The three-stranded fuse that burned toward the Common Era seemed to make Jesus’s arrival inevitable. He met our human expectations, matched the Jewish predictions, and arrived at precisely the right time in the history of the Roman Empire to be shared with the entire known world. A New Testament writer, the apostle Paul, wrote, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4–5 ESV). What did Paul mean when he described Jesus’s arrival as coming in
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