You have to feel a little sorry for him - so many people hated him and tried to kill him during his life, and in the nearly two thousand years since he died, they've continued to accuse him of simply being nasty!
But, according to Harvard professor Harvey Cox, and Garry Wills, a professor at Northwestern University, "Paul was neither an anti-Semite nor a misogynist ... Paul frequently commends women leaders in the congregations and proclaims that in these new messianic congregations there should be 'neither male nor female, neither slave nor free.'" What about those claims that Paul was anti-woman? It's true that he commands that women should always wear headcoverings in certain meetings, but he also gave orders about what men should and should not wear: everybody needed to dress appropriately, both men and women.
Paul simply wanted to "tell Jews everywhere that the messianic era they had prayed for had dawned and that a certain rabbi from Nazareth, slain by the Romans as a threat to their empire and raised from the dead by God, was the long-anticipated Messiah ... the hour had now come ... to welcome the gentiles into the covenant." Paul was an expert in that covenant, having worked in the San Hedrin (the Jewish high counsel) as an assistant to one of the San Hedrin's members; Paul knew the Jewish writings - the Tanakh and the Talmud - in great detail, being himself one of the most orthodox Jews.
This new religion would grow rapidly: "the time was ripe for just such a message. With the Roman pantheon in decay - dismissed by thoughtful people as mere superstition - and with Roman society rife with moral decay, Jewish monotheism and morality held a powerful attraction. Large numbers of gentiles were already attending synagogues but hesitated to undergo the circumcision and dietary restrictions required for conversion. At the same time, many Jews were looking for a more universal expression of their faith, in keeping with the emerging cosmopolitan culture. Paul's message attracted both. He taught that God had given his law to both Jews and gentiles, the former in the Torah, the latter by nature. All had fallen short, but now all were forgiven and called to constitute a single new and inclusive community."
Although extremely well-educated in matters of spirituality, Paul was not ignorant of politics: "the Roman Empire was not just the background of Paul's life and work but shaped his every word and deed. The empire was shaky, and Paul discerned its inner rot. He saw his task as preparing infrastructure that would replace it when it collapsed. Thus he gave the congregations he organized a political, not a religious name: ecclesia, meaning an official assembly of citizens. When these upstarts insisted that there was someone higher than Caesar to whom they owed supreme loyalty, Roman officials saw that they threatened the symbolic capstone of the whole system. The empire executed Peter and Paul, and Jesus before them, because the imperial elites did not view their movement as a harmless, otherworldly cult but as a real and present danger."
