Paulus of Tarsus, was the son of a merchant who gained Roman citizenship and put aside his Hebrew heritage, renounced all ties to the Pharisees and threw in his lot with the Sadducees, who he viewed as Palestine's salvation. Paulus rejected many of the values of his father and chose to rejoin their native peoples, where he took the name Shaul, as he thought it gave him quasi-Hebrew stature. However in doing so he turned his back upon his ties to Roman citizenship, a sacrifice that he hoped would win him favor in the eyes of Yahweh."
Overview[]
Paulus was raised among the many temples and cults that line the alley ways of Tarsus, and he was exposed to many concepts foreign to the understanding of the common people, so he was regarded as strange and not quite natural in his desire to reassert his Hebrew ties. Just having the desire, of course, wasn’t enough to overcome his lukewarm talents as a scribe and a scholar, and after failing the entrance examination for the priesthood he could never rise to be a Rabbi. The best he could do was become a temple guard.
When Yesus’s body disappeared from the temple the Roman’s suspicious about how quick he died during his crucifixion Pilot and Caiaphas ended up sending a bunch of Guards to Syria to look for leads. Paulus was amongst those guards. However Paulus suffered from epilepsy and had a fit on the way. The Rabbi tired of dealing with him had the remaining guard bind him up and leave him. This night's events will shape the rest of his life and give him a purpose and direction hardly foreseeable from the seeming mundanity of it all. The next morning Paulus was rescued by Yessus Ben Malakai a poor merchant son of the Rabbi Hilkiah. Whose name is misremembered as Barnabas, a man fated to be his companion for several years. The two became lovers though in later times Paulus would repent of his actions and label them a sin, then go on to make infamous invectives condemning the practice after breaking up with his lover and choosing to go it alone in his travels.
Twenty years from now he will be charged with the crime of Apostasy, of Of making false claims and presenting ideas that will be justly viewed as a threat to the Hebrew nation. It is here that he falsely claims that he was a great student of Gamael, who was a wise and well-learned man with much stature among those Pharisees allowed to sit in the Sanhedrin. While in prison he wrote letters, which in time will be incorporated, into what is commonly known as the Bible of the Christians, his version of events will be the accepted reality to a great many devout believers...and as he named the Pharisees his enemies, all of the Hebrew will fall unto an aegis of many progroms that assign the blame of Jesus' death upon the collective heads of the entire Jewish race. That is the degree to which Paul cast his own apostasy into the mark which became the accepted standard of the Church he founded.