? But even when you look at, like the Council of Ephesus, where Nestorius is getting deposed, when Nestorius walked into that council, he was still the Patriarch of Constantinople. And so they address him as "His Holiness, Nestorius, the Patriarch of all," the terms of respect, all the, everything. And then at the council, he gets deposed. And now, okay, now he's not a bishop anymore, right? Because he was a heretic, right? So, I think that's the framework to understand how St. Paul and the other apostles looked at the temple.
>> Hey, Nick.
>> Uh, hello.
>> Can you hear me?
>> Yes. Um, I tried and, uh, when I, you were explaining, um, how the land was all owned by the high priest and so that was like a serfdom, and also they never did a jubilee. And then how the land in jubilee is supposed to go to the each tribe, each clan and family from generations. How this is this the, what the Israelis now claim this was promised and you, you know, it's when God, you said once that God fulfilled this promise to them, but then I have this, uh, fight in my head to make a logical conclusion if it's fulfilled, then in the jubilee the land goes back to the same people, which, you know, the dependents of the ones which received it. So, I hope I was clear to.
>> Yeah.
>> To, yeah. Okay.
>> Yeah. So, yeah, that was true. It was supposed to, every 50th year, the land was supposed to go back to the original families, but they never did it.
>> They never did it.
>> Even though they were commanded to do it.
>> And so that's part of how wicked the Sadducees were, right? That they were, they, they had taken all that land and refused to give it back to the families, um, who, who God had originally given it to, and basically enslaved those people, right? Uh, to work, work the farmland that should have belonged to them, right? To make the, the Sadducees, the high priest's family richer. So, uh, nowadays Israelis, do they have that claim or it's a different, or like, what if?
>> Yeah. So, they don't for a couple of reasons. Number one, um, that was, that was already fulfilled. But number two, uh, not only do they not have genetic testing to know who's from what family, uh, genetic testing is illegal in the nation state of modern nation state of Israel. All right.
>> So they are, they are claiming land that their families, their ancestors had had no rights to.
>> All righty. Thank you.
>> Anastas, you have a question?
>> Yes. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to ask your question, Father.
>> Yes, sir.
>> U I'm Greek. Um, so the first observation is that Paul is not a Greek name. It's a Latin name. And that's it's in Latin.
>> Paulos is the Greek form. Yeah.
>> But it's in Latin that it's mean small.
>> Yeah. Palos. Yeah. Yeah. With a Y.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, another thing that struck me is the name for Pharisees, being you call them, uh, holiness and, uh, set aside. If we were to assign to them a Greek name, that would be Hagios, which is what the original church members were called, too.
>> Yeah.
>> That's what they were claiming about themselves. Yes.
>> Right. So, so the, the
>> Paul calls everybody a saint.
>> All you had to do was to be baptized and take communion and you were a saint.
>> Yes. Well, he, he calls them saints and called to be saints,
>> right? He says God, Christ has made you holy, and now you need to become holy.
>> Right. Right. Yeah.
>> Um, and, and a fellow participant asked a question about Shema, and I was just recently reading, um, uh, Ephesians 4, and in Ephesians 4, there is something that to me, at least, strikes as "Our God is one." I mean, "Our Lord is one. Our church is one. The calling is one. The baptism is one. But our God is one." And so, yes, indeed, the Shema was part of Paul's upbringing.
>> Yeah.
>> And he does, he does something interesting with it in, uh, we'll probably talk about later in First Corinthians, where he takes the Greek form of the Shema and puts Jesus' name into it.
>> Uh-huh.
>> So, yeah.
>> Um, yeah. So, um, I also appreciated the fact that you said in answer to another question, "Where did you get this information from?" And you said, "There is a number of traditions suggesting," at least to me, that just because something is a tradition, it should neither be accepted unquestionably nor rejected unquestionably. That if, if it's collated and it's consistent with the faith, the, there are many reasons to suggest that it might, in fact, be useful to us.
>> Yes.
>> And one of the things you mentioned was for St. Gamaliel, August 2nd is his feast day. So if we go into the books of the church, we're going to find his Synaxarion and we're going to read what the church talks about. Well, on June 30th is the feast day of Simon the Zealot.
>> And in the Synaxarion, it says he's called a Zealot not because he belonged to the Zealot party, but because once he met Jesus, he zealously followed him. And in fact, there is the other piece of information that he is the young man that was getting married at Cana, and Jesus and his mother were invited to.
>> There's at least one other tradition about that wedding, though, too. But that may be. Yeah.
>> Yes. But that brings me to the main one, which, uh, Eric brought up, this business of Paul being a radicalized violent Zealot.
>> I had never heard that Zealots fought against fellow Jews. I always
>> They were Roman collaborators. Yes. Yeah. I always thought that, uh, that, uh, they, they were primarily objecting to Roman authority. Now, if a Jew was a collaborator,
>> he might have been worse than a Roman.
>> Yeah.
>> Because he was a wolf in the height of a sheep. But there was no such indication in the in the case of of Stephen. In fact,
>> Oh, no, he was not. Stephen was not. He thought that Stephen was a heretic.
>> No. Yeah. But, but that Paul somehow was a Zealot who was violently after Stephen. In fact, there is every indication as far as I can read that Paul did not participate. He condoned, and there unquestionably that he condoned. The reason he did not participate, I assign to the fact that he was under 30 years old at the time, and you had to be 30.
>> You weren't supposed to. Yeah. Actively. Yeah.
>> Uh, but there is, reading his epistles repeatedly, he seems to have in mind this image of Stephen dying and looking up in the sky and seeing the Son of God seated at the right hand of the Father. And, and, uh, Paul says, "I finally get it."
>> Right? He had the same, so
>> Stephen, Christ is actually standing, but that's the only difference between their visions. But
>> I think like another participant mentioned, I think that it's very likely that Paul was a very traditionalist, uh, Jew, Judean follower. He was not in persecuting Christians because he was a violent man. He was persecuting Christians because they were heretics, and it was part of his, of his zealousness. But that doesn't
>> persecution took violent forms.
>> But he, but Paul didn't actually, we do not know. We do not have evidence that Paul actually
>> Well, he's he's on his way to Damascus to put people in chains and drag them back. I mean, that's violent,
>> right?
>> Oh, I, I don't disagree that that is right. But, but, but some people have have
>> have read between his words that he may actually have blood on his hands.
>> Right. And we don't know that for sure.
>> But my feeling is that he had blood on his hands, not because he actually spilled it, but because he arrested them, chained them, took them, and then somebody else.
>> Yeah. Yeah. And stood there, watched the execution, and approved of it. But not in the case of Stephen. So he was what you would, he was what you would call an accessory after the fact in modern law.
>> And I'm sure you're going to go into the the relationship between Paul and Barnabas.
>> Yeah.
>> Who was another one of his colleagues or upper classmen, actually, as far as my calculations show, Barnabas was a little older than Paul.
>> That's why he comes and vouches for St. Paul later. Yeah. Right.
>> Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna get into all that. Yeah.
>> Yeah. I, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.
>> Okay. Thank you again, uh, Father Steven, for a really interesting and incredible beginning to our study on the life of St. Paul.