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    ds of vigilantes, broke into the homes of Christian Jerusalemites

    and hauled the inhabitants off to prison.  Then Saul volunteered to bust

    up a community of Christians in Damascus.  But on the road to the

    northern city, Saul had a strange experience.  He felt enveloped in

    light.  And he heard the voice of Jesus, the deceased leader whose

    views he so deplored.  Saul became St. Paul, and dubbed himself the

    newest of Jesus' apostles.  Then the freshly-minted holy man went off

    to win others to his idiosyncratic notions of what Jesus' teachings were

    all about.

    The community of Jesus' followers does not seem to have

    welcomed Paul's posthumous reinterpretation of their leader's ideas

    with open arms.  They probably regarded him with suspicion.  With

    his big city ways and complex ideas, he was anything but their rustic

    kind.  Finally, the self-styled apostle, in exasperation, decided that if he

    couldn't dig up followers among the Jews, he'd turn elsewhere.18  Thus,

    Paul began a vigorous campaign to win over "the gentiles"--citified

    Greeks, Romans, Anatolians, Sicilians, Spaniards and others whose

    urbane views were more congenial to his own.19

    In the process, Paul was one of the early innovators of a new

    concept: transferable religion.  He broke free of the old notion that a

    God was an emblem of tribal heritage and sliced the ties that bound

    divinity to genes.

    Paul was not the first to free gods from chromosomal

    components.  Buddha had done the same over five hundred years

    earlier.  But Paul was among the most influential ever to apply the

    idea.  Thanks to Paul, the Christian meme would eventually sweep

    together an awesome jumble of genes.  Dark haired Greek and Roman

    genes, blue-eyed, blond Scandinavian genes, red-headed Irish genes,

    russet-skinned American Indian genes, black-complected African

    genes, and even the occasional Chinese and Japanese genes.  Folks

    whose genetic coils were dramatically distinct would find themselves

    yoked together by a common thread.  That intangible tie-line was a

    meme.

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