He stood by the little pile of garments, stiffly erect, his lip curling in disdain as he listened to the shouting of the mob. He had chosen this duty, the guarding of the witnesses' clothing, in order to keep away from the scene of the actual execution. He did not disagree with the verdict; he was a member of the Sanhedrin and sat at the trial of the Christian, Stephen, giving his voice in favour of the death sentence. He nevertheless despised, with all his heart, these tumultuous and ignorant Jews of Jerusalem and wished sometimes he was back in his native city of Tarsus in Cilicia, where his own family and all their fellow-Jews had adopted Greek customs and culture and lived their lives on a level of dignity and poise which was completely unknown to the masses here in Judea.

He turned now and looked again towards the crowds, his well-built form standing in an attitude of impatience and his aquiline features making no attempt to conceal the distaste he felt at the whole proceeding. The man deserved his fate; he had clearly been guilty of blasphemy and he felt no remorse or sympathy for him, but he was thoroughly disgusted with the manner in which the Sanhedrin had handled the trial and allowed things to get out of hand. Saul had wanted the evidence to be carefully presented and the connection of this man Stephen with the crucified felon Jesus of Nazareth clearly demonstrated, so that the whole affair could be made a stern warning to all who felt tempted to listen to the message of the risen Jesus so persistently being preached in Jerusalem. He had hoped to hear a grave and solemn statement from the High Priest, to be repeated from lip to lip as the news got round, followed by the pronouncement of a salutary sentence which would send a shiver of fear into the hearts of those who professed discipleship of Jesus. This man Jonathan was not a bit like his predecessor Caiaphas, thought Saul bitterly as he turned again and looked moodily at the heap of clothes at his feet. Joseph Caiaphas was a shrewd and crafty politician and knew just how to handle the men around him. Jonathan on the other hand had first lost control of his own feelings when Stephen made that absurd claim of seeing heaven opened and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God, and then allowed the disorganized rabble to take the prisoner by force and hurry him away to the place of stoning before so much as a formal judgment could be uttered. The proud claim of the Pharisees that whilst they sat on the Sanhedrin no son of Israel should have his blood shed, even judicially, until every means of avoiding that final act had been sought out and found unavailing, was a dead letter whilst these Sadducee High Priests ruled, he thought angrily. First Jesus of Nazareth; now this; even though they deserved what they received it was an offence against God and against Moses that their trial and execution should be dictated by mob law and not by the judicial procedure laid down in the statutes given at Sinai.

He shook his head as though to rid himself of the vision which remained still before his eyes; a countenance looking up to heaven, and appearing as though it was the face of an angel. A prisoner, accused of serious crime against God and Moses, by the stern law of Israel's great lawgiver commanded to be cut off from amongst the people, yet calmly standing there delivering a discourse on the purposes of God and Israel's place in those purposes which had won Saul's ungrudging admiration. That was the kind of sermon he himself liked to give and liked to hear. Stephen was a Greek Jew like himself, a man in every way superior to these clods of Judean Jews and had he not embraced this blasphemous heresy about a Son of Man who was also the Son of God he might have done great things in Israel. But he deserved to die, and for the sake of the purity of Israel's religion and the sanctity of the covenant he must die, and the sooner the whole wretched business was over and done with the better. He turned his head impatiently and through a gap in the crowd he caught a glimpse of that face again, once more a face as it had been that of an angel; upon his ears fell a faint voice borne to him on the wind "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge" and then the crowd closed in again and suddenly there was a great silence.

How long Saul stood there after that he never knew. He was dimly conscious of the witnesses picking up their clothes and speaking to him, but he comprehended nothing of what they said. The mob was dispersing and going down the hillside in twos and threes and groups; the members of the Sanhedrin were coming towards him rubbing their hands and Jonathan the High Priest, a complacent smile on his face, began to say something to Saul of a congratulatory nature. Suddenly, Saul could bear it all no longer; he nodded curtly to Jonathan, turned his back on the group and walked quickly away, as though pursued by some nameless thing whose existence he would not admit and yet from which he must try desperately to escape

Saul of Tarsus was a man of about thirty at this time, four years after the death of Jesus. Born in Tarsus, a seaport town in the Greek-speaking Roman province of Cilicia, some four hundred miles from Jerusalem across the Mediterranean Sea, the greater part of his life had been spent under the influence of Greek life and culture. His father was a Jew of the Dispersion, of the tribe of Benjamin, and a Pharisee. For how many years his forbears had lived among the Gentiles is not known; maybe several centuries, maybe much less. But the father, though resident in an alien land, gave the lad the true training of a son of Israel, and to such good effect that at this early age Saul was already a member of the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem, the highest religious court in the land. His elevation to that position must have been quite recent, for four years earlier when Jesus was arraigned before that same Sanhedrin Saul was not a member; it is quite certain that he never saw Jesus in the flesh and could not have been in Jerusalem during His ministry. In all probability he was, as a young lad, sent to Jerusalem for a few years to study under the Doctors of the Law. This was when he "sat at the feet of Gamaliel" (Acts 22. 3), then he returned home in Tarsus and was trained there to earn his living as a tentmaker (Acts 18.3) Cilicia was noted for its sail cloth and other materials made from the woven hair of Cilician goats and weaving was probably Saul's trade. Then he returned to Jerusalem, after the death of Jesus but before that of Stephen, to take up some official position in the Pharisee community which involved his election to the Sanhedrin.

Great changes had taken place in Jerusalem in those four years. Caiaphas had been deprived of his High Priesthood by the Romans. Pontius Pilate had been recalled to Rome in disgrace. The Emperor Tiberius had died and been succeeded by the insane Gaius Caligula. None of those who shared responsibility for the death of Jesus remained. It was almost as if a new generation was taking over the control of Judea and Jerusalem, and the young man Saul was one of that generation, marked out for high office in Pharisaic circles. Although so young, he was probably already a widower, for one of the qualifications for membership of the Sanhedrin which was considered almost an essential was that the candidate should have been married. The fact that there is no reference in the New Testament to Paul having a wife would seem to infer that if in fact he had been married, his wife must have died before his conversion on the Damascus road. The tones of almost yearning affection in which in after years he referred to Timothy and Onesimus as "sons" might well point to a great disappointment in earlier life in the lack of any sons of his own. It might even be that some great untold sorrow connected with the loss of a wife at an early age may account at least in part for the bitter unsparing frenzy in which he now plunged, hunting out and persecuting to the death, those who to his mind were disloyal to the Mosaic law. That he had a married sister and a nephew living in Jerusalem is known from Acts 23.16, but no other details of his family life are recorded.

The physical appearance of this great champion of the faith has always provoked curiosity. Nothing is known for certain. There is a very common impression that St.Paul was of most unprepossessing appearance. A certain amount of play has been made with his own statement in 2 Cor.10.10 to the effect that "his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible", "to be accounted nothing of" is the meaning of the original. The verse need only mean that in the circumstances of his relation to the Corinthian Church he was far more terrible by his letters in his absence than he would be by his words at his presence. The one definite clue to his physical appearance comes from his visit in company with Barnabas to Lystra on his first missionary journey, when the pagan citizens, impressed by the miracle he had performed identified Paul with Mercury on account of his eloquence. Now Mercury in the ancient mythologies, the wing-footed messenger of the gods, was always conceived as young, tall and strikingly handsome. The Lycaonians would hardly have identified Paul with Mercury unless he at least measurably fulfilled their conception of the physical appearance of their god. That was when Paul was a comparatively young man; it is more than likely that persecution, ill-treatment and poor health through the years took their toll so that 'Paul the Aged' may well have come nearer to fulfilling the traditional aspect.

So Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, young, talented, ambitious, burning with zeal for the God of his fathers and intolerant of all who questioned the rigidity of the ancient traditions, came in touch with the message of the Gospel and the power of God, all unconscious that this thing was about to overturn his whole scheme of things and change his entire life. On the day that he gave his vote for the death of the martyr Stephen he all unwittingly set in motion a chain of circumstances that was destined to make him, first, the greatest exponent of the Christian faith and the most noted missionary of all time. Then it would lead through persecution and prison and thirty years of indefatigable labour, to a martyr's death in his own turn. He died alone, at the hands of the Roman executioner, on the Appian Way outside the city of Rome, but the torch he lit and tended with such fiery zeal during his eventful life has never been put out, and will not dim until it is swallowed up in the greater light of the Kingdom for which he lived and died.

AOH