Martin Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul (1991) 
transl from German (at times of a crucial summation the translation can be
confusing).

Reviewed by Susan Ruth Miller [and highly recommended].

Hengel's interest is in rectifying the state of scholarship in two areas
pertaining to Paul: 

1. Its neglect of the Paul of Jewish origin and in particular Paul the
Pharisee. 

There has been much scholarly research on Paul's perspective on the law
without considering his background as a Pharisee. This approach limits our
understanding of that very perspective. Hengel wants to fasten Paul
tightly to his Pharisaic origin and depict him as a diaspora Jew with
strong links to a Palestinian source in opposition to the scholarship that
views him as an exclusively "hellenized" Diaspora Jew. 

2. Hengel's second objective is the assertion of the acceptablility of
Acts as a document which reflects factual information that can be brought
to bear on a re-construction of Paul's early life. 

The key to his understanding of Acts is buried in one of his 136
footnotes. (Hengel's copious and thorough footnotes comprise nearly half
of the book's content.) In this footnote Hengel makes clear his belief in
Luke's having been a companion of Paul, a believer in the revelation of
Jesus and his having written Acts with the "lines of development having
been drawn rightly." Acts is not a late book which falsifies the original
material, and therefore is usable historically.  This is opposed to other
scholars who see Luke as a second generation Christian not interested in
the historical circumstances, who "sets down the picture of the apostles
circulating in his own day."
 
Hengel proceeds to re-create (or create depending on one's analysis
of his methodology) an entire world out of the bits and scraps of
biographical information existing in Acts of the Apostles and Paul's
letters. 

Instead of rejecting the belief that Paul is from Tarsus (a rejection
which would support his own theory of the thoroughly Jewish diaspora Jew),
Hengel embraces that idea (of Paul's Tarsus origins) and then continues to
demonstrate that Paul was in spite of his Tarsus background only slightly
influenced by the experience. Paul is a deeply committed Jew of the
Pharisaic ilk whose connections to Jerusalem predominate. 

There follows a detailed analysis of Paul's education, citizenship
(Rome and Tarsus), his name, social origin, the degree of his attachment
to Judaism, Paul the persecutor. 

sumiller@sas

//end//