John B. Polhill
Writing in the third century A.D., the Christian scholar Jerome mentioned a tradition that Paul migrated to Tarsus with his family from Gischala in Judea. Jerome added that they fled because the area was being laid waste by the Romans. Gischala was in Galilee, not Judea. However, there is ample evidence that the term Judea was used to refer to all of Palestine in the first century. The second problem is more difficult. Paul told the Jewish crowd that he was born in Tarsus (Acts 22:3), not carried there from “Judea.” Jerome’s tradition must be corrected at this point. The most likely time for a Jewish family to flee Roman repression in Palestine was that of Pompey (around 67 B.C.). If Jerome’s tradition has any historical basis, we must assume that the family went to Tarsus before Paul’s birth, perhaps as much as two generations earlier.
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The Quest for the Historical Paul
James Tabor
Bible History Daily
Biblical Archaeological Society
1/28/2020 originally published Nov. 2012 at jamestabor dot com (Taborblog)
Whether Paul was born in Tarsus one has to doubt since Jerome, the fourth century Christian writer, knew a different tradition. He says that Paul’s parents were from Gischala, in Galilee, a Jewish town about twenty-five miles north of Nazareth, and that Paul was born there.[xi] According to Jerome, when revolts broke out throughout Galilee following the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C., Paul and his parents were rounded up and sent to Tarsus in Cilicia as part of a massive exile of the Jewish population by the Romans to rid the area of further potential trouble. Since Jerome certainly knew Paul’s claim, according to the book of Acts, to have been born in Tarsus, it is very unlikely he would have contradicted that source without good evidence. Jerome’s account also provides us with the only indication we have as to Paul’s approximate age. Like Jesus, he would have had to have been born before 4 B.C., though how many years earlier we cannot say. This fits rather nicely with Paul’s statement in one of his last letters to a Christian named Philemon, written around A.D. 60, where he refers to himself as a “old man” (Greek presbytes), a word that implies someone who is in his 60s.
[xi] Jerome, De Virus Illustribus (PL 23, 646).
Commander:
Are you then not the Egyptian who some time ago created turmoil and together with the four thousand sicarii went out into the wilderness?
You speak Greek, but before you spoke to me in Greek, I knew for sure you were the Egyptian who some time ago created turmoil and together with four thousand sicarii went out into the wilderness. You all gathered at the Mount of Olives creating turmoil about attempting to make the walls of Jerusalem fall down.
Acts 21: 38 and Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20, Chapter 8, Section 6, Lines 169-172
Steefen said
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James Tabor
Acts’s claim that Paul grew up in Jerusalem and was a personal student of the famous rabbi Gamaliel is also highly suspect. The book of Acts has an earlier scene, when the apostles Peter and John are arrested by the Jewish authorities who are threatening to have them killed, in which Gamaliel stands up in the Sanhedrin court and speaks in their behalf, recommending their release (Acts 5:33-39). The story is surely fictitious and is part of the author’s attempt to indicate to his Roman audience that reasonable minded Jews, like noble Roman officials, did not condemn the Christians. It is likely that the author of Acts, in making Paul an honored student of Gamaliel, the most revered Pharisee of the day, is wanting to further advance this perspective. Throughout his account he constantly characterizes the Jewish enemies of Paul as irrational and rabid, in contrast to those “good” Jews who are calm, reasonable, and respond favorably to Paul (Acts 13:45; 18:12; 23:12).
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