There may, in other words, have been a different kind of vacuum into which the Jesus message made its way. It was not so much a matter of people giving up an old “religion” and then finding a new one. Nor was it explicable as dissatisfaction with existing philosophies and the discovery of the new one that Paul was teaching. Rather, people who were used to one kind of political reality, albeit with its own history and variations, were glimpsing a vision of a larger united though diverse world — and then, as they looked around them, they were discovering at the same time that Rome, after all, could not really deliver on its promises. When the new communities spoke of a different Kyrios (Lord), one whose sovereignty was gained through humility and suffering rather than wealth and conquest, many must have found that attractive, not simply for what we would call “religious” reasons, but precisely for what they might call “political” ones. This looked like something real rather than the smoke and mirrors of imperial rhetoric (N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography, HarperOne (2018), p. 423).