The Name of Saul/Paul and the
Sources of the Pentateuch:
Weekly Mailbag June 26, 2016
Why did Saul change his name to Paul?
And what were the
sources lying being the Pentateuch, the first five books of
the Hebrew Bible? Good questions!
in the Weekly Reader’s Mailbag
I’ll deal with them here
QUESTION:
What is the meaning of “Paul” that Saul of Tarsus was moved to
change to that name upon his conversion?
RESPONSE:
Ah, right – my students ask me this a lot in my New Testament
class. When we all grew up in Sunday School we learned that
when Saul of Tarsus converted, he changed his name to Paul, so
that Saul was his Jewish name and Paul his Christian name. As
it turns out, that’s not quite right.
Paul himself never gives any indication that he had another
name, Saul.
But he is called Saul in the book of Acts.
Until he converts. After that he is usually called Paul. But
not always! See, e.g., Acts 11:30 and 13:2 (there are other
instances). There the Christian Paul is called Saul. What
gives with that? Did people (or the Holy Spirit, in 13:2!)
forget that his name had changed when he became a Christian?
Nope. The deal is this. Saul was not renamed Paul after his
conversion.
Saul is his Aramaic name.
Paul is his Greek
name.
He didn’t change his name.
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure if he actually had an
Aramaic name Saul, historically, despite the fact that the
author of Acts calls him that. I see little to suggest that
Paul – the real historical figure — had spent any real time in
Judea before his conversion.
QUESTION:
Can you please post a bit on the Documentary Hypothesis? I
understand it is out of fashion a bit these days. What are the
theories that replaced it?
RESPONSE:
This question is about the Hebrew Bible, specifically about
the multiple authors of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).
I dealt with this
question about four years ago on the blog, when talking about
my (then) new textbook on the entire Bible, from Genesis to
Revelation. Here is what I said then.
Traditionally it was thought that the five books of the
Pentateuch were written by Moses – so that they are even today
sometimes called the Law of Moses (or the books of Moses).
But the books do not claim to have been written by Moses: they
are anonymous – and Moses is talked *about* in these books;
the author[s] never use the first person pronoun.
But scholars have long had highly compelling reasons for
thinking that these books were not written in Moses’ day –
during the thirteenth century BCE – or, in fact, by ONE person
at all.
It is not that there was a different author for each
of the books. The situation is more complicated than that.
The five books we now have were edited together by someone who
was utilizing earlier sources that (most of them, at least)
provided material for more than one book.
The person who
first popularized this view was a nineteenth century German
scholar named Julius Wellhausen.
“Documentary Hypothesis.”
The view is called the
According to this hypothesis, the first four books have three
sources lying behind them, named J, E, and P.
The book of
Deuteronomy is set apart, and is attributed to a source D.
The chronological sequence of these sources (we don’t know
their real authors, of course) provide the other unofficial
name for this hypothesis: JEDP.
There are lots and lots of reasons for thinking that this view
is basically right.
There are internal contradictions
between different parts of the Hebrew Bible (for example,
there are two accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2; the
first is from the P source, the second from the J source);
different episodes use different names for the divinity
(Yahweh – or in German, Jahweh – for the one source, and so
that is why it is called J; Elohim, the Hebrew word for God,
in another, hence the E source); different portions reveal
different concerns (parts are completely devoted to Priestly
concerns, hence P).
Wellhausen argued that these four sources all told traditions
of ancient Israel, and – a highly significant aspect of his
theory – since the sources were originally written at
different times in the history of ancient Israel, they can
tell us about what the concerns and conditions of the authors
were, in their own day and time, more than they can tell us
about what was really happening, say, in the days of Moses.
For these sources were in fact centuries removed from the
events they narrate.
The older scholarship claimed that J
was from the 10th century (in the days of King Solomon); E from
the 9 t h century; D from the 7 t h century; and P from the
6 t h century BCE.
Today scholars rarely buy into Wellhausen’s hypothesis in
toto. But not because they think the whole shooting match (or
in fact, even a single shot) goes back to Moses. Instead,
scholars have tended to make the picture even more
complicated, murkier, more nuanced, with more than just four
sources and all interwoven in complex ways. The complexity
that is sometimes proposed is mindboggling at times. If they
still think in terms of four major sources, they date them
even late than Wellhausen (some scholars think that the
sources did not start getting produced until the 6th century.
That would be 700 years after Moses! Assuming Moses was a
real person – which many scholars do not assume at all. I
happen to be one of them.
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