Word: persecutors
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...Light. He storms onto the Biblical stage in the Acts of the Apostles as a hot-eyed, self-appointed persecutor of the Christian community in Jerusalem. He even appears at the stoning of Stephen, Christianity's first martyr. He "made havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison." Then all at once, in a flash of blinding light, he became one of them...
Paul's sudden conversion from persecutor to apostle of the persecuted faith has prompted New Testament scholars to some elaborate detective work and guessing games. Some believe that Paul spent most of his early career not in Jerusalem at all but in Damascus itself, hence could not have taken part in the stoning of Stephen or known Jesus. The emphasis on Jerusalem, suggests Professor John Knox of Union Theological Seminary, may have been provided by Physician Luke who may have innocently doctored both the Acts and his Gospel to present Christianity as a continuation of the mainstream of Judaism...
...American Psychiatric Association an explanation of a phenomenon that has long baffled both courts and psychiatrists. Most murderers fall into one of two neat classes: the legally sane, who have an understandable motive such as robbery, and the legally insane, such as the paranoid who kills his imagined persecutor. But now and then there appears a third type -the man who kills without apparent motive, yet appears sane before and after the crime...
Psychiatrist Sargant sees these quick conversions under great emotional stress almost anywhere. He believes that every important conversion recorded in the New Testament (most notably that of Saul of Tarsus, persecutor of Christians, to Paul the Apostle) was of this type. In modern times, thinks Sargant, many conversions to and from Communism (e.g., Arthur Koestler's carefully recorded experiences) followed the pattern. So, too, did religious and pagan dedications among Voodooists in Haiti, among some tribes on the west coast of Africa, among the Quakers (says Sargant, because they "shook and trembled before the Lord"), among the lamas...
With just this kind of historical detective work, the scholars have moved in on the dramatic cast of characters offered in the Habakknk commentary. The leading members of the cast are the already famed Righteous Teacher, a spiritual leader with special inspiration from God, and his persecutor, the Wicked Priest, a sacrilegious, murdering, despoiling drunkard who comes to a bad end. There are probably subsidiary villains, referred to as the Man of the Lie and the Preacher of the Lie (though it is possible that these are additional epithets for the Wicked Priest). In the background is the House...