Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

somewhat unaffected by the
     persecutions of the Hellenists. It was as though the priestly authorities did not
     consider the two groups to be related.
    Meanwhile, the expelled Hellenists flooded back into the Diaspora. Armed with the
     message they had adopted from the Hebrews in Jerusalem, they began transmitting it,
in Greek
, to their fellow Diaspora Jews, those living in the Gentile cities of Ashdod and
     Caesarea, in the coastal regions of Syria-Palestine, in Cyprus and Phoenicia and Antioch,
     the city in which they were, for the first time, referred to as Christians (Acts 11:27).
     Little by little over the following decade, the Jewish sect founded by a group of
     rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. No longer bound
     by the confines of the Temple and the Jewish cult, the Hellenist preachers began to
     gradually shed Jesus’s message of its nationalistic concerns, transforming it into
     a universal calling that would be more appealing to those living in a Graeco-Roman
     milieu. In doing so, they unchained themselves from the strictures of Jewish law,
     until it ceased to have any primacy. Jesus did not come to fulfill the law, the Hellenists
     argued. He came to abolish it. Jesus’s condemnation was not of the priests who defiled
     the Temple with their wealth and hypocrisy. His condemnation was of the Temple itself.
    Still, at this point, the Hellenists reserved their preaching solely for their fellow
     Jews, as Luke writes in the book of Acts: “They spoke the word to no one but the Jews”
     (Acts 11:19). This was still a primarily Jewish movement, one that blossomed through
     the theological experimentation that marked the Diaspora experiencein the Roman Empire. But then a few among the Hellenists began sharing the message
     of Jesus with gentiles, “so that a great number of them became believers.” The gentile
     mission was not paramount—not yet. But the farther the Hellenists spread from Jerusalem
     and the heart of the Jesus movement, the more their focus shifted from an exclusively
     Jewish audience to a primarily gentile one. The more their focus shifted to converting
     gentiles, the more they allowed certain syncretistic elements borrowed from Greek
     gnosticism and Roman religions to creep into the movement. And the more the movement
     was shaped by these new “pagan” converts, the more forcefully it discarded its Jewish
     past for a Graeco-Roman future.
    All of this was still many years away. It would not be until after the destruction
     of Jerusalem in 70 C.E . that the mission to the Jews would be abandoned and Christianity transformed into
     a Romanized religion. Yet even at this early stage in the Jesus movement, the path
     toward gentile dominance was being set, though the tipping point would not come until
     a young Pharisee and Hellenistic Jew from Tarsus named Saul—the same Saul who had
     countenanced Stephen’s stoning for blasphemy—met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus
     and became known forevermore as Paul.

Chapter Fourteen
Am I Not an Apostle?
    Saul of Tarsus was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples when he
     left Jerusalem to find and punish the Hellenists who had fled to Damascus after Stephen’s
     stoning. Saul was not asked by the high priest to hunt down these followers of Jesus;
     he went of his own accord. An educated, Greek-speaking, Diaspora Jew and citizen of
     one of the wealthiest port cities in the Roman Empire, Saul was zealously devoted
     to the Temple and Torah. “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of
     the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” he writes of himself in a letter
     to the Philippians, “as to [knowledge of] the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor
     of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5–6).
    It was while en route to Damascus that the young Pharisee had an ecstatic experience
     that would change everything for him, and for the faith he would adopt as his own.
     As he approached the city gates with his traveling companions, he was suddenly struck
     by a light from heaven flashing all around him. He fell to the ground in a heap. A
     voice said to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
    “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.
    The reply broke through the blinding white light, “I am Jesus.”
    Struck blind by the vision, Saul made his way to Damascus, where he met a follower
     of Jesus named