set the stage to correct erroneous accusations that Paul betrayed Jesus and Judaism, invented Christianity, used weird new terms, made weird new claims, was anti-Semitic and antimarriage, proslavery and propatriarchy. Much or all of those issues stem from ignorance of the terms and claims of Roman imperial theology and of how Paul proclaimed Jesus’s vision of God’s Kingdom both as a challenge to his fellow Jews and as a confrontation between Christ and Caesar. For that two-front struggle, his language was deliberately designed to be appropriate to the provincial capitals of the Roman Empire.
