He had plenty of female friends and colleagues later on, as we can see from the greetings in his letters, especially Romans. He seems to have treated them as equals in the work of the gospel, just as he insisted in a famous passage that gender distinctions were irrelevant when it came to membership in the Messiah’s family.25 But he had decided that, for him, marriage was now out of the question, not because he was a super spiritual man who had risen above that kind of shabby second-rate lifestyle (as some later Christians would try to pretend) or because he did not possess normal human
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