Paul

Paul first appears minding the coats of the men stoning Stephen, and consenting to his death. He was a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees, trained in Jerusalem under the best teacher in the city, and convinced that this new movement was a blasphemy to be cut out. He asked for letters to go to Damascus and bring back followers of the Way in chains. He had the law on his side and a clear conscience.

Outside Damascus a light knocks him to the ground and a voice asks the question that rearranges his biography: why persecutest thou me. He gets up blind. He spends three days without food or drink in a stranger's house until Ananias arrives — having argued back against the instruction to go, with good reason — and calls him «brother Saul». Then come years of silence in Arabia and in Tarsus before Barnabas goes looking for him and brings him to Antioch.

What follows is some twenty years on the road: three great journeys through Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece, founding communities in port cities and keeping them going afterwards by letter. He worked at his trade, making tents, so as not to be a charge on the churches. The list he draws up himself in 2 Corinthians 11 is the best summary of his life: five times thirty-nine stripes, three shipwrecks, prisons, a night and a day in the deep, perils of rivers, of robbers and of false brethren.

One argument runs under all his letters: whether non-Jews had to become Jews to belong. He said no, confronted Peter in public over it and won the point at the council in Jerusalem. That decision is why Christianity left Palestine. He ended up a prisoner, appealed to Caesar as a Roman citizen, was shipwrecked on his way to Italy and spent two years under house arrest in Rome, receiving visitors and writing. Acts ends there, without saying how he died.

Paul is the proof that nobody is out of reach. The text does not present him as a sincere seeker who needed a nudge: he was on his way to arrest people. The scene with Ananias, who resists going to see him because he knows exactly who he is, is there so that it cannot be read as a comfortable conversion.

His other lesson is about strength. He asked three times for a physical problem he calls «a thorn in the flesh» to be taken away, and the answer was no. What he got instead — «my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness» — sums up his theology better than anything else he wrote: what holds you up is not your own capacity.