were now being fulfilled in their own community, promises precisely of return from exile; like 4 Ezra re-reading Daniel, parallel to the hints we find in Josephus, in order to claim that the long apocalyptic drama was now reaching its point of denouement, so Paul invokes the great stories of God, Israel and the world because his view of salvation itself, and with it justification and all the rest, is not an ahistorical scheme about how individuals come into a right relationship with God, but rather