What we think we know about early Christianity is still heavily influenced by traditions of faith. The award-winning historian Johannes Fried reexamines biblical and non-biblical sources and assembles them into a new, coherent picture: According to this view, there was a fundamental conflict within the emerging Christianity between the followers of Jesus, who preserved the words of their master and rabbi in the earliest core of the Gospel of Thomas, and the Apostle Paul, who proclaimed the message of the Son of God’s crucifixion in the pagan world. Paul's teachings prevailed, while the tradition of Jesus' followers was deemed heretical and forgotten. Johannes Fried traces their footsteps and demonstrates that everything could have been quite different from what we believe.

"Jesus lives!" This joyful message could be understood in various ways after Jesus' crucifixion. His closest circle in Jerusalem knew that he had survived the cross and preserved the words of the fleeing master. The Apostle Paul, on the other hand, who encountered Christ Jesus only in a vision, proclaimed the miraculous resurrection of the Son of God from the dead and had little interest in the life of the Jewish teacher. Johannes Fried reconstructs the conflict based on the available biblical and non-biblical sources and shows how Paul's teachings of crucifixion and resurrection shaped the canonical gospels and gained traction in the Roman Empire, while the tradition of Jesus' followers—preserved, for example, in the Gospel of Thomas—was pushed into areas outside the Roman Empire, deemed heretical, and ultimately forgotten. Johannes Fried follows the few remaining traces with the tools of a historian and shows that everything could have been quite different from what we believe.