Paul of Tarsus

Paul was born in Tarsus, a prosperous port city of Cilicia, at about the time Jesus was born. He was a Pharisee of the strictest party and, by birth, a Roman citizen – raised inside Jewish law and fluent in the Greek that carried ideas across the empire. He made his living stitching tents. He began his public life persecuting Christians, and on the road to Damascus something happened to him that he spent the rest of his life trying to explain, turning him into the opposite of what he had been.

Over some fifteen years he wrote a handful of letters to small, frightened congregations around the Mediterranean. Written to settle local quarrels, they turned out to be the founding documents of the moral world you still inhabit. On the Areopagus in Athens he told the Greeks that God had made every nation "of one blood"; to the Galatians he wrote that "there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free," a sentence thrown straight into Aristotle's ladder of natural slaves. To the Corinthians he set love (agape) above the wisdom that the Greeks from Thales to Plotinus had held to be the summit of a human being. To the Philippians he showed a God who empties himself (kenosis) down to the death of a slave. And in the seventh chapter of Romans he switched on the conscience as an inner court: "for the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do."

His best witness is a hostile one. Nietzsche aimed The Antichrist squarely at Paul, because he saw, more clearly than many Christians, that Paul had carried out a transvaluation of all values, and he hated him for it. He is the enemy who concedes the scale of the victory in the very act of attacking it. To climb out from under Paul you would have to go back to the beginning and deliberately call mercy weakness. Almost no one is willing.