To imagine the early history of Christianity, we would do much better to use the standard map of the world that was regularly offered in medieval times. In these older pictures, the then-known continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia all appeared as more or less equal lobes conjoined at a central location, which was Palestine, with Jerusalem at its center. This image made splendid theological sense, in that Jesus’s sacrificial self-giving occurred at the very center of the world that he was saving.