Episode 2 David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul

I'm David Suchet,

and I'm on a journey around the Mediterranean, following in

the footsteps of a man, who, 2,000 years ago, travelled more than

10,000 miles around the Roman world by foot,

and many, many more by sea.

This is extraordinary. We must appear that size from up there.

For the last 25 years, I've been fascinated by St Paul.

To some, he is the man who did more than anyone else to

transform Christianity from a small, Jewish sect,

into the most powerful religion in the world.

To others,

he is a preacher of prejudices that have echoed down throughout history.

-They must have thought, "The arrogance of the man."

-Absolutely!

Here he is, on the basis of one vision,

so he says, telling everybody what they should do.

Changing all the rules!

A man of contrasts and confusions,

a fanatical persecutor of Jesus' earliest followers,

who once supported the stoning to death of early Christians.

Who then claimed to have experienced a miraculous

conversion on the road to Damascus.

"Love, is patient, love is kind,

"it does not envy, it does not boast.

"It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered."

A man convinced that the end of the world was coming,

and that he had a God-given mission to convert non-believers to Jesus.

You are just made of stone.

Push you over and you'll break into hundreds of pieces.

If ever there was an historical character

I've longed to play, it's Paul,

so, for me,

this is a very personal quest.

I could look like that!

What do you think?

A little bit?

I will be seeking out clues in the places he visited, deciphering

new evidence from the latest archaeological research, and meeting

expert witnesses from around the region to help me uncover this

remarkable man, hidden within the pages of the New Testament.

My search for Paul has led me out of the Holy Land,

and through Roman Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey.

I have arrived just off the coast of Kavala, a major seaport,

in eastern Macedonia, in northern Greece.

In the first century AD,

this was the main gateway to Philippi,

a major garrison city of the Roman Empire.

And it was here that Paul first set foot on European soil.

And by the time he'd reached here in around AD 50,

he had already established small communities of believers

in Asia Minor, but now, he had set his sights on the West,

to lands where the name of Jesus was not known.

For Paul, this is a desperate race against time.

To convert non-believers to Jesus before the end of the world arrives.

But he is now moving closer to the heart of the Roman Empire,

where Caesar himself is revered as a god.

And he is carrying with him a radical new manifesto,

preaching that all are equal,

whatever their place in society.

Calling for love and understanding within communities,

and demanding that pagan ways be

swept away by a higher moral code.

Surely Paul must've realised he was putting himself in grave danger?

Attacking the Roman religion was attacking the Roman State.

Once ashore, Paul's journey to Philippi took him along the

Via Egnatia, a major Roman road that ran through northern Greece.

Incredibly, several long stretches of the road still exist today.

It really is the most extraordinary feeling to know that I'm

actually walking on the same stones as Saint Paul walked

when he went to Philippi,

and it's 15 kilometres and uphill most of the way.

This region was one of Rome's oldest and largest provinces.

The heavy presence of Empire surrounded Paul

as he approached Philippi.

He was definitely stepping out of his comfort zone.

How would he be received in a city where the worship of pagan

gods was woven into the very fabric of life?

Where their images adorned not just temples,

but workplaces, public arenas and even people's homes.

On the outskirts of Philippi, I met one of the city's modern

guardians, Alexi Labranidis.

Alex, hello.

-Hello.

-David.

Welcome. How are you?

Very well, thank you. So, this is Philippi.

This is Philippi, let's see the city.

We are entering the city from the city walls.

They were combined with the theatre.

What was it like in the first century here?

Very crowded and full of life.

It was a city between 10,000 and 15,000 people,

and imagine that we had people from everywhere,

not only Romans.

Yes. What was the religion here?

It was a mixture. Everybody was believing his own faith.

Traces of pagan gods from all over the ancient world,

from Greece, Babylon and Egypt have been found in Philippi.

Alex was keen to take me in search of new discoveries,

carved into the cliffs, high above the city's amphitheatre.

Let's see what I can find.

You go that way, and I'll go up there.

Oh, look, up there. It looks like a hunting scene.

It looks as if the hunter is throwing something.

It's like a big comic book on the rocks.

It does look like a big comic book, in a huge quarry,

a comic book quarry.

HE LAUGHS

Are there many of these all over?

All around, you can...

Oh, look, there is another one here!

Wow!

Here you can see Artemis with a bow, and dog.

We had a society of hunters,

they had dogs and they believed in Artemis,

the goddess of the hounds.

Why are they here amongst these rocks?

People were mining here, and were taking material to build

the city of Philippi,

so they were giving an offer back...

Back to the earth?

Back to the earth, yes.

I just love the fact that these carvings are something that

people put back into the earth, in gratitude...

for them taking the rocks out of the earth to build this

fantastic city of Philippi.

Giving back to the earth for what had been removed was a basic

pagan belief.

It was clearly well ingrained in this city.

Convincing people to give up these traditions would not be easy.

Paul's first challenge was to try

and find a way into this possibly hostile community.

He would have to tread carefully.

What would become the Christian faith had never been

spoken of in Europe before.

He needed to find a sympathetic first audience.

When Paul first came here,

he was just outside the Roman colony of Philippi.

And, as was his custom,

he went looking for a synagogue to start preaching, but the Jewish

community here were so small there wasn't even a synagogue,

so he came down to a riverside, and there were a group of women here.

One of the women was called Lydia, she was a purple-dye trader,

and she heard him speak,

and was baptised.

The important thing here is that Lydia became the first

European convert to this new religion that would one day

be called Christianity.

Other converts followed.

Paul now had a toehold in Europe,

but his time in Philippi was short-lived.

When he converted a slave girl without her owner's permission,

it led to his arrest and public beating.

Philippi was a start, but it was time to move on.

Along the Via Egnatia to Thessalonica, 150 kilometres,

and a four-day walk away.

Though Paul was leaving Philippi behind, it was vitally important

that he stayed in touch with the small community he'd established.

There was always the risk that a fledgling church would break

apart after he had gone.

Paul was to become a master of the new technology of letter writing.

The only contemporary sources we have for Paul's life

and journeys are in the Bible's Book Of Acts, and in a remarkable

series of his own letters which now form much of the New Testament.

Each of the surviving letters was written to a specific community.

The Philippians, the Romans, the Thessalonians.

What intrigued me was how and why these letters were written.

At Thessalonica's Vlatadon monastery,

I met biblical scholar, Eddie Adams.

Paul primarily wrote to communities, and mostly to communities

that he himself founded, so he was writing to his own converts.

I think what prompts him

to start writing is usually the circumstances of the churches

being addressed. Something goes wrong,

there is some problem and that causes him to put pen to paper,

I think he had a very strong sense of responsibility for the churches

under his control, and I think his activity was absolutely frenetic.

If he's not writing letters,

he's going to new places to found congregations. We get the sense

that Paul is, in every sense of the phrase, a man on a mission.

Something to remember about the letters, which might interest you,

as an actor, is that they were written, and they were designed to

be read out loud, in congregations and in community contexts.

So we actually have his spoken word?

Yes, I do think we are capturing the voice,

we have, in the letters, captured the voice of Paul.

Inside the monastery, one of the monks had a surprise for us.

-Hello.

-Welcome.

So, where are we, what is...

This is the oldest part of Vlatadon monastery,

where tradition says that here preached for the first

time, Saint Paul to the people of Thessalonica.

Wow!

He actually preached here?

Right in this space.

This spot?!

That's amazing.

This mosaic is from the seventh century.

After that, in the 14th century, they built the rest of the church.

-Doesn't that put shivers up your back?

-Hmm, hmm.

This chapel was erected...

because Paul actually spoke here.

That is quite extraordinary.

It gives you a kind of material connection.

I didn't expect that.

No, that was an unexpected pleasure.

So how did he actually write his letters, then?

He's usually not the person who picks up the stylus

and actually writes,

usually his letters are dictated,

that seems to be his standard procedure for composing a letter.

Paul's letters were written to specific churches,

but crucially they were also copied and shared between communities,

carrying his message and voice around the Roman world.

So, would you put this down for me?

Yes of course.

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile...

"Neither slave nor free.

"Nor is there male or female.

"For you are all one.

"In Christ Jesus."

-Can you read that back to me, now, in Greek?

-Yes.

HE RECITES GREEK VERSE

That actually is a quote from one of Paul's letters.

And that is how he actually wrote them.

He didn't pick up a quill, dip it in ink and write on a piece of paper

or papyrus, no, he dictated them to a scribe.

So what we have, when we actually read Paul's letters,

are his actual spoken words, his chosen vocabulary,

his sweep of sentences, his energy, and that tells me

so much about Paul, the man.

Thank you very much indeed.

You're welcome.

In recent years, some of Paul's letters have come under fire.

One passage, in particular, has been drawn into the modern debate

over women's place in the Church,

and has been used to justify why they shouldn't be priests.

Yet in the very same letter, Paul appears to contradict himself,

by referring to women praying and prophesying in church,

implying he doesn't expect them to be silent.

Remember, Paul's first convert in Europe had been a woman.

In another letter, he mentions 26 prominent

members of the community, nine of whom were women.

Women were also valuable recruits.

Being in charge of the household meant they could offer a venue

for meetings, and access to networks of family, friends, and associates.

So, was Paul a misogynist?

How should we read his letters?

The next day, in Thessalonica's central market,

I met New Testament scholar, Ekaterini Tsalampouni.

Do you think Paul would have attracted women to follow him?

Paul had many co-workers who were women.

Paul, of course, he is a man of his world, he knows very well

what the place of women in this society is, he, of course, takes

into consideration these ideas,

but I think he's a bit progressive.

He treats them, somehow, as equals.

I really find that so fascinating.

So, is what you are actually saying,

is that the seeds of women's

liberation today, could have been sown in Paul's own theology?

Yes, because, for Paul, we must always connect his thoughts,

his theological ideas,

with his expectations of the end of the world.

-He is quite sure that the end is imminent...

-Yes

-..so he thinks

and sees everything through this perspective, and when you see

things this way, you can see that men and women can only be equal.

"There is neither male, nor female."

Yes.

It's brilliant, I've never read it that way before. Thank you.

Ekaterini's point was simple.

Paul was a man of his time, with the attitudes of his time.

But he also believed the end of the world was coming soon.

He didn't differentiate between men and women. His goal was to

save as many people as possible,

and no-one should be lost.

In Thessalonica, though,

Paul's drive for new converts provoked an angry mob.

Some in the city took his claims that Jesus was a king,

and that there was only one God, as a direct challenge to

the authority of Caesar.

CHORAL SINGING

Around AD 49,

he wrote his letter to the Thessalonians,

the earliest surviving Christian writing of any kind.

In it, it is clear that he had left behind a small

but thriving community.

The legacy continues to this day.

After being driven out of Thessalonica, Paul

set off for Athens.

To aid his journeys, and the transport of his letters,

he was able to exploit the supremely efficient communications

network of the Roman Empire.

I suppose roads like these would have been called

the super-highways of the ancient world.

They would have carried messages, information

and new ideas between cities,

towns and villages.

But unlike the modern high-speed internet,

where messages can travel across the globe in seconds,

in the ancient world, messages travel slowly,

and would have required somebody to actually set out on a journey.

Paul knew the risks, but he wouldn't give up.

For me, the journey to Athens was by car and train.

Paul would have walked or travelled by ship along the Aegean coast.

On a clear day, he could have seen Mount Olympus,

home of the Greek gods.

Who are they? The 12 gods of Olympus?

-Ares.

-Ares.

-Theas.

-Theas.

-Poseidonas.

-Poseidoras.

Poseidonas, not...

-Poseidonas?

-Yes.

-Hera.

-Hera.

We've got four.

We've got eight more to go.

You've got 15 kilometres to find eight gods.

LAUGHTER

I'm getting quite excited now because there are one or two

characteristics of Paul's that are rising to the surface

that there are really changing my preconceptions about him.

For example, I've been told now by so many people,

that Paul appears to be pro-women, whereas before I thought

he was completely anti-women, almost a misogynist.

Another thing is his persistence.

He goes into these pagan cultures,

and everything starts off quite well, and then

it goes totally pear-shaped,

and this repeats itself over, and over again.

Apart from, perhaps, Thessaloniki,

which seems to have had some success.

And now, I'm off to Athens, the centre of philosophy and learning.

I wonder how he fared there.

When Paul arrived in Athens it had been under

Roman rule for over 100 years,

yet it was still the cultural

and intellectual centre of the ancient world.

A place of lively debate,

pretty much all of the time.

Convincing a city of master philosophers

that they should give up their pagan beliefs

would be a hard sell indeed.

According to tradition, Paul confronted the philosophers

on the Areopagus, a bare, marble hill below the Acropolis in Athens.

It was there I met historian, Despina Iosif.

Despina, we are in this fantastic location.

But how does this relate to Paul?

It is a place where Athenians used to hold philosophical discussions,

and it is no wonder, because of this amazing view, as you can see.

When Paul came to Athens

and he was preaching the Christian message, some philosophers

found his message intriguing,

and they decided to bring him here,

and invited him to give a speech.

What do you think Paul's reaction would have been, coming to Athens?

He saw the city full of gods, and so many idols everywhere,

and so many temples.

He was, in fact, outraged to see the city full of pagan gods.

Athenians typically worship their gods with offerings,

or animal sacrifices at altars scattered around the city.

In his speech, Paul mentions seeing an altar, honouring an unknown god.

The Athenians venerated the unknown god,

-just to make sure they didn't leave...

-Didn't leave anyone out.

Exactly.

You've got to hedge your bets when gods are concerned.

-Exactly. You can never be too sure.

-No.

Referring to the unknown god allowed Paul to argue that his god

was now making himself known to Athens.

Was his message shocking to them?

Oh, I am sure it was, because they were really unfamiliar

with the Jewish religion

and he told them about the coming of Jesus, and

the resurrection of the dead, which they really found particularly odd.

To the Greco-Roman mind, humans had an agreement,

an agreement of a reciprocal nature, with their gods.

Gods expected humans to perform sacrifices for them,

and humans expected, in return,

gods to grant them prosperity

and to fulfil their wishes.

So, the Christian message must have struck, at least initially,

most pagan listeners as bizarre.

I wonder what it must have been like for Paul in Athens,

convinced that he, among all others,

was the only one who knew that the world was about to end.

Did he ever have doubts?

Did he ever worry how he was perceived?

At the city's Agora, the ancient marketplace,

I met archaeologist Heinrich Hall.

So, if Athens was such a mega-centre of paganism,

why would he have bothered?

I think he had to come here, really.

I think not coming to Athens, for his mission,

would simply not have done, because Athens is such a significant,

intellectual centre, and a centre of debate, as we said,

so for someone who comes to spread a new idea,

avoiding Athens would look very odd, and a bit weak.

So what was the reaction to Paul?

It's not terribly clear, I think.

If you read the account in The Acts the reaction seems to be not

disrespectful, they don't cause him trouble,

they don't arrest him, there's no fighting.

It also doesn't seem overly respectful,

they don't mass converge or anything like that.

Paul faced an uphill challenge to convince Athenians of his message.

Philosophical debate was woven through the very fabric of the city,

and I'd heard about the ancient Greek tradition of symposiums.

Basically, a drinking party with added philosophy.

Restaurateur Souli Adamis had researched the food and culture

of the symposium to bring the tradition back to life

for modern Greeks.

First, the men have to be dressed, and then the women.

I was asked to give a helping hand preparing a typical symposium meal.

Souli, what are we actually going to be cooking?

Today, we're going to cook piglet, stuffed piglet.

Stuffed piglet?

-Piglet.

-Now, is this a traditional dish?

This is from the fifth century before Christ.

They had this during symposium.

Of course, everybody uses this word, but in Greek,

it means that "I share with my friends, eating, drinking

"and sharing our ideas, exchanging our philosophical ideas."

And these symposiums would last around 12 hours.

SHE LAUGHS

-12 hours?!

-12 hours!

The symposium tradition caused Paul considerable problems.

Taking bread and wine in remembrance of Jesus

at the Last Supper was an important part of early Christian worship.

But from his letters, it's clear some of Paul's Greek converts

didn't understand the difference between the Christian

celebration and the festivals of eating

and drinking that they had become used to at symposiums.

-It's my friend!

-This is your friend? This is your friend? OK, what now?

-What do we do?

-We will stuff a pig.

-OK.

-My goodness! I feel like a surgeon now!

-Yes.

And this now goes in the oven? How long do you cook this?

-Six hours.

-Six hours?

-Yes.

Six hours, gas mark four. It's going to be fantastic.

It's been absolutely fascinating for me

to watch this re-enactment of a symposium.

And this was going on when Paul would have been here.

And you'd see how the debating,

the intellectual society, was really rooted in Athens.

But apparently, this could become very bawdy indeed.

I think I'll leave them to it. Could go on for some time.

Paul had little success with the Athens intellectual elite.

He needed a city with a more receptive audience,

somewhere it would be easier to convince people

of the value of his arguments.

And so to Corinth, and through the magnificent Corinth Canal.

Completed in 1893, amazingly, the first serious attempt to

construct it was started in Paul's day,

the Emperor Nero himself digging out the first rock

with a golden pick.

This is extraordinary! We must appear that size from up there.

What a feat of engineering!

I wonder what Paul was thinking as he approached Corinth.

I mean, he had a pretty tough time of it in Europe so far.

And yes, he'd made a few converts along the way,

but certainly, in Thessaloniki and Philippi,

he had to leave in a hurry, and he wasn't that well received in Athens.

So it must have been with a little more than apprehension that he

was approaching possibly the most notorious city in Greece.

As he himself says in a letter, "I came to you in weakness

"and fear and much trembling."

At that time, Corinth was literally a melting pot of people

from different nations, different religions, and certainly, different morals.

So it must have been a huge challenge ahead of Paul.

When Paul first arrived in Corinth, around AD 50,

this was a young and dynamic city with attitudes to match.

Unlike Athens, it had been rebuilt as a Roman colony,

less than 100 years earlier.

Free of religious and intellectual traditions,

Paul had more room to operate.

According to Acts,

he set up shop and started earning a living as a tent maker.

Archaeologist Guy Sanders, excavation director here

for the last 15 years, agreed to show me around.

Guy, this looks like a major street or road. What's around it?

It's THE major road of the city.

It's the Cardo Maximus,

it's the main North-South drag in the city of Corinth.

So where we're walking now, Paul would have walked?

Many times, I would've thought. Yes.

And would he have had a shop here in these colonies?

I think this was a high rent for the poor!

It's more like Harrods than the kind of place that you would find

a tent maker's shop.

-Yeah.

-He would have been a few streets over, I think.

Why would Paul have come here, then? What was special about Corinth?

Well, it was one of the biggest cities in the Empire.

It had fantastic harbour facilities on both coasts.

So there would have been hundreds of thousands of people

living in the region and engaged in international trade.

So people may have come from as far away as Britain and Egypt,

-the Black Sea.

-Really? We had Britain here?

I think highly likely you had people from the north-west of Europe

as well as from the farthest flung parts of the Empire.

And by coming here, Paul had a captive audience.

And when they left again, they would be perhaps taking his message

far further than he could carry it.

Did he have a strategy, do you think, in coming here?

-He stayed in Corinth for about 18 months.

-Yes.

Which, I think, suggests that he did have a strategy

and he'd invested a lot of money

and effort in trying to establish his church in Corinth.

He had to support himself somehow,

and he was a tent maker, as you said.

The kind of society that he moved in was probably the lower,

the poorer echelons of society.

We're talking about eight in ten people would have been at the poverty line.

I imagine that he had a lot of contacts with people

within his peer group.

There's no reason why he wouldn't be sitting outside a shop,

making tents so that he could talk to people who were passing by on the streets.

Some people he'd meet once, and many would come back and talk again.

I think what I've learnt about Paul, now having visited Athens

and Corinth, is that he was very adaptable.

He was also a man who knew when he was wanted and when he wasn't.

I mean, we learnt that in Athens, he could talk to philosophers,

but he wasn't really welcome there and he left.

Whereas in Corinth, it was a different matter.

He seemed to get on well with the common people.

This was a port, a great port city.

People would come in from all over the world and go out

to other parts of the world.

He must have felt happier here

because he stayed here for 18 months, longer than, well,

anywhere else he stayed.

So that, in his own words, "I've become all things to all people,

"so that by all possible means, I might save some."

While in Corinth, Paul wrote a letter

to a community of believers in Rome.

It laid out his theology in the clearest possible terms.

Romans would become the most influential

script in the history of Christian thought.

His purpose for writing it was to announce his intention

of visiting the city to gather funds for a mission westwards,

perhaps to Spain.

But before he could go, he had an errand to run. Back to Jerusalem.

We know that Paul made at least two trips to Corinth,

and when he was leaving for the final time, he was taking with him

quite a large sum of money as a donation for the church back at Jerusalem.

It would appear that his plan was to set sail from a nearby port,

here at Kenchreai.

But at the very last minute, he and his companions discovered a plot

against Paul's life, so he decided to walk clockwise around the Aegean!

I think this is clockwise.

Returning to Jerusalem proved to be a fateful decision.

Trouble was brewing.

Many Jews believed Paul's methods in converting pagans were

anti-Jewish and were baying for blood.

A showdown was coming at the Jewish Temple,

the most sacred site in Judaism.

Archaeologist Ronny Reich has directed the excavations

on the temple steps where Paul and, indeed, Jesus

would once have walked.

We are outside the Temple Mount.

We just climbed the main staircase leading to one of two gates,

the Hulda gates.

And you should imagine masses of people, in those days,

coming on pilgrimage to enter the Temple Mount,

bringing their offerings, animals, sheep.

We slaughter there, in front of the temple, on the altar of sacrifice.

How many people would have come in the first century?

Tens of thousands.

Did they have any ritual to go through before they would enter?

Oh, certainly.

One obligatory ritual, everybody had to be in a pure state,

-ritually pure.

-Yes.

That means that he had to take a ritual bath in what is called,

in Hebrew, a mikveh.

-There are many mikvehs...

-Yes, yes. Let's have a look.

-OK, show me one?

Yes, yes. There.

Here. Use the steps into the mikveh.

-We have to imagine that it was full with water.

-Right up to about here?

Up to about here.

Total immersion of the human body for one moment.

Just into the water and outside from the water makes you pure.

And it was so important?

Well, this was a pre-requisite, entering the Temple Mount.

You don't go to the temple as a tourist,

-just to have a look and enjoy.

-No.

You go for the rituals and prayers,

and to see the house of God.

-And now we are pure. We can go to the temple.

-Off we go!

When Paul returned to Jerusalem, it would have been natural for him

to visit the temple.

The strict purity rules meant that any non-Jewish or Gentile

companions he had with him were not allowed beyond a certain point.

Paul new these rules, but he was accused of breaking them.

Either he purposefully picked a fight or his enemies had framed him.

We're told that within moments, a riot broke out.

Paul's life was in grave danger.

Could he really have provoked such a violent response?

The temple Paul knew was destroyed by the Romans in AD70,

around ten years after his visit.

In the seventh century, the Dome of the Rock,

one of the most sacred places in Islam, was built on the site.

Gershon Solomon, founder of the Temple Faithful movement,

is leading a highly controversial campaign

to rebuild a third Jewish temple in its place.

He fervently believes the biblical temples

should once again be at the centre of Jewish life,

and he would reinstate the ancient traditions.

But, I was hoping Gershon could help me understand

why Paul's alleged actions were so provocative.

The temple was the heart and soul of the Jewish people.

They could not come inside the temple because of the law of pureness.

-You should know. We are not coming in a regular building.

-No.

Even not to a synagogue. You are coming to the house of God.

If it was discovered that Paul brought gentiles inside

this temple area, how would people have reacted?

First of all, it would be considered as a terrible provocation.

Right.

-He knew the laws of the temple.

-He would've known.

On the wall was written in Greek,

-"The stranger that will cross this wall will die."

-Will die?

-Yeah.

So, if Paul or any other one will bring gentiles inside the temple

it could be a terrible thing, and the reaction will be also terrible.

-Which is why there was a riot.

-Yeah.

In the end, only the intervention

of the nearby Roman garrison saved Paul's life.

He was arrested and taken under military escort

to the Roman governor in Caesarea.

Paul's mission had come to a grinding halt.

Caesarea was the capital of the Roman province of Judaea,

purpose-built around a magnificent new harbour.

Roman historian Gil Gambash took me into the water to see its remains.

Now, they're big pillars there, they're huge.

You can actually touch them. Yes.

Comes all the way to the surface.

The columns themselves couldn't be earlier than Herod was,

-so we're talking about late first century BC.

-nearly 2,000 years.

-That's right.

-2,000 years.

Paul spent two years under arrest in Caesarea.

Back on dry land, Gil showed me

where it's thought he may have spent much of that time.

Caesarea would be very much like the era of Rome,

the governor of this province would be sitting here,

in this most central city in Judea,

probably making use of Herod's palace,

where we stand right now, as his Praetorium,

his government seat, if you will.

Where we're standing now, the praetorium, did you say?

Would Paul have been imprisoned or put under house arrest here,

where we are now?

It's very hard to tell, but there is a likelihood that, yes,

this is the seat of the governor.

But we have to imagine being held under the custody of the governor,

not because he's guilty of something,

but because there are charges standing open against him

and also, perhaps even more so,

because these are a destabilising element in the province.

And I think that would have been a strong enough motivation

for the governor to keep him close by.

The Roman governor seemed in no particular hurry

to resolve Paul's case

but, after two years, that governor was replaced.

The new man was minded to send Paul back to Jerusalem.

It would have meant certain death.

Paul demanded his right, as a Roman citizen, to be tried in Rome.

As he languished in prison, Paul seems to have begun reflecting.

Ever since his conversion,

he'd been preaching that the end of days was coming soon.

But the years had passed and the world had not ended.

Paul began to suspect that he himself might die

before Jesus returned.

From prison, he wrote...

Very moving the me to think that it's here in Caesarea

that Paul would have spent his last two years in the Holy Land,

that he spent it under guard, fighting for his innocence,

and having to appeal to Caesar and go to Rome.

And I wonder, when he left here, what he would have thought.

Maybe this was his last view of the Holy Land,

and that's given me pause for reflection.

Many of Paul's ideas on how converts should live their lives

challenged the social and political structures of the Roman state.

If the world had ended, as he predicted,

none of this would have mattered.

But, as time went on and communities grew larger,

it was inevitable that Paul's subversive message would be noticed.

The world was changing

and these early Christians now risk the wrath of Rome -

the very place where Paul was now heading.

The Bible's Book of Acts tells how Paul was taken by ship to Rome.

But, on the way, a storm blew up and, after two weeks of being

tossed around at sea, he was shipwrecked on Malta.

The ship's company was forced to overwinter on the island

before continuing to Rome.

Paul finally arrived in Italy around AD60.

From the port of Puteoli where he landed,

he then faced a 130-mile walk along this road, the Appian Way, to Rome.

By now, he was probably in his late 50s

and would have spent 30 years on the road.

He had established small communities of believers

throughout the Roman Empire,

but this was his first time in the Imperial city itself.

And he was arriving in chains.

It must surely have crossed his mind

that he might never leave Rome alive.

The Rome Paul saw was not the Rome of Gladiator.

Many of the big, iconic monuments, the Coliseum, the Pantheon,

and the triumphal arches had not yet been built.

But the city was under the rule of the Emperor Nero,

who would launch the first imperial persecution of the Christians.

Back on the Appian Way, I met archaeologist Valerie Higgins.

Very nice to meet you.

Paul, coming to Rome, he would've come into a pagan society.

How did the pagans regard Christians?

Christians were quite threatening,

because of course the pagan religion was not

a religion in the sense that we know religion,

in that it was not divorced from the state and, indeed,

the state was intimately involved in the religion.

So, if you are saying that he denies the pagan gods,

it's really treason,

because it's really denying the Emperor and his power.

It may seem to us that Christians wouldn't be that threatening -

you know, what is it in the message that is so threatening?

But it is that denial of the Emperor, denial of the gods.

We're so used to Christianity today, we have no idea that

it could ever have been that sort of a threat at all.

No, in a way, it seems bizarre that an empire like the Roman Empire,

which has all these armies and has all this power

seems to feel so threatened by a message

which is actually so mild, in many ways,

you know, but they really genuinely did feel threatened by it.

Rome was not a good place to argue that there was only one God,

and that God wasn't Caesar.

In his search for a fair trial, Paul had insisted on his right,

as a Roman citizen, to be tried in Rome.

It may have been a fatal mistake.

After his arrival in Rome, the story of Paul seems to get a little hazy.

From the Book of Acts in the Bible, we know that he was allowed

to stay in rented accommodation for two years

with a soldier guarding him.

He was, however, allowed to welcome visitors.

After that, the story just simply stops.

There is no record of his trial, nor of the results of it.

So, what was actually going on?

Tradition claims that Paul lived in Rome's Jewish quarter.

Of course, he had supposedly come here to stand trial

for violating the temple in Jerusalem.

But, after two years, maybe that offence had been forgotten.

Curiously, though he was under some form of house arrest, he does seem

to have been free to carry on trying to make new converts.

A dangerous game under Nero.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

The church tradition is that Paul paid the ultimate price

and was martyred for his faith.

Father Scott Brodeur, an expert in Paul's writings,

explains what he thinks may have happened.

He is announcing that Jesus is Lord.

And we know, in the Roman Empire,

there's only one Lord, and he is Caesar.

So, if someone starts saying, this Jesus, this Jew from Galilee,

we believe he is the son of God, and he continues to reign, he has power.

Are you implying that his power is conflicting with that of Caesar? Yes.

That's political.

That's very political indeed.

He's brought before the authorities for this political charge.

He's not going to back down.

Is not suddenly going to change his tune

and say this isn't what I believe.

And ultimately, that would get him killed.

How was he executed?

He was beheaded. He was beheaded.

So, compared to crucifixion,

a far more merciful way to put someone to death. A quicker way.

Horrific in itself, of course, but again,

compared to crucifixion, far less painful.

There's something that slightly puzzles me, for such a major event

in Christianity, why isn't it mentioned?

We have to remember that the Acts of the Apostles are written

by Saint Luke.

And Saint Luke has other concerns.

It's not a biography.

So, Luke is concerned with showing that the gospel has reached Rome

and continues to be preached.

So, in a sense, what you're saying is that he deliberately

didn't write it, because if you write the death of Paul,

people could be reading that's the death of the gospel.

Precisely. That's the point.

Some have argued that Paul wasn't executed, that he continued

westward to Spain, or perhaps return to the East.

The truth is, we just don't know.

But, the Church tradition is that he was beheaded and buried here

in Rome, where the basilica of Saint Paul outside the walls now stands.

Cardinal Francesco Monterisi led me to what he believes

is the final resting place of Paul.

The tomb is behind this door.

If we open it...

And, inside the sarcophagus is Saint Paul?

Yes, we believe the disciple is inside.

Have you been able to see inside?

We could not open the sarcophagus.

But a scope has been dropped inside.

We have been able to see some pieces of tissue

and some pieces of bones.

We have been able to remove a small piece of bone,

and it was examined by experts

and the submission was that it belonged to a man

of the first or second century after Christ.

Right. Amazing.

Yes, this is the basis of the idea

that this is real corpse of Saint Paul, buried in this sarcophagus.

Amazing. It's very special.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

It's a great privilege for me. Thank you.

We can never be sure whether Paul's body ever lay in this tomb.

It seems that the biggest piece of evidence that he died in Rome

is that it is here that his story ends.

There is simply no evidence for anything else.

It's strange that the New Testament

doesn't record what happened to Paul.

If he was executed, then perhaps publicising that fact

would only serve to discourage new converts.

Or maybe in the midst of Nero's persecution of Christians,

one man's death simply went unnoticed.

The Roman persecution of Christians, however, continued for 250 years

after Paul's death, but the faith

continued to grow until AD380, when Christianity was made

the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Rome seem to have no record of Paul

but it did have one credible last clue

to the man I thought I had come to know

Throughout my journey I had carried in my imagination

a portrait of Paul.

An image I'd seen repeated in paintings, statues

and icons down through the centuries.

And then, in a suburb of Rome,

in a catacomb deep beneath a modern office block, my guide, Dario,

took me to meet archaeologist Fabrizio Bisconti.

He'd made an astounding discovery. Oh, goodness!

Buongiorno. Buongiorno.

THEY GREET EACH OTHER IN ITALIAN

Professor Bisconti, hello.

-OK, andiamo.

-Thank you.

These catacombs were originally pagan

but began to be used by Rome's Christians

in the 4th century AD.

What I was about to learn about the man

I had been pursuing for so long would come as a bit of a shock.

Oh, my goodness me. There he is.

He's got very piercing eyes.

That's unique, isn't it? And the date of this?

380 AD.

So, is this the very earliest picture of Paul in the world?

It was so exciting to see the earliest ever portrait of Paul.

He was exactly as I had always imagined him.

But, it appeared that this was not in fact Paul.

Do you think that is what Paul looked like?

After all this time, Paul was not Paul.

His portrait had been based on the image

of a third century philosopher called Plotinus.

That image had then been copied down through the centuries.

So, maybe he didn't look like me after all.

In a strange sort of way, it was appropriate

that if I really wanted to find Paul,

the best place to look was in his own words.

So, let's hear this extraordinary man speak.

"For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve

"to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

"But, by the grace of God, I am what I am

"and his grace to me was not without effect.

"How can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?

"If there is no resurrection of the dead

"then not even Christ has been raised

"and of Christ has not been raised,

"our preaching is useless and so is your faith!

"But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead.

"The first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

"For, since death came through a man,

"the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.

"For, as in Adam, all die, so in Christ, all will be made alive."

Like Paul, or dislike him, you certainly can't ignore him.

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