model for us—to the second reading, the eschatological, Christotelic reading. The coming of Christ is, as the church claims, the central event in the entire human story. The implications of that event included the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost and the formation of a new people of God, the church, where now Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, become one people of God. Whatever racial, class, or gender distinctions might have been operative beforehand now count for nothing. A new