That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. The ultimate offensiveness, though, was to one particular people: Jesus’ own. The Jews, unlike their rulers, did not believe that a man might become a god; they believed that th

To demand of the Galatians that they submit to the knife would be to assume that Christ had been inadequate to save them. It would be to reinstate precisely the division between the Jews and the other peoples of the world that Paul believed to have been ended by his Lord’s crucifixion. It would be to geld any sense of his mission as universal.

‘To the victor is granted the right to lay down laws.’7 Such was the maxim that Pompey, as he deposed kings and redrew boundaries, took for granted. The Jews, though, in defiance of earthly power, claimed a status for themselves that no empire, not even one as mighty as Rome, could ever hope to emulate.

Certainly, to dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern. Rather, it is to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian.

Only centuries after the death of Jesus – by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ – did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists.

That truth might deceive was a paradox with which the Greeks were well acquainted.

All ten commandments, though, were dependent for their potency on the first. There were other gods, after all, who did not put the same value on moral principles as did the God of Israel.

Apollo might have favoured the Trojans, and Hera the Greeks, but no god had ever cared for a people with the jealous obsessiveness of the God of Israel. Wise, he was also wilful; all-powerful, he was also readily hurt; consistent, he was also alarmingly unpredictable. Jews who pondered the evidence of their scriptures never doubted that he was a de

Nature, the Stoics argued, was itself divine. Animating the entire universe, God was active reason: the Logos