he was well equipped to be the apostle of universalism, but behind the Janussface and the Varying tactics of the professional evangelist there was a terrific consistency of inner doctrine and purpose. Indeed, when he arrived at the Jerusalem Council in AD 49 to present his case for complete freedom of action for his gentile mission, his teaching was assuming its mature form. It was based not merely on direct communication from God but illuminating experience in the field. And Paul and his companion could and did point vociferously to the success of their presentation. He had found a Church which believed in baptism, had a Last Supper rite, and a belief that Jesus’ death and resurre ction was a fulfillment of prophecy; but it was also inclined to hold that circumcision was linked to salvation and that a great deal of the Mosaic law was still valid - perhaps all of it. This was not a program for gentile convert s, even though it raised no difficulties for Diaspora Jews. Gentiles regarded circumcision as distasteful; it was associ ated in their minds with the objectionable features of a nation Tacitus called ‘enemies of the human race’. More important, however, was that Paul found he could not explain the nature of Jesus’ doctrine without using concepts and terms comprehensible to those nurtured in the Greco-Roman world. Jesus foresaw his passion but had not explained it. Paul had to explain it, to a Greek -Speaking, Greek-thinking audience. The act of salvation had to be wider than the mere messianism of the Jews, which sounded to Greeks like local politics, and bounded in time as well as geography. What was Judea to them? Paul found it hard to explain why Jesus was a Jew, let alone why he had to be a Jew. Thus the circumstances which led up to his crucifixion were irrelevant, and he omits them. The historical Jesus he simply identified with the pre-existent son of God, and he interprets the crucifixion as a divine action with Salvationist intent, and of cosmic significance. And of course, the more Paul preached along these lines, the more clear it became to him that his Hellenized gospel was closer to the truth as he understood it than the restriction imposed by the narrowing vision of Jewish Christianity - if, indeed, it could be called Christianity at all. The Hellenic world could accept Jesus as a deity but Judaism placed a gulf of absolute difference between God and man. And there was nothing in Jewish literature which suggested the idea of an incarnated savior of mankind who redeemed by virtue of his own sacrificial death. Paul's gospel, as it evolved, could be seen to be alien to traditional Jewish thinking of any tendency, even though it contained Jewish elements. It can be summarized as follows. Jesus of Nazareth came from the line of David. He was born of a woman, but was established as Son of God, with full power, through his resurrection from the dead. He lived a short life in Palestine, embracing earthly poverty, and for our sins humbled himself in his death on the cross. God raised the crucified and buried one and exalted him to the highest throne at his own right hand: 'For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ The atoning death of Jesus the Messiah, sacrificed for our sins, served as our expiation and ransomed humanity. His dying affects the redemption of the cosmos and humanity as a whole, for in his death the world has been crucified and has begun to pass away; Christ will shortly come again from heaven as the Son of Man. Here we have, in all essentials, the central doctrines of Christianity: the view of history, the salvation mechanism, the role and status of Christ Jesus. Everything in it had been implicit in the teachings of Christ. Paul made it explicit, clear and complete. It is a theological system, capable of infinite elaboration, no doubt, but complete in all essentials. It is cosmic and universalist; it is, in fact, Hellenized - Paul, the Jew, whose natural tongue was Aramaic and whose Greek was singular, had supplied the part of the Hellenized processing machine, and thus made Judaic monotheism accessible to the entire Roman world. But there was one key aspect of the saving mechanism which caused Paul problems, and his attempt to solve them drew him and his successors into an endless series of new difficulties. Christ's coming on earth set in motion the mechanism: that was clear. But when did it culminate? What was the time scheme of Christianity? The whole of Jesus’ work implied that the apocalypse was imminent; some of his sayings were quite explicit on the point. It is true that his teaching also contains the concept of an individual, interior 20