Quotes from John Pollock

Disgust at idols strengthened his love for idolaters, and the man who once held Gentile neighbors at a distance now listened to their problems, fears, and temptations.

His joy was a release of Paul's conversion, not the heavy backslapping practical-joking humor of the Victorians, nor the cynical satire or the flippancy of the twenty first century mass media, just the gift of not taking himself or his adversaries too seriously.

A colleague like Barnabas could comfort him (Paul) in illness and keep him from overstrain when fit.

Though blue sky and the road's yellow dust and the green of the nearing oasis were all snuffed out, he (newly converted Saul) did not miss them. Light suffused his blinded eyes, his mind.

Faith in Christ leaped from person to person like some divine epidemic, not of disease but of spiritual health.

His (Paul's) entire personality within mutation. He was being turned inside out as he led Jesus light the recesses of his soul.

For a slave to be taught that he should no longer lie and cheat with revolutionary; more astonishing still was the slave's discovery that he did not want to lie or cheat and that he now loved the owner whom he had once resented and feared.

In youth his mind had been closed, for every prejudice of upbringing was a disinfectant against pagan ideas. He now had an even more satisfying answer to the puzzles of human strivings and destiny. Paganism at its philosophical best would appear a gluttering candle to a man who had followed the Light of the World, and more usually it was idolatry, mixed with license.

In his late forties, an age when men settle to comforts and seek a firm base, Paul began his roughest travels.

His ally was the age-old, unending human search for truth and security. In the first century as the twenty first, some were devout, some superstitious, others were frankly materialistic, even though in that age they paid lip service to the gods. Others, contemptuous of religion, believed only in mankind. But at heart, when disguises were torn away and defenses broken, lay the same anxieties and hopes.