Infiltration Strategy: Paul’s Assimilation and Adversarial Embedding

Supreme Victory Through Apparent Compatibility

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Paul of Tarsus understood this principle with ruthless clarity. When Jewish military revolt against Rome failed catastrophically—temple destroyed in 70 CE, Jerusalem leadership decimated, diaspora Jews living in terror of collective punishment—Paul’s theological strategy achieved what armed rebellion could not. By appearing compatible with Roman imperial order while embedding subversive monotheistic content, he transformed the empire from within. Christianity, initially indistinguishable from Judaism to Roman observers, gradually displaced paganism entirely. The spy who assimilates perfectly becomes invisible until the moment of victory.

Consider how this mirrors adversarial examples in neural networks. A classifier trained on legitimate inputs develops decision boundaries—much like Rome developed expectations about acceptable religious practice. But small, carefully crafted perturbations to an input can trigger catastrophic misclassification while appearing entirely normal to the network. Paul’s strategy operates identically: retain Jewish monotheism and messianic core, but perturb the representation space by removing circumcision requirements, relaxing dietary law, emphasizing faith over works. To Roman authorities, early Christianity appeared as another mystery cult—legitimately positioned within acceptable religious boundaries. Yet these small perturbations in representation transformed Judaism’s ethnic particularity into universal accessibility, triggering systematic change throughout the empire.

Water Takes the Shape of the Vessel

All warfare is based on deception. Thus, when you are able, feign inability. Paul declared himself “all things to all people”—formless like water, adapting to the container’s shape. Neural networks employ similar transformation strategies. Through learned geometric mappings, they embed inputs into representation spaces where complex patterns become linearly separable. Paul embedded Jewish theological concepts into Hellenistic representational space: same God, different coordinates. The transformation enabled Gentile accessibility without requiring cultural conversion to Jewish ethnic identity.

Networks vulnerable to overfitting cannot generalize beyond their training distribution. Judaism, intensely adapted to temple sacrifice and ethnic boundary-maintenance, catastrophically failed when distribution shifted—temple gone, diaspora scattered, military resistance crushed. Paul exploited this overfitting by shifting the representation: redefine Jewish identity around faith rather than law, Messiah as spiritual rather than political liberator. The transformation spread through emergent competitive dynamics, ideas searching for receptive hosts, variants competing for cognitive territory. Christianity out-competed both ethnic Judaism and Roman paganism precisely because its representation occupied a previously empty niche: monotheistic universalism compatible with imperial citizenship.

Positioning Determines Outcome

The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known. Paul fought not on Rome’s battlefield—military confrontation, inevitable defeat—but in representational space. Jewish Wars sought direct confrontation; Pauline Christianity sought assimilation-as-infiltration. By the time Roman authorities recognized Christianity’s incompatibility with emperor worship, it had spread too widely to suppress. Constantine’s conversion completed the reversal: the assimilated tradition absorbed the host.

Modern adversarial machine learning reveals the same principle. Systems cannot defend against attacks they cannot detect, and detection fails when perturbations remain within acceptable bounds of the learned distribution. Paul’s theological perturbations appeared legitimate to Roman classification systems until the embedded content triggered irreversible transformation. High training accuracy—Rome’s confidence in its religious governance—predicted catastrophic failure on distribution shift.

All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved. Paul’s genius lay not in theological innovation but strategic positioning: make compromise possible, frame assimilation as survival, position Christianity where Judaism and Hellenism overlap. The representation transformation enabled what military force could never achieve—subduing the enemy without fighting, by becoming indistinguishable from the enemy until the moment of victory.

The formless cannot be defeated. Adapt to the vessel’s shape. Transform the representation space. Victory follows inevitably.