What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
ABuddhist
Posts: 1016
Joined: Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:36 am

What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar?

Post by ABuddhist »

I ask because Paul would not be the first religious leader (or even founder of a new religious sect) to inflate his credentials when talking to converts/followers.

Furthermore, the fact that Paul cites from the Septuagint (as far as I can recall) and reveals only limited knowledge of Aramaic in his authentic writings strongly suggests to me that he was not able to read Hebrew. Otherwise, I suppose that he would have cited the Jews' scriptures in a way that more accurately reflected the underlying Hebrew that he would have studied.

But I am only an amateur, and I am wondering whether any scholars have produced evidence from Paul's letters that Paul was, as he claimed, a Pharisee and a Jewish scholar.
John2
Posts: 4309
Joined: Fri May 16, 2014 4:42 pm

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by John2 »

Acts says that Paul was a Pharisee (23:6) and spoke Hebrew (21:40), and for what it's worth, I think Acts may have been written by someone who knew Paul. But in any event, it shows that someone who was fairly close to Paul's time and arguably knew his letters thought that he was a Pharisee and knew Hebrew.

... Paul, knowing that some of them were Sadducees and others Pharisees, called out in the Sanhedrin, “Brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee ..."
... Paul, standing on the steps, motioned with his hand to the people. And when there was a great hush, he addressed them in the Hebrew language ...

Some translations have this (and the other references to Hebrew in the NT) as Aramaic, but the Greek says Hebrew.

https://biblehub.com/interlinear/acts/21-40.htm


And in 22:3 Paul is also presented as learning from Gamaliel. Do you think the author of Acts thought Gamailel taught Paul in Greek? Did anyone in antiquity think this?

I was educated at the feet of Gamaliel in strict conformity to the law of our fathers.



There is also a brief article here that argues for Hebrew being the primary language for Jews in Israel in the first century CE (like in the Dead Sea Scrolls).


https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/6601/


That Paul knew some Aramaic is normal, since the OT and the DSS use it as well. But the vast majority of the OT and DSS is in Hebrew, as is the Mishnah, which indicates to me that the primary language of Paul's time for Jews in Israel (and all the more so for Pharisees) was Hebrew.
Last edited by John2 on Thu Nov 25, 2021 1:26 pm, edited 3 times in total.
User avatar
neilgodfrey
Posts: 6161
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 4:08 pm

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by neilgodfrey »

Alan Segal took exception to a view that Paul was never a Pharisee in Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee.

Page 227:
Yet Rom. 7:9-12 is troublesome: "I was once alive apart from the
Law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died; the very
commandment which promised life proved to be death to me. For sin,
finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me.
So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good."
These verses appear to state that he gave up Torah at a particular point and
then returned to it. Paul nowhere explicitly states that he stopped observing
Torah, and many New Testament scholars justifiably maintain that
Paul continued to be an observant Jew throughout his life.6 If this report is
to be taken as personal, Paul is saying that there was a period of time when
he did not observe Torah. For some reason he returned to it, and when he
did, sin revived in him. This passage seems to contradict Paul's statements
in Galatians and Corinthians where he says he gave up the law!

There are five logical possibilities for making sense of this statement:
On one of the five possibilities Segal writes,
3. There could have been a time before Paul became a Pharisee when he
did not keep the law. Acts records that Paul came from a Pharisaic family
in Tarsus (Acts 23:6), but several scholars have questioned the meaning of
being a Pharisee in the Diaspora.9
Endnote 9. . . .
9. Claude G. Montefiore, Judaism and St. Paul (London: Goschen, 1914).
See also James W. Parkes, Judaism and Christianity (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1948); Jesus, Paul, and the Jews (London: SCM Press, 1936). Hyam
Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, uses the
Ebionite tradition about Paul and the pseudo-Clementine correspondence to sug-
gest that Paul never was a Pharisee. This suggestion, which uses late, unreliable,
and wildly biased documents as historical data, while propounding that everything
Paul himself said is a lie, seems to grow naturally out of the author's too obvious
polemical and apologetic motives.
(As if to be perverse, Maccoby in a later work argued that it was Jesus who was the Pharisee, as you may know. Compare Falk.)
John2
Posts: 4309
Joined: Fri May 16, 2014 4:42 pm

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by John2 »

(As if to be perverse, Maccoby in a later work argued that it was Jesus who was the Pharisee, as you may know.)

Maccoby was the first author I ever read about Christianity, and I used to think it was a crazy idea that Jesus was a Pharisee, but now it seems plain as day, only not in the way Maccoby argues. I think the Pharisaic elements he is seeing in Jesus are due to Jesus being a Fourth Philosopher, and Josephus says in Ant. 18.1.6 that aside from their radicalism, Fourth Philosophers "agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions." This is why I call Christians (and all Fourth Philosophers) "radical Pharisees." And it explains why Pharisees (like Josephus and Paul) were attracted to the Fourth Philosophy.
John2
Posts: 4309
Joined: Fri May 16, 2014 4:42 pm

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by John2 »

3. There could have been a time before Paul became a Pharisee when he
did not keep the law. Acts records that Paul came from a Pharisaic family
in Tarsus (Acts 23:6), but several scholars have questioned the meaning of
being a Pharisee in the Diaspora.


Josephus didn't become a Pharisee until his late teens. And while Josephus' father Matthias may have been a Sadducee, Josephus says he didn't try out the three Jewish sects until his late teens, so maybe something similar happened to Paul.

And when I was about sixteen years old, I had a mind to make trim of the several sects that were among us ... for I thought that by this means I might choose the best, if I were once acquainted with them all.
Last edited by John2 on Fri Nov 26, 2021 12:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Ken Olson
Posts: 1277
Joined: Fri May 09, 2014 9:26 am

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by Ken Olson »

ABuddhist wrote: Thu Nov 25, 2021 11:12 am But I am only an amateur, and I am wondering whether any scholars have produced evidence from Paul's letters that Paul was, as he claimed, a Pharisee and a Jewish scholar.
I'm going to skip the question about whether Paul was a Pharisee for the moment because it requires some discussion about exactly what a Pharisee is, and move on to the question about whether he was a Jewish scholar.

E.P. Sanders has famously argued that Paul was a scholar who had studied the Septuagint (the Greek form of the Scriptures of Israel) in depth and had a prodigious memory. When Paul is arguing that people are saved by faith, not by the law, in Galatians 3, he quotes/paraphrases Gen. 15.6 in Galatians 3.6: "And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness", and Habbakuk 2.4 in Galatians 3.11, "The one who is righteous will live by faith", whereas in Galatians 3.10: 'Cursed is everyone who does not obey all the things written in the book of the law", he cites Deuteronomy 27.26. According to Sanders Paul has cited the only two passages in the Jewish Scriptures that combine faith/belief and righteousness and also the only passage that contains the words law and curse. Someone working with a computerized concordance could do this, but it would take a long time paging or scrolling through the Septuagint to find these. Paul seems to have done this through memory (E.P. Sanders, Paul: A Very Short Introduction, 126-128; Paul: The Apostle's Life Letters and Thought, 72-73).

Best,

Ken

Additional Note: While Paul frequently quotes the Scriptures of Israel in Greek, he never quotes any Greek author.
ABuddhist
Posts: 1016
Joined: Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:36 am

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by ABuddhist »

Ken Olson wrote: Thu Nov 25, 2021 2:02 pm
ABuddhist wrote: Thu Nov 25, 2021 11:12 am But I am only an amateur, and I am wondering whether any scholars have produced evidence from Paul's letters that Paul was, as he claimed, a Pharisee and a Jewish scholar.
I'm going to skip the question about whether Paul was a Pharisee for the moment because it requires some discussion about exactly what a Pharisee is, and move on to the question about whether he was a Jewish scholar.

E.P. Sanders has famously argued that Paul was a scholar who had studied the Septuagint (the Greek form of the Scriptures of Israel) in depth and had a prodigious memory. When Paul is arguing that people are saved by faith, not by the law, in Galatians 3, he quotes/paraphrases Gen. 15.6 in Galatians 3.6: "And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness", and Habbakuk 2.4 in Galatians 3.11, "The one who is righteous will live by faith", whereas in Galatians 3.10: 'Cursed is everyone who does not obey all the things written in the book of the law", he cites Deuteronomy 27.26. According to Sanders Paul has cited the only two passages in the Jewish Scriptures that combine faith/belief and righteousness and also the only passage that contains the words law and curse. Someone working with a computerized concordance could do this, but it would take a long time paging or scrolling through the Septuagint to find these. Paul seems to have done this through memory (E.P. Sanders, Paul: A Very Short Introduction, 126-128; Paul: The Apostle's Life Letters and Thought, 72-73).

Best,

Ken

Additional Note: While Paul frequently quotes the Scriptures of Israel in Greek, he never quotes any Greek author.
I thank you very much for your answer, which is exactly what I was seeking, given my (and others', apparently) doubts about Acts' reliability.
User avatar
Irish1975
Posts: 1057
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:01 am

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by Irish1975 »

Darrell Doughty's article "Citizens of Heaven: Philippians 3:2-21 as a Deutero-Pauline Passage" brings some much needed skepticism to the Pharisee claim:
The portrait of Paul in Philippians 3:4-9 is exceptional. Elsewhere Paul's previous persecution of the church of God testifies that his call to be an apostle was by the grace of God (1 Cor 15:9-10; Gal 1:13-15). In Phil 3, however, it serves as evidence for his righteousness under the law. Nowhere else in the Pauline writings is Paul identified as a Pharisee. And nowhere else in these writings is there an appeal to Paul's blamelessness with regard to righteousness under the law. Only in Acts, where Paul's strict observance of the law is a central concern, are both his identity as a Pharisee and his persecution of the church set forth as evidence of his blameless conduct as a Jew (Acts 22:3-5; 26:4-5, 11). Nowhere else does Paul refer to Christ as "my Lord" (v 8), although such language is implied by the accounts of Paul's Damascus experience in Acts (9:5; 22:8; 26:15). Nowhere else does Paul speak in such a way of "gaining Christ" (v 8) or being "found in Christ" (v 9); and the meaning of this language is obscure.
This wholly polemical passage (most of chapter 3 of Philippians!), in other words, has all the marks of being from a later time, and from the circle that composed Acts. It is highly polemical, and exaggerates all the themes of more genuine Pauline texts. The purpose is to define Christianity over against Judaism in the crudest way possible, to claim that Christians are the true Israel, that those who practice circumcision (i.e. Jews as such) are "dogs," and so forth.

See the whole article.
Charles Wilson
Posts: 2098
Joined: Thu Apr 03, 2014 8:13 am

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by Charles Wilson »

Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker, Paul and the Invention of Christianity: https://www.amazon.com/Mythmaker-Paul-I ... =ABIS_BOOK

Paul may have been a liar, cheat and thief but he was no Pharisee by any stretch of the imagination.
John2
Posts: 4309
Joined: Fri May 16, 2014 4:42 pm

Re: What evidence from Pauline Letters (aside from Paul's claims) do we have that he was a pharisee and a Jewish scholar

Post by John2 »

Irish1975 wrote: Thu Nov 25, 2021 5:10 pm Darrell Doughty's article "Citizens of Heaven: Philippians 3:2-21 as a Deutero-Pauline Passage" brings some much needed skepticism to the Pharisee claim:
The portrait of Paul in Philippians 3:4-9 is exceptional. Elsewhere Paul's previous persecution of the church of God testifies that his call to be an apostle was by the grace of God (1 Cor 15:9-10; Gal 1:13-15). In Phil 3, however, it serves as evidence for his righteousness under the law. Nowhere else in the Pauline writings is Paul identified as a Pharisee. And nowhere else in these writings is there an appeal to Paul's blamelessness with regard to righteousness under the law. Only in Acts, where Paul's strict observance of the law is a central concern, are both his identity as a Pharisee and his persecution of the church set forth as evidence of his blameless conduct as a Jew (Acts 22:3-5; 26:4-5, 11). Nowhere else does Paul refer to Christ as "my Lord" (v 8), although such language is implied by the accounts of Paul's Damascus experience in Acts (9:5; 22:8; 26:15). Nowhere else does Paul speak in such a way of "gaining Christ" (v 8) or being "found in Christ" (v 9); and the meaning of this language is obscure.
This wholly polemical passage (most of chapter 3 of Philippians!), in other words, has all the marks of being from a later time, and from the circle that composed Acts. It is highly polemical, and exaggerates all the themes of more genuine Pauline texts. The purpose is to define Christianity over against Judaism in the crudest way possible, to claim that Christians are the true Israel, that those who practice circumcision (i.e. Jews as such) are "dogs," and so forth.

See the whole article.


Even if we dismiss Php. 3, we also have Gal. 1:14 ("I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers").

The oral Torah of the Pharisees is commonly known as the traditions of the fathers (e.g., Mk. 7:5: "So the Pharisees and scribes questioned Jesus: 'Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders?'"). As Josephus puts it in Ant. 13.10.6:

What I would now explain is this, that the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers.

And since the Sadducees rejected the traditions of the fathers, Paul cannot have been a Sadducee. And since Paul doesn't appear to have been an Essene to me, I think the best option is that he was a Pharisee.

And most Jews then were Pharisaic (at least in Israel), just like today, and according to Josephus, even Sadducaic judges deferred to Pharisaic rulings in Ant. 18.1.4.

But they [the Sadducees] are able to do almost nothing of themselves; for when they become magistrates, as they are unwillingly and by force sometimes obliged to be, they addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise bear them.

So for me the odds are that Paul was a Pharisee, even if we didn't have Php. 3, Gal. 1:14 and Acts.
Post Reply