25 January - the conversion of St Paul

as published in Great Yarmouth Parish Life

January is a month of the beginning of great things!  As well as the naming of the Son of God, we celebrate the conversion of the greatest ever apostle of the Christian faith.  Many books have been written on Paul, and here is the briefest of introductions
 

He was a Jew, born as ‘Saul’ at Tarsus, and brought up by the rabbi Gamaliel as a Pharisee.  A devout, fanatical Jew, Saul persecuted the Christians, and watched with satisfaction the first Christian martyrdom, the stoning of Stephen.  Then, on his way to Damascus, Saul had a vision of Christ that stopped him, literally, in his tracks. He realized that this Jesus whom he was persecuting was in fact the Messiah for whom he had longed

Saul changed overnight.  He took a new name, Paul, and became an evangelist for the cause of Christ.  He became a leader in the early church, and his special calling was as an apostle to the Gentiles.  He wrote many epistles to the young churches he founded – and thus, inadvertently, wrote a great part of the New Testament

Life as the greatest apostle was hardly full of perks: he was stoned, beaten, mobbed, homeless, hated, imprisoned, and, finally, martyred. Tradition has it that he was beheaded in Rome during the persecution of Nero in AD 64, and buried where the basilica of St Paul ‘outside the walls’ now stands.  His mighty faith in Christ has kindled similar belief in many hundreds of millions of people down the centuries
 

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