That is a really good book. I won’t bore you with a reading list as I am sure half the fun you and I experience is finding the meadow of historical flowers and sucking, like a butterfly, from the ones that appeal most.
I find Paul/Saul as repellant as he is necessary to the foundation of the Christianity we know and revile today. Reading ‘his’ epistles it can be clearly be seen that he had a rapacious desire to control this embryo religion that had already spread to all corners of the Empire. He wanted to expand its base (and so his earnings from “donations”) and to do so he was happy to cast aside his own jewishness and adherence to the law.
But was he? He remained a devout jew, he only introduced the gentiles to the jesus figure. A perfect Man and perfect Jew who obeyed the Law.
His quarrel was with the Second Temple headed by James. By not ensuring the gentiles followed the Law (including circumcision) he condemned them to life outside the Garden of Eden when the next world came to pass. In some traditions they would be slaves to the chosen ones who were devout Jews.
Was this the paranoid objective of this compelling and complex character? Certainly he did not foresee the hijacking of his epistles by the gospel writers or the dilution of his message by the Greaco Roman divine traditions of the time. (Virgin birth, magical events, reincarnation) .
I can only speculate, but the more I read this charlatans messages to his adherents the more I can see his appalling (but all too familiar to us nowadays) strategy of milking the audience for their worth.
It is interesting to compare the early traditions of the Thomasinian Church in India, founded without the Pauline influence and speculate just what that Church would be like today if it hadn’t been infected by the Portuguese brand of Catholicism in the 15th Century.
That is my current study.