Paul (Apostle living at the time of the New Testament)

Paul was born Saul, a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin and a Roman citizen from Tarsus, trained as a Pharisee under the respected teacher Gamaliel and an active persecutor of the early church until a blinding vision of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus turned him into its most influential missionary. He planted churches across the eastern Mediterranean on three long journeys, wrote roughly half the New Testament in letters to those churches, and was eventually imprisoned and executed in Rome. A Roman inscription found at Delphi naming the proconsul Gallio fixes the date of Paul's time in Corinth precisely enough that it anchors the chronology of his entire ministry.