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3142715
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access to The Biblical World
of Gamaliel, the
Pharisaic father, especially purestPharisaic
the Pharisee of the
day. "Thefor
father of a son destined Jewish a . theological
. . . instruction
education. This iswas
surely a slender
exclusively religious. Mathematics,
premise upon which to profane
geography, base the
history, con-
philosophy
clusions which Professor Pfleiderer draws -all this was non-existent for the ortho-
in support of his hypothesis of Paul's dox Jew. He had only morals, the
dependence upon Stoic teaching for his positive law, and the sacred history:
ethical and human ideals! It is no and the Bible was all this."' "All
whit easier a conjecture than the
the one
learning of the youthful Saul was
that Paul attended the Stoic schools. interpretation of Scripture."' How,
How could a child pick up street-corner
consciously or unconsciously, the great
sermons and mold them into a consistent ideas of Stoicism could have survived
ethical teaching, especially a child in Saul's mind-supposing that they
brought up in the atmosphere of had been previously absorbed-in an
prejudice-of others' prejudice against environment such as this, is hard to see.
himself as a Jew, of his own anti-Gentile For a time, "he returns to Tarsus,
prejudice ? a mature man..... .It is then
Any indebtedness of Paul to the Greek [so Prat assumes] that he notice
schools of Tarsus seems precluded by a baseness and absurdity of the
consideration of his style. A French tended philosophers who made a
writer, Father Prat, points this out in fession of vending wisdom, the
his Th"ologie de St. Paul (p. 20): "At trigues, their mean jealousies,
the age of five years the Jewish child insults, their greediness for gai
frequented the school..... .But it their secret corruption, their insu
was not from the rhetoricians that Paul
able pride raised over a vast aby
learned the elements of letters. His
ignorance. The portrait which we
Greek is not the Greek of the schools;
in the Epistle to the Romans of
it is a language picked up by usage,
false teachers called wise has less the
haphazard in conversation, vivacious,
air of a copy from memory than of a
full of imagery, picturesque [rather
picture drawn after nature." Whether
than imaginative, he might have added],
or not the Stoic preachers justified this
admirable in expression, originality,picture,
and there can be little doubt that
it is a correct representation of Paul's
movement, but a stranger to the precepts
of professional grammarians." And on
opinion. He had little use for the
p. 23 he adds, "The learning of St."philosophers."
Paul In one epistle he warns
is not bookish." If his Greek is not the his readers, "Beware lest any man
Greek of the schools, still it is not deceive you with philosophy and vain
thoroughly Septuagint. It is rather deceit, after the tradition of men, after
the colloquial Koind picked up by a the elements of the world.'"3
theologically minded Jewish tent-maker. Supposing chance infiltrations of
At the age of fifteen, probably, Saul Stoicism acquired in youth-stray
was sent to Jerusalem to sit at the feetwords from street-corner sermons-had
I Prat, op. cit., p. 27. 2 Weinel, St. Paul, p. 56. 3Col. 2:8; cf. I Cor. 1:26-31.