Jesus or Paul

Death on the cross, resurrection, mission of the apostles to Jews and Gentiles, our concepts about early Christianity are still strongly influenced by traditions of faith. The historian Johannes Fried re-interrogates the biblical and extra-biblical sources and puts them together to form a new, coherent picture: there was a basic conflict in the emerging Christianity between followers of Jesus in Jerusalem, who knew about his survival and who held his teachings in the earliest core of the Gospel of Thomas, and the Apostle Paul, who spread the message of the substitutionary atoning death of the Son of God in the pagan world. The message of Paul prevailed in the Roman Empire. The tradition of Jesus' followers, on the other hand, was branded heretic and only a few traces remain. Johannes Fried follows them with the tools of the historian and shows that everything could have been very different from what we believe.