Saint Paul

Entry number 11 is Saint Paul. I deliberately avoided Jesus himself since there is almost nothing verifiable one can know about him. Even with Paul we know almost nothing, but there are some things we can tease out.

The bio I read was by a famous religious historian, so it's kind of about the life of Paul but a lot more about how his teachings influenced Christianity, which is interesting but not really bio. So this will be pretty brief.

Paul was born in the year 5, meaning he was about 10 years old when Augustus died, and died in 65 or 67 after being executed by Nero.

Paul was a Pharisee, a specific kind of ancient Jew, who initially rejected Christian faith but converted and became one of its biggest boosters after claiming to have had a vision of Jesus.

He seems to have been a very practical guy; he founded a bunch of Christian communities across the middle east and spent a lot of time running around trying to manage them. To do this he ended up writing a lot of letters, which were eventually adopted as part of the Bible.

The letters — some of which he wrote, some of which he got others to write and signed off on, as busy managers do — are mostly of a pretty practical nature. He's sorting out questions about how communities should run, and frequently he's trying to raise funds for the church.

Christianity was young and small at the time, but the Romans, not yet Christian themselves, were taking enough notice and annoyed enough that he got put under house arrest for years at a stretch, during which he still saw visitors and wrote more letters.

A big issue in Paul's time was whether non-Jews could be Christians and, though himself Jewish, he came down firmly that everyone could be a Christian. This is part of what made Christianity so successful and him so important to it.

In his letters he's sometimes a jerk, showing off knowledge or scolding. At one point he says he hopes people getting circumcisions have the knife slip and cut their whole dicks off. Not everyone trusted him with church funds. But it seems like he was mostly trying his best.

The later inclusion of his letters, edited and shuffled, into the Bible itself radically changed how people saw them. Instead of being practical advice and observations they became proclamations and law, which was not really how they were intended.

And that's basically all we know! Next up is Hadrian.