Sublime

The first was a young man called Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul.4 According to his own account, he was a Jew by birth who had been sent by the community to suppress the activities of the new sect of Christians, Jews who believed that the Messiah had come. On his way to perform his mission he experienced a conversion and became convinced that

If, then, the Temple remained for ever, and his movement fizzled out (as Gamaliel thought it might159), he would be shown to have been a charlatan, a false prophet, maybe even a blasphemer. But if the Temple was to be destroyed and the sacrifices stopped; if the pagan hordes were to tear it down stone by stone; and if his followers did escape from

Esther—A Jewish beauty in a Persian king’s harem seems an unlikely biblical heroine. The book about her is the last narrative in Act 2.

The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, “the Christian Messiah.”

If, after all, he looked like leading a whole town astray, then Deuteronomy 13:12–18 would come into play; it has been suggested that this was why several towns refused to countenance his teaching, since to do so would court disaster for them as well as for him.