Gide. I'm Gary Stevens. And welcome to the second series of the History in the Bible podcast. More of the history in more of the books in all the Bibles.

Episode 2.51. We need to talk about Paul. In the last episode of the history in the Bible,

I left the book of Acts with the martyrdom of Jane's son of Zebedee. We also saw Peter convert the Roman centurion Cornelius. At this point,

about a third of the way through, Acts introduces the man who will dominate the rest of the book.

The Pharisee and Roman citizen Saul, also known as Paul.

Paul began as a single-minded persecutor of the Jesus followers,

determined to root them out as the blasphemers they surely were.

Just a few years after Jesus died, Paul had some sort of vision and transformed into Jesus'

greatest proselytiser.

Paul decided that he was destined to bring Jesus to the pagans.

Paul preached to them throughout Syria, Asia Minor, which is modern Turkey, and Greece,

in a series of missions that has spanned 30 years.

Paul died as a martyr.

In later tradition, Paul joined Peter as one of the two very greatest of the apostles. Paul looms large to us today

because he is a major protagonist in the book of Acts and because the early church decided to include

a slew of his letters in the New Testament. In his own time, Paul was just one of

numerous missionaries. Paul cites many of them by name. But not one scrap of writing survives from

those proselytizers. They are just names to us. Thanks to the accidents of history, Paul's

letters are the earliest Christian documents we possess. His first letters, or at least the

earliest we have, were penned 15 years after the death of Jesus. The final editions of the Gospels were edited

somewhere between three and six decades after the crucifixion. Paul's letters carry a further

distinction. With the possible exception of the Gospel of Mark, they are the only Christian documents we have that were written before the cataclysm that was the destruction of the Jewish temple.

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