Paul's "persecution" of the early Christians?

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Paul claims to have persecuted the early Church, but, to me, his claim seems rather dubious.  After all, Paul was not a Roman official or a member of the legions, and given Roman federalism, it seems unthinkable to me that Paul, a mere Roman citizen, could harass Roman subjects?  It seems that not only the Roman authorities, but the local ones under Roman governorship, would object, strongly, to such behavior.  Some will cite 2 Corinthians 11:24 where he states, "Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.", but this claim is also odd, given Paul's Roman citizenship.

It seems to me that the story of Paul's persecution of the early Church was invented, and was (and is) pure myth.

You were being told that Paul was a Roman citizen, you didn't listen. There was a difference in being a Roman citizen and a Roman subject. Roman citizens had many rights, Roman subjects had few to none. The Romans were having enough trouble with the Jews at the time to worry about a man persecuting his own people, to them this amounted to help rather than a problem. Jesus being a Roman subject was by manipulation able to be arrested by non-Roman citizens and tried and found guilty outside a Roman court. Pilate himself found it easier to allow the Jews to fight among themselves because it distracted them from rebellion against the Roman Empire.

GC

So where was Paul's birth certificate to prove that he was in a fact a Roman?  He was an Egyptian terrorist when he wasn't killing animals in the arenas and chasing down religious heretics.