Paul’s Jewish identity, Acts tells us, was already being called into question by the early second century. In that same century, Paul’s god (sic) underwent a similar identity crisis. The ethnicity of the high god shifted: God the Father lost his Jewish identity too. Though some pagans continued to identify the high god as the god of the Jews, educated ex-pagan Christian theologians increasingly thought otherwise. In the work of Valentinus (fl. 130s), of Marcion (fl. 140s), and of Justin Martyr (fl. 150s), we can trace this process whereby God the father of Christ became no longer Jewish. The point of orientation shared by all three thinkers—a point fundamental to the theology of Middle Platonism—was that the highest god was radically transcendent and changeless, and that another, lower god, a demiurgos, organized the material cosmos. This demiurge, functioning as a metaphysical buffer, protected the high god’s immutability, radical stability, and absolute perfection. It was he, not the high god, who arranged unstable matter into cosmos, “order.” -Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle