St. Paul - Lisbon, Portugal
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 38° 42.601 W 009° 08.044
29S E 488343 N 4284606
This sculpture is located inside St. Antonio Church in Lisbon.
Waymark Code: WMPYMT
Location: Lisboa, Portugal
Date Posted: 11/11/2015
Views: 3
This small metallic sculpture depicts the saint standing..and holding a sword with his right hand and a Bible in his left. A sign at the site indicates that the sword symbolizes that Paul is a soldier for Christ and suggests the penetrating force of God.
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"Paul the Apostle ... c. 5 – c. 67), originally known as Saul of Tarsus ... was an apostle (though not one of the Twelve Apostles) who taught the gospel of Christ to the first-century world. He is generally considered one of the most important figures of the Apostolic Age. In the mid-30s to the mid-50s, he founded several churches in Asia Minor and Europe. Paul took advantage of his status as both a Jew and a Roman citizen to minister to both Jewish and Roman audiences.
According to writings in the New Testament Paul, who was originally called Saul, was dedicated to the persecution of the early disciples of Jesus in the area of Jerusalem. In the narrative of the book of Acts, while Paul was traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus on a mission to "bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem", the resurrected Jesus appeared to him in a great light. He was struck blind, but after three days his sight was restored by Ananias of Damascus, and Paul began to preach that Jesus of Nazareth is the Jewish Messiah and the Son of God. Approximately half of the book of Acts deals with Paul's life and works.
Fourteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament have traditionally been attributed to Paul. Seven of the epistles are undisputed by scholars as being authentic, with varying degrees of argument about the remainder. Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews (which is not asserted in the Epistle itself), already doubted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries but almost unquestioningly accepted from the 5th to the 16th centuries, is now almost universally rejected by scholars. The other six are believed by some scholars to have come from followers writing in his name, using material from Paul's surviving letters and letters written by him that no longer survive. Other scholars argue that the idea of a pseudonymous author for the disputed epistles raises many problems."