Paul: The Outsider Who Rebuilt Christianity

Season 2 · Episode 13

Full episode description

Paul is the most consequential figure in early Christianity, and he is also the most contested. The man who persecuted the Jesus movement became, in his own telling, the apostle to the gentiles. The seven undisputed letters of Paul are the earliest Christian writings we possess, older than any of the gospels.

Part 1 of this two-part episode reads Paul as a person:

• the Pharisee from the city of Tarsus, educated, multilingual, and Roman in citizenship
• the persecution he says he led against the early Jesus communities
• the revelation on the road to Damascus, which he describes briefly and from which the Book of Acts later builds an elaborate scene
• the years in Arabia and Cilicia that he barely explains
• the contested apostleship, which Paul defended throughout his correspondence against people who had walked with Jesus in the flesh
• the question of how an apostle of the crucified one could be recognised by a movement whose other leaders had known the man before his death

Paul is not the founder of Christianity. Jesus is. Yet Paul is the person who turned a Jewish messianic movement into something that could travel beyond Judea, speak Greek, accept gentiles without circumcision, and survive its founder’s absence in a world built for Rome.

Part 2 follows what Paul does with that authority. The fight at Antioch. The cross as the new centre of the message. What Paul thought the cross actually accomplished. how he built a network of communities held together not by a temple but by letters.

Not from tradition. From evidence.