Saul was born at Tarsus, in Cilicia,[10.2] in the year 10 or 12 of our era.[10.3] According to the manner of that day, his name was Latinized into that of Paul;[10.4] yet he did not regularly adopt this last name until he became the apostle of the Gentiles.[10.5] Paul was of the purest Jewish blood.[10.6] His family, probably originally from the town of Gischala, in Galilee,[10.7] professed to belong to the tribe of Benjamin;[10.8] and his father enjoyed the title of Roman citizen,[10.9] no doubt inherited from ancestors who had obtained that honor either through purchase or through services rendered to the state. Perhaps his grandfather had obtained it for aid given to Pompey during the Roman conquest (63 B.C.). His family, like most of the old and solid Jewish houses, belonged to the sect of Pharisees.[10.10] Paul was reared according to the strictest principles of this sect,[10.11] and though he subsequently repudiated its narrow dogmas, he always retained its asperity, its exaltation, and its ardent faith. During the epoch of Augustus, Tarsus was a very flourishing city. The population, though chiefly of the Greek and Aramaic races, included, as was common in all the commercial towns,[10.12] a large number of Jews. The taste for letters and the sciences was a marked characteristic of the place; and no city in the world, not even excepting Athens and Alexandria, was so rich in scientific institutions and schools.[10.13] The number of learned men which Tarsus produced, or who pursued their studies there, was truly extraordinary;[10.14] but it should not therefore be imagined that Paul received a careful Greek education. The Jews rarely frequented the institutions of secular instruction.[10.15] The most celebrated schools of Tarsus were those of rhetoric,[10.16] where the Greek classics received the first attention. It is hardly probable that a man who had taken even elementary lessons in grammar and rhetoric would have written in the incorrect non-Hellenistic style of the Epistles of St. Paul. He talked habitually and fluently in Greek,[10.17] and he wrote or rather dictated[10.18] in that language; but his Greek was that of the Hellenistic Jews, a Greek replete with Hebraisms and Syriacisms, scarcely intelligible to a lettered man of that period, and which can only be accounted for by his Syriac turn of mind. He himself recognised the common and defective character of his style.[10.19] Whenever it was possible he spoke Hebrew--that is to say, the Syro-Chaldaic of his time.[10.20] It was in this language that he thought, and it was in this language that he was addressed by the mysterious voice on the road to Damascus.[10.21]