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Oh, I thought it was VERY positive toward Christianity, and very positive toward the Apostle Paul, as well.

I thought it was a great article!

But this is slightly different, and it is very exciting... To understand why this news is being treated as such a sensation, we have to examine his life - an extraordinary and dramatic life which, it is no exaggeration to say, changed the course of the world... Just think of the implications of it historically. If Paul had never had this showdown with Peter, Christianity would have remained a sect within Judaism...

I think a lot of people are over-sensitive. I personally see nothing derogatory in the following, nor do I think Paul himself would've been insulted by it:

You can tell from his letters that he is a driven, hyperactive genius of a man - more like a half-mad poet, I have often thought, than a clergyman.

His great flights of beautiful prose-poetry about the nature of love, or about the consolations of faith, echo down the ages to inspire new generations of readers afresh.

'Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword?'

Paul was the first great theologian, insisting that we are forgiven not because of our good deeds, but solely because of God's love for us. He was the prime influence on all the great Christian philosophers and thinkers from Augustine to Luther.

As far as the use of the words "more like a half-mad poet than a clergyman," and especially given the nature of a lot of modern clergymen, I'm not so sure Paul himself wouldn't have agreed with that assessment.

Early Christianity wasn't just a bunch of church business as usual. It was radical stuff.

Conclusion:

These were men and women who were alive during the lifetime of Jesus, and their lives had been turned around by their beliefs concerning his life, death and resurrection. To all the apostles, therefore, the Church owes an historic debt.

But to none more so than Paul, who opened up to the Gentile world the inexhaustible riches of the Jewish spiritual tradition which culminated in Jesus Christ.