SOME COMMENTS ON MICAH BERDICHEVSKY’S SAUL AND PAUL

Although Micah Berdichevsky (1865–1921), a giant of Hebrew literature, never completed his book-length study of the apostle , his literary executors ensured that Saul and Paul was published in 1971. Like the better known study by Joseph Klausner, Paul (1939), Berdichevsky’s work was a Zionist perspective on the founder of Gentile Christianity, written in Hebrew. Central to Saul and Paul is a mysterious document that Berdichevsky believed to be an ancient Jewish account of the conversion and missionary success of Paul, namely, the tale of the pagan priest, Abba Gulish. He went on to argue that Saul and Paul had been two different individuals, the one Jewish, the other pagan, and that Christian tradition had amalgamated them. Attributing historicity to a Hebrew legend rather than a Greek Christian one, Berdichevsky argued that Paulinism of Christianity in the Jewish Paul’s adoption of non-Jewish, Hellenistic ideas, Berdichevsky went one step further and denied Paul even a Jewish birth. In addition to a comparison of Klausner and Berdichevsky’s views of Paul, this short article includes the Hebrew text and translation of the story of