More Alternative Histories

I would not be able to work for the Time Patrol, ensuring that even the Holocaust happened on schedule. If I were able as a time criminal to initiate a twentieth century without World Wars, then I would do so, confident that, although the history into which I had been born would cease to exist along a second temporal dimension, it would not cease to exist along its own temporal axis. That is to say that, if I had traveled from 2018 to, e.g., 1900 in order to change history from 1900 onward, then the original timeline would not terminate either in 1900 or in 2018 but would continue to exist through the Danellian period and beyond although, along the second temporal dimension, that entire timeline would have been superseded by an alternative timeline differing from 1900 onward.

It becomes impossible to read any history without imagining divergences that the Patrol would want to counteract, e.g.:

Pauline Christology without Johannine Trinitarianism;

Jesus not as God Incarnate but as a man raised by God to Messianic status only at and by means of his Resurrection;

Christianity differing from Judaism not about the nature of God but only about the identity and status of His Messiah.

Some Jews imagined that the Messiah and other favored individuals or beings preexisted their births with God even though they were not co-eternal or consubstantial with Him. Similarly, the Aeneid has Caesar's soul in Hades waiting to be born. It is the Fourth Gospel that goes further by locating the Word in the beginning with God and as God. Since that is the belief that became orthodox, the Patrol has to preserve it.