Over the last century much has been made of Paul as the inventor of Christianity, the man who took the unfocused, anti-intellectual messianism of the bubble-headed followers of Jesus and constructed it into an effective theological weapon, which Christians would eventually use to beat not only the Jews but the whole of the ancient world. This is only partly true. Paul did not invent the faith of the early Church in the continuing reality and presence of Jesus. If Paul became in his own lifetime the most articulate spokesman for this faith, he was never much more than an articulator who knew how to zero in on the most essential elements of his argument and could thread his discourse with the welcome colors of his own very personal experience. If Paul had never left the Pharisaical school, the Jesus Movement that became Christianity would have survived and probably even prospered (if with a more limited scope), but it would have been a Christianity that lacked (at least for some time) Paul's intellectual edge as well as his emotional edginess.

For beyond his education, by which he intertwined antiquity's most rigorous intellectual traditions, we cannot neglect to consider the man's natural temper: neither flatterer nor diplomat, neither charmer nor salesman, Paul was not the sort of man you would immediately associate with the effort to pitch a new idea, let alone a whole new worldview and way of life. Devoid of small talk, anecdotes, and the sort of chatter that puts people at their ease, Paul was an either/or kind of guy, an absolutist for whom the matter under discussion would always be All or Nothing. An intellectual overachiever, pushed repeatedly to success by a keenly competitve father, Paul had no time for ordinary social niceties and neither gave nor expected to receive normal social comforts. One can imagine him sitting uncomfortably in some conventional parlor, staring penetratingly at his hostess while trying to find some Meaning in her inquiry as to whether he took one lump or two.

But the combination of intellectual and emotional relentlessness that constituted Paul's personality made this unlikely man the perfect vehicle for this moment in the development of the Jesus Movement. Had he appeared a little earlier--say, soon after the "raising" of Jesus and the descent of the Spirit--his intellectual ardor would probably have been too much for the inchoate community of simply educated disciples who were just beginning to get their minds around these inexplicable events. Once they had got their bearings again, come to understand what had happened as a coherent story, and begun to give voice to their unique experiences, they were--whether they knew it or now--ready to hear from someone more intellectually incisive than they, someone who could give a more precise formulation to these experiences, someone who was part of them but also part of the larger world of which they had only limited knowledge. Had Paul arrived on the scene much later than he did (when the movement, settling down as an elaborated organization with defined structures, had become the Church it would become), his emotional edginess--his intolerance for muddleheadedness, his knowing when he was right and you were wrong, his essential abstraction from the details of ordinary life--would have made him a poor candidate to be an organization man; and he would soon have been isolated and eventually cast aside.