This elimination of the early residence of Paul in Jerusalem is no mere by-product of a generally skeptical attitude toward the Book of Acts, but is important for the entire reconstruction of early Christian history which Bousset and Heitmüller and Loisy propose; it is made to assist in explaining the origin of the Pauline Christology. Paul regarded Jesus Christ as a supernatural person, come to earth for the redemption of men; and toward this divine Christ he assumed a distinctly religious attitude. How could he have formed such a conception of a human being who had died but a few years before? If he had been separated from Jesus by several generations, so that the nimbus of distance and mystery would have had time to form about the figure of the Galilean prophet, then his lofty conception of Jesus might be explained. But as a matter of fact he was actually a contemporary of the Jesus whose simple human traits he obscured. How could the "smell of earth" have been so completely removed from the figure of the Galilean teacher that He could actually be regarded by one of His contemporaries as a divine Redeemer? The question could perhaps be more easily answered if Paul, before his lofty conception of Christ was fully formed, never came into any connection with those who had seen Jesus subject to the petty limitations of human life. Thus the elimination of the early Jerusalem residence of Paul, by putting a geographical if not a temporal gulf between Jesus and Paul, is thought to make the formation of the Pauline Christology more comprehensible. Peter and the original disciples, it is thought, never could have separated Jesus so completely from the limitations of ordinary humanity; the simple memory of Galilean days would in their case have been an effective barrier against Christological speculation. But Paul was subject to no such limitation; having lived far away from Palestine, in the company, for the most part, of those who like himself had never seen Jesus, he was free to transpose to the Galilean teacher attributes which to those who had known the real Jesus would have seemed excessive or absurd.