The First Seventy Years

THE GOSPELS AND THE GREAT WAR:  AD 60-80
September 17, 2014

In the fourth and fifth decades of the Christian faith the church lost its first generation of leadership and its home in Jerusalem. The two focal points for these decades became the war with Rome and the appearance of a Gospel by Mark.  The great task for the church over these years was to preserve the words of Jesus and his story, and they accomplished this task in what surely for Jerusalem Christians was the "worst of all times." For all of the fourth decade Christianity's homeland was plunged into war with Rome, and once again believers were forced to flee from Jerusalem.  Doubtless churches were still being planted in these decades, but Luke's wonderful narrative ends about the year 62 A.D., and there is no record of the new churches established in the secondary towns and villages of Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece.  Because the living voices of the original leaders were being snuffed out Christians, like Jews before them, needed to put their story into writing, and there were those whom God had called who could put their pens to work so God could speak through them.  The letters of Paul, Peter, James and Jude were treasured in these decades by those who had them, but there was not yet a "New Testament."  The scriptures used by the believers were the Old Testament books ("the word of truth" that Timothy was urged to "rightly divide")  interpreted in the light of Jesus' resurrection.   In the Roman world one building built in the church's fifth decade stands to this day as a testimony both to Rome's greatness and its cruelty;  the Coliseum was begun by Vespasian in 70  A.D. and finished by Titus in 80 A. D.

The Key Dates
62 James the Just, "the Lord's Brother," martyred
62 Simeon becomes leader of Jerusalem Church
64 Peter and Paul martyred during Nero's reign
66 The War With Rome begins
66-68 Christians Leave Jerusalem for Pella
70 Temple is destroyed, Jerusalem burned
70 Mark's Gospel written

From James to Simeon in Jerusalem
One of the surprises most people encounter in tracing the changes in the church in the early decades is the emergence of James, the brother of Jesus, as the leader after Peter is forced to leave Jerusalem by Herod Agrippa I.  Nothing in the four Gospels prepares us for the emergence of one of the brothers as a believer much less as the dominant leader  of the Jerusalem church.  We saw earlier what a powerful figure James was as both Peter and, later, Paul came to James to get agreements on how they could evangelize.  Fully Jewish, widely respected in the Jewish community and legendary in his prayer life, James lived and served Jewish Christianity until his death in 62 A.D.  The story of James' execution by the same Temple authorities that crucified Jesus is told by Hegessipus, a second century Christian writer.  James was called upon by the authorities to testify against the Christian understanding of who Jesus was, but he used the occasion to witness to the gathered crowd about Jesus.  He was thrown off the wall of the temple and then beaten to death by a man in the crowd as he prayed for his persecutors.  There are doubtless some legendary elements in the story Hegessipus told, but the Roman historian, Josephus, confirmed that James was executed on trumped up charges while there was no Roman Prefect in Judea.  Here is what Josephus said:

"...the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James" met his death after the death of the procurator Porcius Festus but before Lucceius Albinus had assumed office (Antiquities 20,9) — which has been dated to 62. The High Priest Hanan ben Hanan (Anani Ananus in Latin) took advantage of this lack of imperial oversight to assemble a Sanhedrin ...who condemned James "on the charge of breaking the law", then had him executed by stoning. Josephus reports that Hanan's act was widely viewed as little more than judicial murder and offended a number of "those who were considered the most fair-minded people in the City, and strict in their observance of the Law", who went so far as to arrange a meeting with Albinus as he entered the province in order to petition him successfully about the matter. In response, King Agrippa replaced Ananus with Jesus son of Damneus.^[1]

We are fortunate to have a list of all the early leaders of the Jerusalem church which Eusebius preserved for us.^[2]  The second leader of the Jerusalem church was a cousin of Jesus named Simeon.  He was the son of Clopas, the brother of Joseph.  This is a person most of us have never heard of, but he served as the pastor of the Jerusalem church  for over forty years in very difficult times.  He is surely one of the great figures of the Christian faith.  It is sad that we know so little about him.^[3]   Simeon took over the leadership of the church either just before the nation was plunged into war or just after--a war that forced citizens to choose sides between the Zealots and the pacifists.  As often happens, the passionate Zealots carried the day and brought disaster upon all the people of Israel, Jews and Christians alike.  While we do not know much about Simeon,  the fact that another relative of Jesus assumed leadership of the Christians in Jerusalem thirty years after the crucifixion  tells us that the family of Jesus was deeply involved in the church in Judea and Galilee.

From Jerusalem to Pella
The revolt against Rome began in Galilee and ended at Masada.  From A.D. 66-70 the rebels managed to carry on the fight against the Romans but that ended with the burning of the Temple by the army of Titus in A.D. 70.  After that the war centered on the Zealot hold outs who had withdrawn to the mountain fortress of Masada.  For three long years the Romans surrounded the mountain fortress while they built a road to allow them to storm the walls.  Perhaps  it was in these years that the Essenes who had withdrawn to the desert at Qumran hid their precious scrolls in the caves to prevent the Romans from taking them.  It took almost two millennia to find them. When at last the Romans breached the walls of Masada the Zealots inside committed suicide rather than being captured and the great war was finally over.  Titus took his looted treasures back to Rome along with captives to be executed, and today tourists can still see the scene of his triumphant return to the city depicted on the Arch of Titus.  It only takes a paragraph to summarize the events of the fourth decade of the church,  but even the massive volumes of Josephus fail to capture the sufferings of the people at the hands of the Romans.
One telling event recorded in the Gospels hints at the terrible tensions that ran through Jewish society in the days prior to the revolt.  A group of conservative Pharisees brought Jesus a Roman coin and asked him if Jews should pay taxes to Caesar.  To say "No" would have invited punishment by the Romans; to say "Yes" would have indicated "softness" on the Roman issue and would have inflamed the Zealots who were already using terrorist type attacks on the Romans even in Jesus' day.  The zealous patriots who were plotting an overthrow of Roman occupiers were already convinced that Jesus was "soft" on the Romans because he had taught his disciples to "turn the other cheek" rather than fight the Romans.  When we read these stories in the light of the rage of today's terrorists and their atrocities, we are reminded of how hard it was to be a follower of Jesus in the days leading up to the great war.  Neutrality was not an option.  People had to declare their allegiance and to refuse to join the revolt could lead to suffering and death.  It was in this atmosphere that the church of the fourth decade in Jerusalem made a gut-wrenching decision--they had to leave their homeland and flee.  The fourth century Christian writer, Eusebius,^[4]  tells us about their decision:
But the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded by a revelation, vouchsafed to approved men there before the war, to leave the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella.  And when those that believed in Christ had come thither from Jerusalem, then, as if the royal city of the Jews and the whole land of Judea were entirely destitute of holy men, the judgment of God at length overtook those who had committed such outrages against Christ and his apostles, and totally destroyed that generation of impious men.
The Christians of Jerusalem all moved to Pella in what is today Jordan.  They may have lived in caves just outside the city.  The excavation of the city has not produced any evidence of Christians inside the city.  Why did they go to Pella?
Cautious speculation suggests that there may have been some local connection between the Galilean leaders of the early Christian community and prominent citizens of Pella. Pella is only 20 miles south of the Sea of Galilee. The Gospels and Acts make it clear that the northern Jordan Valley region was familiar territory for the predominantly Galilean early church leaders. Some scholars have suggested that at least some of John the Baptist’s earlier missionary work may have taken place in the northern Jordan Valley, and not just in the southern Jordan Valley traditionally associated with his activities. More practically, three of the best crossing points in the northern Jordan Valley fall within the territory of Pella. With Galilee itself already devastated and occupied by the Romans after the start of the revolt in 66 A.D., Pella might have seemed the safest short-term bet in a very difficult neighborhood.^[5]
We don't know how long these Christians remained in Pella and we can't be sure that they ever returned to Jerusalem but most historians believe they did return.  According to Eusebius, those who returned joined with the remaining family of Jesus in Galilee to elect Simeon, the son of Clopas, uncle of Jesus, as head of the Jerusalem church.^[6]   Simeon led the church until some time in the reign of the emperor Hadrian, some forty years.

From The Living Word To Books
The fourth decade of the church not only saw the death of James, the great leader of the Jerusalem church, but also witnessed the deaths of both Peter and Paul. We do not have first hand evidence about the deaths of these two Christian leaders.  According to tradition, both were executed during Nero's reign (A.D. 54-68).  It is well documented that Nero used Christians as scapegoats to escape responsibility for the great fire that destroyed much of Rome in 64.  It may well be that Peter and Paul were executed during this period.  Tradition says that the Apostle Paul was beheaded since Roman citizens could not be crucified.  Simon Peter is said to have asked to be crucified upside down because he was not worthy to be crucified as Jesus was.  It may well be that Peter's tomb lies deep beneath the Vatican as recent excavators have claimed.  The letters Paul and Peter wrote ultimately became viewed as inspired scripture and now make up half of the entire New Testament.  Their contributions to the growth of the church were secure by the time of their deaths, but their loss marks a tipping point in the history of the church.  The apostolic age came to an end with the death of these two leaders and the ability to hear the gospel directly from those who had seen the risen Lord died with them.  And with the death of the living witnesses there was the great danger that the words of the Lord would be lost.  Just as the Jews who left Jerusalem to go to Babylon in 586 B.C. needed to preserve for future generations what they knew, so too Christians needed to keep the story of Jesus alive when the apostles and first disciples began to pass away.
Scholars tell us that we can thank John Mark for doing something that had never been done before--write a Gospel.  There had been Greek biographies and stories of people who did remarkable deeds and there had been historians who wrote about the events of empires, but there had never been anything quite like a Gospel.  Mark's Gospel is not a biography.  After all it doesn't even begin with Jesus' early life.  It isn't just a dry listing of what happened, either.  Mark pieced Jesus' story together to lead up to the last week when Jesus was crucified. Almost half of Mark's Gospel is taken up by that last week! Along the way Mark told the remarkable story of Jesus' announcement of the Kingdom of God and Jesus' own understanding of his role in it, a role the disciples struggled to grasp and Rome never understood.   The teachings of Jesus were apparently already widely known among the churches by the  fourth decade.  Mark does not write about them except as they are part of Jesus' ministry to people.  There is no "sermon on the mount" in Mark.  It is very difficult to answer even the most basic questions we like to ask about an author's work.  When did he write?  Where did he write?  To Whom did he write? Where did he get his information? Why did he write?  As I've said already, we may be able to answer the last question;  it seems clear that Mark wanted to show who Jesus was and show that his crucifixion was not for crimes he committed but because of his obedience to the Father.  But the other questions continue to elude scholars.  It is now generally agreed that both Matthew and Luke knew and used Mark; so Mark wrote before those two.  It is not crystal clear that Mark knew about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. but he may have.  Most assume that he wrote while the great war between Rome and Israel was being fought.  Perhaps he was in Rome far removed from the fighting.  He writes as a Jew but he translates words that non-Jews would not recognize so he thinks there are Gentiles who will be reading his work.  According to a very early tradition, Mark was an associate of Simon Peter whose testimony about Jesus he recorded.  Luke, of course, describes Mark as working with the Apostle Paul.  We do not have an original copy of Mark but some of Mark is preserved in a manuscript dating 200-250 A.D.  Sometime in the fifth decade, A.D. 70-80 copies of Mark began to make their way to the churches.  One interesting fact is that every early manuscript of our New Testament is part of a codex, a book, rather than a scroll.  Christians needed to be able to find passages more easily than the old scrolls of Judaism allowed and thus the new literary form of a "gospel" found its place in a brand new way of preserving texts, in a book.

Conclusion
The fourth and fifth decades of the Christian church, A.D. 60-80, witnessed profound pressures on Christians.  The madman Nero slaughtered innocent Christians in the most barbaric fashion in Rome while Rome's armies destroyed the Temple and ravaged the entire land of Israel, forcing Christians to flee and robbing them of their physical home in the heart of Judaism. The church would never be the same.  But these decades preserved the old, old story for all succeeding generations and made it possible for Matthew and Luke to do their work.

________________________________

 BACK TO TEXT1. Quoted in Wickipedia article at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus
The story is found in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, (xx.9).

  BACK TO TEXT2. "I have not found any written statement of the dates of the bishops in Jerusalem, for
tradition says that they were extremely short-lived, but I have gathered from documents this much—that up to the siege of the Jews by Hadrian the successions of bishops were fifteen in number. It is said that they were all Hebrews by origin who had nobly accepted the knowledge of Christ, so that they were counted worthy even of the episcopal ministry by those who had the power to judge such questions. For their whole church at that time consisted of Hebrews who had continued Christian faith from the Apostles down to the siege at the time when the Jews again rebelled from the Romans and were beaten in a great war. Since the Jewish bishops then ceased, it is now necessary to give their names from the beginning  
The first then was James who was called the Lord's brother, and after him 
Simeon was the second. 
The third was Justus, 
Zacchaeus was the fourth, 
Tobias the fifth, 
the sixth Benjamin, 
the seventh John,
the eighth Matthias, 
the ninth Philip, 
the tenth Seneca, 
the eleventh Justus, 
the twelfth Levi, 
the thirteenth Efres, 
the fourteenth Joseph, and last of all
the fifteenth Judas. 
Such were the bishops in the city of Jerusalem, from the Apostles down to the time mentioned, and they were all Jews."   Eusebius,  Church History, 4.5. 1-4

 BACK TO TEXT3. "Simeon the son of Clopas was leader of the Jerusalem church - and doubtless the most important figure in Jewish Christianity - for at least 40 years, until his martyrdom in the reign of Trajan (either between 99.and 103 CE or between 108 and 117 CE). When Luke's first readers read of Cleopas (Lk. 24:18) and John's first readers of Mary of Clopas (Jn. 19:25), many of them would no doubt easily have recognized the parents of their famous contemporary. That we know so little about so significant a figure is another salutary reminder of the great gaps in our evidence for early Christianity. But the great reverence with which he was remembered in Jewish Christian tradition can be seen in Hegesippus's hagiographical account of his death.[16] The historically reliable information in the account is that Simeon was arrested on a charge of political subversion, because he was of a Davidic family and supported the alleged Davidic king Jesus, and was put to death by crucifixion. This fits well into the period between the two great Jewish revolts…".  Richard Bauckham, "The Relatives of Jesus," Themelios 21 (January, 1996) 21.

  BACK TO TEXT4. Eusebius, Church History,  5.3.

  BACK TO TEXT5. Stephen Bourke, "The Christian Flight To Pella," Biblical Archaeological Review (39:03, May/Jun 2013), 30-39, 70-71. 

  BACK TO TEXT6. After the martyrdom of James and the capture of Jerusalem which immediately followed,
the story goes that those of the Apostles and of the disciples of the Lord who
were still alive came together from every place with those who were, humanly speaking,
of the family of the Lord, for many of them were then still alive, and they all took
counsel together as to whom they ought to adjudge worthy to succeed James, and all
unanimously decided that Simeon the son of Clopas, whom the scripture of the Gospel
also mentions, was worthy of the throne of the diocese there. He was, so it is said, a
cousin of the Saviour, for Hegesippus relates that Clopas was the brother of Joseph.

Eusebius, Church History, 3:11

The First Seventy Years

COME OVER AND HELP US -A.D. 50-60 

September 10,2014

The first ten years of the church had two focal points:    Peter's sermon on Pentecost and Paul's vision on the Damascus Road.^[1]   The great task which had to be accomplished in those first ten years was finding convincing scriptural support for a suffering savior, a crucified Messiah.  The second ten years had two centers, too:  Paul's first missionary trip and the Gentile compromise with James at the Jerusalem Conference (Acts 15).  The great task which had to be accomplished in the second decade was coming to grips with the truth that non-Jews could respond to God's grace.  We come now to the third decade of the Christian church, the decade which saw geographical as well as numerical growth. The two centers for this decade's action must surely be Corinth and Ephesus, places not people, because these are the two great cities in which Paul's group worked most in this decade.  The great task in the decade was the establishment of permanent Christian communities in the uttermost parts of the world.  At some point they began to call themselves "church," but it is very hard to say just when that was.  Paul's vision in the night at Troas of a man saying "Come over and help us!" vividly symbolizes the decade.  This is the decade we think we know the most about thanks to Luke and his "Book of Acts,"  but even after all these centuries of study there is much that is unknown, much that we wish we could know. For example, who was that man in Paul's vision?  Was it Luke himself?  Was the man already a Christian who was seeking Paul's help in saving others? Had the faith already spread to Macedonia before Paul got there? Luke ends his second book almost in the middle of a sentence.  We wonder why.  Was he unable to finish?  Did he plan another volume that he did not live to write?  The questions are intriguing. We can speculate, but we probably never will know the answers to questions like these.
Luke was with Paul in Macedonia, Greece and Asia Minor, so those are the churches we know the most about.  The gospel, however, did not just go west. It also went east, north and south.^[2]   Paul, himself, tried to go north to Bithynia but was prevented for some reason.^[3]  Who took the gospel there?  Paul tried to go east, too, but opposition from the Nabateans (and the Temple authorities?) closed that option.^[4]   Who went east from Jerusalem, Damascus and Antioch?  Legends have grown up that may contain a grain of historical remembrance about the people who went to these places, but they did not have a Luke to tell us about their missionaries.^[5]   Thus our story of the third decade will begin with the west and add what we can to Luke's history to see what was happening in the great city of Rome, the old city of Jerusalem, the Egyptian city of Alexandria on the shoulder of Africa and along the southern shore of the Black Sea.


Dates for this Decade

49           Expulsion of Jews from Rome (A Fixed Date)^[6]
50-52 Paul's second missionary trip: Cilicia, Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece
51         Trial of Paul before Gallio in Corinth  (A Fixed Date)^[7]
53-57 Paul's third missionary Journey:  Asia, Macedonia, Greece
57-60 Paul's imprisonment in Caesarea under Felix and Festus(A Fixed Date)^[8]


The Church of the West (Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece)

The Great Compromise
The third decade of the church begins with a great compromise stemming from a conference in Jerusalem.  Following the first missionary trip by Paul and Barnabas to Cyprus and then to the heart of Asia Minor (our Turkey), Christians (from the church in Jerusalem) made the long trip to Antioch themselves and demanded that the new Gentile Christians keep the law--after all, all Christians up until then had been Jews who lived by the law and were circumcised.  We call these people Judaizers, but this is not Jews against Christians.  It is Christians demanding that other Christians live like Jews as all of the original Christians had done.   While some new Gentile, Christians might have followed the food laws, surely few would have submitted to circumcision as the Jerusalem church was demanding.  Thus to give in to their demands would have made Paul's mission to Gentiles impossible.  Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem and met with James, the head of the church there, and all the "elders" and told them how God had touched the hearts of Gentiles.  Peter testified that God had changed his heart and led him to Cornelius.  We don't know how long this meeting took, and we certainly don't sense in that account the depth of the division between those who insisted on being true to God's law in the Bible and those who had felt God's call to be a "light to the Gentiles" (Isaiah 42:6).  To their credit, a compromise was reached which required Gentiles to obey only the broadest of the law's demands and did not require circumcision of the males.  In the light of the absolute gridlock witnessed today between political parties in this country, the ability of these Christian leaders to compromise even when precious principles were at stake is remarkable.

What Can We Deduce
We need not trace the detailed events of Paul's second and third missionary journeys;  these episodes are well known to most of us.  Our goal is to trace the growth of the church in this decade.  What can we learn from the stories of the second and third missionary journeys about the expansion of the Christian faith between the years 50 and 60 A.D?  Even when we do not expect to find evidence to document our understandings, it still helps to ask about details that Luke does not give us.  How Jewish was Christianity in Macedonia and Greece?  How large were the churches that Paul founded?  How many Christians were there by 60 A.D.? Which version of the Bible did they use?  Did they have a hymnal?  Did they meet on Sunday morning?  You can, perhaps, add your own questions to the list, but let's ask these and see if there are any answers to our questions.

How Many Members?
We have already noted that all of the original Christians were Jews who continued to be Jews after they believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him.  It is clear that in almost every place Paul took the gospel, he presented his case first in a synagogue to Jews.  After all, Paul's argument that Jesus was the Messiah even though crucified only had meaning to Jews who knew the Bible.  This was true of Macedonia and Greece as well with the exception of Paul's work in Athens which was not fruitful.  Some of the Jews accepted Paul's message; others called the police and/or ran him out of town.  But in Macedonia and Greece most of the first Christians were Jews just as they were in Jerusalem.
We have already noted that like MBBC all the early churches were house churches without a separate building.  There are no references to church buildings in the book of Acts so we do not know when or where the first church building appeared.  Since the congregations met in homes scholars have spent considerable effort to find out how large the groups could have been.  This would have been primarily dependent on the size of the homes involved and this, of course, would have depended a lot on the wealth of the church members.  Archaeologists have uncovered some first century homes in ancient Corinth--homes that would have been there in Paul's time.  By counting all the people mentioned in the New Testament in relation to Corinth it appears that
"If we discount the overlaps between the different lists we end up with sixteen specific individuals. Prisca and Aquila we know were married, and we can safely assume that the other fourteen also had spouses. That brings us to a total of thirty, which is obviously a minimum figure. Neither Luke nor Paul intended to give a complete list; mentions of particular names were occasioned by specific circumstances. Moreover, we are told that the households of two members of the community, Crispus and Stephanas, were baptized with them. Thus, we have to add an indeterminate number of children, servants/slaves, and perhaps relations. It would be more realistic, therefore, to think in terms of between forty and fifty persons as a base figure for the Christian community at Corinth."^[9]
Forty or fifty people would have been too many to fit even in the large wealthy homes the archaeologists have uncovered.  Perhaps the church met in more than one home. As one scholar has put it:
"'The church in the home of X', then, would be a subgroup of the larger community. If Prisca and Aquila acted as the center of such a subgroup in Ephesus ( 1 Cor 16.19) and in Rome (Rom 16.5), it is very probable that they did likewise in Corinth. Such subgroups would have been made up of the family, servants, and a few friends who lived in the vicinity. While such subgroups would have tended to foster an intimate family-type atmosphere at the liturgical celebrations, they would also have tended to promote divisions within the wider city community. It seems likely that the various groups mentioned by Paul in 1 Cor 1.12 would regularly have met separately."^[10]
So the picture that emerges for a church in a large city like Corinth is a group of perhaps fifty people who met in more than one home.  The nucleus of the churches would have been those "first responder" Jews who then led others through the Old Testament testimonies to Jesus as Messiah.   We know of about ten churches Paul established and there were doubtless more that Luke does not tell us about so in the third decade the Pauline churches may have numbered between 500 and 1000 members.  There were many more in Israel.


What Was A Church Service Like?
Who had Bibles?  Probably very few churches had a Bible.  A full hand-written copy of the Old Testament would have been a very expensive item.  Early Christians would have learned their Bibles by repetition and one-on-one instruction.   It seems likely that instead of a full copy of the Bible, congregations prepared lists of the passages that were important to them and copied these for others.^[11]   But from which version of the Bible did they memorize these passages?  It is clear when we compare a quotation in the New Testament with its source in the Old Testament that the texts are not the same in most cases.  The reason for this is that early Christians outside of Jerusalem (and some inside) read the Greek version of the Old Testament which scholars call the Septuagint.  Our Old Testaments are translations of the Hebrew version.  This reliance on the Greek Bible will have major ramifications in the later decades of our period.
We know that the early Christians got together to eat meals;  Paul's first letter to the Corinthian church makes this very clear.  Like them we still celebrate the Lord's Supper and have fellowship meals on Wednesday evenings, but were they like us in any other ways. Did they repeat the Lord's Prayer?  Did they sing hymns?  Did they recite a creed?  Did they preach sermons?  The answer to all these is most likely "Yes."   Scholars have long noted that some passages in Paul's letters sound like the quotation of a hymn.  One such passage is the famous part of Philippians 2 that begins, "Have this mind among yourselves..." .^[12]    In addition to specifically Christian hymns, the Psalms would have been sung--especially the Psalms that spoke of Christ like Psalm 110.  The creed we know of as "The Apostles' Creed" is very old but probably was not used in these early decades.  The earliest creed may have been the simple confession, "Jesus is Lord," which people made when they were baptized.^[13]   And, finally, we know from Paul's advice to the Corinthians that church services involved all of these elements:
When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification. If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn; and let one interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silence in church and speak to himself and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said.   If a revelation is made to another sitting by, let the first be silent.^[14]

The Church of the Rest (Jerusalem, Rome, Alexandria and the Black Sea Shore)
While Paul, Silas, Luke and their companions were carrying the gospel to  Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece, what was happening to the Christian faith elsewhere?

Jerusalem

Since Luke tells us mostly about the new congregations to the west, there is a tendency for us to assume that the church in Jerusalem was no longer important.  How wrong we would be to make this assumption.   Jews had been dispersed all over the world by this time, but Jews everywhere still considered Jerusalem the center of the earth.^[15]   The church in Jerusalem was still the mother church; its consent was important to those who took the gospel to the Gentiles.  When a Gentile like Cornelius was accepted as a Christian, the church in Jerusalem had to be informed by Peter and give its consent.  When Gentiles were approached in Antioch with the gospel, the Jerusalem church sent Barnabas to check on them.  When Paul and Barnabas took the gospel to Gentiles in Galatia, they had to go to Jerusalem and defend themselves before James and the other disciples (Acts 15).  Clearly the Jerusalem church was a central authority in the first few decades of the church and James, its leader, was in the eyes of many the leader of the whole church.  What do we know about James and this church in the third decade of Christianity?
James was the brother of Jesus. His name in Hebrew is "Jacob."  Paul listed James as one of those to whom the risen Christ had appeared. In the Gospel of Thomas, which is not in our Bible but may well be very early and contain authentic memories of Jesus' sayings,  the disciples ask Jesus who will lead them after he is gone and Jesus replies, "Where you are, you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into existence."  When Peter escaped from prison and left Jerusalem, he asked that James be told of his going; from that point on James was the sole leader of the Jerusalem church.  We do not know a lot about James from external sources, but everything we know suggests that James was a very devout Jew who was highly regarded by the Jewish community in Jerusalem as his title, James the Just, suggests.  Legend paints him as a man who wore callouses on his knees by kneeling in prayer in the temple courtyard so much.^[16]   James and the church which he led in Jerusalem were committed to their Jewish faith and its practices.^[17]   They opposed giving them up and, thus, as the church became more and more Gentile in its complexion the gulf between the traditional Jewish group in Jerusalem and the new churches began to widen.
Rome
When did the gospel get to Rome?  Apparently it got to Rome before it got to Corinth in A.D. 50.  Claudius expelled all the Jews from Rome in A.D. 49 and two of the people expelled, Priscilla and Aquila, were already Christians!  As mentioned earlier the arrival of Christians in Rome may have been the cause of the ferment in the Jewish community that caused Claudius to expel the Jews.  As far as we know none of the apostles were the evangelists of Rome though, of course, Catholics have long given Peter the role of the first pope in Rome.  It may well be that people who heard Peter on Pentecost took the message back to the synagogues of Rome, making the church in Rome one of the very earliest even though it was a long way from Jerusalem.
What we do know is that Paul wrote his longest and most theologically complex letter to the Christians in Rome in the year A.D. 57 while he was at Corinth.  The recipients of a document like the book of Romans were obviously thoroughly conversant with the Old Testament so they were most likely Jews.  It would seem likely that the recipients were intellectually advanced and that Paul was well aware of this as he wrote.  If the people Paul greets in the last chapter of Romans were, indeed, in Rome (there is some question about this) the size of the congregation would have been at least as large as that at Corinth, that is, at least fifty or more.^[18]    It is difficult to say more about the great Roman church at this early stage.
Alexandria
Alexandria, Egypt became the second greatest city in the Roman Empire after Rome itself.  Because of its  dependable grain production, it became the bread basket for the city of Rome, and the great grain ships that left daily from Alexandria also served to transport people around the Mediterranean world.  Paul used these ships on several occasions.  Christianity arrived early in Egypt;  Alexandria was not much further from Jerusalem than Antioch.  The modern churches in Egypt are the Coptic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church both of which trace their origins to Mark, the author of the earliest Gospel. Here is the way today's Coptic Church remembers its beginnings:
The history of Christianity in Egypt dates back verily to the beginnings of Christianity itself. Many Christians hold that Christianity was brought to Egypt by the Apostle Saint Mark in the early part of the first century AD. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, in his Ecclesiastic History states that Saint Mark first came to Egypt between the first and third year of the reign of Emperor Claudius, which would make it sometime between AD 41 and 44, and that he returned to Alexandria some twenty years later to preach and evangelize. Saint Mark's first convert in Alexandria was Annianus, a shoemaker who later was consecrated a bishop and became Patriarch of Alexandria after Saint Mark's martyrdom.^[19]
Eusebius is probably not correct in placing Mark in Egypt in the 40's--that would be even before his trip with Barnabas and Paul  to Cyprus--and Paul says that Mark was with him at some point late in his travels,^[20]  so there is some doubt that the Coptic memory is accurate.  If Mark did not take the gospel to Egypt in the early decades, many others must have, and the strong Jewish community of Alexandria doubtless counted many believers among its number.

The Black Sea Shore
Until the modern conflict in Ukraine many Americans would have had a hard time even placing the Black Sea on a map, but as so often in the last century our geographical knowledge has been enhanced by the wars that have occupied our lifetime.  Ukraine with its great seaport that Russia has long lusted for, Sevastopol, lies on the north shore of the Black Sea.   Along the south shore--across the sea from Ukraine--lay the Roman districts of Asia, Bithynia, Pontus and Cappadocia.  Luke did not give us much information about how the gospel got to this region. Luke tells us that Paul tried hard on his second missionary trip to go north into Bithynia but "when they had come opposite My′sia, they attempted to go into Bithyn′ia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them…" (Acts 16:7).  We may never know what happened to turn them away from Bithynia and the other northern provinces.  We do know that Peter addressed a letter to the Jewish churches of this region:  "Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappado′cia, Asia, and Bithyn′ia…" (1 Peter 1:1).  Apparently Peter was in contact with churches in these provinces in his lifetime (the third decade) so either he or others took the gospel to these places very early.
O The Places You'll Go
Dr. Seuss could well have been describing those Christians of the third decade who took the gospel to all four compass points and, thereby, shaped our world for all time to come--and for eternity.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
...
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!”

Footnotes

 BACK TO TEXT1. In mathematics, an ellipse is a curve on a plane surrounding two focal points.  To those of us who don'tpeak mathematics, it is a line drawn around two circles side by side.  The centers of the two circles are the two focal points.  Thus Pentecost and Paul are the two circle-centers for the first ten years.
 BACK TO TEXT2. One of the places east of Antioch that became a center of Christianity was Edessa where a major early harmony of the Gospels known as the Diatessaron by Tatian was produced.
 BACK TO TEXT3. Acts 16:7  "the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them"
 BACK TO TEXT4. See Richard Bauckham,  "What If Paul Had Travelled East Rather Than West?"
Biblical Interpretation A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 12/1999; 8(1-2):177.   See below about who went south to Egypt.
  BACK TO TEXT5."Though scholars who begin with the legends and find it impossible to ascertain the truth behind them tend to think Christianity did not reach Mesopotamia in Paul's lifetime or even in the first century, it has to be said that the constant communication and travel between Jerusalem and the eastern diaspora makes it virtually incredible that it did not. Jewish pilgrims and merchants from the east would have heard the gospel in Jerusalem and taken it back to their synagogue communities."  Bauckham, 180.
  BACK TO TEXT6. Acts 18:2 notes that Priscilla and Aquila had come from Rome to Corinth.  The Roman historian Suetonius (c. AD 69 – c. AD 122) recorded that  "Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [the Emperor Claudius] expelled them from Rome." The date is normally calculated as 49 A.D.
 BACK TO TEXT7. Acts 18: 12 mentions the Proconsul, Gallio before whom Paul appeared,  and an inscription found at Delphi which can be dated between January 51 and August 52 dates Gallio's term of office.
 BACK TO TEXT8. Felix was Procurator from 52-58 and Paul was his prisoner for some two years before he left office (Acts 24:27)  "When Felix was succeeded as procurator, having already detained Paul for two years, he left him imprisoned as a favor to the Jews" (Acts 24:27).
 BACK TO TEXT9.  Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, "House Churches and the Eucharist," in Christianity at Corinth: The Quest for the Pauline Church, Edited by Edward Adams and David G. Horrell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 133.
 BACK TO TEXT10. Ibid.
 BACK TO TEXT11. "In various early Christian writings there is a group of quotations from Jewish scripture that occur in textual forms that often do not agree with traditional readings of either the Masoretic text  [Hebrew] or the Septuagint [Greek], and they are given interpretations and applications uncommon or unknown in Judaism. The recurrence of these quotations has given rise to the hypothesis that in the early church there was a collection (or collections) of "testimonies," anthologies of texts that had been extracted from Jewish scriptures and compiled as proof texts for Christian claims and that early Christian writers were indebted to these testimony books for their quotations."  Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Chuch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) 26.
 BACK TO TEXT12.  Ralph Martin, A Hymn of Christ: Philippians 2:5-11 in Recent Interpretation & in the Setting of Early Christian Worship...(Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1997) viii.
BACK TO TEXT13. "The newer approach to the text, which is adopted in the following pages, sees the hymn as setting forth the story of salvation. ...  In the context of early Christian worship the Christ-hymn proclaimed the drama of His descent to this world, His submission to death and His victory over spiritual powers. The hymn, which had an existence independent of the use which St Paul made of it, is cited by him in reference to the pastoral situation at Philippi in order to show how the Church came to be in the sphere of Christ's lordship; and this fact is made the basis of the ethical appeal."
 BACK TO TEXT14. 1 Corinthians 12:3  "No one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit."; Romans 10:9  "If with your mouth you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.";  Philippians 2:11  "and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
 BACK TO TEXT15. I Corinthians 14: 26-29
  BACK TO TEXT16."For first-century Jews, Jerusalem was not at the eastern edge of a world defined by the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean world depicted in maps of Paul's missionary travels in Bibles and reference works. For first-century Jews, Jerusalem was the centre of a world which stretched as far east as it did west, and, equally importantly, the centre of the Jewish diaspora, which also stretched as far east as it did west." Bauckham, op. cit., 171   The term "diaspora" means "dispersed" and is the term used for Jews who live outside Israel.
 BACK TO TEXT17.  "...you may be interested to know that the early Irish church, which had a rich tradition of Christian apocryphal literature, translated into Irish or adapted in Irish from older sources, had its own distinctive way of referring to our James. It called him James of the Knees. As far as  I can tell this epithet is never explained, but it must derive from the account of James in the second-century writer Hegesippus. According to Hegesippus, James spent so much time kneeling in prayer for his people that his knees became hard like a camel's." Richard Bauckham, "James At The Centre, A Jerusalem Perspective on the New Testament," St Mary's College Bulletin 37 (1995) 46.
 BACK TO TEXT18. "Like most Christian Jews he [James] took it for granted that Christian Jews remained Jews and continued to observe the Mosaic law, but he did not require Gentile Christians to do so and endorsed even Paul's Gentile mission. His vision was a thoroughly universalistic vision which naturally required no abandoning of Jewish identity by the Jewish people of God. James's greatest difference from Paul was simply his position at the heart of the Jewish world, committed to the mission to his own people."  Bauckham, op. cit., 53.
 BACK TO TEXT19.  It is puzzling that when Paul arrives in Rome as a prisoner in the sixth decade no one in Rome seems to be aware of his letter!  Luke does say that some Christians met Paul as he approached Rome (Acts 28:15) but this seems to be a very small group.
  http://www.touregypt.net/chiste1.htm#ixzz3BhHjfU1n
  BACK TO TEXT20."Greetings to you from my fellow prisoner Aristarchus, and from Mark, the kinsman of Barnabas, about whom you have been given instructions; if he visits you, make him welcome." (Colossians 4:10)

The First Seventy Years

The Decade of Division:  A.D. 40-50

September 3, 2014

The first decade after the crucifixion of Jesus witnessed a veritable "big bang" explosion of the Christian faith in the world.  The exposure of people from all over the Roman world to the testimony of the disciples on Pentecost began the fulfillment of the Great Commission.  Suddenly there were believers in Judea, Samaria and at least to the uttermost parts of the Roman world.  The murder of Stephen sent another wave of witnesses out from Jerusalem.  The Jewish leadership in Jerusalem attempted to suppress the testimony of the disciples, but when one of their own number, Saul of Tarsus, had a transforming vision of Christ on the way to Damascus, the momentum began to swing to the disciples.  Although Luke in the book of Acts records the addition of thousands of believers in Judea alone, we must understand that these thousands remained Jews.  There was no church building and no separate worship structure for these early Christians.  They continued to worship as Jews but with a new understanding that God had once again acted in their midst.

Key Dates For the Second Decade, A.D. 40-50
There are few dates in this decade that can be verified by secular history or literature.  Most dates for this period have been calculated by working backwards from known dates for Paul.  One exception is the expulsion of Jews from Rome by the emperor Claudius in 49 A.D. which is generally accepted as established based on external references. ^[1]  
Another fixed date is the death of King Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D.  Since Agrippa only ruled four years, A.D. 41-44, the execution of James (the brother of John)  and the imprisonment of Peter (from which he escaped) recorded in Acts 12: 1-3 can be dated within these years.  Peter had to leave Jerusalem immediately after his escape from prison and James, the brother of Jesus, assumed the full leadership of the Jerusalem church at that point.  James was the pastor of the Jerusalem church until his own martyrdom in A.D. 62 and, thus, is a major player in the second decade of the Christian faith.
A third event for which there is external verification is a famine which affected  Israel between the years A.D. 46-48.  Apparently Christians suffered from hunger in these years just as everyone else in Israel.  One of the first things Paul does according to the book of Acts is to accompany Barnabas on a trip back to Jerusalem to  take an offering for hungry Christians (Acts 11:30).   When Paul lists his trips to Jerusalem (Galatians 2), he does not mention the famine visit  unless the famine visit also involved the defense of his approach to the Gentiles.
Luke did a great job of telling the church's story in an exciting and interesting way, but he did not footnote his story so we could see the connections with life in the Roman Empire.  Someone has noted that in a similar fashion, Luke never bothered to describe a single geographical feature or beautiful scene that Paul would have encountered in three trips on foot across what is today Turkey!  Such details were not important to the story, but they would have been tremendously helpful to us as we try to reconstruct the events.  Let's work our way through the second decade of the faith, understanding that our dates may not be exact.

The Other Life Changing Vision
The first decade of the story of Christianity was dominated largely by the Damascus Road experience of Saul of Tarsus.  That story is so gripping that we forget that there was another vision that changed history;  this was Peter's vision of the clean and unclean animals (Acts 10:9-16) which challenged every thing he had ever believed.  In some sense Peter's experience is a metaphor for the new understanding of God's will that every Jewish Christian of the second decade had to go through.  We live in a world that changes so rapidly that yesterday's truths may well become today's trash.  It is difficult for us to sense how hard it was for Peter (and James and the first generation Jewish Christians) to think of non-Jews as people that God loved.  For a millennium or more Jews had regulated their lives by the laws found in the first five books of our Old Testament.  They accepted every law as given directly by God through Moses.  When Peter had his vision, however, he was called upon to realize that the way he and others had interpreted that law was defective.  They had, by extension, considered Gentiles as "unclean." Jews considered all Gentiles to be outside the covenant relationship with God.  For Gentiles to be brought into the covenant relationship, they had to submit to circumcision and live in obedience to the law as Jews.  Many Gentiles were attracted to the Jewish understanding of God and the moral demands of the ten commandments.  Some submitted to circumcision and became proselytes, but many more became what Luke calls a "God fearer,"  a person who joined the Jewish community but did not become a full proselyte.  This was how Luke described Cornelius, "a centurion of what was known as the Italian Cohort, a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms liberally to the people, and prayed constantly to God" (Acts 10:1-2).  Although a Gentile, Cornelius had become part of the Jewish community in Caesarea where his army unit was stationed.  Through his vision, Peter was challenged to see that the living God could override tradition;  while the law was unchanging, its application to life was not.  Coming to terms with this truth proved to be the hardest thing Christians had to do in the second decade of the faith.  It may still be the hardest thing many Christians have to do as they live in a world now being seen through the lenses of modern science.
As Luke tells the story of the church, it is largely about the trauma the early Christians endured as the Gospel went to the "uttermost parts of the world" to include Gentiles  whom the Jews had long looked upon as "unclean."  One of the first stories after Pentecost dealt with the tension between Greek speaking Jews and Hebrew speaking Jews that led to the appointment of deacons.  All of the deacons had Greek names and presumably spoke Greek.  One of them was a man not unlike Cornelius; his name was Nicolaus, and he was not a Jew by birth--he was a proselyte (Acts 6:5).   Philip went north to Samaria and evangelized people that most Jews considered "unclean" even though they were descendants of Jews. Then Philip went south and testified to an African eunuch who was not a Jew but became a Christian.  The conversion of Cornelius extends the story of God's grace further, and it caused a furor among some of the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.  Here is the way Luke describes the scene:
        Now the apostles and the brethren who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.  So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him, saying, "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?" (Acts 11:3).  Peter defended his actions by telling them how God had changed his own understanding.  If God chose to accept the Gentiles, Peter argued, who was he to object.

The Church in Antioch
The Gospel had reached Damascus within two or three years of Jesus' crucifixion.  Damascus was almost half way to Antioch.  The Gospel surely made its way to Antioch very early in the first decade.  Luke says that the martyrdom of Stephen about A.D. 34  scattered Christians up the Mediterranean coast line to Phoenecia, the island of Cyprus and the great city of Antioch.  Some of the Christians who fled northward were Greek speaking Jews from North Africa (one wonders if Simon of Cyrene who carried Jesus' cross might have been one of them!) and when they got to Antioch they did not limit their preaching to the Hebrew community.  They preached to  Greeks.^[2] For the first time there was a major collection of Christians--a church--outside Jerusalem.   Some--and perhaps most--of these Christians were Gentiles;  they did not have centuries of Jewish tradition and practices in their experience.  Now there were two centers of the church,  one stressing the Jewish foundation of faith in the Messiah and the other stressing the Hellenistic, non-Jewish, understanding of the meaning of Jesus' death and resurrection.  The Jerusalem church was the "mother" church whose influence was significant.
       When word reached Jerusalem that non-Jews were being saved in Antioch, James and the leadership of the church chose Barnabas to go to Antioch and see what was happening.  More than likely, Barnabas was sent to restrict what Jerusalem considered un-orthodox evangelism just as Saul had been sent by Temple authorities to Damascus a few years earlier to stamp out the new faith.  Barnabas  soon saw that the Gospel message when accepted by Gentiles brought them salvation just as it had to the Jews in Jerusalem and he reported this back  to the mother church.  Here is the way Luke described all this in Acts 11: 19 Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoeni′cia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none except Jews. 20 But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyre′ne, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus.21 And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number that believed turned to the Lord. 22 News of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. 23 When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad; and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose; 24 for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a large company was added to the Lord.
Luke did not tell us how Barnabas reported to Jerusalem.  He does not give us any indication of the intense opposition in the Jerusalem church that the inclusion of Gentiles aroused, but it will be obvious a little later.  We can get a sense of these hostile feelings by calling to mind the way modern denominations have reacted to expansions of the faith that change centuries long traditions.^[3]  The difference  between Antioch and Jerusalem dominates the story in the second decade (and, indeed, in a sense it still does).

Paul in Antioch
When we last mentioned Paul, he had been hustled out of Jerusalem because some people were plotting his assassination. The year was about A.D. 40.   A hurried walk from Jerusalem northwest to the port city of Caesarea  made it possible for Paul to book passage on a ship back to his home town of Tarsus.  After his transformation in Damascus, he could no longer safely stay in Jerusalem.  For the next several years (A.D. 40-47?) we have no information about Paul.  There is so much we would like to know.
Was he welcomed home by his family?
Did they accept Christ?
Did they reject him?  ^[4]
Did he found churches in his home state of Cilicia?
He mentions visiting churches in Cilicia on his journeys but doesn't tell us where they were.   We have no letters of Paul to churches in Cilicia.
Did he minister as a rabbi in a synagogue in Tarsus?
Did he just work with his hands as a tent maker?
Did he preach constantly during these years?
Obviously he used these years to work out the details of his theology which we can detect in his letters, but with whom did he debate the issues?
Was there anyone in Tarsus whom he counted as a fellow Christian?
He went back to Tarsus at least three times, but with whom did he stay?
We can only guess at Paul's activities in these years, but the church in Antioch was growing rapidly.  Apparently Barnabas, who had been sent by the Jerusalem church to see what was happening in Antioch, did not go back home.  He remained in Antioch and became the pastor of the church.  When it became apparent that the church was growing so fast that he needed help, he turned to the man he had met years before, the man we know as "the apostle Paul."  Here is the way Luke tells it (Acts 11):
25 So Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul; 26 and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church, and taught a large company of people; and in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians.
        It would have taken Barnabas the better part of a week to walk the 150 miles from Antioch to Tarsus.  Tarsus was a large city, and we can only guess at the process Barnabas used to find Paul.  He would have gone to one of the synagogues in Tarsus to ask about a Jewish man.  One wonders what the typical member of a Jewish synagogue in Tarsus thought of Paul.  If he was as controversial in his home town as he was elsewhere, everyone would have known him and Barnabas would have had little trouble finding him even in a large city.  How long did it take Barnabas to convince Paul to move to Antioch?  What arrangements did Paul have to make to leave his home town?  Paul and Barnabas had at least five years of catching up to do before they made the long walk to Antioch.  Once back in Antioch, Paul and Barnabas ministered to the church for a year, possibly the year A.D. 47.

Sending Out Missionaries
Up to this point, the Christian faith had been spread by its enemies.  Persecution had forced disciples to leave Jerusalem.  Now, for the first time, a church sent its members out as missionaries to proclaim the good news elsewhere (Acts 13):
"Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyre′ne, Man′a-en a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. 2 While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” 3 Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off."  It was a process that would ultimately take Paul some ten thousand miles across the Roman world as he and others bore the message to the "uttermost parts of the world."
We know this mission trip as the first of three trips made  by Paul.  The year was  A.D. 48.  The old friends, Barnabas and Paul, were selected by their peers to spread the good news.  Luke tells us that Barnabas and Paul took John Mark from Jerusalem with them. John Mark was Barnabas' cousin and both had roots in the island of Cyprus.   Although it is difficult to fit all the pieces together, ^[5] Barnabas and Paul had apparently made a trip to Jerusalem to take money for food to the Jerusalem congregation.  We know that there was a severe shortage of food in Israel about A.D. 46 which prompted the Gentile Christians in Antioch to help the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Several years later, Paul went to all of the churches he started collecting money for the Christians in Jerusalem which means that the hard times were spread over a decade or more. When Barnabas and Paul returned to Antioch they brought Mark with them and Mark began the mission trip with them.
The story of the first trip which took them to Cyprus and then on to the interior of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) is too well known to rehearse here, but the continuing tension between the Judaizers (those who insisted that one become a Jew in order to be a Christian) and the Gentile wing of the church needs to be noted.  While Luke does not say so, it seems likely that the tension over Gentiles played a part in Mark's withdrawal from the mission.  He went with the group to Cyprus but when  Barnabas and Paul crossed over to the mainland and to Gentile territory, Mark returned--not to Antioch-- but to Jerusalem.  Later when Barnabas wanted to take Mark again, Paul refused.  Surely there was a serious disagreement  that caused the breach between these two old friends and colleagues.  We know from Paul's letter to the Galatians that Paul had a public confrontation with Barnabas (and Peter) over the refusal to eat with Gentiles when leaders from Jerusalem came to Antioch.^[6]  Mark apparently was uncomfortable taking the Gospel to Gentiles at least at this stage of his life.
After the very successful mission trip to the interior of Turkey (Galatia),  Paul was outraged when he learned that members of the Jerusalem church--perhaps with the blessing of James--had gone to the churches he had established in Antioch, Lystra and Derbe and convinced some of his converts that they had to be circumcised and keep the law.  Paul wrote an angry letter, which we call Galatians, berating those who had knuckled under.   Then Paul went to Jerusalem for a face-to-face meeting with James, the leader of the church there, to lay his theology before him and the church.  Acts 15 is Luke's account of this conference.  It is likely that Galatians 2 is Paul's version of the same conference but there are serious differences in the two accounts that scholars have written many volumes about.  The conference recognized that Gentiles could become Christians without circumcision and obedience to the full law.  Because of that conference there are Gentile Christians like those of us here all over the world.  The year was probably A.D. 49 and the second decade was coming to a close.

________________________________

BACK TO TEXT1.  A fifth century Christian writer, Paulus Orosius, cites Josephus and Suetonius as evidence of the event: "Josephus reports, 'In his ninth year the Jews were expelled by Claudius from the city.' But Suetonius, who speaks as follows, influences me more: 'Claudius expelled from Rome the Jews constantly rioting at the instigation of Christ [Christo, ...].' As far as whether he had commanded that the Jews rioting against Christ [Christum] be restrained and checked or also had wanted the Christians, as persons of a cognate religion, to be expelled, it is not at all to be discerned."   Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII 7.6.15-16, cited in Slingerland, 'Orosius', JQR 83, 1/2 (1992), p. 137.   [Cited from a Wickipedia article  which can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudius'_expulsion_of_Jews_from_Rome]

BACK TO TEXT2.  It isn't clear whether Luke meant actual Greeks or Greek speaking people (Hellenists).

BACK TO TEXT3.  Think about the furor over women in ministry, acceptance of gays and lesbians and all the other recent divisive extensions of the traditional Christian understanding of the Gospel.

 BACK TO TEXT4.  It may be that Paul's statement that he had "suffered the loss of all things" (Philippians 3:8) for Christ's sake means that his family had rejected him and cut him off from his normal inheritance.  He never mentions his own father and mother.  Perhaps they were already dead.

 BACK TO TEXT5.  For those interested in the scholarly debate about how the events of these years fit together see:  Robert W. Funk, "The Enigma of the Famine Visit," Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 75, No. 2 (June, 1956), pp. 130-136.

  BACK TO TEXT6. "But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity. " Galatians 2: 11-13.

The First Seventy Years

Reading The Bible Backwards: A.D. 30-40

August 27, 2014

"No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.  No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins (Luke 24:37-38).  The new faith that grew in the hearts and minds of those first followers of Jesus of Nazareth was first poured into the existing wineskin of Judaism.  For a time the new and the old shared a home in the temple in Jerusalem and in the synagogues of the Roman world.  Ultimately, however, the pressure produced by all the fermentation required a separate skin and the two faiths went their separate ways.  The old wineskin of Judaism wasn't burst--it still holds the ancient faith of the Jews, but a new wineskin was created in that first seventy years or so after the crucifixion.  Two thousand years of aging have brought us to today.  Seventy years ago a new bubble appeared in the Christian wineskin; we call it MBBC.  Over the next few weeks we'll look at the seventy years at the beginning of Christian history while we celebrate the seventy years of MBBC's existence.  Those of us who live on this end of history owe those early Christians a great debt; at the cost of their very lives they kept the Faith.
Our story will move from those early years we shared with Judaism through the geographical explosion of Christian congregations into the Gentile world and the invention of a new literary form we call "gospels" to tell the story of Jesus.  War between Jews and Romans darkened the birthplace of Christianity as both Christians and Jews suffered the loss of all things physical.  The great war hastened the physical and spiritual separation of Christianity from Judaism, and there was a final hardening of lines by the synagogues that made it very difficult if not impossible, for Jewish Christians to continue to attend.  The story of our first seventy years at MBBC  is fascinating and shares a few of the characteristics of that first Jerusalem congregation.  For one thing, both MBBC and the first Christian churches were house-churches without a stand-alone church building.  Thankfully, however, our story does not involve the terrible suffering faced by the earliest Christians.  In this first session we'll try to identify the most significant events in the very first decade after Jesus' crucifixion from about 30 to 40 A.D.

Dating Events in the First Ten Years?
The generally accepted date for the crucifixion is Friday, April 7th of the year 30 A.D.  The major events between A.D. 30 and 40 that are recorded in the book of Acts are:
A.D. 30- Peter's sermon on the first Pentecost and the rapid addition of believers to the initial band of disciples
A.D. 31-32-the election of "deacons" to address administrative issues related to food distribution
A.D. 33-34-the stoning of Stephen and the resulting scattering of believers from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria (and beyond?)
A.D. 37-Saul receives his vision of Christ in Damascus
A.D. 40-Saul's first introduction to Peter and James in Jerusalem

Luke, who wrote Acts, does not actually give us dates for these events, and we can't be absolutely certain that the dates listed above are correct.  We don't know, for example, how many months or years went by before the first deacons were chosen.   Enough time elapsed for problems to arise within the community.  Paul (Saul) says that his first visit to see Peter (Cephas) and James was three years after his Damascus Road experience (Galatians 1:18), but we don't know when he had his vision.  Obviously Paul's Damascus Road experience came after he witnessed the stoning of Stephen, but we don't know the date of Stephen's death.  These dates have to be calculated by going backwards from some certain dates in Paul's missionary trips and we can only give a range for these early dates.  But with the understanding that we may be a few months off either way, we can be confident in the dates.  (1)
It is obvious that Pentecost and Paul are the two big events in these first ten years, at least as far as datable events go.  Not every significant event can be dated, however, and it will be helpful if we can put ourselves back in Jerusalem in those months and early years after the crucifixion.

The Church and The Temple
Across the centuries Judaism and Christianity have allowed the wall of separation (2) that was once torn down to be rebuilt.  It is hard for us today to think of ourselves as Jews--but Jesus and every one of the original followers of Jesus were Jews.  Jesus, his disciples and members of his family were in Jerusalem to observe the Jewish festival of Passover when Jesus was arrested and crucified.  These original followers of Jesus did not stop being Jews because Jesus was crucified.  Luke tells us that the entire group numbered about one hundred and twenty people.  He names specifically the eleven remaining disciples, an unspecified number of women, Mary the mother of Jesus and the four brothers of Jesus.  In the Gospels we are not introduced to the other disciples by name, but Luke tells of Jesus sending out the "seventy" ahead of him to the villages they were approaching (Luke 10:1-12).  It seems likely that the group of one hundred twenty in Jerusalem after the crucifixion included those people who had been followers already.  Every one of those disciples was a Jew.
Luke says that immediately after the crucifixion the daily life of these disciples involved "attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes" (Acts 2:46).   The temple complex included the large area around the temple with its covered and colonnaded porticoes.  There would have been room in these outer walkways for the entire group of disciples to gather.  The temple activities would have included morning and evening sacrifices plus the recitation of prayers and psalms by the priests.  Luke tells us that Peter and John "were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour" (Acts 3:1) when they encountered a lame man who was then healed.  They subsequently taught those who had gathered to witness the excitement about Jesus.   The miracles did not occur every day, but the teaching and witnessing apparently did.  The public worship of these early Christians was worship in the Jewish temple (and perhaps in synagogues but Luke does not tell us of a single occasion when the early Christians went to a synagogue).  Throughout this first ten year period of the early church every Christian was also a Jew and distinctively Christian practices were added to existing Jewish ones.

The Addition of New Believers (3)
Luke makes it clear that many people accepted the message of Peter and others in the days shortly after the crucifixion.  Luke says "the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved" (Acts 2:47).  Acts 2 tells the familiar story of the first major event in the life of the early church (4) on the day of Pentecost when these Christians were filled with the spirit and people from all over the Roman world heard their testimony.  When these visitors returned to their native lands, they took the message of Jesus with them and the seeds of the Christian faith were planted in many lands.  Luke tells us that "about three thousand souls" were added to the church as a result of Peter's preaching on Pentecost.  Luke says that "those who received his word were baptized," but he did not give us any indication of who baptized these converts or what process the group followed in accepting new members.  How the small band of Christians assimilated the overwhelming number of new believers we do not know.
According to Luke's account in Acts, the earliest Christian group "had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need" (Acts 2:44-45).  That description of the early church as a  "community of goods" has been the subject of intense scholarly debate and study. (5)   The Gospels suggest that Jesus and the disciples lived in a similar way with Judas being the treasurer for the group. (6)  Whatever the exact level of private ownership involved, (7) it is clear that these Christians cared for each other and shared their goods with their brothers and sisters.  It is not clear how long this arrangement prevailed, but it was doubtless in place throughout the first ten years of the church.

Re-Reading the Bible
One of the most significant events of these early years is not something we can put on a particular day or year, but there is ample evidence for it.  Although the Gospels indicate that Jesus clearly rejected the role of the traditional Messiah, the disciples apparently did not get that message.  Jesus rebuked Peter for his misunderstanding (Matthew 16:23), but immediately after the crucifixion Luke writes that two of the disciples "had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."  Those hopes were crushed by Jesus' death.  Even some weeks after the crucifixion, Peter insisted that Judas be replaced to bring the number of apostles back to the number of the tribes of Israel (Acts 2:15-26).  This seems to suggest that the disciples still thought in terms of a redemption of the nation, Israel.
Beginning with the education of those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, those early Christians had to re-read their Bible, our Old Testament.  Once they became convinced that God had raised Jesus from the dead, they began to comb the Old Testament to see if a crucified and risen Messiah could be found there; they read their Bible backwards.   And, indeed, he could!  Luke has recorded the gist of Peter's sermon on Pentecost, and his preaching shows what they found when they re-read the Bible.  Peter found that Psalm 16 said, "thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let thy Holy One see corruption."    The disciples read that verse in the light of their experience of a resurrected Jesus, and it said something it had not said before!  Now they understood that the Psalmist "foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.  This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses" (Acts 2:31-32).  Suddenly the Bible came alive for the disciples.  Had they not found Jesus in their Bibles, surely no one would have believed that the cross was part of God's plan.  But, as a result of their powerful re-interpretation of the scriptures, "many of those who heard the word believed...(Acts 4:4).

Confronting the Power Structure
There were others listening besides the crowds of people whose hearts were convicted when Peter accused them of denying "the Holy and Righteous One" and killing "the Author of Life" (Acts 3:14).  Many in the crowds were convicted of their guilt and repented, but the temple officials and the Sadducees were "annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead" (Acts 4:2).  It had been only two or three months since that terrible Friday when Jesus was crucified.  Only the women who loved Jesus could risk being associated with him that day.  The same temple police who arrested Jesus were still in charge.  It must have taken great courage for Peter and John to stand in the temple courtyard and publicly condemn the leadership of the temple for the murder of Jesus.  One of the things that can't be missed in the early chapters of Acts is the danger Peter and his colleagues faced by publicly accusing the temple leaders of criminal actions and affirming God's intervention to raise Jesus from the dead.  The temple police arrested Peter and John and commanded them "not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus" (Acts 4:18).  After being released Peter continued to teach the crowds in the temple, and he was arrested again.  The High Priest charged, "you intend to bring this man's blood upon us" (Acts 5:22) to which Peter responded, "The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree.  God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior...and we are witnesses" (Acts 5:31-32).  The temple leadership was outraged by Peter's charge and probably would have executed Peter had it not been for a wise Pharisee named Gamaliel who talked them out of it.  So the confrontation with the authorities continued.
Within four or five years of the crucifixion, many people like those who heard the Gospel in other languages on Pentecost had joined the group.  Some of these Jews from outside Israel spoke Greek rather than Aramaic, and the church appointed seven "deacons" (all with Greek names and one who was not a Jew by birth but by choice) to minister to these Hellenists. (8)  One of these deacons was Stephen, and it is clear from Luke's record of his sermon that Stephen argued the case against the temple officials even more vigorously than did Peter:
 “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.  Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered,  you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it” (Acts 7:51-53).
Stephen was stoned to death after making his charge against the established leadership and, understandably, members of the church in Jerusalem "were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria" (Acts 8:1).  If the temple leadership had wanted to contain the new movement they did precisely the wrong thing!

Paul's Vision of Jesus
Who could have predicted that one of the men who watched the gruesome murder of Stephen, and condoned it, would ultimately be the theologian who helped the world understand what Jesus' death meant?  Yet that is exactly what happened.  Within six or seven years of Jesus' crucifixion there were Christians throughout the land of Israel and in the synagogues of the great city of Damascus one hundred and thirty-five miles to the north.  In all likelihood Christian believers had also made their way three hundred miles south to Alexandria in Egypt which was destined to become one of the major centers of the Christian faith.  But in these two major centers as well as in Jerusalem, Christians were still Jews as well.  The Jewish leadership in Jerusalem was outraged by the charges leveled against them by the Christians, and they were just as angered by the assertions that Jesus had been raised from the dead because the Sadducees denied that there would be a resurrection.  Thus they permitted Paul (the Greek name for Saul) to hunt down members of "the Way" both in Jerusalem and in Damascus, and it was on the road to Damascus where one of the most revolutionary events in the first ten years of the Christian faith occurred.  The man on his way to hunt down Christians was himself struck down by a blinding light and a voice that changed his life.
There is so much we wish Luke had been able to tell us.  Who was the man named "Judas" to whose house Paul was taken in Damascus.  Does Luke know his name because he became a Christian and was remembered?  How many Christians were there among the Jewish community in Damascus?  How did they learn about Paul's experience?  How long did it take for word to get back to the temple leadership in Jerusalem about what had happened?  How (and when) did Ananias become a Christian?  When Paul later told of this event he said of Ananias that he was "a devout man according to the law, well spoken of by all the Jews who lived there..."(Acts 22:12).  It does not sound as if Ananias was a newcomer to Damascus who had fled from Jerusalem!
One can only speculate about  what  went on in Paul's life that brought him to his knees far to the north.   Luke does not say, but one wonders how the sight of that brutal murder of Stephen affected Paul.  Did it weigh on his heart?  Did it make him ready to hear the voice of Jesus?  Perhaps over the weeks or months between that execution and Paul's trip, Stephen's sermon caused Paul to re-read the Old Testament for himself.  And perhaps the image of that battered body kept haunting him.
One can only guess at what might have happened to Paul had his vision come to him while he was within reach of the temple police in Jerusalem!  After Paul's encounter with Jesus in his vision he did not --probably could not--return to Jerusalem for three years. It appears that the temple authorities in Jerusalem asked King Aretas of Nabataea who had control of Damascus to arrest Paul and send him back to them, and he tried to do so but failed. (9)

Conclusion
The first ten years of the Christian church comes to a close with Paul being sent out of Israel and back to his home town of Tarsus because those who murdered Stephen wanted to do the same to him (Acts 9:29).  Likewise, Peter, who had escaped from prison in Jerusalem, had to leave the city (Acts 12:17) and go to Caesarea which was controlled by the Romans.  There were Christians who stayed in Jerusalem even in the face of this extreme hostility and they were still observant Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah.  The departure of Simon Peter opened the way for new leadership and James, the brother of Jesus, became the head of the church.
The first decade was dominated by appearances of Jesus that convinced the disciples that God had raised him from the dead.  This lead to a re-reading of the Bible and confrontation with the temple leaders which cost Stephen his life and forced Peter out of Jerusalem.  And a final appearance of Jesus to a zealous Pharisee on a murderous mission set the stage for the rest of the story.

1.  In addition to these dates for events in Israel it might be helpful to get some reference points for the Roman World.  Jesus was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus.  Tiberius assumed the role of emperor in A.D. 14 and was the emperor throughout the ministry of Jesus.  He died in A.D. 37 and was replaced by Caligula.

2.  Paul asserted that "he [Jesus] is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility..." (Ephesians 2:14).  There was a wall around the Temple in Jerusalem in which there were signs warning non-Jews not to enter the sacred area.  Paul saw that wall as a symbol of everything that kept Gentiles from sharing in the covenant promises that Jews enjoyed.

 3. James D. G. Dunn, Beginning From Jerusalem [Vol 2 of Christianity in the Making] (Wm B. Eerdmans, 2009), 9, Footnote 29.  Dunn surveys seventeen terms that are used to name Christians in the New Testament.  The term believers best captures what the earliest Christians thought themselves to be. Note the references: those who believe-Acts 2.44; Rom. 3:2; I Cor. I 4. 22; I Thes. I. 7: 2.10, 13;  those who believed/became believers - Acts 2.44, 4.32;  2 Thes. 1.1 0;  those who had become (and remained) believers-Act 15.5, 18.27, 19. 18, 21.20. 25;  believing/faithful - Acts 16.1. 15: I Cor. 7.25: 2 Cor. 6. 15: I Tim. 4.10, 5. 16; 6.2, Tit. 1.6;  the believers/faithful - Acts I0.45; 12.30; l Tim. 4.3. 12.

4.  It is not clear when the early Christians began to call themselves a "church" (the Greek word is ekklesia).  The word simply means an "assembly."  The word "synagogue" means the same thing and is used by Luke to name the Jewish assemblies.

 5. Brian Capper, 'The Palestinian Cultural Context of Earliest Christian Community of Goods' from The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1995), ed. R. J.  Bauckham (volume 4 of The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting), pp. 323-356.

 6. "The gospels seem to suggest that Jesus and the Twelve formed such a community
(...John 12:6, 13:29); the early chapters of Acts portray the disciples as continuing to live in this
way after the Ascension." JustinTaylor, "The Community of Goods among the First Christians and among the Essenes"  in  Historical Perspectives: From the Hasmoneans to Bar  Kokhba in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls,  Edited by David Goodblatt, Avital Pinnick, and Daniel R. Schwartz (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000) 147-164 .

 7 .Acts 2:46 describes the disciples as "breaking bread in their homes" indicating that they had individual houses and did not live together as a group.  We get the impression from the Gospels that all early Christians were in Galilee, but it seems that at least some of that group were from Jerusalem and its suburbs of Emmaus and Bethany.  We are not told where Mary and Jesus' brothers lived in Jerusalem or how they earned enough to live.

  8.The Hellenists appear one more time in Acts 9:29 but this time they are Jews who have not become Christians.  It may be that these "Hellenists" came from the same synagogues that put Stephen to death:  the synagogues of the Cyrenians, the Alexandrians and the Cilicians (Acts 6:9).

 9. Paul wrote to the Galatians that he waited three years to return to Jerusalem (Galatians 1:18-19).  To the Corinthians he wrote:  "At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped his hand" (2 Corinthians 11:32-33).