At one level the answers are obvious. Paul went on a mission to tell people about Jesus; he believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of the scriptures, that he had been crucified, raised from the dead, and exalted to God’s right hand. Yes, but this fails to address the underlying questions. As I said earlier, I assumed for many years, and many readers will still assume, that the only real point of it all was to get people to “believe” in this Jesus so that they would be “saved” and “go to heaven when they died.” But this was not the concern that drove Paul and Barnabas.
