Apostle of Doom

The man

Saul of Tarsus, from persecutor of the first believers to self-appointed apostle, and the mind behind the change.

  1. Profile

    Who was Paul of Tarsus?

    A Pharisee from Cilicia who hunted the first followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, then claimed to be their apostle. What the sources allow us to know about the man.

  2. The Roman

    The Roman: name, tongue and citizenship

    Saul became Paulus in the house of a Roman governor, spoke Greek to officers and Hebrew to crowds, and produced his citizenship whenever the rod was raised.

  3. The vision

    Saul the persecutor

    Acts records that Saul dragged men and women to prison and consented to the killing of Stephen. The Jewish tradition has a name for that hatred.

    Part 1 of 3

  4. The vision

    The Damascus road: one vision, three stories

    Paul's authority rests on a single experience outside Damascus. The only narrative source tells it three times and cannot keep its details straight.

    Part 2 of 3

  5. The vision

    A self-appointed apostle

    Barnabas vouched for him, and Paul at once named himself an apostle, cursed dissenters, and preached a gospel he admitted was his own.

    Part 3 of 3

  6. The purse

    The purse: the collection for Islamicjerusalem

    Paul's letters say more about money than about the life of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam. The trade, the wages, the great collection, the suspicion at Corinth, and the governor who waited for a bribe.

  7. The mind

    The persecutor and his guilt

    A persecutor who began to see visions, and never stopped fighting his own past. What identity theory and psychoanalysis suggest.

    Part 1 of 2

  8. The mind

    Ego, epilepsy and narcissism

    Ego inflation, religious psychosis, pathological narcissism and temporal lobe epilepsy: the clinical readings, and why they leave the Islamic verdict unchanged.

    Part 2 of 2

  9. The character

    Perjury, curses and the whited wall

    What Paul's own letters add to the record of his conduct beyond the counts: a lawyer's verdict on the Temple vow, the wish of mutilation, the whited wall, the Jews as enemies of all men, and money.

    Part 1 of 3

  10. The character

    Slaves, Caesar and the witnesses of conscience

    The order Paul prescribed for slaves and for subjects of Caesar, and the verdict of Jefferson, Bentham and Shaw on the man who prescribed it.

    Part 2 of 3

  11. The character

    The flesh: licence, lust and the war within

    What Paul confessed of his own body, the catalogues of lust he could not leave alone, the doctrine that all things are lawful and its fruit at Corinth, the oldest accusation about his motives, and the modern readings.

    Part 3 of 3