Paul lived among people who revered only the best. But Paul announced that God had chosen the foolish to shame the wise and the weak to shame the strong.
In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew
That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics – and yet equally was foreign to them both. Its impact was destined to render Paul’s letters – the correspondence of a vagrant, without position or reputation in the affairs of the world – the most influential, the most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written
Across the millennia, and in societies and continents unimagined by Paul himself, their impact would reverberate. His was a conception of law that would come to suffuse an entire civilization. He was indeed – just as he proclaimed himself to be – the herald of a new beginning.