ABSTRACT
Had Jesus left explicit instructions about how to organize, or even what to organize, the lives of many of his early admirers probably would have been much simpler than they were. Their conflicts over authority-over who had it and over how far it extended-could then have been avoided altogether or at least easily resolved, and this short study of conflict management would be much shorter. These controversies were decades and more ahead when Jesus first started talking about God's will and human well-being. He appears to have concentrated principally on emancipation rather than organization. The evangelists, however, featured objections that Jesus supposedly raised against the Pharisees' strict observance of ancestral laws, and they dramatized the Pharisees' refusal to acknowledge Jesus as the messiah. Marcion set Paul's letter to the Galatians at the head of the collection, perhaps because it emphatically announced that Christianity superseded the Hebrews' ceremonies and convictions: "Neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation." .
