’answers a fool according to his folly,5 by showing up the worldly nature of the error and using secular language to do it. It can be a risky tactic to adopt,6 but here it warns the Christians of the danger of the position they were about to fall into, which was that of becoming utterly indistinguishable from surrounding paganism, and aping non-Christian concerns. This is one of the relatively few occasions on which the New Testament actually calls Jesus divine,7