There is little or no trace in the first Christian decades of a Christianity unmarked by devotion to Jesus as a living agent. Even allowing for the most sceptical reading of the Gospels and Acts, we can say that within about twenty-five years from the likeliest date of Jesus' crucifixion, he was being invoked by Christians as a source of divine favour and almost certainly addressed in public prayer at Christian assemblies. The concluding verses of Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth (16.22-23) illustrate both things, with the ambiguous Aramaic formula, maranatha, strongly suggesting a direct address to the glorified Jesus as Lord, and the reference to 'grace' stemming from Jesus identifying him as a bestower of the kind of favour that is normally to be looked for from God. Without entering into the very involved question of how far Jewish piety at the time accepted a cult of angelic powers, we can at least say with certainty that Jesus was, within a generation of his death, regarded as present to and in the believing community, the object of personal devotion, the recipient of personal address. He is coming again to act as judge; but in the meantime, he is not absent, and his future judgement can in some ways be anticipated or affected by the present decisions of the church and especially of its charismatic leaders, acting 'in' the Spirit of Jesus (e.g. 1 Cor 5.4-5). By the end of the first Christian century, this presence of Jesus and anticipation of his return and judgement have become both pervasive and pictorially vivid in Christian literature. Luke depicts the first martyr Stephen commending his spirit to Jesus (Acts 7.59) as Jesus had commended his to the Father (Luke 23.46); the writer of the Revelation depicts Jesus as bearing the title and the attributes of the God of Israel (Rev 1.11, cf. Isa 44.6; and compare the pictorial details with the divine manifestations e.g. in Dan 7 and Ezek 1), and issuing sentences upon the Christian communities of western Asia Minor.