He calls himself "the son of Pharisees"--plural. Could his mother have been considered a Pharisee, or could he mean both his father and his grandfather were Pharisees?
"What is the evidence that Paul belonged to the Sanhedrin?"
There isn't any. He wasn't. My statement was in error.
What I should have said was that Saul served the Sanhedrin as an investigator and prosecutor prior to his conversion, not that he was himself a member of the 71. That would have been correct.
In my eagerness to make the point that Saul of Tarsus was certainly Jewish, I ran past the facts and made and error.
We are prone to do this out of religious zeal.
It's a trap easily fallen into.
And we should always try to resist it, and correct ourselves when we find we have done it.
As to the specific time that the Judaism became formally matrilinear, it is difficult to pinpoint.
The Jewish War and destruction of the Temple mark a clear break in history, because after that the Jews were no longer geographically as compact or secure. The Jewish CENTER was broken, and the religion and ethnic group fell everywhere into ill repute because of the war against the Empire.
Certainly in the aleas of warfare, many many Jewish women were enslaved and raped by Roman soldiers and their auxilia.
But the Jewish traditions regarding Jesus suggest that Jesus was ben Pantera, son of the Panther, which may be a gloss on the Pantera legion. In other words, Jesus was the son of a prostitute and a Roman soldier. Such was the opinion of an earlier part of Jewish tradition. This is not exactly emphasized in the modern world of get-along gemutlichkeit, in which the words of hatred for Judaism and Jewish authorities contained in the New Testament are jarring. We should remember that the hatred was mutual, and that the Jews of the era were the established power, and murdered a lot of Christians. Saul of Tarsus was a prosecutor out there ferreting out Christians for arrest, torture and death. The anti-Jewish polemics of the New Testament were those of an oppressed minority believing it possessed the truth but fighting for its life, and the destruction of the Temple was viewed, by the Christians of 70 BC, as proof that God had destroyed the Jews and condemned them to perdition, etc.
Anyway, to return to the matrilineal concept, we can't point to a single document that says when it became so - no such document exists. But we do know that before the Romans was the Hellenic era and the Maccabean dynasty, and terrible traumas from foreign invasions, etc. Certainly after the destruction of the Temple the matrilineal principle became recorded in the Jewish traditions. But was this made up out of wholecloth, or did it represent a traditional understanding? Probably the latter.
Beyond that, a high-ranking Jew like Saul of Tarsus, committed and zealous and studying within Jewish circles, was certainly a Jew by birth, both patrilineal and matrilineal. Think well about TODAY, when changing religion is really no big deal, when deal and horror does not await anybody who challenges anything, and when yeshiva is wide open to anyone of any faith who wants to enter it. Just how many young Christians or Gentiles are devotedly focused on joining the rabbinate? Probably none.
Now retrograde to the ethnically bigoted, utterly closed-minded, violent and xenophobic First Century Palestine. Could Saul the Gentile have become a prosecutor in the Sanhedrin, and a committed student of Judaism in the inner circle? No. It was impossible. Could a Roman have simply showed up, said he wanted to adopt the religion, and actually been admitted to the inner circle, and entrusted with the most delicate matters of faith?
No.