The story
A believer in AD 60 had no New Testament. He had the Hebrew Scriptures in a synagogue scroll, whatever letter of Paul his own church happened to own, and the memory of people who had met Jesus. If he wanted to check a teaching he asked a man who had been there.
It begins in a rented upstairs room with about a hundred and twenty people waiting, because Jesus had told them to wait. At the feast of Pentecost, with Jerusalem crowded by pilgrims from every direction, the Spirit comes with a sound like wind and what looked like fire. Peter, the man who had denied he even knew Jesus a few weeks earlier, stands up in the street and preaches Him as risen Lord. About three thousand are baptized that day (Acts 2).
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”The marching order Jesus gave before He left, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth, and Acts is simply the story of that sentence coming true.
The first church was a Jerusalem church, and it looked Jewish. Believers kept meeting in the temple courts at the hours of prayer, then broke bread in one another's houses. They pooled money so that no one among them went without, and the apostles taught daily. Growth brought the first practical crisis almost at once: Greek-speaking widows were being missed in the food handouts, so seven men were appointed to run it, Stephen among them.
Stephen argued in the synagogues of the Greek-speaking Jews, lost no argument, and was dragged outside the walls and stoned. A young Pharisee named Saul kept the coats of the men who threw the rocks. The persecution that followed drove believers out of Jerusalem, and that scattering, meant to end the movement, is what spread it. Philip preached in Samaria and baptized a court official from Ethiopia on a desert road, and the message was suddenly outside Judea.
For we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”Peter and John, ordered by the council to stop preaching, answer that they cannot help speaking about what they have seen and heard; that refusal is what most of these witnesses eventually died for.
The next barrier was bigger than geography. Peter, sent by a vision to the house of a Roman officer named Cornelius in Caesarea, watched the Spirit fall on Gentiles who had never been circumcised, and had no answer except to baptize them (Acts 10). In Antioch, believers started preaching to Greeks on purpose. The city gave the movement its nickname, "Christians," Christ-people, and it stuck, though at first it was probably not meant kindly.
Antioch also sent out the missionaries. Barnabas and Saul, with John Mark, sailed for Cyprus around AD 46 and then went inland through the Galatian towns. The pattern almost never varied: find the synagogue, preach Jesus from the Scriptures the audience already trusted, gather whoever believes: Jews first, then the Gentile "God-fearers" who hung around the edges of synagogue life. Paul was stoned at Lystra and left for dead, got up, and walked back into the city.
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,Paul hands on a summary he says he first received from believers before him, Christ died for our sins, which makes this the oldest statement of the faith we can put our hands on.
The roads and the sea lanes did the rest. Rome had spent a century building paved highways and clearing pirates out of the Mediterranean, and a traveler could cross from Jerusalem to Rome in a few weeks on one passport and one language, the common Greek that a Judean tentmaker and a Corinthian dockworker both spoke. Jewish communities were already settled in nearly every port and provincial capital, each with a synagogue, and each synagogue was a ready-made first audience. The gospel traveled the empire's own arteries.
Where it landed, it met in houses. There were no church buildings for a long time, believers gathered in a courtyard or a dining room, thirty or forty at most, around a shared meal. That is why the letters name so many hosts: Priscilla and Aquila, who moved from Rome to Corinth to Ephesus and carried a church with them each time; Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth at Philippi; Nympha in Colossae; Philemon. It also meant the movement had no headquarters to raid, you could arrest a household and the church down the street kept meeting.
I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Greek.The gospel is for the Jew first and also for the Greek, the conviction behind the Jerusalem Council and behind every road Paul walked.
The Gentile turn forced a decision no one could dodge, and around AD 49 the leaders met in Jerusalem to make it. The question was whether a Greek had to take on circumcision and the law of Moses to belong to the Messiah of Israel. Peter told what he had seen at Cornelius's house, Paul and Barnabas reported what God had done among the nations, and James, the brother of Jesus, now leading the Jerusalem church, gave the ruling: do not make it harder for them (Acts 15). It kept the church one body instead of two.
The costs were not abstract. James the son of Zebedee was executed by Herod Agrippa I in AD 44, the first apostle to die. Paul once summarized his own record almost impatiently, five floggings of thirty-nine lashes, three beatings with rods, three shipwrecks, a night and a day in open water (2 Corinthians 11). In AD 62 the high priest Ananus used a gap between Roman governors to have James the brother of Jesus stoned; Josephus, who was no Christian, reports that decent people in the city were disgusted by it.
The era's writings, 1 to 3 of 8: each with its date and one line on what it holds.
| Writing | Date | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| The letters of Paul | c. AD 49–65 | Real mail to real congregations, dictated to a scribe and carried by hand; 1 Thessalonians is usually reckoned the earliest surviving Christian writing of any kind. |
| The four Gospels | c. AD 65–95 | Written accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, put on paper as the eyewitnesses began to die; most place Mark first and John last, though the range is debated. |
| Acts of the Apostles | c. AD 62–85 (disputed) | Luke's second volume, and the only inside narrative of this era we possess, without it we would know the shape of these seventy years only in fragments. The book stops with Paul alive under house arrest and says nothing of his death, Nero's persecution, or the fall of the temple, which argues for the early 60s; many scholars still prefer the 70s or 80s. |
In July of AD 64 fire burned through Rome for days, and Nero needed someone to blame. Tacitus, writing about fifty years later and with no sympathy for the victims, describes Christians torn by dogs, nailed up, and set alight to light the emperor's gardens (Annals 15.44). It is here that tradition places the deaths of Peter and Paul: Peter crucified, Paul beheaded outside the city as a Roman citizen. The New Testament never records either death; 1 Clement, written about thirty years afterward, is our earliest witness, and it speaks of their suffering without describing it.
Six years later the other center fell. Judea revolted in AD 66, and in AD 70 the legions of Titus broke into Jerusalem and burned the temple, exactly as Jesus had said would happen (Matthew 24:2). Eusebius preserves a tradition that the believers had already left for Pella, east of the Jordan. Whatever the details, the effect was permanent: the sacrifices stopped, the mother church lost its city, and the faith's center of gravity moved out into the empire and never moved back.
The era's writings, 4 to 6 of 8: each with its date and one line on what it holds.
| Writing | Date | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| The general letters and Revelation | c. AD 50–95 | Hebrews, James, 1–2 Peter, the three letters of John, Jude, and the Revelation, written to scattered believers under pressure rather than to one city. |
| The Didache ("The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles") | disputed; c. AD 50–120 | A short handbook on baptism, fasting, the Lord's Supper, and how to tell a true traveling teacher from a freeloader; lost for centuries and rediscovered in a Constantinople library manuscript in 1873. |
| 1 Clement | c. AD 95–96 | A long letter from the Roman church urging the Corinthians to reinstate elders they had pushed out, and, in passing, the earliest witness to the deaths of Peter and Paul. |
How do we know any of this? Mostly from inside, Luke's Acts and the letters, which are the closest thing to a running record. But the outside evidence lines up in ways worth knowing: Tacitus and Suetonius on Nero and Claudius, Josephus on James and the siege, a stone at Delphi that dates Gallio's year in office and anchors the whole timeline, a pavement at Corinth naming a city official called Erastus that may well be the man Paul greets in Romans 16. And the writings themselves survive in more early copies than any other book of the ancient world; a scrap of John's Gospel found in Egypt is usually dated to the first half of the AD 100s. The dates in this era are careful reconstructions, not certainties, but the shape of what happened is about as well attested as ancient history gets.
The era's writings, 7 to 8 of 8: each with its date and one line on what it holds.
| Writing | Date | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| The seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch | c. AD 107–110 | Written while he was marched to Rome to die; they sit just past this era's boundary, but their author was formed inside it and they show what the apostles' churches looked like a decade on. |
| Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War | AD 75–94 | Not a Christian source at all, but the historian who gives us Herod's family, the revolt, the siege of Jerusalem, and passing notices of John the Baptist, James, and Jesus. |
1 Corinthians 15:3, Romans 1:16