It is our task to trace the development among the Greek churches of Christianity conceived as a "revelation of God in Christ," alongside of its development in the 'apostolic' church, until the period of 'catholic' unity and the completed canon. Upon this development the story of Paul's personal fortunes in Acts throws but little light. We merely see that his great peace-making visit to Jerusalem was suddenly interrupted by his arrest in the temple, while engaged in an act of worship undoubtedly intended by him to demonstrate his willingness in the interest of unity to "become as under the Law to them that are under the Law." After this his great delegation from the Gentile churches must have scattered to their homes. Paul remained a prisoner for two years in Cæsarea, and after an adventurous journey covering the ensuing autumn and winter (59-60), spent two more years in less rigid confinement at Rome. We need no hint from his request in 2nd Tim. iv. 13 for "books and parchments" to infer that the years of forced seclusion in Cæsarea were marked by study and meditation; but narrative and inference together convey but little of what we mainly desire to know: the course of religious development in the Pauline churches, as a background for the literature. On the other hand recent research into religious conditions in the early Empire has removed the principal objections to the authenticity of Philippians, Philemon, Colossians, and even Ephesians. We are far from being compelled to come down to the time of the great Gnostic systems of the second century to find a historical situation appropriate to this group of letters purporting to be written by Paul from his captivity. Indeed they exhibit on any theory of their origin a characteristic and legitimate development of the Pauline gospel of Son ship by the Spirit of Adoption abolishing the dispensation of Law. It is a development almost inevitable in a conception of 'the gospel' formed on Greek ideas of Redemption, if we place in opposition to it a certain baser type of superstitious, mongrel Judaism, revealed in the Epistles themselves, repeatedly referred to in Acts, and now known to us by a mass of extraneous documentary material.