wing, end the Gentile mission, exclude the Greek element, or force it into conformity, and so complete the reassertion of Jesus’ followers. This process continued so long as there was a Jerusalem Church, that is, up to AD 70. Sometimes it was aimed at radicals, like Stephen. Sometimes it got out of hand and struck at men of the centre, like James. Its object was not to destroy the movement but to keep it within the broad circle of Judaism. And it came very near to success. Into this struggle for the soul and personality of the new sect came the apostle Paul, ‘the Jew of Tarsus’ as he called himself. He was the first and greatest Christian personality; he has always been the most argued about, and the most often misunderstood. He has sometimes been accused of ‘inventing’ Christianity; and in addition, or alternatively, of perverting Christ's teaching and forcing them back into Jewish channels. This was the complaint of Nietzsche, to whom Paul was ‘the eternal Jew par excellence'‘Paul embodies the very opposite type to that of Jesus, the bringer of good news: he is a genius in hatred, in the vision of hate, in the ruthless logic of hate. What has not their nefarious evangelist sacrificed to his hatred! He sacrificed first and foremost his savior, he crucified him on his cross. . . . A god who died for our sins: redemption by faith: resurrection after death all these things are falsifications of true Christianity, for which that morbid crank must be made responsible.’ This Is a favorite line of attack. Indeed, a frontal attack on Christianity itself is usually an attack on what is regarded as the Pauline element. Thus Alfred Rosenberg and the Nazi anti-Christian propagandists concentrated primarily on ‘the evil rabbi Paul’. But the truth is that Paul did not invent Christianity, or pervert it: he rescued it from extinction. Paul was the first pure Christian: the first fully to comprehend Jesus’ system of theology, to grasp the magnitude of the changes it embodied, and the completeness of the break with the Judaic law. Herein lies the paradox. For by birth Paul was a pure Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin. 'Circumcised on the eighth day,’ he intones, ‘of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless.’ From a tradition passed on by Jerome, we learn that his family came from northern Galilee, near the Lake of Genesee, and was ultra-conservative. The Pharisaic background went back to his great-grandparents. The family had moved to Tarsus at the time of the Roman occupation, had become wealthy Roman citizens, but remained pillars of the conformist Diaspora. Thus Paul's sister was taken to Jerusalem to be married, and his father sent Paul to the rabbinical high school there. He spoke Greek and Aramaic, and read the scriptures in Hebrew as well as in the Septuagint. As a young man Paul had assisted at the martyrdom of Stephen and had subsequently taken a leading part in the Pharisee drive in the Diaspora against the Hellenizing Christian element. It is important to realize that Paul did not simply become a Christian. Many Jews might do this without any great change in ideas. Paul moved right across the religious conspectus, from narrow sectarianism to militant universalism, and from strict legalism to a complete repudiation of the law - the first Christian to do so: not even Jesus had gone so far Paul insists, repeatedly, that his change of view was instant and complete; it was in fact miraculous; he did not argue himself around but had the truth in all its plenitude revealed to him instantaneously by Jesus himself. Unless we accept Paul's view of how he became a follower of Christ, it is impossible to understand him. He believed in it as passionately and completely as did the disciples who had seen the risen Christ: in fact he drew no distinction between the two types of vision. It was his title to the rank of apostle and his claim to preach the authentic Christian message. But Paul had more than a divine mandate for the gentile mission. He came from Tarsus, which has been termed ‘the Athens of Asia Minor’. It was a trading emporium, a centre of cults of every kind, Gnostic, exotic, oriental and Stoic. It was a focal-point of syncretism, a cultural and religious crossroads, a city familiar with weird religious processions outdoors and Hellenic debate within. Paul was a product of this diversity, and thus he can NE presented as a Hellenist or a rabbi, a mystic or a chiliast, even as a Gnostic. 19