From the Pauline message to the theses on the concept of history by Walter Benjamin, which sometimes contain extraordinary borrowings from it, the inversion of past and future, of memory and hope, forms the core of messianism. Messianic time is the now; as a segment of profane time between the resurrection of Jesus and the apocalyptic end, it constitutes itself in the temporal experience of the present. Agamben's book adheres to the messianic model of a dizzying recapitulation: the exegetical knowledge of the Bible transitions into the illuminations of the philosopher, who, drawing from Schmitt, Kafka, and Scholem, interrogates the Pauline texts and finds in them the conceptual roots of Hegelian dialectics.