190 A History of Judaism
have been all the more remarkable, but our evidence that he held this
status comes not from his own letters but from the less reliable narrative
of his career to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, when his citizenship
proves crucial in enabling him to escape a flogging:
The tribune directed that he was to be brought into the barracks, and
ordered him to be examined by flogging, to find out the reason for this
outcry against him. But when they had tied him up with thongs, Paul said
to the centurion who was standing by, ‘Is it legal for you to flog a Roman
citizen who is uncondemned?’ When the centurion heard that, he went to
the tribune and said to him, ‘What are you about to do? This man is a
Roman citizen.’ The tribune came and asked Paul, ‘Tell me, are you a Roman
citizen?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ The tribune answered, ‘It cost me a large sum of
money to get my citizenship.’ Paul said, ‘But I was born a citizen.’ Immedi-
ately those who were about to examine him drew back from him; and the
tribune also was afraid, for he realized that Paul was a Roman citizen and
that he had bound him.The fact that this episode provides the author of Acts with the crucial
link in his narrative of the shift of Christian mission from Jews in Jeru-
salem to gentiles in Rome has been taken as reason either to believe it
true or to judge it to be fabricated. What is certain is that the author of
Acts looked back at Paul’s career from the perspective of a gentile Chris-
tian community, and that his narrative included much that is not to be
found in Paul’s own letters. This does not imply that everything not in
the letters must be untrue, since there was no reason for the letters to
include everything about Paul’s life. But in principle it would be good to
understand Paul, as an undoubtedly complex Jew, primarily from what
he himself wrote. Even this procedure is not without difficulty, since six
of the thirteen letters in the New Testament attributed to him appear to
have been written not by him but by his followers in the decades follow-
ing his death. And it is in the nature of letters composed for a specific
audience or a specific occasion to be indirect and allusive in a fashion
which would have been entirely comprehensible to their original recipi-
ents even if they are baffling to us.^48
Despite such problems, we know a great deal more about Paul than
about most other Jews of his time. Born with the name Saul, in Tarsus
in Cilicia (in south- western Turkey), he was brought up a Pharisee and,
according to Acts, ‘sat at the feet of Gamaliel’.^ We have already noted
his claim in his letter to the Galatians that as a youth he had been a
zealot for ancestral traditions. As a diaspora Jew, he wrote in Greek,