I have a friend in England who writes that he is giving up on the Constantinian/Nicene Church and seeking the pre-Pauline Church where the true religion must lie. I’ve bee pondering that for a week or so. What the heck would pre-Pauline be? His ministry and writing existed only during the first thirty years of Christianity. To be sure, the nascent church developed throughout a lot of the Roman Empire without Paul’s help, so there were obviously ways to be Christian without being specifically Pauline. But doesn’t that beg the question? There is no pre-Pauline Church. There is just a Pauline way of being Christian among a small variety of other ways of being Christian all developing at the same time.