Hero and saint conversion - Essay Example

Full Hero and Saint Conversion The idea of a hero to the Romans and Greeks is integrated to the conversion of saints in the sense that the heroes and saints are mortals who are able to feel the pains of the common man. However, what would make a mortal become a hero or a saint would be the tests in one’s life which are overcome by the individual. Hercules to the Romans or Heracles to the Greeks for instance, is a hero not only because of his extra-ordinary strength and wit but more especially due to the difficult tasks he did to redeem himself from killing his wife and children when he went insane.

Although Hercules/Heracles was a son of a god, he was born to a mortal woman, making him a mortal as well, not exempted from the difficulties every human being meets. And this would be the very essence that integrates the Roman and Greek heroes to the making of the modern hero or saint. Paul of Tarsus for instance, though he was not a layman but formerly a Roman officer, being a Roman citizen with Jewish decent and having the power to execute the law under his command did not enjoy all his lifetime as one could imagine a person in authority.

Instead, after his encounter with Jesus through a vision on his way to Damascus to persecute the early Christians, he suffered similar persecutions that he did to the disciples when he was still a Roman soldier. He encountered not only trials and miracles in escaping death from his fellow human beings but also from natural calamities. An example of which would be his survival from a shipwreck along with his fellow prisoners and the soldiers guarding them when they were sent to Italy. Due to the storm, they landed in Malta instead and this is where another miracle happened to Paul when he was bitten by a poisonous snake from the fire they made which he simply shook off from his hand.

When the people who were expecting him to die observed that he was not affected by the poisonous snake, they made their opinion that he was a god. On the other hand, Mohammad, the founder of the Muslim religion grew in poverty being orphaned from childhood. He served his own uncle as a camel herder at a young age and known the difficulties of life at a very young age. Nothing exceptional happened to him during the first four decades of his life to have qualified him a hero or a saint, living like any ordinary person.

He married at the age of twenty five a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior and from then on had been a merchant, enriching his knowledge about different cultures. He was exposed to Christianity and Judaism which most probably is the nearest explanation to his future claims of having revelations from God, because of the similarities of his claims about his encounters. More importantly, the links between the Greeks and Romans to Judaism and the early Christian church is also the thread that would bind the relationship of the creation Muslim hero to Greek and Roman heroes of old.