The Life of Paul Part 2 – The World Paul Grew Up In: Tarsus, Rome, and Jerusalem

And the day that Saul went to Jerusalem for the first time, he ported there on the docks of the Cednus River. The ship was loaded with human cargo; all of them were Hebrews. You sat or you slept, whether you sat up or stretched out, on the cargo. There was nothing there for you in the way of accommodations, and you provided your own food. The ships stopped at Tyre and Sidon, as well as at a small village named Babylon, a tiny village composed almost entirely of shipbuilders. The ship came further and further until it began to approach what was called Caesarea by the sea, a city that had never existed except as a small village that had been notorious for its brothels. But now, in what was simply called the tower, Herod had decided to build a great temple and a city for Augustus Caesar. So, the city was named Caesar, the first true Caesar of the empire.

Herod was a man who knew how to placate people. They hated Syrians. He built a polished marble road north and south, east and west in the city of Antioch. For the Jews, he built a sacred temple, rebuilding that of Solomon’s torn down temple. And only 60 miles away, a heathen temple sits on the banks of the Mediterranean Sea. A city dedicated to the worship of Augustus Caesar and to Apollos.

There had been no seaport there, nor was there any hope of one, but Herod the Great had built great wood, vats of wood, nothing but wood about six feet deep, had them floated 700 yards out into the city and sunk, and there they sat from the edge of the city out to 700 yards out. These wooden vats were held down in a restless sea. After they had been solidly secured into the seabed, concrete was pumped into all of these compartments, reaching 700 yards out into the sea. The concrete hardened after several years, and suddenly, there was a harbor. Ships could come in from the sea on one side and then on another, with the mouth of the sea, of the harbor, awaiting the largest passenger ships and warships of the world. And as they entered the harbor, they saw exactly what Saul saw. High up on the hill, a heathen temple to Apollo, the god of fertility and other things. He kept his head down and his hands over his eyes.

He spent the night with a Jewish family; the next day was a meeting in the synagogue. He went down a small, narrow lane, not knowing that in a few more years, within his lifetime, a great war would break out between the Jewish inhabitants of Caesarea by the sea and the entire Roman Empire right there on that narrow street. He walked past the great hippodrome, beautifully garnished with all sorts of statues, a vast area of land and stadium seats laid out for horse racing. Neither could he have possibly conceived that on one day, one day, 40,000 Jewish men and women and children would in the year 66 be slaughtered on the stadium floors of that hippodrome.

Now, Saul did with his father and his grandfather the same thing that most people did; he timed his arrival to be on a Sabbath. And so, for 60 miles, he and other Jewish people came arm in arm singing the Psalms of Ascent. They approached the city coming in on the Sabbath day, the day before and the day after, to observe the great Passover, to see the city, to see the gold, to see the pomp, to see the thousands of Levites, the hundreds of trumpets, to watch 20 men push and pull and tug to do nothing but open the gate to the city of Jerusalem, to walk into that great packed temple courtyard and watch the Levites blow their trumpets, and their drums, their bugles, and see the high priest step out on the highest terrace and know that behind those doors was God himself.

That was Saul’s first time in the city. There is a little-known event that took place in his life that day. There were over a hundred colonnades, or over a hundred cloisters, where many things took place, including buying and selling, but there was one cloister that was given over to a very devout and highly regarded teacher. His name was Hillel.