When we look back at very ancient history and prehistoric times we might find that there were times when a person could hardly sleep peacefully without fear of another person harming them in their sleep. When was it that there was first a person who nobody needed to fear this way? We like to think the so-called stone age people were savages, hunting and gathering, killing their enemies and maybe even their friends. Religion may have been animistic and in some places, such a the earliest cities, polytheistic and based on mythologies. There were clearly times and places where people had moral fibre and virtue and worshipped with knowledge the Creator known to them by visions and dreams. There was the great scientist, wise teacher and priestly prophet of God known to us today as Enoch, one of the pioneers of religious writing and author of many scriptural, scientific revelatory books who possibly introduced the first version of the solar and lunar calendars. He and some of his early descendants were known ever since for being righteous and just, above and beyond their contemporaries. This was apparently some 5000 years ago. It must have been a striking thing to have around righteous people who could be trusted and revered at a time when government was perhaps basic and primitive, mainly based on tribal heads and respected people with some early forms of public administration revolving around temple worship of a few cities' adopted Gods or gods.
Roll forward and history doesn't tell us things ever changed away from this very much over the following thousands of years when for most people religion was about idols and myths and dutiful righteous behaviour mainly concerned adherence to laws and religious temple-based rituals. The occasional person whose righteous behaviour went beyond the norm through a special personal faith in and knowledge of God, perhaps through dreams of revelation and other gifts of prophecy was exceptional so that such people were noted as having the spirit of the Gods within them and they were revered as prophets. The majority just conformed to laws and rituals or didn't and were considered righteous or wicked on that basis rather than because of their faith and their faithfulness to a known God. For most God was unknown and unknowable.
Then along came a special time when the first person some 2000 years ago received not only special revelation of God, in this case of the Christ, but also the means to bring many others previously oblivious to God to a true righteousness by faith and personal knowledge of God Himself. This extended religion to the masses as the means to reach them was at last revealed. Who was this? Paul. What was this means of reaching the pagans? Preaching of the Christ and of Him crucified. The Christ had appeared to Paul (then called Saul) on the road from Palestine to Damascus giving him the first taste of that preaching as the Christ proclaimed to him "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting". Paul became an apostle of this preaching, proclaiming to both Jew and Gentile this Christ, Jesus, once crucified by evil people, now risen and all-powerful and able to save those who turn to Him, believing. Religion had changed for ever and now salvation could come by preaching to those who believed the message: The message of the persecuted, crucified Christ Jesus, raised again by God, soon to return to Earth to judge the living and the dead and to give to believers eternal life.
