I've been reading through the bible end to end. Having been ill for over a year and not being able to sleep normally means that I have hours to spare to do things like this and I thought I might get some sort of overview through 'feel' rather than intense line by line study. I got to the minor prophets in the Old Testament which, by length, turn out to be not quite so minor after all and then I came to the New Testament and I realised just how tiny it is by comparison. I whizzed through the four gospels and found them much more similar-feeling than they ever had before (even John) and then Acts comes as a tumult of activity following the whirlwind of pentecost. Disciples suddenly rush out in all directions hurrying to tell people the Good News. Paul is converted much sooner into Acts than I had previously thought and he features very strongly most of the way through and then we have his letters. It is absolutely clear that, without Paul, Christianity might never have happened. It would quite possibly have remained a small Jewish sect like the Essenes or the pharisees. Even Peter seems to have been ambivalent about converting the pagans. Paul's apostolate lasted, perhaps, fifteen years and it is clear from his journeyings and his letters that he was a driven man fighting against time and against circumstance. This is not a man who has time for niceties or finesse. He comes across often as a wheedling bully (which he himself admits) who will do anything, or almost anything, to get his essential message across. He made enemies everywhere: amongst the Jews of course, but also amongst the converts and he makes no bones about condemning these outright with very little room for argument ro comeback.
I have always had problems with Paul: theologically and instinctively too and my gut feeling about Paul at the moment is that he was a frail, sometimes slightly bigoted, human being doing an amazing task against impossible odds. He was also amazingly successful. We are all a testament to that.
I can see now why many theologians spend a lifetime studying Paul and why the letters need to be there in the New Testament but that isn't to say that everything he writes I can agree with or understand and I guess there will always be controversy around this.
The three main areas of difficulty for the church over the past few hundred years has been the place of slaves, then women and now homosexuality. Paul was a man of his time and not every word he wrote or uttered was a divine revelation in the way in which, say, the Moslems understand the Qu'ran. Revelation continues through history and each generation should be contributing to this. Time didn't stop after the death of Paul.