Ian Harris sheds light on a controversial new novel about St Paul - and on the real life and beliefs of the man who inspired it.
Paul, that troublesome Jew who more than any other carried a brand-new vision of a transformed creation to the Mediterranean world, is having a mixed year.
The Catholic Church is celebrating his special place in the Christian story with a year-long focus on him, capped off by a claim to have found traces of his bones under a church in Rome.
In stark contrast, English novelist Philip Pullman has given notice of a book that will blame Paul for perverting Christianity, called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
He apparently thinks Paul stuffed up with his talk of Christ as the son of God.
There is nothing new in this divergence.
Conflicting attitudes have swirled around Paul down the centuries: to some he is appealing, to others appalling.
Which of those options anyone takes today ought to depend at least partly on the facts, so I shall start there.
First, Paul was not only a good Jew, but a member of the strict and scholarly Pharisee party.
He loathed the new Jesus movement that had sprung up within Judaism, and persecuted its followers with holy zeal.
Then, out of the blue, he experienced a vision of Jesus that turned his life upside down.
He became a champion of the infant faith, even claiming a special calling to spread it among people in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Greece and Rome.
He made a point of visiting Jewish synagogues there, appealing especially to so-called "God-fearers" who were not Jews, but who were drawn to Jewish monotheism and worshipped with them.
He won converts, but also made enemies.
Pullman concedes that Paul was "a literary and imaginative genius".
He might have added "mystic".
Those qualities showed in the way he built on Jesus' teaching about the kingdom of God, giving it a mythic dimension by inviting new Christians to enter into the concept in an intensely intimate way.
This they would do by identifying in daily life with the one who had proclaimed that kingdom - he called this mythic projection "Lord" or "Christ".
The titles go beyond admiring the human Jesus as messenger of God's kingdom: Paul's call was to build on Jesus' vision by actively participating, "in Christ" (a favourite phrase of his), in making that kingdom real.
Paul's reputation has suffered because for centuries the churches have taken for granted that he was writing holy scripture.
That idea would have startled him.
He thought he was writing letters to young Christian communities around the Mediterranean.
Thirteen of the 27 books in the Christian New Testament are attributed to him, but scholars judge only seven to be unquestionably his: the other six were given his name to accord them greater authority, but differ from his in vocabulary, style, tone and content.
Most of the things people dislike about Paul today - putting women in their place, sanctioning slavery, appeasing the Roman authorities - occur in the letters he didn't write.
So Paul wrote his letters to known people in known places at a time when Rome ruled the known world.
And Rome took pride in having established a new world order, headed by an emperor who was everywhere exalted as Son of God, God of Gods, Lord, Redeemer and Saviour of the World.
Paul vehemently disagreed.
He preached a diametrically opposite world order based not on power but on righteousness.
Peace and prosperity would be won not by might of arms, but through justice, love and sharing: that was how Jesus' vision of God's kingdom would be realised.
So for Paul, those imperial titles belonged rightly to Jesus, and his presence could still be experienced through "Christ" - not just another name for Jesus, but a mythic way of conveying his continuing relevance in ushering in that alternative world order.
"A new creation", Paul called it.
In any empire such notions are inherently subversive.
They got Paul into trouble repeatedly, with Romans, Jews, pagans.
He tells how he was beaten, whipped, stoned, imprisoned, shipwrecked.
Around 64 AD, he was executed in Rome.
Pullman, however, says Paul made Christ up and Christ was a scoundrel.
Tosh! It was that mythic Christ that helped make Jesus a living force in Paul's time and across the centuries.
He would have found it a bitter irony that when the church became all-powerful, it adopted the Roman model of power and domination, rather than his alternative of establishing the kingdom of God (or Godness) through justice, love and sharing.
But you can hardly blame Paul for that.
Ian Harris is a journalist and commentator.
