Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Ananias, who laid hands upon him and restored his sight. Immediately,
     something like scales dropped from Saul’s eyes and he was filled with the Holy Spirit.
     Right then and there, Saul was baptized into the Jesus movement. He changed his name
     to Paul and immediately began preaching the risen Jesus, not to his fellow Jews, but
     to the gentiles who had, up to this point, been more or less ignored by the movement’s
     chief missionaries.
    The story of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus is a bit of propagandistic
     legend created by the evangelist Luke; Paul himself never recounts the story of being
     blinded by the sight of Jesus. If the traditions can be believed, Luke was a young
     devotee of Paul: he is mentioned in two letters, Colossians and Timothy, commonly
     attributed to Paul but written long after his death. Luke wrote the book of Acts as
     a kind of eulogy to his former master some thirty to forty years after Paul had died.
     In fact, Acts is less an account of the apostles than it is a reverential biography
     of Paul; the apostles disappear from the book early on, serving as little more than
     the bridge between Jesus and Paul. In Luke’s reimagining, it is Paul—not James, nor
     Peter, nor John, nor any of the Twelve—who is the true successor to Jesus. The activity
     of the apostles in Jerusalem serves only as prelude to Paul’s preaching in the Diaspora.
    Although Paul does not divulge any details about his conversion, he does repeatedly
     insist that he has witnessed the risen Jesus for himself, and that this experience
     has endowed him with the same apostolic authority as the Twelve. “Am I not an apostle?”
     Paul writes in defense of his credentials, which were frequently challenged by the
     mother assembly in Jerusalem. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Corinthians 9:1).
    Paul may have considered himself an apostle, but it seems that few if any of the other
     movement leaders agreed. Not even Luke,Paul’s sycophant, whose writings betray a deliberate, if ahistorical, attempt to elevate
     his mentor’s status in the founding of the church, refers to Paul as an apostle. As
     far as Luke is concerned, there are only twelve apostles, one for each tribe of Israel,
     just as Jesus had intended. In recounting the story of how the remaining eleven apostles
     replaced Judas Iscariot with Matthias after Jesus’s death, Luke notes that the new
     recruit needed to be someone who “accompanied [the disciples] all the time that the
     Lord Jesus went in and out among us, starting with John’s baptism, right up to the
     day [Jesus] was taken from us” (Acts 1:21). Such a requirement would clearly have
     ruled out Paul, who converted to the movement around 37 C.E ., nearly a decade after Jesus had died. But that does not deter Paul, who not only
     demands to be called an apostle—“even if I am not an apostle to others, at least I
     am to you,” he tells his beloved community in Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:2)—he insists
     he is far superior to all the other apostles.
    “Are they Hebrews?” Paul writes of the apostles. “So am I! Are they Israelites? So
     am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ?
I am a better one
(though it may be foolish to say so), with greater labors, more floggings, more imprisonments,
     and more often near death” (2 Corinthians 11:22–23). Paul holds particular contempt
     for the Jerusalem-based triumvirate of James, Peter, and John, whom he derides as
     the “so-called pillars of the church” (Galatians 2:9). “Whatever they are makes no
     difference to me,” he writes. “Those leaders contributed nothing to me” (Galatians
     2:6). The apostles may have walked and talked with the living Jesus (or, as Paul dismissively
     calls him, “Jesus-in-the-flesh”). But Paul walks and talks with the divine Jesus:
     they have, according to Paul, conversations in which Jesus imparts secret instructions
     intended solely for his ears. The apostles may have been handpicked by Jesus as they
     toiled away on their fields or brought up their fishing nets. But Jesus chose Paul
     before he was born: he was, he tells the Galatians, called by Jesus into apostleship
     while still inhis mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). In other words, Paul does not consider himself
     the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the
first
apostle.
    The claim of apostleship is an urgent one for Paul, as it was the only way to justify
     his