Who Was Saint Paul?
Everyone knew, as the Acts report, that Timothy’s father was Greek, which evidently meant that he was neither Jewish nor Christian. Jews had to live by the Torah. But as Paul told the Galatians with breathtaking audacity, the law could actually be fulfilled by following a single precept, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In saying this, he effectively collapsed into one Jesus’s two greatest commandments, to love God and to love your neighbor. According to Matthew, Jesus had said, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
.. Paul’s authentic utterances in his letters often conflict with one another. At times they advocate Jewish law and Jewish practices, such as circumcision, dietary restrictions, and observance of the Sabbath, and at other times they appear to suggest that the love imposed by Christian universalism should bring Jews and Christians together without distinction.
.. Nietzsche had a very different view of Paul, as a Jew who was “ambitious and importunate” with a mind “as superstitious as it was cunning.” He was a “very unpleasant man” with an “extravagant lust for power,” but wracked by anxiety over how to fulfill the Jewish law. “How he hated it,” wrote Nietzsche. By converting to Christianity Paul succeeded in throwing down the cross of the law “to which he felt himself nailed.”