St. Paul the Apostle

Paul's life begins not in Tarsus but in Jerusalem, at the feet of Gamaliel and then at the stoning of Stephen — the young Pharisee who held the cloaks of the men throwing stones and who gave his approval to what they did. The persecutor who becomes the apostle is the defining reversal of the New Testament after the resurrection itself. Blinded, thrown to the ground, hearing a voice that names itself as the one he is persecuting: the conversion on the road to Damascus is total, and the life that follows is its consequence.

The chronology of Paul's career repays careful attention — the years in Arabia, the return to Damascus, the first visit to Jerusalem, the long missionary campaigns through Asia Minor and Greece and finally to Rome. The Acts account must be supplemented by what the letters add more personally: the thorn in the flesh, the catalogue of sufferings in Second Corinthians, the anxiety for all the churches that presses on him daily. His method is striking — a man who supported himself by tentmaking so as not to eat another man's bread for nothing, who used every legal avenue available to him as a Roman citizen, who never softened the message that cost him his freedom. The Roman imprisonment and the letters to Timothy show the aged apostle still writing, still urging the deposit of faith to be guarded, still confident that the race has been run well. The tradition of his beheading outside Rome on the road to Ostia, on the same day that Peter was crucified on the Vatican hill, is old and deserves serious weight. The great basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura stands above the burial place.