In Quest of the Historical Pharisees

CHAPTER 7. Paul and Gamaliel

CHAPTER 7 PAUL AND GAMALIEL Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner 175 DID PAUL LEARN FROM GAMALIEL? THE PROBLEM Acts 22:3 claims regarding Paul that, as a Pharisee, he studied “at the feet of Gamaliel”; that is, with the patriarch of the Pharisaic party of the Land of Israel in the succession from Hillel, thence, via the chain of tradition, from Sinai. What can he have learned from Gamaliel? Here we identify a program of topics that Paul can have taken up in his discipleship or indeed in any association or familiarity with Gamaliel—specifically, subjects and in some cases even halakhic principles important in certain formal constructions of the Mishnah plausibly identified with the patriarchate in general, and with Gamaliel (or at least a Gamaliel) in particular.1 We propose to outline subjects treated in such constructions that are covered, also, in Paul’s letters— a limited proposal but one that, in context, carries implications at once historical and theological. Formulating the problem in a minimalist framework conveys our critical judgment that we cannot immediately reconstruct the teachings of the Mishnah’s named authorities, including Gamaliel. Why should we not take whatever the Rabbinic sources—early, late, and medieval—attribute to (a) Gamaliel at face value? The answer to that question hardly requires elaborate statement, but perhaps it does bear repeating in outline. No critical scholar today expects to open a rabbinic document, whether the Mishnah of ca. 200 CE or the Talmud of Babylonia (Bavli) of ca. 600 CE, and to find there what particular sages on a determinate occasion really said or did. Such an expectation is credulous.2 There is a second problem, separate from the critical one. Even if we were to accept at face value everything Gamaliel is supposed to have said and done, we should still not have anything 176 BRUCE CHILTON AND JACOB NEUSNER remotely yielding a coherent biography, or a cogent theology, or even a legendary narrative of more than a generic and sparse order. We have only episodic and anecdotal data, bits and pieces of this and that, which scarcely cohere to form a recognizable whole. Although the person of Gamaliel is not accessible, we do have a corpus of compositions that portray convictions characteristic of the institution of which in his time he was head,3 and which is represented by passages in the Mishnah that exhibit a distinctive form and Sitz im Leben. We refer to what became the patriarchate. Gamaliel, as we shall see, is identified as part of the patriarchal chain of tradition that begins at Sinai and culminates in the Mishnah. What became the patriarchate is embodied in Hillel, Gamaliel I, Simeon his son, Gamaliel II (after 70), Simeon b. Gamaliel II (of the mid-second century ), and the Mishnah’s own sponsor, Judah the Patriarch (ca. 170–210). Whatever its standing and form prior to 70, its theological tradition is situated by tractate Abot chapters 1 and 2 squarely within that traditional continuum. Form-analysis of traditions formally particular to Gamaliel and Simeon b. Gamaliel affords episodic access to a number of theological convictions and topics important to the continuing tradition of the patriarchate preserved, on its own terms, in the Mishnah. These, then, in our view will suggest the topical program and perspective to which Paul would have been exposed in any association with the patriarch Gamaliel—a program characteristic of the patriarchate throughout its history, as we shall show.4 THE PATRIARCHATE AND THE COLLEGIUM OF SAGES Our account of the theologies of the patriarchate and sages’ collegium begins not with the Mishnah but with Abot, its first apologia, which reached closure ca. 250 CE, a generation or so after the completion of the Mishnah. There we begin, as the passage cited indicates , with a chain of tradition extending from Sinai to Hillel, and that links the figures of the patriarchal house—Gamaliel, Simeon, Gamaliel, Simeon, and Judah—to Sinai through Hillel. An abbreviated citation suffices: PAUL AND GAMALIEL 177 TRACTATE ABOT 1:1–18 1:1 A. Moses received Torah at Sinai and handed it on to Joshua, Joshua to elders, and elders to prophets. B. And prophets handed it on to the men of the great assembly. 1:2 A. Simeon the Righteous was one of the last survivors of the great assembly. 1:3 A. Antigonos of Sokho received [the Torah] from Simeon the Righteous. 1:4...