And yet, as strange as that world now seems to us, what would have seemed far stranger to the people of that time was the extraordinary claim that the God who reigned on high, over this entire order of light and darkness, with all its radiant hierarchies of spirits and powers and its abysmal mysteries of demonic malice, had appeared in the form of a slave and died as a criminal, only then to be raised up and revealed as the Lord of all things. Whether one believes it or not, the very announcement of such a conviction in that world, in that age, was as singular an anomaly within the normal
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