Nothing is clearer in the New Testament than that its authors passionately believed that they had been ‘set free’ in their own time by the Easter events – and that the same freedom would be experienced – in the present – by all who believed.

How else could Paul say of the resurrected Jesus: “Now this Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2 Cor 3: 17) To recognise Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah was – for Paul and those who listened to him – to see him as a liberator in the fullest sense of that word, even under the ever-dangerous Pax Romana.