It has been said that without Paul we would never have heard of Jesus.  Yet Paul often gets a bad press.  There are many who say that we have a Pauline Christianity and a Jesus Christianity and this is even replicated in discussions among different groups of Christians today.  For example many of you know that Archbishop of Canterbury has called a conference of Anglican primates in October to discuss relationships within the Anglican Communion over issues of Sexuality.  At the same time a parallel conference is being organised by fundamentalist evangelicals to oppose that conference.  In some ways these tensions echo the tensions within the church down the ages and even from earliest times.

 It is said that Paul was arrogant, a misogynist, claimed that he had always done more than the other apostles put together, he had suffered more, worked harder, seen more visions.  He was authoritarian and anti sex.

 Jesus and Paul were very different people but they had one thing in common they were 100% Jewish.  The special thing about a Jew is that he always has to keep thinking about God.  In the view of these two men God is utterly concerned for the human race, and bound up with them.  Jesus and Paul are so full of God that they broke the limits of Jewish belief.  Both put their lives wholly at the service of this God.  However they did so in very different ways.

 Jesus public ministry probably lasted a year whereas there were nearly thirty years between Paul’s conversion, near Damascus where he began his ministry, and his arrival in Rome as a prisoner.

Then the ground that they covered was very different. Jesus ministry was in northern Palestine, which is a very small area anyway about the size of the county of Nottinghamshire.  Paul’s work in contrast covered enormous territories; the western part of what is now Greece and Turkey.  He travelled 10,000 miles, on foot over Roman roads, and by sea to Eastern parts of the Mediterranean.  We need maps and descriptions of cities to talk about his work.

 Jesus ministry was an ‘explosion of humanity’ which takes into account that he immediately came up against opposition, which is why he caused such an explosion.  He was a poet, he spoke in images and symbols; he spoke provocatively asking people to think for themselves.  Loving neighbour involved loving non Jews and even sinners.  He talked about the coming of the kingdom of God and of a Father God who we could call Abba. ‘daddy’.  He gave up everything to follow his calling as the Son of Man which led to his inevitable death.

Paul was a townsman not a poet.  He had studied theology, trained to reason and argue and his situation was less clear cut than that of Jesus.  He had to deal with Jews who had recently become Christians, and he was often involved in discussions with them.  The people to whom he wrote letters often led different lives and lived in other parts of the world and he often  had to refer to their circumstances.

 There has never been a need to find the historical figure, a large part of the NT consists of letters he wrote or dictated.  He has always been in full view.  Our knowledge of Paul comes from 3 sources; Paul’s own letters, the Acts of the Apostles and evidence collected by experts who know Graeco-Roman antiquity and Jewish belief in the world at that time.

We need to remember that at the time of Jesus and therefore Paul as many as between 4 or 6 million Jews were dispersed throughout the Roman empire.  They were dispersed through previous conquests and exiles from their homeland.  We can add 1 or 2 million for the Jews in Palestine.  The Jews  probably in total accounted for 10% of the population in the Empire.

 You will remember that at the first Pentecost there were people from all over the Roman Empire .  These were the Jews of the dispora who had come to Jerusalem for the feast.  So Paul was a Jew born in Tarsus, a university town, and he studied there.  He was a Hellenistic Jew, born a Roman freeman and a Pharisee of the law and came to Jerusalem and studied under Gamaliel.  He would also have been familiar with the surrounding mystery religions and gnosticism.  He would have been bilingual but probably not steeped in Aramaic the natural tongue of Jesus.

 He was not a personal disciple of Jesus and in Jerusalem would have come across the early gospel of the church that proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah God’s anointed one who was crucified but had risen from the dead.  For Paul this meant quitting everything he had learnt and which had moulded him to embrace a belief that was the opposite of what he had proclaimed.  He became in his words a new creation or ‘I have been crucified with Christ’.  ‘I am always being put to death I am dead.’

It meant that he had to be willing to acknowledge that the place of the Torah on which he had staked his life was called into question by the early Christians proclamation of the gospel that meant whether he was willing to acknowledge in the cross of Christ God’s judgement upon his self- understanding and God’s condemnation of his Jewish striving after righteousness by fulfilling the works of the law.

 It is even greater than if Tony Blair learnt that all his convictions about going to war with Iraq were totally misguided and that he should have interpreted the events in a totally different and perhaps opposite way.  We learn about the conversion experience of Paul in 3  places in Acts and also in Paul’s own letters.  The basic question was do you have to be a Jew to gain access to the one God of Israel or has God opened up a new way for all people for all time through Jesus?

 Paul first appears on the stage in Acts at the stoning of Stephen.  Stephen was one of seven deacons all given Greek names.  Stephen preached ‘full of the Holy Spirit’ that Jesus had been sent by God as his final representative as the Messiah and had been put to death by followers of the Torah.  For Paul if Jesus was the anointed one who was put to death condemned by the Torah then the Torah had ruled itself out of court.

Whatever happened on the road to Damascus, the blinding light, the voice,  the blindness, the ministry of Annanias it was for Paul the turning point.  It was decisive in drawing a line under his previous life and beginning a new life.  He changed from persecutor to persecuted from powerful to powerless, from being a member of a closed group to being an alien.

 We shall see that this experience gave him a new slant on the gospel.  He became the first Christian theologian as he tried to communicate and systemise the Christ event for the people of his own day spread across Asia Minor.  The church was given an intelligent, learned, passionate, complicated, and articulate advocate of God’s purpose.  He became the greatest apologist for Christianity that our faith has known.

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