“God is love,” says St John in a famous line. There has never been a more radical statement in the history of humanity. To understand its original contrast with the generally accepted accounts of divinity in the ancient world is to grasp afresh its revolutionary quality.

In the Acts of the Apostles, we hear that devout Jews from every nation had gathered in Jerusalem for the feast of Shavuot which commemorated the most important event in Israel’s history, the giving of the Torah (the first five books in the Hebrew Bible) to Moses at Mt Sinai.