The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul’s Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never really interested him in the first place. Far more important to Paul was Jesus’s death and resurrection, the cosmic events that had transformed history and changed the fate of all peoples, regardless of their beliefs or ethnicity. If they imitated Jesus’s kenosis in their daily behavior, he promised his disciples, they would experience a spiritual resurrection that brought with it a new freedom.5 The Messiah, he told the Galatians, had given “himself for our sins, to
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