I need hardly repeat any more of Gallio’s broodings. But finally he gave me an order.

“Go and find out about that man’s teaching, Minutus,” he said. “You’ve the best qualifications to do so, as you’ve known him since your childhood in Antioch. And also you are in general acquainted with the Jehovah of the Jews and their laws and customs. Your father is said to have been very successful in Antioch as a mediator between the Jews and the city council.”

I seemed to have fallen into a trap and it was useless to object, for Gallio turned a deaf ear to all my protests.

“You must overcome your prejudices,” he said. “You must be honest if you are to seek the truth, insofar as your duty permits you. You’ve plenty of time. There are worse ways of passing it than studying the wisdom of this Jewish savior of the world.”

“But what if he gets me into his power with his magic?” I asked bitterly.

But Gallio did not even consider my question worth answering.

An order is an order. I had to carry it out to the best of my ability. It might be quite important to Gallio to be absolutely clear on what such a dangerous and influential rabble rouser preached. On the day of Saturn, I dressed in simple Greek clothes, found the Jews’ synagogue and went into the building next door. It was not a real synagogue but an inoffensive cloth dealer’s house which he had given up to the assembly Paul had founded.

The reception room on the upper floor was full of simple people waiting with joyful expectation in their eyes. They greeted each other in a friendly way and I too was welcomed and no one asked my name. Most of them were craftsmen, small traders or trusted slaves, but there were also some old women wearing silver ornaments. Judging by their clothes, only a few of them were Jews.

Paul arrived with several disciples. He was greeted with cries of homage as a messenger of the true God, and some women wept with joy when they saw him. He spoke in a loud, piercing voice and was so carried away with the conviction of his own words that it was like a hot wind blowing through the sweating crowd of listeners.

His voice alone pierced me to the marrow. I tried to listen attentively and make some notes on a wax tablet, for at the beginning he referred to the Jewish holy scripts, showing by quoting from them that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in Jerusalem, in fact was the Messiah or Christus the prophets had predicted.

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It was interesting that he quite openly referred to his own past. He was undoubtedly a gifted man, for he said he had studied in the renowned philosophy school in his home town, Tarsus, and later in Jerusalem with famous teachers. In his youth he had soon been elected to the highest Jewish council. He said that he had been a passionate adherent to the laws, and a persecutor of the disciples of Jesus. He had even guarded the clothes of the stoners and in that way taken part in the first illegal execution of a member of the assembly of the poor. He had hunted, bound and dragged to court several followers of the new way and finally at his own request had been given authority to arrest the adherents of Nazareth who had fled from persecution to Damascus.

But on the way to Damascus he had seen such an unearthly light that he had been blinded. Jesus himself had appeared to him, and since then he had changed. In Damascus, a man who had acknowledged Jesus, a certain Ananias, had laid his hands on him and given him back his sight, for Jesus of Nazareth wished to show him how much he must suffer to proclaim the name of Christ.

And suffered he had. Many a time he had been flogged. Once he had been nearly stoned to death. He bore scars of Christ on his body, he said. All this the listeners had heard many times before, but they listened just as attentively and occasionally cried out with joy.

Paul told them to look around and with their own eyes confirm that there were not many wise, powerful or important people among them. This he considered showed that God had chosen what on earth is simple and despised, to shame the wise men. God chose the foolish and the weak instead of the wise men, for he transformed the wisdom of the world into foolishness.

He also spoke on the searching of the spirit and they who run races. And he talked of love, more impressively, I thought, than I have ever heard anyone else speak. Man should love his neighbor as himself, yes, to the extent that whatever he did for the good of another without love was of no benefit to him. He maintained explicitly that even if a person distributed all his possessions for the good of the poor and gave his own body for burning without feeling real love, then he was still nothing.

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