Called to Follow Christ

Paul's Background, Conversion, And Early Ministry

[And Paul said,] "I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia ... a citizen of an important city ... circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews ... brought up in [Jerusalem] at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law being zealous for God ... I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age ... I persecuted this Way up to the point of death by binding both men and women and putting them in prison." —Acts 22:3a, 21:39b, Philippians 3:5, Acts 22:3b, Galatians 1:14a, Acts 22:4

HIS PARENTS NAMED HIM SAUL, after the first king of Israel who, like their child, was of the tribe of Benjamin. His father and mother were part of the Jewish diaspora, living in Tarsus, a major city in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, with what may have been as many as two hundred thousand residents.

Tarsus was located ten miles from the Mediterranean Sea on the plateau between the Taurus Mountains and the sea. You could get there by ship traveling up the Cydnus River to a harbor leading into the city. It was a magnificent city, cooled by a sea breeze and nestled at the base of the mountains.

In earlier times, Tarsus had been the capital of the region called Cilicia; by Paul's time, though no longer the capital, Tarsus was still a very important city. Caesar Augustus had granted it special status as a "free city," a way of ensuring the loyalty of its citizens. This was particularly important because Tarsus was located on a key east–west trade route bringing goods from the east to the interior of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). This ancient highway passed through the famous Cilician Gates, a mountain pass to the north of Tarsus. As citizens of a free city, the people of Tarsus were permitted to govern themselves, were allowed to mint their own coins, and were free from most Roman taxes. (As you can imagine, avoiding Roman taxes was a tremendous draw, and people were eager to move there.)

There's little left for us to see of Tarsus from Paul's time. Much of the modern city was built atop previous cities that were built atop even earlier cities; hence, the ruins of Paul's Tarsus are mostly buried beneath the present city. Two exceptions include a section of Roman road within the city and an old well referred to as St. Paul's Well, which is adjacent to excavated ruins said to be Paul's childhood home. The likelihood of these ruins being Paul's home seems remote to me, but these landmarks give visitors a place to anchor Paul's story.

We learn in the Book of Acts that Paul was born a Roman citizen (22:26), and yet it is estimated that only 10 percent of the empire's population at the time had been granted citizenship, perhaps significantly less in the eastern part of the empire. This leads us to believe that Paul's parents likely were wealthy or important landowners or business owners in Tarsus who themselves had been granted citizenship. It's also likely they were tentmakers or owned a tentmaking business, given that Paul himself was trained as a tentmaker.

Tarsus was an important intellectual center in the Roman Empire. Strabo, a Greek philosopher and geographer who died in A.D. 24, described Tarsus and its citizens this way:

The inhabitants of this city apply to the study of philosophy and to the whole encyclical compass of learning with so much ardour, that they surpass Athens, Alexandria, and every other place which can be named where there are schools and lectures of philosophers.

It was a place of culture and learning. It is likely that young Saul, whose Roman name was Paul, received instruction at the Greco-Roman primary and grammar schools of Tarsus up to the age of thirteen before being sent to study in Jerusalem. In these schools, Paul would have learned the art of writing and the use of language; he would have studied the Greek poets and the basics of Greek rhetoric and logic. These studies would have played a pivotal role in preparing him at an early age for his later work as an apostle, Christianity's first theologian, and the man who would be credited with writing thirteen of the New Testament's twenty-seven books.

Though the practice of having a Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen began later than Paul's time, it may give some indication of when Jewish young men being prepared for rabbinical studies might have gone to Jerusalem to study. Similarly, the story of Jesus in the temple when he was twelve might point to an age at which boys in Paul's time were thought to become men and hence ready to learn from the great teachers in Judaism. It seems at least possible, then, that Paul was sent to Jerusalem by his parents sometime around his twelfth or thirteenth birthday, where he may have studied the Law, both written and oral, under Gamaliel I, one of the leading first-century rabbis, up to the age of twenty. For a first-century Jew, this may have been akin to our practice of going away to college.

Mention of Paul's age raises the question of when he was born, and to that we have no clear answer. It is often said he was born sometime between 5 B.C. and A.D. 10. I lean more toward A.D. 10, which would mean that Paul finished his schooling under Gamaliel around A.D. 30, close to the year Jesus was crucified. This fits nicely with the idea that young Paul was anxious to make a name for himself by persecuting the fledgling Christian movement.

How God Uses the Puzzle Pieces of Our Lives

You may wonder why these details of Paul's early life are important. The reason is that Paul and the things he would later think, write, say, and do were in part the result of his early life experiences. Think of Moses, who grew up in Pharaoh's household and thus was the ideal candidate for God to use in liberating the Israelite slaves from Egypt. In a similar way, Paul's childhood in a predominantly Gentile city known for its culture and outstanding Greco-Roman education, his tentmaking in his father's shop as a boy, his grasp of the Greek language, his Roman citizenship, his education by one of the leading rabbis of his day—all these experiences were critical to the work Paul one day would be called to as Christianity's leading apostle to the Greco-Roman world.

Pause here for a moment and consider your own background—your family of origin, the experiences you had growing up, your education, and religious training. In what ways might God call you to use these things for his purposes?

I was baptized Roman Catholic as an infant, but we did not attend church much when I was small. My father was Catholic, and my mother was a member of the Church of Christ. When they married it was clear my father was not likely to join the Church of Christ, nor my mother the Roman Catholic Church. When I was in third grade, my parents struggled to find a...