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Denying the origin of Christianity in the belief that Jesus was the risen Christ, the book argues that a new religion called Christianity can be identified only when Gentiles experienced the risen Christ as the source of ecstatic spirit-possession. In Durkheimian terms, those like the apostle Paul's Greek converts who affiliated on the basis of this experience, symbolized their new association by imagining Christ in an innovative cosmological position relative to Torah, reflecting what constituted a new religious community.