A Word Before We Begin

I did not set out to defend Paul. I set out to convict him.

For most of my life I read the way I was taught to read: the red letters were the part that mattered, the rest was commentary, and when you wanted the doctrine cleaned up and settled, you went to Paul — he wrote most of the New Testament anyway. I inherited that habit without ever inspecting it. And then, when I finally went back through the whole of it slowly, with the Torah open beside me, I hit a collision I could not walk around. Yeshua said it as plainly as a man can say anything: I did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets… not one stroke of a letter will pass (Matthew 5:17–18). And Paul, in Galatians, seemed to call that same Law a curse. The two would not sit in the same room. And if they truly could not be reconciled, then one of them had to go — and it was never, ever going to be Yeshua.

So I went after Paul. Not gently. I put him on trial as a hostile witness and I tried to throw him out of my Bible, because if I could disqualify him, the contradiction would vanish and the Torah would keep standing. I was the prosecutor, and I wanted a conviction. I dug for the smoking gun — the place where the planted spy, the false apostle, the man who quietly undid what Yeshua plainly upheld, finally showed his hand.

I want to tell you honestly what happened, because it is the reason for this book. The harder I worked to convict him, the plainer his innocence got. The man I was trying to throw out turned out to be the most Torah-soaked Jew in the entire New Testament — a Pharisee of Pharisees, trained at the feet of Gamaliel, who quoted the Law and the Prophets on nearly every page he wrote, who kept the commandments to the end of his life, and who said in his own defense, under oath, that he believed everything laid down in the Law and the Prophets. The case I was building kept collapsing in my hands. Not because I went soft on it — because the evidence would not hold the verdict I wanted. Every "abolition" verse, run back to the Greek and read in its own world, said something other than what I had been told it said. And the more carefully I read, the clearer it became that the problem was never Paul. The problem was a misreading of Paul — one so old and so settled that we mistook it for the text itself.

That is what this book is. It is the trial, laid out in the open, so you can render your own verdict. I am not asking you to take Paul on my say-so, and I am certainly not asking you to take me on my say-so — I never do. I am a lay teacher in a small Iowa town with a worn Bible and a stubborn streak, and all I can do is the legwork and hand it back to you. Read with the text open. Test every line. Where the defense holds, you will not be trusting me; you will be seeing it yourself, which is the only kind of seeing that lasts.

And I am going to do something that may surprise you for a book that ends in acquittal: I am going to put the case against Paul as strongly as I know how. The whole case — the verses, the planted-spy theory, the charge that his own conversion is the very thing Yeshua warned us not to believe, the claim that Scripture itself condemns him. All of it, at full strength, before a word of defense. Because a verdict that ducks the strongest version of the charge is worth nothing, and because I owe you the same honesty I owed myself when I went hunting. If the case were going to convict him, I wanted it to get its best swing.

It is worth saying why now, of all times. This case is spreading. It has become a headline — Paul: deceiver, liar, false apostle, a spy planted to corrupt the faith — and good people, people who love the Torah and want to honor Yeshua, are being handed it and quietly throwing out half their Bibles. The answer to that is not to shout the question down. The honest people asking it deserve better than that, and so does the text. The answer is to do the one thing almost no one does with an accusation this serious: try it. Hear the charges in full, weigh the evidence, and let the verdict fall where the text puts it.

So that is what we will do. The defendant is the Apostle Paul. The standard is the Memra's own words. The evidence is the Greek of his letters and the record of his life. And you are the jury.

Let's convene the court.