Via-UK Mail
Ruthless, half mad, he stoned Christians to death. He also founded modern civilisation. And until yesterday, his fate was one of history's great mysteries...
Deeply moved, the Pope delivered the news on Sunday that fragments of bones found in the tomb traditionally considered to be that of Saint Paul did indeed date from the first or second century.
Which means that, in all likelihood, they are the bones of the Apostle Paul - bones that have lain there for 1,950 years yet, astonishingly, have only been discovered in our time.
You might say, so what? Aren't Roman Catholics always making claims about bones and relics? Was it not said that if you measured all the bits of the True Cross venerated throughout the world you could build a bridge to the moon? Yes, yes.
But this is slightly different, and it is very exciting. The Pope was not saying that he revered some relics as a matter of faith. He was saying that scientists, by carbon dating, have come as close as possible to identifying the very bones of St Paul himself.
Why is he so convinced? Though the carbon-dating experts knew nothing of their origins, the bone fragments were recovered after a tiny probe was inserted into the tomb which lies in a crypt beneath the Basilica of St Paul outside the Walls in Rome - a church long held to have been built on the site where Paul was buried.
It was only three years ago that the tomb itself was discovered by Vatican archaeologists.
The fact that it was positioned exactly underneath the epigraph Paulo Apostolo Mart (Paul the Apostle and Martyr) at the base of the altar convinced them it was Paul's tomb.
Now backed by the evidence of his carbon-dated bone fragments, the Pope has announced: 'This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that the bone fragments are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul.'
What makes the discovery all the more exciting is that the last days of Saint Paul have always been a bit of an historical puzzle.
To understand why this news is being treated as such a sensation, we have to examine his life - an extraordinary and dramatic life which, it is no exaggeration to say, changed the course of the world.
Paul was almost certainly educated in Jerusalem. He probably began life as a member of a strict Jewish sect, and studied with an insular group of Jews who thought the world was about to end.
Then, around AD30, came the era of a new prophet - Jesus - whose teaching had, in a famous New Testament phrase, turned the world upside down and whose creed was despised by Paul's Jewish sect.
More...
After Jesus's death by Crucifixion - which was how the Romans dealt with political criminals and other trouble-makers - you might have supposed that 'The Way', as the movement which followed his faith came to be known, would fizzle out.
Not a bit of it. Jesus's formerly cowardly followers - they had, by their own admission, all run away when he was arrested - were prepared to stand up and claim, quite extraordinarily, that he had risen from the dead.
The chief of them, Peter - who had even denied knowing him - testified before the Jewish courts that Jesus had risen again. By this stage, Paul was known as Saul of Tarsus. And he set to work to try to stamp out this nonsense.
He got permission from the Chief Priests to arrest the followers of Jesus and throw them in prison.
It seems as if he was on hand when the first martyr - Stephen - was stoned to death for blasphemy. And then, as we know so famously, Saul of Tarsus had what he called an 'apocalypse' or, literally, a revelation.
Having been a violent persecutor of Jesus's followers, Paul became convinced that he had seen the risen Christ. 'Who are you?' he asked, receiving the mysterious reply: 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.'
In some versions of the story, Paul heard this vision while he was riding to Damascus to persecute Jesus's disciples.
In his own version he simply talks of an apocalypse. Either way, it changed his life. But more importantly, it changed the world. It brought into being the religion we know as Christianity.
So what is the historical significance of Paul, as he became known after his conversion? It is, quite simply, that he decided you did not need to be a Jew to follow Christ. The Chief, or Prince, of the Apostles was regarded as Peter.
But 20 years after Jesus's Empty Tomb had been found and his followers proclaimed his Resurrection, they were still teaching that in order to follow Jesus you must be a Jew.
Paul, on the other hand, began preaching in the parts of the world now known as Lebanon and Syria. In Syrian Antioch, the term Christian was first used of those he converted.
Having travelled all over modern Turkey (Asia Minor) he soon got to Europe: Macedonia, Athens, Corinth, and from there converts went to Rome.
We know that at first Peter was opposed to the idea of Gentile Christians. When these two leading followers of Christ met in Jerusalem, Paul denounced Peter 'to his face' (Galatians 2:11 if you like looking up texts) and said that Christianity was for all - it was a universal, or catholic, faith - whether you were male or female, Jewish or Gentile, a slave or a free person.
Just think of the implications of it historically. If Paul had never had this showdown with Peter, Christianity would have remained a sect within Judaism.
The fact that today billions of non-Jews know the Psalms, or the story of Abraham and Isaac, or the story of King David, or the words of the Prophets - all this is down to Saint Paul.
You can tell from his letters that he is a driven, hyperactive genius of a man - more like a half-mad poet, I have often thought, than a clergyman.
His great flights of beautiful prose-poetry about the nature of love, or about the consolations of faith, echo down the ages to inspire new generations of readers afresh.
'Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword?'
Paul was the first great theologian, insisting that we are forgiven not because of our good deeds, but solely because of God's love for us. He was the prime influence on all the great Christian philosophers and thinkers from Augustine to Luther.
But what happened to him in the end? We never knew. We know from the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible that he was arrested for causing an affray in Jerusalem, when Jews set upon him for preaching Christianity.
We're told that, as a Roman citizen, he made an appeal to Caesar's supreme court in Rome, living for two years under house arrest. But then his story fizzles out.
Now, it appears that the aural tradition, passed on by word of mouth since the second century, that he had suffered martyrdom and was beheaded for his faith, is true.
For this same tradition insists that his tomb is in the church of St Paul outside the Walls - where the bone fragments identified as his have been found. The Roman Church from the very beginnings made a cult of its martyrs and revered both Peter and Paul as the two great leaders of their Church.
Sparring partners in life they might have been. In death they were martyrs - the Greek word means witnesses - for Christ. The fact they had differed so hotly about the admission of non-Jews to the Church makes their union in death - as the two pillars of the Christian tradition - more impressive.
Today's squabbles among the Christians - whether to admit women to the priesthood, for example - seem trivial compared with the great big question: can non-Jews become Catholic Christians? Can you be a Christian and not be circumcised?
Paul said of course, and he eventually persuaded the Jerusalem Church, who included Jesus's own family, St Peter and others, that the unsearchable riches of Christ were not limited to those who abstained from ham sandwiches.
It was much bigger than persuading the other Christians to lift the dietary requirements. It was the whole ethos of Catholicism (catholic literally translates as universal), the whole belief that Christianity was a religion for all the world.
From Saint Paul descends not only the Christian faith as believed by so many billions since he had his apocalypse. As well as the faith - which is not shared by everyone today - there are the 2,000 years of Christian history and culture.
And that is something which we all do share, whether we wish to or not. For this reason, the discovery of his bones is of immense historical significance. We have found the father of our civilisation.
The Vatican archaeologists have also found a very old fresco - dated to three centuries after Paul's death - on the walls of the catacombs, which appears to be a faithful likeness of Paul.
The old icon-painters and makers of frescoes and mosaics did not paint from whim. They saw their task as the keeping alive of a tradition, and accounts of Paul's appearance would have been passed down from generation to generation.
This picture, of a bald Jewish man with a pointed beard, is very likely authentic. Both discoveries - of the bones and of the frescoes - are inspiring new discoveries of the Christian faith's roots in actual history.
Historical research alone will never produce faith. But it has always been part of the Christian claim that it was historically rooted. The ministry of the Church - its bishops and priests - goes back, as far as the West is concerned, in an unbroken line to the martyrs of Rome in the early days of Christianity.
These were men and women who were alive during the lifetime of Jesus, and their lives had been turned around by their beliefs concerning his life, death and resurrection. To all the apostles, therefore, the Church owes an historic debt.
But to none more so than Paul, who opened up to the Gentile world the inexhaustible riches of the Jewish spiritual tradition which culminated in Jesus Christ.
