St. Paul the Revolutionary - New Evangelizers

Yesterday was the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. These two men were the pillars of the ancient Church who were martyred by the Roman Emperor Nero.

And yet even though they were killed by Rome, they conquered Rome in the name of Christ.

Particularly, the influence of St. Paul cannot be overlooked. When I teach about him, I tell my students that it is impossible to oversell how important Paul is to the Christian faith. But his ideas are not merely ideas that shaped the internal workings of Christian theology.

Paul’s ideas changed the ancient world.

Other writers are written volumes of books explaining this principle in writing more in-depth and eloquent than I can provide in this brief article. But I would like to share three brief insights as to why Paul was so important:

1. THE BRUTALITY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

The agnostic historian Tom Holland spent the early part of his career studying the classical period of antiquity. Like many young men, he became fascinated by ancient Greco-Roman culture. But as he continued in his studies, something began to distress him. He talked about the “quality of callousness” found in the ancient world.

We live in a world where we start from a principle of every human life having value, thus each of us as essential rights. This was not part of the ancient Greco-Roman mindset. Other people were seen as a means to an end. Julius Caesar killed and enslaved thousands of people for personal glory and this was seen by the Romans as heroic. As Holland continued researching the Greeks and Romans, he began to discover how alien their thought was from his own, especially in the way they were so casually cruel about human life. We are all familiar with their bloodlust as displayed in the gladiator fights and executions in the Colosseum. But this fell down to the micro-level as well. Fathers had the right to kill their babies at birth if they did not like the look of them. In fact, the father was a such a tyrant in the house that he could beat, kill, or sell into slavery his own children.

This is the world into which Paul preaches. This is the world he changed.

2. LONG-LASTING EFFECTS

Some have sayd that Paul led to ripples of revolution in society. The ideas found in his letters about the dignity of all people, whether they were male, female, Jewish, Gentile, slave, or free, would lead to further cultural revolutions once his ideas took hold.

Again, it is important to grasp what a change this was from what had come before. I wrote in a previous article that Rome enslaved 75% of the people int he Mediterranean, bleeding them dry of people, wealth, and resources. The only type of leadership was one of domination, where this exploitation was justified because might makes right.

But when Paul preaches to the Romans, he gives them the vision of Christ’s better way: one where the only authority is the authority of service. It was actually very dangerous for Paul to imply that wives have equal dignity with husbands or that masters had moral obligations to slaves. But he laid the groundwork for any revolutionary framework that puts the dignity of the human person at the center.

In fact, it was said that his ideas were so far-reaching that the ripples of revolutions would occur without people realizing that the ripples came from him.

3. HE NEVER ARGUES CHRIST’S DIVINITY

One of the popular trends in recent Biblical studies is to take the idea that Jesus’ divinity is a later development of Christian theology. The thinking goes that early Christians did not believe Jesus was God, but that it was later traditions that dressed Him up in Godliness.

But this is clearly not the case as proven by St. Paul. No Bible scholar disputes that his writings were some of the earliest in Christianity, at least pre-dating the Gospels. If this was the case, then Paul should be writing about Jesus more human terms than divine terms.

Instead, what we find is that Paul never argues that Jesus is the Son of God. In all of his letters, he never lays out an argument or a proof that Jesus is Divine.

He just assumes it outright.

And it seems that he is writing to people who are also assuming it. Everyone in the early Christian community appears to be on the same page: Jesus Christ is God. Since Paul’s letters are some of the earliest writings, and he does not bother to convince you that Jesus is divine, we can see that it was already a widely accepted idea from the earliest days.

This idea is so revolutionary that it upended all of Western Civilization. The world no longer needed to be cruel and dark because Christ is the light. He is the God made man who took the form of a slave. And in doing so, Paul shows the Roman world that everyone, even the slaves, have the presence of God inside of them. This utterly corrodes and crumbles the casual cruelty of the ancient world. And from its ruins the Christian principles of justice, dignity, and charity are laid as its new foundations.

This was the revolution that changed the world.

This the revolution of St. Paul

Copyright 2025, WL Grayson

W.L. Grayson

I am a devoutly Catholic theology teacher who loves a popular culture that often, quite frankly, hates me. I grew up absorbing every movie, TV show, comic book, science fiction novel, etc. I could find. As of today I’ve watched over 2100 movies and tv shows. They take up a huge part of my life. I don’t know that this is a good thing, but it has given me a common vocabulary to draw from in order to illustrate whatever theological point I make in class. I’ve used American Pie the song to explain the Book of Revelation (I’ll post on this some time later) and American Pie the movie to help explain Eucharist (don’t ask). The point is that the popular culture is popular for a reason. It is woven into the fabric of our lives and imaginations, for good or ill. In this blog I will attempt to bring together the things of heaven with the things of earth. Of course this goal may be too lofty for someone like me.