The Sacred Writings of Paul

The apostle Paul, who wrote many of the books in the New Testament, was a fearless and revolutionary religious innovator. In a society where slaveholding was commonplace and women were little more than servants, he preached a groundbreaking equality founded on a new spiritual identity. In an imperial political system that demanded unquestioning allegiance, Paul told his readers they were citizens of heaven. Yet Paul's writings have also given rise to destructive tendencies in the name of religion: narrow, exclusivist thinking; a simplistic ?right or wrong? vision of the world; and a shallow, ?we?re-number-one? triumphalism?points of view where Paul may have diverged from Jesus's own teachings about the world and God's kingdom.