To many Christians, this might seem like an odd question. After all, wasn’t Paul a learned Jew, educated in Jerusalem at the feet of Rabban Gamaliel, the greatest Jewish teacher of his day (see Acts 22:3)? And didn’t he debate for weeks on end in the synagogues (see Acts 18:4)? How could anyone question if Paul knew Hebrew?
On some level, this is a Jewish question more than a Christian question, but since Paul’s credibility is always being challenged—it seems like, next to Jesus, Paul is at the top of the list for criticism and attack—it is worthwhile to take a moment to set the record straight.
Some argue against Paul’s knowing Hebrew because, they say: (1) the references to Paul speaking in the “Hebrew language” in Acts actually mean Aramaic (see Acts 21:40; 22:2, and see #39 and #40); (2) Paul always quotes the Greek Septuagint when citing verses from the Hebrew Bible, which only makes sense if Paul couldn’t read Hebrew; and (3) at times his citations seem to violate the meaning of the Hebrew, which again would point to his being unable to read the original. One Jewish scholar, followed recently by a Jewish journalist, has even argued that Paul was not even born Jewish but was rather a convert to Judaism—which would make him a bold-faced liar, too (see Philippians 3:4–6; Galatians 1:13–14).[208]
What, then, do some Jewish scholars say about Paul? Here are some statements from past generations.[209] First, I cite Joseph Klausner (1874–1958), who taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This was his verdict on Paul’s Jewishness:
It would be difficult to find more typically Talmudic expositions of Scripture than those in the Epistles of Paul.[210]
Even at the end of his life, after he had had many sharp conflicts with the Jews . . . after all this, he called to his place of confinement first of all the Jews of Rome, and assured them that he had nothing ‘whereof to accuse’ his people (‘my nation’).[211]
Truly, Paul was a Jew not only in his physical appearance, but he was also a typical Jew in his thinking and in his entire inner-life. For Saul-Paul was not only ‘a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees,’ but also one of those disciples of the Tannaim who were brought up on the exegesis of the Torah, and did not cease to cherish it to the end of their days.[212]
Paul lived by Jewish law like a proper Jew; also, he knew the Old Testament in its Hebrew original and meditated much upon it. . . . Hence there are Semitisms and Hebraisms in the language of the Epistles, in spite of the richness of their Greek. If Paul was a ‘Hebrew of the Hebrews’ and ‘a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees,’ educated in Jerusalem and able to make speeches in Hebrew (or Aramaic), obviously he was not a ‘Septuagint Jew’ (Septuaginta-Jude) only, as various Christian scholars have been accustomed to picture him.[213]
Regarding Paul’s allegedly deceptive missionary practices in which he said he acted “as a Jew to the Jews” (see 1 Corinthians 9:20–22), Professor David Daube, the respected author of The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, argues that Paul took over his missionary methods “from Jewish teaching on the subject: the idea that you must adopt the customs and mood of the person you wish to win over, and the idea that, to be a successful maker of proselytes, you must become a servant of men and humble yourself.”[214] Even here, Paul operated within a Jewish framework.
More recently, Professor Alan Segal wrote:
Without knowing about first century Judaism, modern readers—even those committed by faith to reading him—are bound to misconstrue Paul’s writing. . . . Paul is a trained Pharisee who became the apostle to the Gentiles.[215]
According to Talmudic and Aramaic scholar Daniel Boyarin:
Paul has left us an extremely precious document for Jewish studies, the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jew. . . . Moreover, if we take Paul at his word—and I see no a priori reason not to—he was a member of the Pharisaic wing of first-century Judaism.[216]
Rabbi Dr. Burton Visotzky, Appleman Chair of Midrash and Interreligious Studies, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, wrote this in his endorsement of Professor Brad Young’s Paul the Jewish Theologian: “The Pharisee Saul of Tarsus is arguably one of the most influential religious figures in the history of Western culture.” Yes, the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, not the deceiver Saul of Tarsus. Even the famous Rabbi Jacob Emden (1679–1776), a champion of Orthodox Judaism, said that “Paul was a scholar, an attendant of Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, well-versed in the laws of the Torah.”[217]
Consider also the testimony of some of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, a number of whom are thoroughly conversant with the best of early Jewish scholarship.
According to Dr. Peter J. Tomson:
As distinct from Philo, Paul had an openly avowed knowledge of Hebrew and of Pharisaic tradition. . . . Again, as opposed to Philo, Paul does not just draw on the Hebraist Jewish tradition of Midrash but proves an independent and creative master of the genre. . . . Although apparently descending from a prominent diaspora family who had acquired Roman citizenship, his mother tongue, quite probably, was not Tarsean Greek but the Hebrew and Aramaic of Jerusalem.[218]
According to John Dominic Crossan (a critical New Testament scholar) and Jonathan L. Reed (an archaeologist), “Paul was Jewish born and bred, understood Hebrew, was a Pharisee, and was proud of all that lineage. He identified himself as a Jew within Judaism.”[219] (This assessment is all the more noteworthy given the skeptical presuppositions of the authors.)
The highly respected Dictionary of Paul and His Letters states:
Paul’s use of Scripture, of midrashic techniques and of contemporary exegetical traditions in Romans 9:6–29 yielded a highly sophisticated composition. It cannot have been the product of an uneducated mind. If he was not trained by Gamaliel, then he was taught by some other Jewish master. In any case, it seems clear that Paul received a formal education in the Judaism of the time.
Today . . . NT scholarship finds more and more evidence for the Jewishness of Paul’s life and thought. Indeed, this change is part of a general movement in Christian scholarship to rediscover the Jewish roots of Christianity. Concurrently, Jewish scholarship shows a growing interest in reclaiming the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul.[220]
Finally, I cite Professor Jarislov Pelikan, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on church history. He writes that, in contrast with past scholarly views that often saw Paul as “the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense,” studies in the last few decades are seeing things much differently. Thus, “scholars have not only put the picture of Jesus back into the setting of first-century Judaism; they have also rediscovered the Jewishness of the New Testament, and particularly of the apostle Paul, and specifically of his Epistle to the Romans.”[221] Yes, scholars are rediscovering the Jewishness of Paul![222]
The charge, then, that Paul didn’t know Hebrew and, therefore, always cited the Septuagint would certainly be quite a surprise to the Jewish scholars cited above, most, if not all, of whom are fluent in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and can recognize the Hebraic fluency of Paul.
What indications, then, do we have that Paul knew Hebrew and was trained as a Pharisee, as he claimed? First, there is the testimony of the Jewish scholars cited above who recognized Paul as one of their own. Second, Paul did not always follow the Septuagint, despite the fact that he was writing to Gentiles who used the Septuagint exclusively and, for the most part, did not have access to any other translation. The most prominent example is found in his quotation of Habakkuk 2:4 (see Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11), a foundational text for Paul, but one where he does not follow the Septuagint. Third, some Septuagint scholars have observed that, upon careful examination, in roughly half of the cases involved (approximately fifty out of one hundred), Paul does not follow the Septuagint exactly when he cites it, suggesting that he may have been involved in a revision of the text based on the Hebrew. Fourth, passages such as Romans 11:27–28, which some have cited as misquotations, actually point to a careful knowledge of the Hebrew text.[223]
There is every reason, then, to take Paul’s testimony in Acts seriously, and for all those who have sought to plumb the depths of Paul’s quotations from the Tanakh, it is clear that not only was he taught by the finest Jewish teachers of his day, he was taught by the Lord Himself.