Note 89 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

According to the Acts, Paul’s name was originally Saul, though no such avowal is ever made in the epistles. The purpose of the statement seems to be to strengthen the case as to his Jewish nationality, which is affirmed in the epistles, as is the item that he had been a murderous persecutor of the early Jesuists. All this suggests a late manipulation of the traditions of an early strife. To claim that the Gentilizing apostle had been a Jew born and bred would be as natural on the Gentilizing side as to allege that the typically Judaic Peter had denied his Lord; while the charge of persecuting the infant church would be a not less natural invention of the Judaic Christians who accepted the tradition that Paul had been a Pharisee and a pupil of Gamaliel. In point of fact we find the Ebionites, the typical Judaic Jesuists, knowing him simply as “Paul of Tarsus” in their version of the Acts or in a previous document upon which that founded.89 And many Jewish scholars have declared that they cannot conceive the Pauline epistles to have been written by a Rabbinically trained Jew.90 This does not preclude the possibility that the original Paul, of whose “few very short epistles” personally penned91 we have probably nothing left that is identifiable,92 may have been such a Jew, but the presumption is to the contrary.