helpers. How could they be separated? And how could two sets of evangelists, claiming the same authority and working in the same area, preach two gospels which were increasingly divergent? Paul complained repeatedly of attempts to pervert and appropriate his congregations, so lovingly brought into existence by his own titanic efforts. He reacted vigorously: his incessant journeys, the immense burden of his life-task, which he sometimes portrays as beyond his resources, almost unbearable, reflected his need to fight on two fronts: against ignorance on the one hand, malicious obstruction on the other. Of course he counter-attacked: Romans itself was a preliminary move, a manifesto, to announce his arrival in Rome and a projected attempt to evangelize the Christian-Jewish community there. Money seems to have been used on both sides to provide the maximum number of evangelists and to sustain welfare-efforts and their administrators. The evidence suggests that, after his initial great successes, Paul lost ground steadily. The Jewish Christians had the enormous advantage that they could draw on the resources, in men and money, of the Diaspora communities. Moreover, they could rightly claim that they were led by men who had known Jesus personally and received the truth from the source. They included members of Jesus’ own family, who took an active part in the Pauline campaign. Who, then, was Paul to claim a monopoly of truth? His reply was to draw attention, again and again, to his personal vision. It was his only credential. This inevitably exposed him to vicious personal attacks, stressing his vanity and pretensions; he was guilty of ‘the cult of personality’. Paul lamented the difficulty of his position, which forced him into a posture of pride, and to claims which sounded like boasting. In the late fifties he returned to Jerusalem for the last time in a vain effort to reach a settlement. The Jewish wing deliberately forced him to make a reluctant gesture of Temple-worship which led to his arrest and imprisonment. Paul could plead Roman citizenship to get out of the clutches of the Judaic religious courts, but the legal tangle in which he became involved - transportation to Rome under escort and then house arrest - ended only in his death during the Neronic persecution. Thus the Jerusalem Church effectively terminated his missionary career. What ensured the survival of Christianity was not the triumph of Paul in the field but the destruction of Jerusalem, and with it the Jewish-Christian faith. One of the many collateral reasons why Paul was anxious to disassociate Christ's teaching from Judaism was that he wished to rescue it from Jewish irredentist politics. The Jewish political and military messiah meant nothing to Greeks and Romans. And to Paul Jesus had never been a messiah in this sense. That was not at all what Christianity was about. As a Diaspora Jew, he had no quarrel with the Romans. On the contrary, he seems to have admired the Roman system and took advantage of it. His public claim to Roman citizenship was more than a physical escape from the justice of the law, now odious to him: it was a symbolic renunciation of Judaic status. Paul did not wish to see the Christian movement damaged and perhaps ruined by involvement with the (to him) irrelevant and hopeless quest for a Jewish state. Christ's kingdom was not of this world! In this respect Paul saw eye to eye with Josephus: would that the two might have met, for Paul could have found a convert. But Paul was defeated and the Jewish-Christian Church of Jerusalem moved closer to Judaism, and - being a radical movement - to Zealotry and nationalism. A Slavonic translation of an early, uncensored, version of Josephus's history suggests that the missing passages on Christianity emphasize the political aims of the Jewish-Christian resurrectionists in Judea. During the sixties the Jerusalem Church lost its Christian significance and the remains of its universalism as it became identified with the growing revolt against Rome. Zealots roamed the country districts. Religious terrorism increased in the towns. The crowded processions of the great feasts became the occasions for sudden murders which provoked riots and brutal retaliation. Law and order broke down and Rome was blamed for the economic distress which ensued. In Jerusalem a despairing proletariat turned against Rome, against a collaborationist sacerdotal aristocracy, and towards wonder-workers, patriotic brigands, and the sectaries. The final revolt and its repression lasted (Qur years, \t placed a great strain on the military and economic resources of the empire and Rome was 23