Saul of Tarsus — a Greek-speaking Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, trained as a Pharisee, a Roman citizen by birth, and the most consequential letter-writer in history. He appears first in Acts approving the killing of Stephen, is stopped on the road to Damascus, and spends the next three decades planting congregations across Asia Minor and Greece and arguing that Gentiles could belong to Israel's God without becoming Jews — the argument that made Christianity a world religion rather than a sect. Thirteen letters bear his name; seven are undisputed, and Romans is the longest and most systematic of them, written in his early fifties to a church he had never seen. He worked with his hands as a skēnopoios (tent- or leather-worker), travelled roughly ten thousand miles, and reached Rome at last as a prisoner. Tradition, early and consistent, has him executed there under Nero — beheaded rather than crucified, the citizen's death.