As we point the research lens, the personality of the apostle Paul begins to emerge against the background of a more general problem. What is Paul's role in the founding of the church? How correctly did he interpret Jesus' words? Or was he an arrogant upstart who imposed a new religion on those around him, in which a certain "Jesus" played the main role, although it had nothing to do with the teachings of Christ?

This is what some of the modern researchers are trying to assert, in particular, on the Jewish point of view. For example, the well-known Jewish scholar and apologist Chaim Maccoby argues in a number of his works that Jesus, whose personality (in the author's opinion) is extremely obscured by the Christian "gospels," was none other than a Pharisee, a respectable and law-abiding Jew who did not intend to abandon the basic principles of Judaism and did not propose a new religion. But Paul, Maccoby believes, contrary to all his claims, was never a Pharisee. He, an eternal marginal in the Jewish milieu, a typically Hellenistic thinker, reinterprets the teaching of Jesus in the categories of Greek, if not Gnostic, thought. The Jesus he invented is exclusively a figment of his religious and philosophical imagination, a character in no way connected with the corresponding historical figure and who came rather from the world of ancient religion – a kind of deity of the Greek pantheon. In this way, Maccoby believes, Paul paved the way for anti-Semitism in Western culture.

Another author, the writer and journalist E. N. Wilson, who publicly renounced Christianity and then published a book about Jesus designed to justify at least some of his personal apostasy, recently produced a similar work on the Apostle Paul. Apparently deaf to Schweitzer's warnings not to introduce Hellenistic concepts into the interpretation of Paul's texts, since the apostle himself was much closer to the Jewish ones, he speaks a little patronizingly of Paul as undoubtedly the greatest thinker, but unfortunately overlooked the true nature of Jesus. It was Paul, who translated into the categories of Hellenistic thought what Jesus taught rather incomprehensibly but inspiredly, who became, in Wilson's opinion, the true "founder of Christianity." From these two examples, as well as from many others like them, it is evident (and this will be discussed later) that the inventors of such theories wander in the misty foothills, and above them in all their dazzling glory rise peaks and glaciers, sheer cliffs and cliffs – and this is the real landscape of Paul's thought.

Thus, in the twentieth century, the teaching of the Apostle Paul was used and distorted no less than in the first. But are we able to listen to it at least a little at the end of the century? Are you ready to apologize for having been unfair to him, and at least a little respect for his views? That is what I have tried to do in my book—to go off the beaten path to the Pauline texts and, at least partially, to see in them what Paul himself is talking about. I try to read the Apostle Paul "in his language." I try to understand what he really wanted to say.

Chapter Two. The Persecutor Saul and the Christian Paul

Intentions of Saul of Tarsus

At the beginning of the tenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, Paul (remember, he addresses his fellow tribesmen) breaks through a phrase in which one can undoubtedly hear an autobiographical note: "For I testify to them that they have zeal for God, but not for reasoning" (Romans 10:2). It is even more pronounced in Phil 3:6, where Paul calls himself "a persecutor of the church out of zeal." And in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians we find the same confession, but more extensive: