
Paul: A Biography

But being a Torah student or teacher was not a salaried profession. Rabbis in Saul’s day, and for centuries afterward, earned their living by other means.
N. T. Wright • Paul: A Biography
We can’t be sure how many Jews lived in Tarsus in Saul’s day. There were, quite possibly, a few thousand at least in a city of roughly a hundred thousand. But we can get a clear sense of how things were for the young Saul.
N. T. Wright • Paul: A Biography
Tarsus rivaled Athens as a center of philosophy, not least because half the philosophers of Athens had gone there a hundred years earlier when Athens backed the wrong horse in a Mediterranean power play and suffered the wrath of Rome.
N. T. Wright • Paul: A Biography
In Paul’s day, “religion” consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another. In the modern Western world, “religion” tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture,
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