Nick Bunick, a businessman in a high-tech industry on the West Coast, says he is the reincarnation of St. Paul, the one who got whacked on the road to Damascus and went on to evangelize the world. Further, Bunick claims his life has been radically changed by the angelic message that seeps into his brain every day and laps over into flashy books about spiritual messengers.

His story is told in "The Messengers: A True Story of Angelic Presence and the Return to the Age of Miracles" (Pocket Books, $20), by Julia Ingram and G.W. Hardin. The book contains two intriguing scenarios.

The first is the account of Bunick's conversion by a psychic who convinces him that St. Paul can use Bunick's body and mind to communicate with the world. The second part of the book is a series of verbatim accounts of St. Paul speaking through Bunick about the experiences he had as a close personal friend of Jesus and his followers.

Bunick's book is selling very well across the country, so I decided to speak with the fellow during his Twin Cities visit in desperate hope that all is not bogus in the world of today's religion.

He is a big man with an embattled face, much as one might picture the original St. Paul. He grew up in a poor Russian Jewish family in a Catholic neighborhood and fought his way to fortune in a high-tech industry.

When his story caught the attention of publishers, they offered Bunick a $1 million advance for two books. (His second, "The Great Tomorrow," will be published next year.) So Bunick took $500,000 and created a wide-reaching advertising campaign: billboards, radio spots and a nationwide speaking tour that is drawing thousands at every stop.

As Bunick and I chatted one day recently, he informed me that God speaks through him. When I asked Bunick about his own Damascus Road experience, he lowered his head, placed his hands at his temples and began to recite, as if in a trance.

But the trance was quickly broken when I asked him to clarify a couple of points. He then returned to the Bunick body, apparently leaving the St. Paul persona in a restful position. Bunick says he can slip in and out of the St. Paul personality when he wants.

So, how do we evaluate this book, which has been a best-seller across the nation for weeks?

For instance, Bunick reveals that St. Paul was a close confidante of Jesus Christ. But in the story of Jesus' life in the four Gospels, St. Paul is never mentioned.

Bunick says the disciples were jealous of the closeness between Jesus and Paul and therefore wrote him out of the Gospel script. Bunick also reveals that Paul died at age 62 in Rome, but no biblical account can be found to support that bit of history. Bunick says those revelations come to him from God and not from the Bible, which, he says, is an incomplete book.

Bunick claims he is sometimes accompanied by a 7-foot-tall angel. He says angels are without sexual identity, have long hair and big wings. He says they make a "whooshing noise" and he can hear the "sound of giant, beating wings." During the hour I spent with Bunick, no sexless, long-haired, 7-foot-tall angels appeared.

Is this like "The Celestine Prophecy," "The Bible Code" and other books that claim to crack the formula for happiness and affluence in a puzzling world? Pilgrims, if this is the closest we can get to religious truth, we have a long way to travel.

What aura of mysterious gas has dulled our senses, allowing this story to captivate the intellects of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of otherwise sane people?

This is not truth. This is our fantasy. We want God to dump the truth on a good man or woman who will then bring it to us in the most attractive and dramatic way. Angel shows on television have been surpassed -- now we have St. Paul speaking through a human being.

One truth about truth remains: It is a hard-fought discovery and almost beyond human grasp. Perhaps, there is one other: You can't get there from the pages of "The Messengers."

Clark D. MorphewNovember 1, 1997