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.

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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.