Christianity's CEO

Jesus may have preached the good news, but Paul was its master marketer.

APOSTLE PAUL

A Novel of the Man Who Brought Christianity to the Western World

By James Cannon

Steerforth. 433 pp. $24.95

Maybe more even than Jesus himself, Paul was the hero of early Christianity. He was the one who took an obscure Jewish sect that looked destined for extinction and turned it into a worldwide movement. Along the way he seems to have lived a life of high adventure, from his Damascus Road conversion and his travels to the far corners of the empire to his execution in Rome as one of the church's first martyrs.

James Cannon, whose unlikely apprenticeship for fiction includes working as an assistant to former president Gerald Ford and as chief of staff for former senator Howard Baker, has taken on this legacy in Apostle Paul , a cradle-to-grave portrait of Christianity's most ambitious proselytizer. Ambition, indeed, is at the core of Cannon's Paul, who goes from being an ardent Hellenist to a hard-line Pharisee to a full-fledged Christian convert with hardly so much as a backward glance. No one could accuse Cannon of whitewashing his subject, who comes across here as every bit as arrogant and pigheaded as his own letters suggest he was. Yet the end effect is to make it hard to swallow Paul as the chosen man of God Cannon clearly intends him to be.

The book opens like a historical potboiler, with plenty of signs and portents and Yoda-like dialogue ("Rich he is, but not too old") and with Paul leading the life of a spoiled princeling in Tarsus, jogging at the gym in the morning, discussing Pindar at the Stoa in the afternoon and making love with his willing slave mistress at night. Family troubles soon send him off to Jerusalem, however, to study with the famed Rabbi Gamaliel. Here things get more interesting, particularly when Paul is taken on by Zadok, an influential scribe of the Jewish Council, and begins to taste real power. He is just coming into his own when his chance friendship with a member of the Nazarene sect ends up compromising him.

After six years of banishment as a lowly librarian -- during which time Jesus has been crucified and his followers have begun to go around proclaiming him the Messiah -- Paul begs his way back into his former position, with the understanding that he will lead the fight against the Nazarenes as proof of good faith. His first target is a former classmate, Stephen of Athens, and after securing a conviction against him for blasphemy, Paul gleefully presides over the stoning, "consumed by an ecstasy that he had never before experienced."

This is Paul's nadir and a good set-up for what we all know is coming next, when Paul heads out to Damascus to pursue those Nazarenes who have managed to escape him. But the actual conversion turns out to be an oddly mechanical thing. Cannon draws the encounter with Jesus on the road almost verbatim from the New Testament, but then, as if he doesn't expect us to find it convincing, he has Paul rely on some fancy intellectual footwork: "Drawing on his scholarly training, he decided to postulate the reality of God's intervention as the basic proposition for a line of analysis and reasoning. . . . At the end he found that the preponderance of evidence permitted but one conclusion: There was more proof that Jesus was the Messiah than that he was not."

Somehow, the spirit is missing here. Paul's conversion is an event that should haunt the rest of the book -- it is not every day, after all, that you meet the Son of God on the road. Instead, within a couple of pages Paul is as insufferable as a born-again Christian as he was as a born-again Jew, flaunting his God-given authority to try to wrest control of the Christian movement from the incompetents and schemers to whom Jesus was foolish enough to entrust his legacy. What is lacking in this is not only some in-the-bones sense of transformation in Paul, but any real feeling for whatever new vision of the world Christianity was attempting to usher in. As a result, the book trails off at this point into a kind of litany of profit and loss -- here a setback, there a success -- with Paul tallying up the new converts with an accountant's eye to the bottom line.

Cannon, in fact, actually seems to be encouraging this mercantile view of Paul as a sort of new man for a new age, preserving the "corporate body" of the church like Christianity's CEO. "As Augustus made the world safe for trade," Paul tells his fellow minister Barnabas, "so also did he make the world safe for you and me to travel afar and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. . . . We can market our faith in other lands just as Nearchus sells his wheat in Rome, and just as Nathan sells his amphorae of good wine in Ephesus."

Maybe Cannon intends this image of Paul to be flattering; certainly an argument can be made that it is accurate. But none of this really brings Cannon any closer to the mystery at the heart of Paul, chosen man of God or no, or to the peculiar power that must surely have come from the man who almost single-handedly put Christianity on the map.

Nino Ricci's most recent novel is "Testament."