This is Scott Hahn, and I want to welcome you to The Road to Amas, a podcast from the St. Paul's Center.

In the decline and fall of sacred scripture, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Weicker

uncovered the disturbing

trends in Scripture scholarship that have contributed to our current crisis of faith.

But they also show why we should be skeptical of the skeptics and why we should trust the Bible.

Learn more in our show notes at St. Paul Center.com forward slash road. And Paul is not only a personal hero of mine and the one I hold most responsible for making

me Catholic, but he is also arguably the most influential writer in human history.

Whose writings have been studied and read as much as his? Whose writings have been

studied and debated as much as his? When you look at church history, you discover what

Harnack said and others too, that the history of Christian theology is sort of a history of all of the debates about what in fact Paul really meant.

You go back to the second century and the Gnostics were always taking his side or they thought they were following Paul until a man like St. Ironius comes along and shows us how to read him a right.

Pelagius thought that salvation was something that we could do ourselves. You know, and if you were weak, well, you might need God's grace. But St. Augustine used St. Paul at the end of the 4th century, the early 5th century, to show that no, without grace, without the power of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul taught us, there's nothing we can do that is pleasing to God. He alone can make us his children and he does it not by our own merit

but by what Christ has merited by the power of the Holy Spirit, by the grace that is more than

just a free gift. It is a participation in the very life of God and Christ's own divine sonship. I mean,

this is ultimately what led me not only to love Paul, which I'd always done since I was

early, since my early days as a Christian, but to trace Paul's trajectory into the Catholic

faith, into the Catholic Church. One of the thing that I think about when I look at Paul's

conversion is he's been described frequently as the most thoroughly converted man in history.

Well, that is certainly true because when you look at Saul and his fellow Pharisees who were

rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, and especially Saul, who wasn't just rejecting him,

but persecuting his followers, and compare him to Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles.

I mean, that is a profound conversion.

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