Furious Saint

He survived five floggings. Three shipwrecks. One stoning that left him for dead. He kept going.Before he was Paul, he was Saul — and Saul was furious. The year is approximately 49 AD. A compact, weather-beaten man in his early forties is being lowered over the walls of a city in a basket, in the dark, because every gate is guarded by men with orders to arrest him. He has been in this situation before. He will be in it again.His name is Paul. He has thirty-nine-lash scars on his back from five separate synagogue floggings. He has survived a stoning that satisfied a crowd sufficiently that they left him for dead outside the city walls. He has been adrift alone in the Mediterranean for a night and a day. He has survived four shipwrecks, multiple imprisonments, and a two-week storm at sea that convinced 275 other people on his ship to stop eating.He was not always this man.A decade earlier, he was the one doing the arresting. He held the coats at the first Christian martyrdom. He ransacked homes before dawn. He set out on the road to Damascus with letters of arrest and the full confidence of a man who has never doubted anything in his life.Then the road happened.The Furious Saint is the untold story of the most extraordinary transformation in the ancient world — told not as theology but as biography. As a life lived at full throttle, on failing legs, across fifteen thousand miles of Roman road, carrying an idea so dangerous that every city he entered either welcomed him or tried to kill him. Sometimes both, on the same visit.This is Paul as he actually was: battered, brilliant, worried about his friends, asking for his cloak before winter, writing letters in prison that two thousand years later still have not finished exploding.For by works of the law no human being will be justified. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law — and are justified by his grace as a gift.That is what this road was for.