Acts 22:3

Acts 22:3. I am verily a man which am a Jew. He starts at once with a statement calculated to allay the suspicions with which many of those who were infuriated against him, without knowing any thing really of his story, regarded him . ‘ I was a Jew', he tells them.

Born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of our fathers. ‘ And, although born,' he goes on to say, ‘in the distant Gentile city of Tarsus, yet it was here, in our Holy City, that I received my education. My master was none other than the famous R. Gamaliel, so well known to every Jew. In those days I was trained by that great master as a Pharisee, to love and to practise all the strictness of our ancestral law.' [See the Galatian Epistle, Acts 1:13-14, where he speaks of his pre-eminence in those far-back days in all this learning, and how none of his fellow-students were able to compete with him in his knowledge of the law, and in his fervent zeal for the old sacred traditions of the Fathers.] The expression, ‘at the feet of Gamaliel,' is strictly accurate. In the Jewish schools, the teacher sat and taught from a raised seat; the pupils sat round on low benches or on the floor, literally at the master's feet.

And was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day. ‘ What ye are now;' said the apostle, ‘I was once a zealot,' a word well known in the extremest phases of the religious life of that disastrous period in Judæa, ‘a zealot for what I deemed was for the honour of God.'