Now when he was still a small boy, Saul observed that certain other boys of Tarsus had a privy "male member" (Hebrew "putz," or weenie) that looked different from his own. When he asked why this was so, his mother gave him the inevitable answer: "Because we're Jewish."
This answer did not satisfy the boy. It was a problem to which he would return throughout his life, sometimes several times a month, but he could not be satisfied.
Saul was circumcised when he was just eight days old, on January 1 – which, coincidentally, was the first day of the first month of the new millennium. You already knew all of that. But here is a little something you may not have heard before about Saul of Tarsus, and it's true: at baby Saul's bris, there was an accident – not tragic, but significant (Philippians 3:5).
Hey, it happens. Not often. But rabbis are human, knives are sharp, and baby boys can suddenly squirm.
So, anyway, there was this accident at Saul's bris. For baby Saul, it was the main reason why the new millennium got off to such a poor start even though he and the long-awaited Messiah were born on the same day, and circumcised on the same day.
Some Christian authorities believe that the apostle was not wholly "emasculated," nor even "totally mutilated," but only damaged; and that he spent his adulthood as "an eunuch for Christ" only in a figurative sense, in that he never married. Other authorities believe that the apostle was left with barely a stump. They point to Saul-Paul's bitter diatribes against every form of sexual intercourse; his lifelong fear of knives; and his affection for that passage where Jesus speaks so eloquently of men who have lost their male member, or even cut it off on purpose, in order to escape lust and to save their soul from Hell (Matt. 19:8-11). Still others believe he was actually "born an eunuch," because Paul later described himself as "one abnormally born" (Matt. 19:12, 1 Cor. 15:8, NIV). We may never know the whole truth: I cannot arbitrate the discussion. I cannot tell you anything about it either way, because Scripture does not report the details, and God never spoke to me about it, and I never saw Paul naked. No one ever saw Paul naked – Saint Paul was a modest man, and he died a 66-year-old virgin. All we know for sure is that he never had sex, and he never had a high opinion of sex. So I guess you could say that even the apostle Paul did not know for sure what he was missing.
– L.
(To be continued!)
