Christianity depends on the belief that the Jesus of history is identical with the Christ of faith and that God in the person of Jesus intervened finally and decisively in human history. But is the historical Jesus the same as the Christian Saviour? And how did an obscure provincial religion based on the paradox of a crucified saviour conquer the Roman Empire and outlive it? This book confronts the enigmas. It sets Jesus in the perspective of his time - within Judaism and its expectations of the Messiah, and in the atmosphere of Greek philosophy and the Roman deification of emperors. It traces the development of Christianity from St Paul and the Romanization of the Church to modern liberation theology.