Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

Furthermore, while these events were taking place in Jerusalem, between the Crucifixion and the revolt, Paul had become active outside Israel. Paul, a tent-maker from Tarsus, west of Adana in modern Turkey, was not one of the original disciples of Jesus. Unlike Christ he was a city man, who was famously converted, around AD 33, ‘on the road to Damascus’, when he had a vision of Christ (Acts 9:1–9). (He had a chronic ailment, epilepsy being suspected.11) Paul had conceived his own version of Christianity and saw it as his duty to spread these ideas outside Israel in the Graeco-Roman world. His conversion, incidentally, should not be exaggerated: Paul was a Pharisee, and therefore a fervent believer in resurrection: so far as he was concerned, he was converting from one Jewish sect to another.12 There can be little doubt that there were, at the time, rival versions of Christianity. In his second epistle to the Corinthians, for example, Paul says this: ‘For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, who we did not preach, or if ye receive a different spirit, which ye did not receive, or a different gospel, which ye did not accept, ye will do well to bear with him.’ Elsewhere he refers to his rivals as ‘the chiefest apostle’, and to James, Cephas (Peter) and John. Because some of Paul’s ideas threatened the credibility and authority of the Jewish-Christian disciples in Israel he was denounced and, in 59 or thereabouts, arrested and taken to Rome (because he was a Roman citizen...