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)