Whereas Apollonius had a plodding Greek chronicler as his evangelist, named Philostratus, Jesus was blessed with a peculiarly persuasive if rather eccentric Pharisee who set out to reinvent and convert the Jesus cult into a universal, rather than a Jewish, faith designed to appeal to Greeks and Romans. And St Paul was acute enough to realise that the Jesus cult could be aimed at the poor and dispossessed. Its strictures against wealth, power and polygamy were well designed to appeal to those who had little to lose. Quite how the Christians eventually (three centuries on) persuaded an emperor,
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