Roman, the prevailing religion Jewish, and the Christian element insignificant. Christianity's center of gravity was farther north or west at Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth and elsewhere in Asia Minor and Greece.

Sometimes Paul made converts and sometimes he ran into opposition. In Jerusalem and Rome he got arrested and in Athens he met with indifference or contempt. Now and then he encountered insuperable resistance or was expelled from a community, and in each such case he cloaked the indignity under a divine mandate to go elsewhere. He wandered up the Aegean's eastern coast as far as Troy and crossed over into Macedonia, whence he ambulated down through Hellas to Corinth.

Here we seem to run into a stretch of history: that Paul was born in Tarsus and that he journeyed westward and northward along the coast of Asia Minor, crossed the Hellespont and continued along the Thracian and Macedonian coasts to Greece along an ancient and well traveled route is easy of belief. And upon his arrival at Corinth and his attaining something like his fiftieth year he wrote two letters that are considered his earliest, those to the congregations at Thessalonica or Salonica, which lies 150 miles north of Corinth and supposably upon Paul's line of march.

As contributions to the historic record of some messiah or other these earliest of Christian documents are worthless. The supposition was that the messiah had been crucified about fifteen years before and that a few years after the crucifixion Paul had seen Jesus in a fit. In these letters Paul exhorts his followers to believe in the doctrines that he has told them in

person, doctrines which he does not here recapitulate. He is

quite sold on the saviorhood of Jesus; but for all we can tell from these letters that messiah may be Paul's own invention. Corinth was something of a headquarters of Paulines; and when Paul was a long time away from there he wrote letters to the Corinthians to resolve schisms, suppress bickerings and maintain his predominance. In First Corinthians he indicates that a man had best find his sexual gratification in other men, but he permits marriage where a man can't content himself without a woman. Much of Paul's counsel is practical, concilliatory and in accord with the customs and thought of the time and place. He asserts in an offhand way that he has seen Jesus Christ and that he is a brother of Peter; apparently we are to take these statements as made in a spiritual sense.

In First Corinthians' 15th chapter Paul gets around to stating his doctrine of Christ's death, burial, resurrection and appearance to Peter, to the other apostles, to 500 men "and last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." He states Christianity's elements and gives instructions for taking up the collection. Church management and a defense of his religious authority are the themes of his other letters.

Paul tells how he went to Jerusalem, entered into the Jewish temple and there got into a brawl of even greater severity than his others. Only thus lately does he declare himself a pupil of the famed Gamaliel and a once-scrupulous Jew. Carried in arrest by the Romans to Caesarea, Paul was held there two years and then sent to Rome, where he dwelt two years. These two-year periods sound more like a mannerism than history, each coming at the end of a chapter with an abrupt change in the narrative's pace.

Christian historians seem disposed to get Paul out of the way by 65 a.d.; and some of the time-killing expedients introduced seem designed to make his conversion and ministry begin curiously early. Thus he is seen as Gamaliel's disciple at the early age of fifteen; he spends three years in Arabia doing nothing immediately after experiencing the most exciting

event of his life, the event that is supposed to have prompted his becoming the most active of the apostles; he is held two years by Felix and Festus with strangely little motivation; he is sent, on little or no provocation, on a leisurely voyage to Rome, where he is held in oddly liberal confinement by a government that customarily disposed of capital cases promptly; and thereafter it is indicated that he made trips to Spain and to the Levant, finally to return to Rome and get himself killed.

It would make truer-sounding history for Paul to have concocted his brand of Christianity some thirty years after the supposed messiah's death and that his extraordinary experiences were a pack of lies but that he did travel in Asia Minor and Greece. He may never have been imprisoned, though he was commonly involved in gang-fights. He was a clever orator, politician and theologian and a great one to magnify his tribulations. He can have invented Christianity about 60 a.d., made a profitable racket of it and in the short space of five years or so got his church established as firmly as it was to be established until it became the Roman state religion. The materials and the field lay ready to his hand. Instead of his being killed in Rome in 65 a.d., he may have lived indefinitely later, and it would be like him to switch religions again.

God's wrath, says Paul, "is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hinder the truth .. Knowing God, they glorified him not as God," and took to the worship of images. Wherefore, Paul argues, "God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonored among themselves..."

Saul-Paul's indictment does not run against us here. We men who love men do not worship lifeless images; and as for dishonoring men's bodies, it is we who love those bodies. Mortification of the body is a Christian practice. We see in the seed-bearing, male human body a veritable temple of goodness, truth and beauty.

"For this cause," Paul goes on, "God gave them up unto vile passions; for their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due."

Paul accused those who disbelieved him of many other things: "all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetise, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful," and so on, verbosely and incoherently. That fellow certainly had a mad on.

He follows this blistering judgment with an exhortation against judging, "for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself." Upshot of the whole tirade is Paul's emphatic dissatisfaction with people who heard him preach and were unimpressed. So far as this passage may be held to state the Christian doctrine against Greek love, it might as logically be held to class man's men-fucking with envy, whispering, innovation, disobedience to parents and boasting. If Paul tried to revoke the behest that we love one another he had no authority to.

Our clergy mutilate the law that they pretend to tell

As if 'twere theirs to do with as they please. Well, what the hell?

Their fabric 'twas, their fabric 'tis, a patent fraud, a sell. Our course, of course, is plain: their senseless discord we shall quell.

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