THE YEARS IN TARSUS
Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, OP
Saint Paul just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Herod the Great died in the Spring of 4 BC. He had been king of the Jews for 33 years, and his rule had been severe and oppressive. His secret police were everywhere, and reported on even the most harmless meeting of friends. The release from pressure at his death was explosive, and inevitably got out of hand. Celebrations turned into riots, which gradually melded into a full-scale rebellion. Rome felt it had to intervene, and Varus arrived in Galilee with two legions from Syria.
After a campaign, if a Roman legion had a financial deficit, it sent out patrols to capture healthy men and women of the vanquished population. These were then sold as slaves to provide the revenue needed to balance the books.
At this point Paul was still a small child and lived with his parents in Gischala (modern Jish), a village in the mountains of Upper Galilee that was famous for its olive oil. It was unlucky to be visited by one of the legion patrols, and Paul and his parents were dragged from their little home. They were driven across country to Ptolemais (modern Akko) where the slave ships awaited. If it is degrading to be offered for sale, how much more to be rejected? Paul’s parents much have suffered several refusals as the ships moved north up the coasts of what are today Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. Only when they reached Tarsus in south-eastern Turkey did they find a buyer.
We do not know who their master was, but a number of assumptions can be made. First he was a Roman citizen. This is the simplest explanation of Paul’s Roman citizenship, which he inherited from his parents. They would automatically have acquired the citizenship of their owner when he sent them free. This would have taken place probably when they were in their forties. Everyone knew that it was uneconomical to keep slaves beyond a point where they were eating more than they produced.
Second their owner was interested in education. We know this because Paul had a first class tertiary education. His letters reveal a fully professional mastery of all the techniques of rhetoric. He was a trained speaker and writer in Greek. Clearly he had followed the courses on offer at what we would call the University of Tarsus, which ranked beside Athens and Alexandria as one of the great graduate schools of antiquity. To reach this level, however, he would have had to have had a solid primary and secondary education. He must have been free to study from a very early age. He did not have to do the multiple chores that usually ate up the day of a child slave. A hint of Paul’s privileged upbringing emerges much later in life when he accidentally betrays a very snobbish leisured class attitude towards manual labour. It was ‘slavish’ and ‘demeaning’.
The University of Tarsus was famous as a bastion of Stoicism. It is unlikely that Paul studied this pagan philosophical system, but it was so much in the air that he could not fail to take in elements of it. Traces surface, perhaps unconsciously, in his letters. The basic tenets were very simple. Wisdom is the acceptance of the fact that whatever happens does so in accordance with divine reason. Virtue consists in striving to live in harmony with divine reason. The sensible, therefore, simply acquiesce in whatever happens to them, believing all external circumstances to be indifferent and irrelevant. In consequence, it is a lack of virtue to protest against pain, poverty, injustice, or death. Nonetheless, human action is rooted in freedom, and one is responsible for one’s deeds. Since everyone possesses a spark of the divine reason, distinctions between Greek and barbarian, master and slave are meaningless. All belong to a universal brotherhood.
Even with the idealism of youth Paul could not subscribe wholeheartedly to such generous ideas. He was a Jew, and Jews did not accept that all were equal. They believed that they were a unique people, set apart from all others. This would have been drummed into Paul every Saturday in the syagogue, which provided the other dimension of his ongoing education. This is where he learned the Jewish Scriptures, which he quotes over 90 times. Even though Paul subsequently abandoned the Law of Moses as a rule of life, he never lost the sense of the Scriptures as God’s communication with his people. For him it was ever a voice, not of the past, but of the present.
