10 Things Christians Don’t Know About the Apostle Paul
He’s not the guy you hear about in church
When I was growing up in church, Paul was the very voice of God—a man wagging his finger at you, going on and on about how bad everyone was.
To be Christian is to know he hates sex, women, gays, and pretty much everything else. When I started reading Bible scholarship, I was shocked.
1. He starts out as a terrorist
I sat through a lot of sermons about him, but never really got his story. He’s a Jewish guy named Saul from a big town north of Jerusalem. He never says anything about his parents. Maybe that means something? When we first see him, he’s out killing Christians.
I didn’t hear in church, though, that this was illegal. As N.T. Wright notes, “under Roman rule only the Romans could carry out the death penalty.” He was sort of a religious extremist, and really, a terrorist.
“I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities,” he says in Acts 26:11. Or that’s how Christianity translates it. The actual language is: “exceedingly maddened.”
