11
squa
ds of vigilantes, broke into the homes of Christian Jerusalemites
and hauled the inhabitants off to prison. Then Saul volunteered to bust
up a community of Christians in Damascus. But on the road to the
northern city, Saul had a strange experience. He felt enveloped in
light. And he heard the voice of Jesus, the deceased leader whose
views he so deplored. Saul became St. Paul, and dubbed himself the
newest of Jesus' apostles. Then the freshly-minted holy man went off
to win others to his idiosyncratic notions of what Jesus' teachings were
all about.
The community of Jesus' followers does not seem to have
welcomed Paul's posthumous reinterpretation of their leader's ideas
with open arms. They probably regarded him with suspicion. With
his big city ways and complex ideas, he was anything but their rustic
kind. Finally, the self-styled apostle, in exasperation, decided that if he
couldn't dig up followers among the Jews, he'd turn elsewhere.18 Thus,
Paul began a vigorous campaign to win over "the gentiles"--citified
Greeks, Romans, Anatolians, Sicilians, Spaniards and others whose
urbane views were more congenial to his own.19
In the process, Paul was one of the early innovators of a new
concept: transferable religion. He broke free of the old notion that a
God was an emblem of tribal heritage and sliced the ties that bound
divinity to genes.
Paul was not the first to free gods from chromosomal
components. Buddha had done the same over five hundred years
earlier. But Paul was among the most influential ever to apply the
idea. Thanks to Paul, the Christian meme would eventually sweep
together an awesome jumble of genes. Dark haired Greek and Roman
genes, blue-eyed, blond Scandinavian genes, red-headed Irish genes,
russet-skinned American Indian genes, black-complected African
genes, and even the occasional Chinese and Japanese genes. Folks
whose genetic coils were dramatically distinct would find themselves
yoked together by a common thread. That intangible tie-line was a
meme.
<< < GO > >>