the only evidence about him is afforded by "The Acts of the Apostles" and the epistles or letters of the New Testament. The Acts were written anywhere from ten to a hundred years after the supposed date of Paul's death; and the letters also seem to have originated toward the end of his life if, indeed, they were not written by other men after he was dead. All of those documents bear evidence of revision at the hands of men friendly to Paul and his doctrines. So far we are concerned, Paul could have fabricated the early part of his autobiography wherever he chose to; and that part on which his churchly authority is based is the very part that sounds fishiest. The latter and better substantiated part sounds like the diary of a modern circuit-riding Methodist.

Paul said he was born at Tarsus, then a 900-year-old city that had been for sixty years under the Roman rule. Tarsus lies on a river ten miles from the Mediterranean where that sea is inclosed in a square corner by Asia Minor on the north and Syria on the east. Paul, a Roman citizen, seems to have belonged to the propertied class, which participated in government.

Born a Jew and later professing Christianity, Paul had an incentive to dramatize his conversation and give other Jews to understand that they should follow his example. So he represented himself as a Jew of Jews who had "seen the light." That pose would call for at least one trip to Jerusalem, training in a rabbinic school and perhaps membership in the Sanhedrin. That he should get thunderstruck with a vision of the messiah whose gospel he was to preach was part of the preparation for his racket, as was the report of his having meditated in Arabia. Tradition, superstition and the intellectual climate called for that sort of thing.

It is guessable that a man who carried on a humdrum trade in Tarsus and did a little political conniving on the side decided, at about the age of forty, that making tents is too hard work and that agitating a new religion is more fun. In religion Paul was a great shopper arounder if he did not make up his religion as he went along; and he was always a leading exponent of his faith of the moment, making up in vehemence whatever he lacked in constancy. Saul's contact with any survivors of that band which once palled around with Jesus, if any such contact (or, for that matter, any such group) ever existed, was, by Paul's own report, uncordial. We might concede his own trip to Jerusalem, but that may have been invention or a mere going through of the motion.

Paul charged "that which is unseemly" against some men whom he disliked, along with a long list of other misdeeds, great and small. We find here a tirade, neither clear nor important, found not in the gospels nor in the Acts of the Apostles, but in an epistle, one of many letters of which several are conceded by Christian scholars to be spurious (and of course to Jewish scholars they are all heretical) appended at the New Testament's latter end and purported to have been written by Paul to a congregation of Romans.

Before Saul became Paul and muscled in into the apostle business the Jesuine church was composed chiefly of Hellenized Jews Essenes, adventists and miscellaneous. With the death of their central figure or, if he be only imaginary, his failure to make an appearance, they would naturally fall apart. Those who remained strong in their particular conviction or who were active in proselytising would, if they lived among the Jews, accommodate their religion to that of their relatives and friends, would form a sect of reformist Jews. Such evidence as we have supports this view.

But Paul was Hellenized in a greater degree than were the companions of Jesus and he was to a still greater degree Romanized. As did the Romans, he disapproved of

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circumcision and the limitation of offspring; and as were they he was inclined to accept practical expedients rather than cling, as Jews do, to a family or tribal observance.

Paul's early companion and sponsor was Barnabus, a Cypriote; and some writings attributed to Barnabus suggest heterodoxy in his Judaism. It is credible that Paul, after using Barnabus to get himself accepted in the proto-Christian community, discarded him. They parted in disharmony; and Paul took on his journeys in Asia Minor and Greece the Roman citizen Silas or Silvanus. Whatever was factual, Jesusine or Jessine in the religion they preached was subordinated to Messianic, Greek and Roman ideas with a dash of Persian.

The Jessine movement petered out, though the Essenes may have survived Paul for a couple of generations, the worshippers of John the Baptist maintained sects fairly strong and enduring and at least one religion claimed Judas as its hero or savior. The man-and-man sexual element in all those movements flourished without being woven into published doctrines, as occurred in Christianity despite Paul's no great regard for it. Paul could speak slightingly of a man's working with a man. but he participated in that work, thereby following a pattern that is very, very common. That Paul had never been a Jew is argued by some because of his non-belief in circumcision; but that evidence is inconclusive; Mohammed also omitted to require circumcision (and the practice, though universal among Mohammedans, is without Koranic sanction), though himself circumcised. Of the Christian churches only the Abyssinian practices circumcision.

Saul-Paul never saw Jesus, and his religion usually differed from that of his pretended master. A highly emotional man, Saul had persecuted the murdered religious agitator's followers. Paul said that he changed his mind as the result of a fit or seizure that he suffered, in which, he said, he saw the then-dead Jesus. That Paul was epileptic is no reproach to him, but it is consistent with the instability that he showed throughout his career. He apparently couldn't hold any attitude for long at a time. He is not to be blamed for changing his mind as he grew older and acquired knowledge and experience; but an inconsistency which may be only a sign of honesty and growth in an ordinary man is devastating to the pretensions of a messenger from God. Changing his religion was one of the things Paul did best; he revised his opinions from the first we hear of him to the last.

Paul's letter to the Romans is regarded by scholars as relatively genuine if any epistle can be so regarded, but its pecularities indicate garbling. It looks to be two letters mashed together. Be discourse classified as indicative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory, Paul's epistle to the Romans is one of the longest exclamations in our language.

Paul does not forbid man-fucking. As does the writer of the story about Sodom, all Paul does is point to man-man sex work as part of the behavior of people who reject his doctrine of the moment. Reading his letter, we infer that he had been meeting with sales resistance. Exactly what line of spiritual merchandise he was drumming then he does not mention, where justification by faith, for example, or justification by works; though possibly the former might be inferred.

Paul, now middle-aged, had another companion named Timothy, a native as Paul was of Asia Minor. (Traditionalists identify this Timothy with the bishop of Ephesus, which is on Asia Minor's west end. Men interested in sexual behavior may remark that Paul is ever and anon linked with some male companion Barnabas, Silas, Timothy or Peter.) All this while, Paul is supposed to have made trips to Jerusalem, but it is hard to see why he should. The politicians in Jerusalem were