When he writes, later, that he has learned to “take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah,”18 it seems highly likely that this was a conviction to which he had come in the silent decade in Tarsus. So too when he tells the church in Philippi to consider carefully “whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy,”19 he is recognizing that human society, even in the radically flawed non-Jewish world, could and did aspire to live wisely and well. All this is
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