The centre from which the early Christian movement developed and spread throughout the ancient world was not Paul, but the Jerusalem church, led initially by the twelve apostles and subsequently by James the brother of Jesus. What was common to the whole Christian movement derived from Jerusalem, not from Paul, and Paul himself derived the central message he preached from the Jerusalem apostles. The heart of Paul’s teaching was common early Christian faith, though he was undoubtedly a thinker of genius who shaped that faith into a characteristic form, as did a number of other major teachers in
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