Dear Rev. Know it all;

I was especially interested in your comment that “ Most Jews in the Greco Roman world probably were not that literate in Hebrew. They use the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Bible in Egypt about three hundred years before Jesus. It was this version of the bible that the first Christians used and considered inspired.”  Recently, I was reading a book called “Why the Jews Rejected Jesus” by Rabbi Klinghoffer and it had all sorts of truth and plenty of silliness in it, but one thing was puzzling to me; the author claimed that St. Paul was clearly not who he said he was– a student of Gamaliel, because his Hebrew was clearly weak. I did not know that Paul was  not an exception, but that Steven and others were also weak in their knowledge of Hebrew. That is very interesting. 

Justin Uthergoy

Dear Justin,

I have often kvetched with Rabbi Lefkovitz about this. It is a standard talking point among some Jewish scholars that Paul could not have been a student of Gamaliel. I have no idea why Klinghoffer says that Paul's Hebrew was weak. Paul says nothing in the language that I can think of, except for "Amen".  He was raised in Tarsus a Greek-speaking city in Turkey. His family seems to have been prosperous, possibly even well connected politically. He was after all, a Roman citizen, a very rare thing at the time. His first languages were quite possibly Greek and Aramaic. For Paul, Hebrew was a learned language, not a living one. I have had students whose French was non-existent, yet they went to France for a couple of semesters and managed. If Paul's Hebrew was weak, which I doubt, He still may have studied under Gamaliel. I have known people who can understand and read a language wonderfully, but when it comes to speaking it, they are quite handicapped.

The reason Rabbi Klinghoffer says that Paul couldn't have studied under Gamaliel was that Rabbi Klignhoffer does not want Paul to have studied under Gamaliel. Gamaliel is one of the great lights of Judaism and the Talmud. It is an embarrassment, and therefore impossible that Paul studied under Gamaliel and that Gamaliel tolerated the Christian movement, as claimed in the Acts of the Apostles when he arranged the release of Peter and John. The evidence would indicate otherwise.

Paul was a Pharisee. Gamaliel, a Pharisee, is thought to have had 500 students. There were only 6,000 Pharisees in the whole world according to Josephus and Philo. That means that the single largest and most popular school of Pharisaic Judaism was the school of Gamaliel. Why shouldn't a rich expatriate Pharisee send his boy Saul back to the old country to study at the feet of the best? Paul was an aristocrat. True, he learned tent making, but every Rabbi was expected to have a trade. There was a saying that, "he who fails to teach his son a trade, teaches him to steal.” At some time in his life, Paul actually had to use his trade. I imagine his family cut him off over this Jesus nonsense. Who knows?

Still, Paul was an up-and-coming young someone. He was delegated by the Jerusalem institution to go and clean up the Christian mess in Damascus. He seems to have known important people like Agrippa and Berenice and Felix the governor. Paul was somebody. Why shouldn't he have studied under Gamaliel? Paul had a few very interesting commonalities with the thought of Gamaliel. First of all, Gamaliel was the grandson of the great Hillel. the School of Hillel which was tolerant and flexible almost to the point of liberality was at odds with the much stricter school of Shammai. Paul took that liberality much further than Gamaliel ever would have by allowing Christians to eat unclean foods and remain uncircumcised. However, Gamaliel's liberality might have prepared Paul for the great shift in thought that his conversion to Jesus caused.  

Then there was the enlightened attitude to the Greek speaking Gentiles that Gamaliel taught. He urged dialogue for the sake of peace. Paul carried tolerance for Gentiles much farther than his supposed mentor. Paul and Gamaliel both believed in the usefulness of correspondence. Gamaliel was known to have been an extensive correspondent with the Greek speaking world. This he has in common with Paul.

We like to think of Paul as a great male chauvinist, but in reality, he believed in the full humanity of women, a rare idea at the time. Remember that Paul said there was neither male nor female in Christ. He and Gamaliel shared an unusual respect for woman. There is an interesting story in the Talmud about a student who quarreled with Gamaliel. The Talmud refers to Jesus as "that man" (oto-ish in Hebrew), not wishing to mention His name.  It calls the quarrelsome student "oto-talmid," (that student,) also refusing to name him. The Scripture says that Paul was filled with rage against the Christian movement. Could it be the very nature of Paul, inclined to rage, that caused a rift with the tolerant Gamaliel? Again, who knows? It's interesting to imagine.

Rabbi Klinghoffer is mistaken, not only in his assumptions about Paul, but about the very assumption that gives the title to his book, "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus." He is assuming that the Jews rejected Jesus.

Fr. Richard Neuhaus, may he rest in peace, made the point in a book review in First Things, February, 2005, that the Jews may not have rejected Jesus. There were millions, perhaps as many as six or seven million Jews in the Roman empire at the time of Christ, only a minority of them lived in the Holy Land at the time, the rest were scattered over the Persian and Roman empires. Two centuries later, there seem to have been a lot less, perhaps only a million. What became of all those Jews? Neuhaus made the point that certainly there were deaths in war and a de-population of the Holy Land itself, but the vast number of Jews in the Diaspora would have been unaffected. He points out that they, being Greek speaking themselves, may simply have become Christians and blended into the local Greek speaking population.

Notice in the Acts of the Apostles, that there was dispute among the widows of the Greeks and the widows of the Hebrews as to the distribution of alms. All the people involved were Jews. The context makes it clear the some were Greek speaking Jews and some Hebrew, that is Aramaic speaking Jews. In effect, Christianity was the first reformed Judaism! Jews who can eat shrimp! Amazing! There are some tantalizing bits of physical evidence for this. The Arab speaking, Palestinian Christians of the Holy Land, who until these sad times, have maintained a distinct life and community can be genetically demonstrated to be descendants of the inhabitants of the land in the time of Christ. For what it's worth, they are genetically the most Judean people on the face of the earth, though this is something no one wants to hear, not Jews, not Palestinian Christians, not nobody! Certainly modern European Jews are much intermarried and are as likely to be as blond as their neighbors. Racial theories are idiotic anyway, but I wonder if this isn't possibly genetic evidence for Neuhaus's theory. That would mean that early Christianity, by in large, was a movement of Greek speaking Jews that welcomed their gentile neighbors. Thus it is  possible that the majority of Jews in the Roman empire eventually became Christians which would explain the strength and the rapid growth of the movement in the first century. Did the presence of Greek speaking Judaism throughout the empire create fertile ground for the Gospel of Christ? Does this explain why the first Christians thought of themselves and not the more conservative minority as the true Israel?

Back to Gamaliel. Gamaliel is not thought of as part of that school which created modern Judaism. Another student of Hillel, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai gets credit for that. After the destruction of  Jerusalem, in 70 AD,  Ben Zakai started the school at Jamniah and it is from this school that modern Pharisaic Judaism descends. Ben Zakai though a follower of Hillel, waspartial to the teachings of the stricter Shamai, and not of the more lenient Rabban Gamaliel, the supposed teacher of Paul. Thus Rabbinic Judaism, and minority Judaism, if Neuhaus was right, developed in contradistinction to the lenient interpretations of Gamaliel and the shocking aberrations of his disciple Paul, the first reformed Jew. What we think of as Judaism went on to define itself as those who did not accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, and certainly not as the Son of God. There has been an antipathy between us ever since. It is sometimes hard to understand who dislikes the other more, Jews or Christians, though one must admit that we Christians have at times been a bit hard on Jews. No wonder they are a bit shy around us. Herschell Shanks of Biblical Archeological Review talks about the different "Judaisms" alive at the time of Jesus. He claims that only two have survived, Rabbinic Phariseeism and Christianity. If we look at it that way, we have a lot in common. Allow me once more to quote the great American philosopher, Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?"
 

Sincerely,

the Rev. Know it all.