Have you ever been confused by the New Testament's use of the names the Apostle Paul and Saul of Tarsus?
So which is it? Sometimes it's thought that Saul was his name prior to becoming a Christian, and then he assumed the name Paul when he became a Christian. That in fact is not the way the New Testament presents it. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham, and today our guest teacher will introduce us to this monumental figure in the early church, and he'll explain why he goes by both Saul and Paul. Today you'll hear a message from Guy Waters, a New Testament professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. It's from his 12-message series, The Life and Theology of Paul. And today only, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800-435-4343, we'll send you this entire series on DVD, along with his companion hardcover book on the Apostle Paul, as our way of saying thank you. So give your gift before midnight tonight to not miss this resource package on the life and theology of Paul. We know the teaching of Paul. You've likely memorized portions of Romans or Ephesians or Philippians. But who was he?
Here's Dr. Waters with this one-day feature on the Apostle Paul. Paul has monumental significance and influence in the history of the church. We take only three men, three great men in God's work in his church, Augustine, Luther, and John Wesley, each of whom traces, if not their conversion, then a radical grasp of the gospel of grace to an encounter with the writings of Paul. Do you remember Augustine's conversion? He was in the garden and he heard a child's voice say, talla lega, talla lega, take and read, take and read, and he opens the scripture to Romans chapter 13 and verse 14. Or flash forward a millennium later and there's Luther in the Tower of the Black Cloister in Wittenberg and he's pondering that phrase in Romans chapter 1 verse 17, the righteousness of God. And it dawns on him that this is the gift of God in the gospel. And he says, I felt at once as though I had been born again and I entered into paradise. Or John Wesley on Aldersgate Street in London, 1739. And the preface to Luther's commentary on Romans is read and he says, I felt my heart strangely warmed.
I'll take you and I. So much of what we know about the Christian gospel comes right from the letters of Paul. The effectual call, justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification. Imagine if we took these 13 letters out of the scripture, how impoverished our understanding of these great truths would be. We owe so much to the apostle Paul. And so standing where we stand this morning, we are in awe of this towering figure. But I want you to imagine yourself as a Christian believer in Jerusalem.
It's about the middle of the A.D. 30s. And all of a sudden you are introduced to a man by the name of Saul of Tarsus. Your response, I suspect, would not have been one of awe and admiration in light of what he was about to do. Your response likely would have been one of fear and terror.
Is this a ruse? Is this some trick by the Jerusalem authorities, a fifth column in the Christian church? Saul was a ferocious persecutor of Christians. He was intent by his own testimony on exterminating the gospel and on trying to destroy the church of Jesus Christ.
And Paul went far and wide to try and accomplish those goals. Paul, the scripture tells us, did not spare even women. And so as Paul is introduced, as Luke tells us in Acts Chapter nine, among the company of believers in Jerusalem, there are men whose wives have been carried off to prison. There are women who have been widowed because of the activity of the apostle Paul.
He had cast his lot sentencing these men to death. There were children who were looking at Saul of Tarsus and who could look at him as the one who would deprive them of mother or father. It goes to show you that you can't separate Paul, the theologian, from Paul, the man. And the scripture certainly doesn't.
That was true then and that's true today. So before we give a look at the theology of Paul, we need to give a look at the life of Saul of Tarsus. And in this lecture, we're going to look at the question, who was he before Jesus Christ lay hold of him on the Damascus road? So now Saul of Tarsus, who was he?
Well, the New Testament tells us quite a bit. We have the benefit, of course, of Paul's 13 letters. His focus is to proclaim Jesus Christ. But Paul testifies to the grace of Christ in his own life, and so he will reflect back on his life before Christ.
We have the Acts of the Apostles. They were penned by Luke, a sometime companion of Paul. He tells us in the Acts that he traveled with Paul. He knew him well.
Now, a word on the name. I've mentioned Saul of Tarsus. I've also spoken of the Apostle Paul. And the New Testament addresses him by both names. Now, sometimes it's thought that Saul was his name prior to becoming a Christian. And then he assumed the name Paul when he became a Christian.
But that, in fact, is not the way the New Testament presents it. He is called Saul all the way until Acts chapter 13. And at verse 9, he is called Paul. And from then on in the Acts of the Apostles, he is referred to as Paul.
What's going on there with his name? Well, the name Saul was his Jewish name. And the name Paul was also his name, but it's a Roman name. Romans had three names akin to our first, middle, and last name. And Paul was one of those three names.
We don't know the other two. And when Paul begins to use the name Paul is the moment when he begins actively to preach the gospel in Gentile lands. And in God's providence, Paul was a man who was conversant in Judaism and could preach the gospel to Jews, but he could also preach the gospel to Gentiles.
And his names reflect that fact. Now, what can we say about the Apostle Paul before the Damascus Road? And when we put what the New Testament tells us together, we can say a fair bit.
We can point to seven or eight things. Firstly, Paul tells us in one of his most autobiographical accounts in Philippians chapter 3 at the fifth verse. He says, I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews. Now, Paul was raised in what we might call an observant Jewish home.
He was circumcised on the eighth day, according to the law of Moses. He was an Israelite and particularly of the tribe of Benjamin. And his parents clearly took pride in that heritage because they named him after one of the most famous sons of the tribe of Benjamin, Saul. Paul says, I was a Hebrew of Hebrews. He did not reject his heritage.
He embraced it wholeheartedly. Jews were under constant pressure in Paul's day to conform to Greek and Roman ways of thinking and living. And it took great effort to live faithfully as a Jew. Paul's parents seem to have done that and Paul himself seems also to have resisted those pressures and to have embraced who he was by birthright. Second, it's always interesting to imagine what did the Apostle Paul look like?
We don't, of course, have pictures or videos. And we get a little hint in 2 Corinthians in the 10th chapter. Here, Paul is quoting his opponents.
And his opponents didn't have a lot favorable to say about him. They say his letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech is of no account. Paul does not seem to have been a strapping person. We have no description of Paul in the New Testament, but we have a suggestive description that comes from an apocryphal book a century or two later.
And it reads as follows. Paul was of a low stature, bald or shaved on the head, crooked thighs, handsome legs, hollowed eye, crooked nose, full of grace. And then, of course, there is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 11. Paul was a man who underwent intense physical suffering. He describes countless beatings, often near death. Five times I received from the Jews the 40 lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, and once I was stoned. Anyone who saw the Apostle Paul would have seen a man whose body bore the marks of intense suffering for Jesus Christ.
The scars and the disfigurement of this kind of torture. That's why he tells the Galatians, I bear in my body the marks of Jesus, and they were evident to all. Third, what can we say about Paul's family? We've already noted that he was born into an observant Jewish family. And he was presumably reared in the synagogue. He would have been taught the scripture from youth.
He would have been taught to pray, to sing the Psalms of David. We know that Paul's father was a Roman citizen. We know that because Paul says that he was born a citizen. And if you were born a citizen, that meant that your father was a Roman citizen.
We'll talk more on that in a moment. Acts mentions a nephew, a son of Paul's sister, who was living in Jerusalem. So Paul, even after becoming a Christian, maintained ties with his family. Paul never mentions a wife. Maybe that he was a lifelong bachelor. Maybe that he was widowed.
We don't know. But he did know that he was called to serve God as a single person. Fourth, where was Paul born? And he tells us that he was born in Tarsus of Cilicia.
Cilicia was a Roman province in what is today southeastern Turkey. And Tarsus was a city on the coast. We know from the book of Acts, particularly the second chapter, that Jews in the first century were spread all around the Mediterranean basin. They lived in North Africa. They lived in Italy.
They lived in Asia Minor. And Tarsus was one such city. Paul has an interesting way of describing the city of his birth.
He says, I am a citizen of no ordinary city. We know about Tarsus, what made it no ordinary city. Well, one recent New Testament scholars described it this way. It was very much a Hellenistic city. It was not a Jewish enclave. It was a university town.
A concourse of ideas flowed through it. It lay on a major Roman road and so it had traffic and trade. And it was estimated to have some half million people.
That was a sizable community in that day. Fifth, we mentioned this a bit earlier, Paul was born a Roman citizen. Now Paul appeals to his Roman citizenship on two occasions in Acts.
Once in Philippi and then a little later in Jerusalem in chapter 22. And it's fair to say that Paul's citizenship probably spared his life on at least one occasion. We see the dramatic moment, especially in Acts 25. And the Roman governor, Festus, the calculating political governor, is about to hand Paul over to the will of unbelieving Jews. And it seems as though Paul's life is forfeit. Paul appeals to Caesar, the right of a Roman citizen to have his case heard before Caesar himself on Italian soil. And so Paul is sent off to Rome. Paul's Roman citizenship, it becomes clear from the scripture, was a way for the gospel to be advanced.
It was one of the means by which the gospel made its way to Rome. And there's Paul's education. Sixthly, what can we say about Paul's education and training? Well, he tells us in Acts 22 that he was brought up in Jerusalem, educated under Gamaliel, strictly according to the law of our fathers. And it was in this way, he tells the Philippians, that I became a Pharisee of Pharisees.
It seems at some point that his family moved him to Jerusalem from Tarsus. And they placed him under the tutelage of Gamaliel, a very well-respected Jewish teacher, a Pharisaical teacher. And he was taught, he says, strictly according to the Jewish law.
Gamaliel was not lax or slack, but he took his Pharisaism very seriously. And Paul himself embraced his training with gusto. He tells the Galatians in chapter 1, I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people. Paul was not a C student. He was at the top of the class.
He was extremely zealous, he says, for the traditions of my fathers. And that gives you a hint where his zeal and his training lay in the traditions that overlay the Scripture and were taught within Pharisaical circles of Judaism. We know that Paul knew many languages. He knew Aramaic, Paul tells us in Acts 21. And Aramaic was the language of the Jewish people at that time. He knew Hebrew.
He could read the Old Testament in the Hebrew original. He obviously knew Greek. He wrote letters in Greek and he conversed in Greek. And in all probability, he knew Latin because he ministered in parts of the empire where Latin was the predominant tongue. So he was multilingual. Paul probably had most, if not all, the Old Testament committed to memory in Hebrew or Greek.
He didn't have the benefit of concordances or search engines the way we do today. And if you look particularly at the quotes in Romans chapter 15, you'll notice in those Scripture quotes a common denominator. It's the word Gentiles. These passages come from all over the Scripture. And what Paul is doing is he's filing through his mental concordance and he's pulling passages that he has memorized from his mind. So he knew the Scripture intimately. But Paul's education extended to Greco-Roman sources.
If you turn to Acts chapter 17, here's Paul at the Areopagus, Paul with the Athenians. He shows himself conversant in the literature, the poetry that Greco-Romans were reading. He's familiar with Stoic philosophy and Epicurean philosophy. So Paul was a broad-minded man. His training ran beyond training in the Scripture. So Paul was a thoroughly educated man. But then seventh, it raises the question, how did Paul make a living?
What was his occupation? Now here we have an important difference between the way Greeks looked at scholarship and living and the way that Jews looked at scholarship and living. For Greeks, if you knew a lot, if you were devoted to a lifetime of learning, then manual labor was beneath you. And that attitude is still with us today.
But it wasn't that way with Jews. For Pharisees, the most learned of teachers were expected to earn a living, farming or business or some other place. Paul learned trades the way that Jews learned trades from his father. He tells us that he was a tent maker.
Tent maker was a person who built and repaired tents. And in a world where people traveled and slept in tents, particularly soldiers, this was a much needed, much sought after trade. And so Paul worked with his hands. And as a Christian apostle, this helped him in many ways. In Paul's day, there were many traveling teachers in the Roman world. And they would, we say, mooch off their hearers. They would teach and then they would get money from their hearers and make a living that way.
And they didn't have the best reputation, as you might imagine. Paul very much did not want to be lumped with that group. And so again and again, he prides himself, a proper sort of pride, in presenting the gospel free of charge. He tells the Corinthians, I'm not one of those teachers that peddles my message. He tells the Thessalonians, when I was with you, don't you remember that I work night and day so as not to be a burden to you? And that was an important thing for Paul, to be able to present the gospel without specter of personal financial gain.
And his occupation allowed him to do that. Eighth and finally, and perhaps most importantly, as Paul surveys the whole of his life before Jesus Christ, he lands on persecution. He tells Timothy, towards the end of his life, in 1 Timothy 1, I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent opponent. It was too much for Paul that Jesus of Nazareth should be believed and worshipped as God's Messiah. And that's what took him to the Damascus Road on that day. Now what have we seen as we've surveyed Paul's life? What we've seen is that God in his providence was preparing Paul from the womb to be the man that we know from the scripture. And he was preparing Paul in ways that I doubt Saul would have foreseen. His birth, his heritage, his family, his education were all lines that would be interwoven into the man we know as the Apostle Paul. He was a deeply cut gorge, we could say.
Abilities, experience, temperament, relations, all in place, but he lacked one thing. And that was the sovereign grace of God that coursed through that gorge. To remake him and renew him and make him the one who would bear witness to Jesus Christ.
And what was true for the Apostle Paul, that God sovereignly prepared him from the womb to be used for God's purposes, is also true of you and me. Thanks for joining us for this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. And wasn't it fascinating to gain an insight into the man before his conversion behind the letter to the Romans and the man who penned those pastoral letters to Timothy? I do encourage you to take the time to listen to all 12 messages in this series. And you can do that when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. We'll send you this series on DVD, but we'll also give you lifetime digital access to the messages and the study guide in the free Ligonier app. And if you prefer to read instead of watch or listen, we'll also send you the companion book, The Life and Theology of Paul. So that's a DVD, a book, and lifetime digital access to the series and study guide when you donate at renewingyourmind.org or when you use the link in the podcast show notes.
This is a one-day only offer, so don't delay. And if you live outside of the US or Canada, you can get access to the series, the study guide, and the e-book when you donate before midnight tonight at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you for your regular support as it truly makes a difference.
None of this would be possible without you. One way that we are seeking to help people know not only the theology of the Apostle Paul, but the teaching of the entire Bible is through our forthcoming children's curriculum titled, Growing in God's Word. We'll be releasing it later this summer, but you can get a first look and join the pre-order wait list at growingingodsword.org. So if you haven't seen it, explore this new resource that has been years in the making to help pass the faith to the next generation. That web address again is growingingodsword.org. Human secularism, you've likely heard of it, but what do we mean by it? And specifically, how did this worldview come to rise and eventually face a demise? Join us tomorrow for another guest teacher here on Renewing Your Mind. .
