detonator to Luther's explosion. It has been used again and again to demolish and reconst ruct SyStEMs of theology, most recently by Schweitzer, Bultmann and Barth. Most theological revolutions begin with Romans, as indeed did Paul's own. Romans is an imperfect document, the work of a man not wholly Satisfied with his case: that is its merit as a key. The circular form of the argument, its return again and again to the same starting points and conclusions, betray the anxiety of a man who still saw, and knew he Saw, through a glass darkly. The imperfection of his vision was, indeed, implicit in the majesty of his conception of God, the distancing he achieves between God and man, and time and eternity. Paul was the beneficiary of a vision. We must accept his sincerity on this: it was clearly the most important event in his whole life. But, as a man who demanded the whole truth, he recognized that his vision had been incomplete. The difference between the theology of Jesus and Paul is not merely that one is implicit, the other explicit; it is that Jesus Saw as a God, Paul thought as a man. But the process of trying to think through the theological problem made Paul into a very formidable figure. On the one hand he presents an insuperable obstacle to any humanist rescue-operation on Jesus - any presentation of him as the greatest and noblest of all human beings, stripped of his divine attributes. Paul insisted he was God: it is the only thing about him which really matters, otherwise the Pauline theology collapses, and with it Christianity. But equally, Paul is an obstacle to those who wish to turn Christianity into a closed system. He believed in freedom. For him, Christianity was ‘the only kind of freedom that matters, the liberation from the law, and the donation of life. He associated freedom with truth, for which he had an unlimited reverence. And in pursuing truth he established the right to think, and to think through to the ultimate conclusion. The process of inquiry, in fact, mirrored his Salvationist theology: he accepted the bonds and obligations of love, but not the authority of scholarship and tradition. He established the right to think in the full Hellenistic sense and thus showed that the Christian faith has nothing to fear from the power of thought. Schweitzer called Paul ‘the patron saint of thought in Christianity’, and added: ‘All those who think to serve the gospel of Christ by destroying the liberty of thinking must hide their faces from him.’ This detailed analysis of Paul's theology and personality has been necessary to illuminate the significance of the Jerusalem Council and its aftermath in the whole history of Christianity. Behind the controversy over circumcision and the attitude to gentile converts a whole range of the deepest issues was at stake. Nor did the suggested compromise of James and Peter work. It was based upon a ruling from Leviticus which provided for the entertainment of strangers and allowed a certain relaxation of the law. This was precisely the kind of misplaced casuistry which Paul thought ruinous to Jesus’ message. Paul made no attempt to put it into operation; later generations, puzzled by its significance, reinterpreted it as a general moral command - thus it appears in the writings of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Jerome. But equally, Paul's opponents did not abide by the apostolic ruling. Both the Acts and Paul's own epistles make it plain that the struggle continued, and became more bitter. For Paul, it was literally a matter of life or death, and his own writings make no attempt to hide its gravity and acrimony. The Jerusalem Council revealed the existence of a ‘centre party’, led in somewhat pusillanimous manner by Peter and James. Afterwards, the centre crumbled and surrendered to the Judaistic wing of the Christian-Pharisees: hence Peter's shamefaced refusal of table-fellowship to Gentiles at Antioch and Paul's stern rebuke. Peter eventually broke with, or at any rate left, the Jewish-Christian Church of Jerusalem. He accepted Paul's theology - he may well have contributed to it with his own knowledge and insights - and joined him in the mission to the Gentiles. In all probability they died together as martyrs at Rome. But the rest of the Jerusalem Church maintained its connection with Judaism and became increasingly hostile to Paul's efforts. The attempt to divide the missionary work was doomed to failure. The missions to the Jews of the Diaspora and to the Gentiles in syria, Asia Minor and Greece, were bound to overlap. The centers were the same: the major cities like Antioch, Ephesus, Tarsus, Corinth, Athens, and Thessalonica. Moreover, the first Christian missionaries were, in effect, taking over the work of the old Jewish Diaspora mission, using the same contacts, buildings, 22