Clement of Rome

1. c. AD 30–33Pentecost in JerusalemFifty days after Passover, with the city packed for the feast, the Holy Spirit falls on about a hundred and twenty believers in an upstairs room. Peter preaches in the street and about three thousand are baptized (Acts 2). The two candidate years depend on which date you take for the crucifixion. AD 30 and AD 33 both fit the astronomy.
2. c. AD 32–35Stephen is stoned and the church scattersStephen, one of seven men chosen to oversee the daily food distribution, is dragged outside Jerusalem and stoned. A young Pharisee named Saul stands guard over the coats. Believers flee into Judea and Samaria, and preach wherever they land, which is how Philip ends up baptizing Samaritans and an Ethiopian official on the desert road (Acts 6–8).
3. c. AD 34Saul of Tarsus meets Jesus on the Damascus roadCarrying arrest warrants for Christians in Damascus, Saul is struck to the ground by a light and a voice. A frightened local believer named Ananias is sent to lay hands on him. Saul is baptized, spends time in Arabia and back home in Tarsus, and does not become the church's most famous missionary for another decade (Acts 9; Galatians 1).
4. c. AD 38–45The door opens to the nations, and Antioch names the movementPeter is sent to the household of Cornelius, a Roman officer in Caesarea, and watches the Spirit fall on uncircumcised Gentiles exactly as at Pentecost (Acts 10). In Antioch, the third-largest city of the empire, up the Syrian coast, believers begin preaching to Greeks as well as Jews, and the crowd there coins the nickname "Christians" (Acts 11:26).
5. c. AD 46–48The first missionary journeyThe Antioch church sends out Barnabas and Saul, with young John Mark along. They cross Cyprus, then push inland to Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. At Lystra Paul is stoned and left for dead; he gets up and keeps going (Acts 13–14).
6. c. AD 49The Jerusalem CouncilThe leaders meet to settle the question that could have broken the church in two: must a Gentile become a Jew in order to follow the Jewish Messiah? Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and James the brother of Jesus all speak, and the answer is no (Acts 15). Somewhere near these years the Roman writer Suetonius records that Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, which is how Paul later meets the exiled couple Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth (Acts 18:2). Suetonius gives no date; the year AD 49 comes from the much later historian Orosius, and some scholars put the expulsion in AD 41 instead.
7. AD 51–52Paul before Gallio in CorinthPaul spends about eighteen months in Corinth and is hauled before the proconsul Gallio, who throws the case out (Acts 18:12–17). A broken inscription found at Delphi fixes Gallio's year in office, and that stone is the firmest peg in the whole New Testament calendar, nearly every other date in this era is measured back and forth from it.
8. c. AD 52–55Three years in EphesusPaul teaches daily in a rented lecture hall belonging to a man named Tyrannus, and the message spreads out along the roads of the province. It spreads far enough to hurt the trade in silver shrines of Artemis, and a silversmith named Demetrius starts a riot in the great theater (Acts 19).
9. c. AD 57–62Arrest in Jerusalem, then Rome in chainsPaul is seized in the temple courts, held two years at Caesarea, appeals to Caesar as a Roman citizen, is shipwrecked off Malta, and finally reaches Rome. Acts ends with him under house arrest, chained to a soldier, still preaching to everyone who comes to the door (Acts 21–28).
10. AD 62James, the brother of Jesus, is killed in JerusalemThe Jewish historian Josephus reports that the high priest Ananus used a gap between Roman governors to convene a court and have James stoned, and that fair-minded citizens in the city objected. Josephus calls him "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ," and that is an outside witness to a leader the New Testament also names (*Antiquities* 20.200).
11. AD 64Fire burns Rome and Nero blames the ChristiansThe Roman historian Tacitus says Nero pinned the fire on a group "hated for their abominations," and describes them being torn by dogs, crucified, and burned as torches (*Annals* 15.44). Tradition, early and widely held, but tradition, puts the deaths of both Peter and Paul in Rome during these years, Peter crucified and Paul beheaded.
12. AD 66–70Revolt, siege, and the destruction of the templeJudea rises against Rome; four years later the legions under Titus break into Jerusalem and the temple burns. Eusebius passes on a tradition that the believers there had already fled the city for Pella across the Jordan. The sacrificial system stopped that summer and has never restarted.
13. c. AD 95–96A letter from Rome, and a vision from PatmosThe church at Rome writes to the church at Corinth to settle a leadership quarrel, the letter we call 1 Clement, one of the two oldest Christian writings we have outside the New Testament. The other is the Didache, whose date is disputed and may be earlier still. In the same decade, by the tradition Irenaeus reports, John is exiled to the small island of Patmos and receives the Revelation.
14. c. AD 100The last apostle dies at EphesusIrenaeus, who as a boy had heard Polycarp, and Polycarp had heard John, says the apostle lived at Ephesus into the reign of Trajan, which began in AD 98. With John's death the generation that had seen and touched the risen Jesus is gone, and everything now depends on what they wrote and whom they taught.

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