or full membership. Without this,
baptized converts were only half-proselytes and could not be fully
assimilated. This classification was still upheld by the Apostolic
Convention, which met under the presidency of James the Elder.(1408) The
time was ripe for a bold and radical innovation, and at this psychological
moment arose a man of great zeal and unbridled energy as well as of a
creative genius and a mystical imagination,--Saul of Tarsus, known by his
Roman name Paulus.(1409) He had been sent by the authorities at Jerusalem
to pursue the adherents of the new sect, but when he had come as far as
Damascus in Syria, he suddenly turned from a persecutor into the most
ardent promoter of the nascent Church, impelled by a strange
hallucination. Paul was a carpet weaver by trade, born and reared in
Tarsus, a seaport of Asia Minor, where he seems to have had a Greek
training and to have imbibed Gnostic or semi-pagan ideas beside his
Biblical knowledge. In this ecstatic vision on his journey he beheld the
figure of Jesus, "the crucified Christ," whose adherents he was pursuing,
yet whom he had never seen in the flesh, appearing as a heavenly being
whom Paul identified as the heavenly Adam, the archetypal "godlike" man.

Upon this strange vision he constructed a theological system far more
pagan than Jewish in type, according to which man was corrupt through the
sin of the first couple, and the death of Jesus on the cross was to be the
atoning sacrifice offered by God himself, who gave His own son as a ransom
for the sins of humanity. This doctrine he used as a lever with which, at
one bold stroke, he was to unhinge the Mosaic law and make the infant
Church a world-religion. Through baptism in the name of the Christ, the
old sin-laden Adam was to be cast off and the new heavenly Adam, in the
image of Christ, put on instead. The new covenant of God's atoning love
was to replace the old covenant of Sinai, to abolish forever the old
covenant based upon the Jewish law, and to set mankind free from all law,
"which begets sin and works wrath." In Christ, "who is the end of the
law," the sinfulness of the flesh should be overcome and the gates of
salvation be opened to a world redeemed from both death and sin.(1410) The
one essential for salvation was to accept the _mystery_ concerning the
birth and death of Christ, after the manner of the heathen
mystery-religions, and to employ as sacramental symbols of the mystery the
rites of bapt