“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The man, historically now, was Paul or Saul. It was given to him to set up a framework. But it was to be a framework of ideas, not of regulations; of men, not of groups. Here he fell down, and he will return as the third personality, just mentioned, in your future.

(“Why the two names, Paul and Saul?”)

He was called both. (Pause.) When the third personality reemerges historically, however, he will not be called the old Paul, but will carry within him the characteristics of all the three personalities.

Paul tried to deny knowing who he was, until his experience with conversion. Allegorically, he represented a warring faction of the self that fights against his own knowledge and is oriented in a highly physical manner. It seemed he went from one extreme to another, being against Christ and then for him. But the inner vehemence was always present, the inner fire, and the recognition that he tried for so long to hide.

His was the portion that was to deal with physical reality and manipulation, and so these qualities were strong in him. To some extent they overruled him. When the historical Christ “died,” Paul was to implement the spiritual ideas in physical terms, to carry on. In so doing, however, he grew the seeds of an organization that would smother the ideas. He lingered after Christ, [just] as John the Baptist came before. Together the three spanned some time period, you see.

John and the historical Christ each performed their roles and were satisfied that they had done so. Paul alone was left at the end unsatisfied, and so it is about his personality that the future Christ will form.

Paul also represented the militant nature of man, that had to be taken into consideration in line with man’s development at the time. That militant quality in man will completely change its nature, and be dispensed with as you know it, when the next Christ personality emerges. It is therefore appropriate that Paul be present.

(Our discussion at break concerned several other points I thought readers might be interested in: One was the zealot designation Seth applied to Paul. At first I’d thought he was going to say there was a connection between Paul, or Saul, and the Zealots, one of the religious sects the Jewish people had been divided into in Judaea in the first century A.D. The Holy Land was occupied by the Romans then, and Paul was a Jew and a Roman citizen. I’d been reading about these sects recently in a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and had been somewhat puzzled by my interest in both the scrolls and the sects; but after hearing Seth tonight I assumed he wasn’t going to say much about these subjects.

(1. Seth had intended the word zealot, as applied to Paul, to be descriptive of his temperament — not a reference to the Zealot sect. A note, added later: More was to come on Paul and the Zealots, though.