Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
By the year 75, the two men who had done more than any others to carry the crucified Jewish messiah out of Judaea and into the imagination of the wider world were both dead. Peter, tradition insisted, had been crucified upside down across the Tiber, unwilling in his humility to die in the same posture as his Lord. Paul had gone the more dignified Roman way, beheaded on the Ostian Road, a citizen's privilege denied to lesser men. Nero, the emperor who had killed them both to give the Roman mob someone to blame for the fire that gutted half his capital in 64, was himself four years dead by his own hand, and the empire had spent a chaotic year cycling through four emperors before Vespasian, a bluff Sabine general, restored some order. In the same years, Vespasian's son Titus had ground Jerusalem into rubble, torn down the Temple whose destruction Jesus himself was remembered to have foretold, and marched its treasures through Rome in a triumph whose arch still stands. Judaism's ancient centre of gravity - sacrifice, priesthood, Temple - had been extinguished in fire and Roman siege engines. The young movement that had sprung from a Galilean carpenter's execution under Pontius Pilate had, by any reasonable actuarial expectation, arrived at the moment of its extinction. It had lost its founding pillars. It had lost the geographical and institutional womb - Jerusalem, the Temple, the mother church of James - from which it had first drawn breath. It was a suspect, illegal, foreign superstition with no emperor's favour, no army, no landholdings, and a founder who had been executed as a common criminal.
And yet the seventy-five years that followed - the span this folio covers, 75 to 150 AD - are the years in which Christianity did not die. It organised itself. It multiplied. It began to write down, sift, and treasure its own memory. It produced men willing to walk to Rome in chains composing love letters to death along the way. And it built, almost invisibly, the scaffolding - bishops, creeds, canon, liturgy - on which everything that would later be called Western civilisation would eventually be raised. This is the story of that unlikely survival.
The word "pope" did not yet mean what it would come to mean. There was no Vatican, no conclave, no claim yet fully articulated to universal jurisdiction. What existed in Rome was a small, watched, largely immigrant and freedman congregation meeting in private houses, led by a succession of elders whom later tradition - Irenaeus of Lyons, writing a century afterward, and the Liber Pontificalis compiled later still - arranged into a tidy numbered list. The list itself is a retrospective act of order-making, and its earliest entries are more securely attested than its precise dates. But the men are real, and their sequence tells its own story.
Clement of Rome, traditionally the third bishop after Peter (after Linus and Anacletus/Cletus), is the first to leave a text we can actually read. Around the year 96, with the persecuting emperor Domitian recently dead and the church at Corinth convulsed by a squalid internal power struggle - younger men had deposed older, legitimately appointed presbyters - Clement wrote a long letter of remonstrance from the Roman church to the Corinthian one. What is startling about 1 Clement is its assumption of authority: a church with no scriptural mandate to intervene nonetheless writes as though it has every right to instruct another church, hundreds of miles away, on how to order itself, invoking the pattern of Old Testament priesthood and the apostolic succession - bishops and deacons appointed by the apostles, who appointed successors in turn, "that when they should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed to their ministration." It is the earliest evidence outside the New Testament of a Roman church already thinking of itself as possessing a peculiar responsibility for the whole body of believers - the seed, whatever one makes of later claims, of Rome's primacy.
After Clement came Evaristus, then Alexander I, then Sixtus I, then Telesphorus - a name later tradition remembered as a martyr - then Hyginus, reaching just past our period into the 140s with Pius I. Their biographies are, frankly, almost blank to us; what matters is the fact of unbroken succession itself, carefully rehearsed a century later by Irenaeus precisely because it mattered to Christians that authority could be traced, name by name, back to men who had known the apostles.
Rome was not alone in this. In Antioch, the church that Acts tells us first gave the movement its name "Christian," a bishop named Ignatius governed with a ferocious, almost obsessive theology of the episcopate. For Ignatius - of whom much more below - the bishop was not merely an administrator but the visible guarantee of unity, the figure in whom the whole community was gathered up: "Do nothing without the bishop," he told the Christians of Tralles and Magnesia and Smyrna, in letter after letter, as though a still-forming institution needed the truth hammered in through sheer repetition. In Smyrna, a bishop named Polycarp - of whom, again, more below - held a see for decades, becoming a living bridge between the apostolic generation and the middle of the second century. In Jerusalem, remarkably, the leadership of the mother church had passed to Symeon, a cousin of Jesus, after James the Just had been murdered by the Sanhedrin around 62; Symeon is said to have led the Jerusalem Christians in their flight to Pella before the Roman siege closed the city, preserving a Jewish-Christian remnant that would nonetheless dwindle in significance as the movement's centre of gravity shifted decisively toward the Gentile, Greek-speaking cities of Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome itself.
What emerges from this scattered evidence is a pattern that would prove decisive for everything after: government by a single bishop in each city, advised by a council of presbyters and served by deacons, each see understanding itself as one link in a chain reaching back to an apostle, and each in loose, letter-writing communion with the others. No emperor designed this. No lawyer drafted it. It grew, house church by house church, out of sheer practical necessity and a shared conviction that the apostolic testimony had to be guarded, not reinvented, by every subsequent generation.
Of the Twelve, John was remembered as the last to die, reputedly at Ephesus, at some point around the end of the first century, having outlived every other apostle by decades. That longevity mattered enormously, because it meant John's personal memory bridged the entire gap this folio covers. Men who as young disciples had sat at his feet were, by 110 or 120 or even 150, elderly bishops themselves - living, breathing links to an eyewitness of the risen Christ, at exactly the moment such links were becoming irreplaceably scarce.
Two men above all carried that inheritance forward. Polycarp of Smyrna, according to Irenaeus (who as a boy had himself heard Polycarp preach and never forgot it), had been "instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ" - and specifically with John. Polycarp governed Smyrna for perhaps sixty years, dying an old man in the 150s, and in that long tenure he became something the young movement badly needed: a living guarantee that the faith being preached in the mid-second century was continuous with what the apostles had actually taught, not a Gnostic reinvention. When later heretical teachers tried to win him over, Irenaeus records Polycarp's blunt verdict on Marcion, father of one such heresy: "I know thee, the first-born of Satan." That was not merely temperament. It was the fierce protectiveness of a man who had heard the truth first-hand and would not see it adulterated.
Papias of Hierapolis, a contemporary of Polycarp and by his own account also a hearer of John (or possibly of "John the Elder," a distinct figure - the sources are genuinely tangled here, and honesty requires saying so), set himself the task of collecting, from those who had known the apostles or their immediate followers, everything he could of what "Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas or James, or by John or Matthew." His five-volume Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord survives only in fragments quoted by later writers, but those fragments are precious beyond their length, because Papias is our earliest external witness to the writing and authorship of the Gospels - he is the source, ultimately, for the tradition that Mark wrote down Peter's preaching and that Matthew compiled a collection of the Lord's sayings. Whatever one makes of the details, Papias represents something new and urgent in the Christian mind of this period: an anxiety, while living witnesses could still be consulted, to fix the oral memory before it dissolved.
This is the deeper significance of "John's disciples" for the Church's future. Christianity, unlike the mystery religions and philosophical schools with which it competed for converts, staked everything on a set of claims about specific, recent, checkable events - a man really executed, really seen alive afterward, by named people, in a named place, within living memory. The generation of Polycarp and Papias was the last generation that could personally youch for the chain of custody between the apostles and the Church of their own old age. That they used those decades so deliberately - writing, collecting, correcting, refusing corruption - is a large part of why the memory of Jesus reached the fourth century, and eventually us, in a form recognisably continuous with its origin rather than dissolved into competing myths.
To a Roman administrator in, say, 110, Christianity was a minor irritant - a superstitio, in Tacitus's contemptuous word, a "deadly superstition" that had broken out again after being checked, "not only in Judaea, the source of the evil, but even in Rome, where everything hideous and shameful in the world collects and becomes fashionable." Suetonius, writing under Hadrian, mentions "Chrestus" causing disturbances among Rome's Jews under Claudius and dismisses Christians as a class of men "given to a new and mischievous superstition." Neither writer thought the movement worth more than a sentence or two. That contempt is itself the measure of how little the empire's elite understood what was growing beneath its notice.
The clearest window we have onto the movement's actual reach comes not from a Christian source at all but from a nervous imperial governor. Around 112, Pliny the Younger, newly appointed to govern Bithynia-Pontus on the Black Sea coast, wrote to the emperor Trajan in some perplexity. Anonymous accusations had brought a flood of alleged Christians before his tribunal - so many, he reported, "of every age, every rank, and of both sexes," that "the contagion of this superstition has spread not only through the free cities, but into the villages and rural districts." Temples, he noted with evident relief, had begun to be frequented again and the sacrificial meat trade to revive, now that his prosecutions had frightened people back to the old gods - testimony, backhandedly, to how far Christian numbers had already cut into ordinary civic and religious life in provincial Anatolia. Under interrogation, apostates told Pliny that the Christians' worst crime was to meet before dawn on a fixed day, sing a hymn "to Christ as to a god," bind themselves by oath not to commit theft, adultery, or breach of trust, and later reassemble to share a common meal of "ordinary and harmless food." Trajan's rescript in reply - Christians were not to be hunted out, anonymous denunciations were to be ignored, but those who persisted when formally charged and refused to sacrifice were to be punished - became, in effect, imperial policy for the better part of a century: the Church was illegal, but its extermination was nobody's priority.
By the time Hadrian toured the eastern provinces in the 120s, the pattern was familiar enough that the proconsul of Asia, Minucius Fundanus, wrote asking for clearer guidance, and Hadrian's rescript in reply essentially reaffirmed Trajan's: due process, no mob justice, no reward for false accusers. The very existence of this bureaucratic correspondence tells us Christianity had become common enough, from Bithynia to Asia to Rome itself, to be a recurring administrative headache rather than a one-off nuisance.
Geographically and socially the movement was overwhelmingly urban and, in this period, still concentrated in the eastern Mediterranean - the string of cities Paul himself had evangelised two generations earlier: Ephesus, Smyrna, Philadelphia, Antioch, Corinth - with Rome as its principal western outpost. Converts were disproportionately drawn from artisans, freedmen, slaves, and traders rather than the senatorial elite, though Pliny's "every rank" suggests the net was already widening. Women, on the evidence of virtually every source from this period, played a conspicuous and often leading role - a fact pagan critics sneered at and modern historians have increasingly recognised as one of the movement's genuine points of appeal, offering women a dignity and communal standing that Greco-Roman religious and civic life rarely extended to them.
Persecution in this period was neither constant nor, by later standards, systematic - but it was real, and it was arbitrary in a way that made every Christian's daily life a low hum of risk. There was no empire-wide edict demanding Christian blood between Nero and the mid-third century; what there was, was worse in its way: a legal environment in which merely being known as a Christian, and refusing to burn incense to the genius of the emperor when formally challenged to do so, was a capital offence, triggered whenever a private accuser, a hostile mob, a natural disaster blamed on divine anger, or a bored provincial governor decided to invoke it.
The charges levelled against Christians in the popular imagination were lurid and largely fantastical, but they stuck with remarkable persistence: that the Eucharistic meal was cannibalism - eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a murdered infant; that the "kiss of peace" and nocturnal, sex-segregated meetings concealed incestuous orgies (a slander apparently generated by outsiders overhearing Christians address one another as "brother" and "sister"); that the refusal to worship the old gods amounted to atheism, and atheism courted divine wrath on the whole community - plague, famine, earthquake, barbarian incursion, all of it could be laid at the Christians' door. Tertullian would later capture the mood exactly, if slightly after our period: "If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile fails to rise to the fields, if the sky doesn't move or the earth does, if there is famine, if there is plague, the cry goes up at once: 'The Christians to the lion!'"
Domitian, ruling from 81 to 96, is remembered - not without some scholarly controversy over the scale involved - as a persecutor in the tradition of Nero, executing his own cousin Flavius Clemens on a charge of "atheism" and Jewish/Christian sympathies and exiling Clemens's wife Domitilla; it was against this backdrop, most scholars believe, that Clement wrote to steady the Corinthians and that the book of Revelation, with its vision of a beast demanding worship and its scorching hatred of imperial Rome as "Babylon," took the shape in which we have it. Trajan's rescript to Pliny, discussed above, then set the pattern that would govern the next century: no active manhunt, but death for anyone who, once formally accused, refused three times to recant. It was, in its way, a peculiarly cruel equilibrium - Christians were safe so long as no one troubled to denounce them, which meant that safety could evaporate at the whim of a resentful neighbour, a jealous business rival, or a crowd looking for someone to blame at the games.
What this pagan pushback failed to anticipate - and this is the great, almost comic irony of the period from a persecutor's point of view - is that it did not work. Every governor who applied Trajan's rescript in good faith was, without quite realising it, running a controlled experiment in what happens when you offer condemned men and women a simple way out - a pinch of incense, a curse against Christ - and watch how many take it. Startlingly, disturbingly to Roman sensibility, many did not.
No figure illustrates this better than Ignatius of Antioch, and no document from this period is more astonishing to read cold than the seven letters he wrote around 107-110 while under armed guard, being marched overland from Syria to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the arena. Rather than despair, Ignatius used the journey to write to the churches along his route - Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia, Smyrna - and to Polycarp personally, and the letters are a unique hybrid of pastoral urgency (guard unity, obey your bishop, beware teachers who deny Christ came in the flesh) and something close to ecstatic anticipation of his own death. To the Roman Christians, fearing they might use their influence to secure his release, he wrote perhaps the most unnerving sentence to survive from the early Church: "I am the wheat of God, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ... Let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can attain to God." He begged them not to intervene. It is not a text that reads as propaganda; it reads as a man working out, in real time and in genuine fear, how to make sense of an appalling death by fusing it completely with the Eucharist he had presided over a thousand times - his own body about to become, in the most literal sense he could imagine, an offering.
Ignatius's insistence, threaded through every letter, that Christ "was truly born, truly ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died... was also truly raised from the dead" was not idle repetition. It was aimed, letter after letter, at teachers who held - this is the heresy later called docetism - that Christ had only seemed to suffer, being too divine to sully himself with real flesh and real pain. Ignatius's blunt reply was that if Christ's suffering was mere appearance, then his own approaching death was meaningless, and so was every martyr's. The doctrine of a genuinely incarnate, genuinely dying, genuinely risen Christ and the courage of the martyrs turn out, in this period, to be two faces of a single conviction.
The pattern set by Ignatius - a bishop's death treated by the wider Church not as tragedy alone but as victory, worth recording, circulating, and commemorating - became the template for a genre. Telesphorus of Rome, ninth in the papal succession, is remembered by Irenaeus as the only one of the early Roman bishops to have died a martyr's death, sometime in the mid-130s. Symeon of Jerusalem, James's elderly cousin and successor as head of the Jerusalem church, was denounced as a descendant of David - dangerous royal blood in Roman eyes - tortured, and crucified around 107, reportedly at the age of 120. These deaths, one by one, were doing something the persecutors never intended: they were turning execution into evidence. If the faith was a fraud, why did those closest to its source - men one and two links removed from the apostles themselves - walk into the arena rather than mutter a formula and go home? Tertullian's famous later aphorism, "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," is not a retrospective sentimentality invented in more comfortable centuries; it is a plain description of what contemporaries, pagan and Christian alike, could already see happening in the towns of Asia Minor in the first half of the second century.
By 75 AD, no "New Testament" existed as a bound, agreed collection - but the raw material was already largely in hand and rapidly being treasured. Paul's letters, written decades earlier to specific quarrelling or struggling congregations, were already being copied, exchanged between churches, and read alongside each other; 2 Peter, writing perhaps near the end of our period, refers to "all his letters" and complains that "there are some things in them hard to understand," which people twist "as they do the other scriptures" - a remarkable, almost throwaway line that shows Paul's letters were already being read as scripture, on a par with the Jewish Bible, within living memory of his death. The four Gospels we know were composed in roughly this window or just before it - Mark generally dated to the 60s or early 70s, Matthew and Luke to the 80s, John to the 90s - and by the time Ignatius was writing in 107-110, he could quote or clearly allude to Matthew and, more strikingly, to Johannine language and theology, showing those texts were already circulating and shaping the vocabulary of bishops two provinces away from where they were written.
The most vivid glimpse of how this material was actually used comes from two texts that bookend our period. The Didache, or "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," a short church manual most scholars place around the turn of the second century (some earlier, some a little later - the dating is genuinely debated), gives startlingly concrete, practical instructions: how to baptise (in running water if possible, or poured over the head three times if not), how often to fast (Wednesdays and Fridays, precisely so as not to fast "with the hypocrites" on the Jewish Monday-and-Thursday schedule), and a Eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving over the cup and the broken bread - "as this broken bread was scattered over the hills and was gathered together and became one, so let your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom." It is liturgy caught in the act of formation, still fluid, still being worked out congregation by congregation.
At the far end of our period, writing just after 150 but describing practice already settled by then, Justin Martyr's First Apology gives the fullest account we have of a Sunday service recognisable, in its bones, as a Mass: the "memoirs of the apostles" (his term for the Gospels) or "the writings of the prophets" are read "as long as time permits," the presider gives a sermon of instruction and exhortation, the congregation stands for common prayer, bread and a cup of wine mixed with water are brought forward, the presider offers thanksgiving "at some length" over them, the people answer "Amen," and deacons distribute the now-consecrated elements to those present and carry portions to the absent. Justin adds, pointedly, that this food is not taken "as common bread and common drink," but is, "as we have been taught, the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh" - a doctrine of real, transformed presence stated as settled teaching, not innovation, only a few decades after the Didache's simpler thanksgiving formula.
Between these two texts sits the crisis that, more than any deliberate church council, forced Christians to start thinking self-consciously about a canon at all: Marcion. Arriving in Rome around 140 and expelled from its church by 144, Marcion proposed to strip Christianity of everything Jewish - rejecting the entire Old Testament, and keeping only a heavily edited Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul's letters, purged of anything he judged to be later Judaising corruption. The mainstream Church's furious rejection of Marcion - Polycarp's "first-born of Satan" jibe was aimed squarely at him - was also, willy-nilly, the moment the wider Church first had to say clearly, in public, which books it actually did regard as authoritative and why the Hebrew scriptures could not simply be discarded. Marcion meant to amputate the Church's Jewish inheritance; the effect of his challenge was to make that inheritance, and the growing collection of apostolic writings alongside it, something the Church now had to defend consciously rather than simply assume.
Underneath every other development in this folio - the bishops, the martyrs, the manuscripts, the liturgy - sits a single load-bearing conviction, without which none of the rest makes any sense at all: that a specific man, executed under a named Roman official in a datable year, had been bodily raised from the dead, and that this event had genuinely happened in history rather than merely symbolising some timeless spiritual truth. Every text surveyed above assumes it as bedrock. Clement, writing to Corinth, appeals to the resurrection of Christ as "the first fruits" guaranteeing a future resurrection of believers, reaching for the natural world - seed-time, the mythical phoenix reborn from its own ashes - as analogies for a claim he treats as beyond serious dispute among his readers. Ignatius, as we have seen, staked his own courage before the beasts on Christ's resurrection being every bit as physical and real as his crucifixion had been, explicitly attacking those who said Christ "suffered in semblance" and warning that such teachers, by the same logic, must also hold that his own martyrdom achieved nothing. Polycarp, in his own surviving letter to the Philippians, ties belief in the resurrection directly to ethical seriousness: "whosoever shall pervert the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts, and say that there is neither resurrection nor judgment... this man is the first-born of Satan" - the same phrase, tellingly, he would later fling at Marcion in person.
This insistence mattered because it cut directly against the grain of the sophisticated pagan and philosophical world Christianity was moving into. Educated Greco-Roman opinion, steeped in Platonic dualism, tended to regard the body as a burden the soul was well rid of at death; the idea that anyone, let alone a divine saviour, would want his flesh back was, to Paul's Athenian audience on the Areopagus decades earlier, the one point in his speech that provoked open mockery. Gnostic and docetic teachers, multiplying through exactly this period, offered educated converts a more palatable synthesis - a Christ who was pure spirit, whose apparent suffering and rising were symbolic lessons about escaping matter altogether. Mainstream Christianity, generation after generation, in document after document surveyed in this folio, refused that exit ramp, at real cost, since a spiritual, symbolic Christ could never have been worth dying for in an arena in Antioch or Smyrna, and everybody on both sides of the argument knew it.
The stakes of that refusal went further than any single doctrine, because a genuinely resurrected body implied that matter, flesh, and the created world were not a prison to escape but something God himself had judged worth reclaiming - a conviction that would, across the centuries this series intends to trace, underwrite everything from the dignity later Christian thought would insist belonged to the individual human body, to the eventual Western confidence that the physical world was orderly, good, and worth patient, rational study rather than mystical transcendence. That is a claim for later folios to earn properly rather than assert here. But its root sits exactly where this folio has spent its time: in the stubborn, repeated, costly insistence of Clement and Ignatius and Polycarp - men one handshake removed from Peter, from Paul, from John himself - that on a particular Sunday morning outside a particular city wall, a dead man got up.
Next in the series: Folio IV will follow the Church through the middle decades of the second century - the Bar Kokhba revolt and the final rupture between Judaism and Christianity, the rise of Gnosticism and Marcionism as internal crises, and the first Christian apologists who began to argue the faith's case before the educated pagan mind on its own philosophical terms.
1. Nero and the First Imperial Persecution
The great fire that consumed much of Rome over six days in July of AD 64 gave the Christian movement its first encounter with the machinery of the Roman state. Suetonius, writing some sixty years later, listed the punishment of Christians almost in passing among Nero's administrative acts, describing them as “a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition” (Suetonius, Nero 16.2, cited in Frend, 1965, p. 160). Tacitus supplies the fuller and more troubling account: unable to dispel rumours that he himself had ordered the fire, Nero “fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace,” convicting them, Tacitus adds pointedly, less for arson than for “hatred of the human race” (Tacitus, Annals 15.44, cited in Frend, 1965, pp. 162–165).
Some were sewn into animal skins and torn apart by dogs, others burned as human torches to light Nero's gardens by night. This was not, on the evidence available, a considered policy against a defined religion so much as an act of imperial scapegoating that happened to fall on a group already regarded with suspicion and contempt (Brown, 2003, pp. 20–22). It is nonetheless the persecution to which Christian tradition, from Eusebius onward, attaches the deaths of both Peter and Paul (Eusebius, 1989, II.25).
2. The Deaths of Peter, Paul, and the Other Apostles
Peter and Paul are remembered by Roman Christian tradition as having died in this same Neronian persecution, Peter by crucifixion — reportedly head downward, at his own insistence, as unworthy to die in the same posture as his Lord — and Paul, protected by his Roman citizenship from crucifixion, by beheading on the road to Ostia (Grant, 1994, pp. 197–204; Grant, 1976, pp. 142–145). Neither death is independently attested outside Christian and near-Christian sources, though the tradition is early and geographically consistent. The deaths of the other apostles rest on considerably thinner evidence. The earliest and best-attested apostolic martyrdom is in fact recorded in the New Testament itself: James, son of Zebedee, was beheaded on the order of Herod Agrippa I around AD 44, a full generation before Nero (Acts 12:1–2). James the Just, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, was stoned to death at the instigation of the high priest Ananus in AD 62, an episode confirmed by the Jewish historian Josephus independently of any Christian source (Josephus, Antiquities 20.9.1, cited in Schaff, 1889, pp. 397–399).
Beyond these two, the record thins into legend: Andrew's crucifixion in Achaea, Thomas's death by spear in India, Bartholomew's flaying in Armenia, and Matthew's martyrdom in Ethiopia rest on apocryphal Acts composed in the second and third centuries and cannot be treated as history in the same sense as the deaths of James or Peter and Paul (Ehrman, 2006, pp. 217–224). One genuine point of archaeological interest is the excavation, in 2011, of a first-century tomb at Hierapolis in Asia Minor, identified by its excavator as the burial place of the apostle Philip on the strength of a nearby fifth-century church built expressly to enshrine it — suggestive, though it confirms tradition rather than replacing it (Lane Fox, 1986, pp. 663–665). Of the Twelve, only John was remembered as having died of old age, at Ephesus, after an exile to Patmos traditionally associated with Domitian's reign (Revelation 1:9; Eusebius, 1989, III.23).
3. Persecution in the Wider First Century
It is worth resisting the natural tendency to read the whole of the first century through the lens of Nero's cruelty. Outside the specific crisis of AD 64, persecution of Christians in this period was local, sporadic, and socially rather than administratively driven, arising from mob hostility, synagogue disputes, or the personal animus of a provincial official rather than from any settled imperial statute (Frend, 1965, pp. 154–158). The tradition of a second, empire-wide persecution under Domitian in the 90s AD, long a fixture of popular church history, rests on remarkably weak foundations: no pagan writer of the period accuses Domitian of persecuting Christians as such, and the fullest ancient account, in Eusebius, was written more than two centuries after the fact and draws on sources that scholars now regard as unreliable (Frend, 1965, pp. 210–216).
What can be said with more confidence is that by the closing years of the century, the movement had grown large and visible enough to attract official curiosity: writing to the emperor Trajan in around AD 111–112, the provincial governor Pliny the Younger reported Christians in significant numbers across Bithynia-Pontus and asked, in effect, for a policy where none yet existed — itself telling evidence that Rome had, by then, no settled way of dealing with a movement it had barely needed to notice a generation before (Pliny, Letters 10.96, cited in Frend, 1965, pp. 217–220).
4. Christian Numbers by the End of the First Century
Any figure offered for the size of the Christian population around AD 100 must be treated as an informed estimate rather than a count. The sociologist Rodney Stark, modelling growth from an assumed base of roughly 1,000 believers around AD 40 at a sustained rate of about forty per cent per decade — a rate well within the range documented for successful new religious movements in the modern era — arrives at a figure in the range of 7,000 to 25,000 Christians by AD 100, rising to several million only after AD 250 (Stark, 1996, pp. 3–7). The classicist Keith Hopkins, working from different assumptions about urban demography and the practical limits on communication and travel, reached broadly comparable orders of magnitude while stressing how fragile any such estimate necessarily is (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 185–191). What both accounts agree on is the essential point: at the end of the first century, Christianity remained a small, overwhelmingly urban, and geographically scattered minority movement, numbered in the low thousands at most, entirely reliant for its future on several more centuries of the same steady, unspectacular growth (Harnack, 1908, I, pp. 1–9).
5. The Expansion of Paul’s Churches
The congregations Paul had planted in Galatia, Macedonia, and Achaia did not simply persist after his death; they became, in effect, the seed points from which the wider Gentile mission continued to radiate. His letters, copied and circulated among sister congregations — Paul himself instructs the Colossians to exchange letters with the church at Laodicea (Colossians 4:16) — gave the scattered Pauline churches a shared body of teaching and a habit of mutual correspondence that outlasted any single missionary's lifetime (Meeks, 1983, pp. 74–80). By the time Pliny wrote to Trajan from Bithynia, a province Paul himself had been prevented by “the Spirit of Jesus” from entering in person (Acts 16:7), Christian communities were nonetheless well established there, evidence that the missionary momentum Paul had started continued to carry the movement into regions he had never personally reached (1 Peter 1:1; Harnack, 1908, II, pp. 224–230).
The overall pattern was one of expansion along the same urban, trade-route logic that had guided Paul's own itinerary: from provincial capitals outward into surrounding towns, carried less by formal missionary strategy than by ordinary believers — traders, freedmen, migrating households — for whom the new faith travelled as naturally as any other part of their social world (Stark, 1996, pp. 20–21).
6. Paul’s Disciples and Their Missions
Paul rarely worked alone, and the network of co-workers named throughout his letters became, after his death, the mechanism by which his churches were sustained. Timothy, a native of Lystra and Paul's closest lieutenant, was left in charge at Ephesus and was remembered by later tradition as its first bishop (1 Timothy 1:3; Bruce, 1977, pp. 441–445). Titus was similarly entrusted with organising the churches of Crete, appointing elders “in every town” (Titus 1:5). Priscilla and Aquila, a married couple who had worked alongside Paul in Corinth and Ephesus, hosted congregations in their own home in at least three cities and are credited by Acts with instructing the eloquent Alexandrian teacher Apollos more accurately in the faith (Acts 18:2–26; Meeks, 1983, pp. 61–64). Epaphras carried the gospel to Colossae, Laodicea, and Hierapolis in the Lycus valley, congregations Paul had never visited in person (Colossians 1:7; 4:12–13).
Onesimus, the runaway slave of Philemon whose return Paul negotiates in his shortest surviving letter, was remembered by Ignatius of Antioch a generation later as bishop of Ephesus, a detail that, if accurate, traces a remarkable arc from bondage to ecclesiastical leadership within a single lifetime (Ignatius, Ephesians 1–2, in Staniforth and Louth, 1987, pp. 60–62). Luke, physician and companion of Paul's later journeys, is credited with the third Gospel and with Acts itself, the narrative that supplies most of what is known of this entire network (Acts 16:10; Bruce, 1977, pp. 244–246).
7. The Structure of the Early Church
The earliest Christian communities were charismatic in character before they were institutional: Paul's letters describe congregations ordered around spiritual gifts — prophecy, teaching, healing, administration — rather than fixed office (1 Corinthians 12:4–11). Even so, the seeds of formal structure appear early. Acts records the appointment of seven men, among them Stephen, to oversee the daily distribution of food to Greek-speaking widows, a practical measure usually treated as the origin of the diaconate (Acts 6:1–6). By the time of the letters to Timothy and Titus, probably written in Paul's name toward the century's end if not by Paul himself, the vocabulary of settled office — episkopos (overseer), presbyteros (elder), diakonos (servant or deacon) — is well established, complete with lists of moral qualifications for each (1 Timothy 3:1–13; Titus 1:5–9).
The Didache, a church manual probably compiled in its present form around the turn of the century, still assumes a mixed leadership of travelling apostles and prophets alongside local, elected “bishops and deacons,” and explicitly urges congregations not to look down on these local officers merely because they lacked the glamour of the itinerant charismatics (Didache 15, in Staniforth and Louth, 1987, pp. 197–198). The final step in this development, the concentration of local authority in a single bishop assisted by a council of elders, is visible in sharp outline just after our period closes, in the letters Ignatius of Antioch wrote on his way to martyrdom in Rome, in which he insists that nothing be done in a congregation without its bishop's knowledge (Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 8, in Staniforth and Louth, 1987, p. 105; Brown, 2003, pp. 27–30).
8. Welfare, Charity, and the Care of the Poor
From its earliest days in Jerusalem, the movement practised a degree of internal economic solidarity unusual among the voluntary associations of the ancient world. Acts describes believers selling property and holding proceeds in common “as any had need” (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35), and although this specific arrangement seems to have been a Jerusalem practice rather than the universal Christian norm, the underlying instinct travelled with Paul into the Gentile churches. His extended campaign to raise a relief collection from the Gentile congregations of Macedonia and Achaia on behalf of the impoverished Jerusalem church occupies two full chapters of his correspondence with Corinth and represents, in effect, the first recorded instance of inter-congregational welfare transfer in Christian history (2 Corinthians 8–9; Galatians 2:10).
This pattern of internal charity is confirmed, just beyond our period, by outside description: writing around AD 150, Justin Martyr describes a weekly collection deposited with the presiding officer of the congregation, “who succours the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us” (Justin Martyr, First Apology 67, in Roberts and Donaldson, 1885, I, p. 186). Tertullian, writing a generation later still, describes the same fund and adds that it was drawn on to bury the poor and support orphaned children, concluding that Christians, “one in mind and soul,” felt no hesitation in sharing worldly goods across congregational lines in a manner that struck outside observers as remarkable (Tertullian, Apology 39, in Roberts and Donaldson, 1885, III, p. 46).
This was a meaningfully different model of generosity from the dominant Greco-Roman practice of euergetism, in which wealthy patrons funded civic monuments and public entertainments chiefly to secure honour among their fellow citizens; the Christian fund, by contrast, was aimed specifically at the powerless — widows, orphans, the sick, prisoners, strangers — who had no civic standing to repay the gift (Brown, 2003, pp. 33–36).
9. Opposition to Pagan Mores and the Violence of Pagan Society
Christian teaching set itself early and deliberately against practices widely tolerated in the surrounding culture. The exposure of unwanted infants, particularly girls, was an unremarkable feature of Greco-Roman family life; a well-known papyrus letter of 1 BC, in which a husband instructs his pregnant wife to “let it be” if the child is a boy but “cast it out” if a girl, is often cited as evidence of how casually the practice could be discussed, though scholars caution against treating a single private letter as proof of universal behaviour (cited in Harper, 2013, pp. 78–82). Against this background, the Didache's flat instruction — “you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill it once it is born” — reads as a pointed rejection of a specific, recognisable social practice rather than an abstract moral position (Didache 2:2, in Staniforth and Louth, 1987, p. 191).
Paul's sexual ethic was similarly countercultural in its symmetry: where Roman convention held wives to a standard of fidelity it did not seriously apply to husbands, Paul insisted that the husband's body belonged to his wife exactly as the wife's belonged to her husband, an equivalence with no real precedent in surrounding Greco-Roman moral literature (1 Corinthians 7:3–4; Harper, 2013, pp. 88–94). A comparable unease with the routine violence of Roman public life — the arena, the gladiatorial games, the exposure of criminals to beasts — is only fully articulated in the surviving sources a little after our period, in Tertullian's polemic against the spectacles, but its roots lie visibly in the first-century insistence that believers renounce vengeance, “not repaying evil for evil,” and accept suffering rather than inflict it (Romans 12:17–19; 1 Peter 2:19–23; Lane Fox, 1986, pp. 425–430). None of this made first-century Christians a numerically significant force for social reform — they were, as noted above, a small and marginal minority — but it did mark them out, to pagan neighbours and later historians alike, as a group whose private ethics ran deliberately against some of the grain of the society around them (Holland, 2019, pp. 102–108).
Closing Note
By the close of the first century, the Christian movement remained small, its numbers modest and its position precarious, resting on no legal protection and subject to violent, if sporadic, official hostility. Yet it had, in that same century, acquired nearly everything it would need for the centuries of growth ahead: a body of authoritative writing, a replicable congregational structure, an ethic of internal welfare that outside observers found genuinely novel, and a set of moral commitments distinct enough from the surrounding culture to give it a recognisable identity. The third folio in this series turns to the second century, and to the Apologists who first attempted to explain this still-obscure movement to a suspicious and occasionally hostile Roman public.
References
The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (1989) Nashville: Thomas Nelson. — The primary first-century textual source for the New Testament events and letters discussed throughout this folio.
Brown, P. (2003) The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. — A survey of how Christianity remade the social and religious landscape of the late Roman and early medieval West.
Bruce, F.F. (1977) Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. — A detailed historical and theological biography of Paul, including his circle of co-workers and their later careers.
Ehrman, B.D. (2006) Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — A critical study distinguishing the historically attested lives of the apostles from later legendary tradition.
Eusebius (1989) The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine. Translated by G.A. Williamson, revised by A. Louth. London: Penguin. — The fourth-century foundational narrative history of the early Church and principal source for many apostolic traditions.
Frend, W.H.C. (1965) Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — The standard scholarly study of Roman persecution of Christians, including the Neronian and Domitianic episodes.
Grant, M. (1976) Saint Paul. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. — A classicist's biography situating Paul's death within the political world of Neronian Rome.
Grant, M. (1994) Saint Peter: A Biography. New York: Scribner. — A companion biography assessing what can be historically established about Peter's death and legacy.
Harnack, A. von (1908) The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. Translated by J. Moffatt. 2nd edn. London: Williams and Norgate. — A monumental early study of how and where the Christian mission actually spread in its first three centuries.
Harper, K. (2013) From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — An account of how Christian sexual ethics diverged from, and eventually reshaped, Greco-Roman moral convention.
Holland, T. (2019) Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. London: Little, Brown. — A wide-ranging account of Christianity's long-term reshaping of Western moral and cultural assumptions.
Hopkins, K. (1998) 'Christian Number and Its Implications', Journal of Early Christian Studies, 6(2), pp. 185–226. — A cautious, methodologically explicit attempt to estimate the size of the early Christian population.
Lane Fox, R. (1986) Pagans and Christians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. — A social and religious history of the encounter between Greco-Roman paganism and the growing Christian movement.
Meeks, W.A. (1983) The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press. — A landmark social history of the Pauline congregations as urban, household-based communities.
Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) (1885) The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volumes I and III. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Company. — The standard nineteenth-century English edition of Justin Martyr's First Apology and Tertullian's Apology.
Schaff, P. (1889) History of the Christian Church, Volume I: Apostolic Christianity, A.D. 1–100. 3rd edn. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. — A comprehensive nineteenth-century history of the apostolic age, still cited for its documentary detail.
Staniforth, M. (trans.) and Louth, A. (rev.) (1987) Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers. London: Penguin. — An accessible modern translation of the Didache and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, key sources for church order.
Stark, R. (1996) The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — A sociological model of Christian growth rates from the first through fourth centuries.
Two figures stand at the threshold of Christian history, and neither began as anything resembling a theologian. Simon, later called Cephas or Peter — “the rock” — was a Galilean fisherman from Bethsaida, working the family trade on the Sea of Galilee alongside his brother Andrew when, according to the synoptic tradition, he was called to follow Jesus of Nazareth (Mark 1:16–18). He became the most prominent of the Twelve: the first to confess Jesus as Messiah at Caesarea Philippi, a witness to the Transfiguration, and, despite a well-documented lapse of nerve at Jesus’s arrest, the figure to whom leadership of the earliest Jerusalem community fell after the crucifixion (Schaff, 1889, p. 252).
Paul — born Saul in Tarsus, a prosperous Cilician trading city — came from an entirely different world. He held Roman citizenship by birth, had trained in Jerusalem under the Pharisaic teacher Gamaliel, and by his own admission had been an active persecutor of the fledgling Jesus movement (Galatians 1:13–14; Acts 8:3). His transformation from persecutor to apostle occurred, on his own testimony, through a visionary encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, an event he treats not as a conversion between religions but as a prophetic commissioning comparable to that of Jeremiah or Isaiah (Galatians 1:15–16; Wright, 2018, p. 51).
The contrast between the two men is instructive. Peter's authority rested on personal proximity to the historical Jesus and on his standing within the Jewish messianic movement centred on Jerusalem. Paul's authority rested on a claimed direct revelation and on an argumentative, letter-writing intelligence that had no equivalent among the original Twelve. Both men would end their lives in Rome under Nero, and church tradition, though not the New Testament itself, has them dying within a year or two of one another in the mid-60s AD (Grant, 1994, p. 197; Grant, 1976, p. 12).
At the core of both men's preaching lay a shared kerygma: that Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified, raised from the dead by God, and exalted as Messiah and Lord, and that repentance and baptism in his name brought forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:36–38). This much Peter and Paul held in common, and it is easy, from a distance of two thousand years, to overstate their differences. But beyond this shared centre, their teaching diverged in emphasis and consequence. Peter's early preaching, as represented in Acts, addressed itself to a Jewish and Jerusalem-centred audience and assumed that followers of the Messiah would remain observant of Jewish law and custom (Acts 2:14–36; 3:12–26).
Paul's teaching, by contrast, hardened over time into a distinctive and controversial position: that a person is justified, made right with God through faith in Christ apart from adherence to the Mosaic law, and that this applied equally to Jew and Gentile alike (Romans 3:28; Galatians 2:16).
His most quoted formulation, that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Galatians 3:28), was a genuinely radical claim in a world organised almost entirely around such distinctions.
It should be noted that Peter was not simply a conservative foil to Paul's innovation. Acts credits Peter himself with the pivotal vision at Joppa and the subsequent baptism of the Roman centurion Cornelius, the episode the author of Acts treats as the theological opening of the gospel to the Gentiles (Acts 10:1–48; Hengel, 1983, pp. 97–128). Peter's later vacillation on the question of table fellowship with Gentiles, discussed below, should therefore be read as a failure of nerve under social pressure rather than a considered rejection of the principle he had himself helped establish.
Peter's position is the more easily explained. As a Galilean Jew steeped in messianic expectation, and as the recognised head of a Jerusalem community that understood itself as the faithful remnant of Israel, Peter had every reason to assume that following the Jewish Messiah meant continuing to keep the Jewish law. His movement toward including uncircumcised Gentiles came, on the evidence of Acts, only through what he understood as direct divine intervention, and even then it left him exposed to criticism from more conservative members of the Jerusalem church (Acts 11:1–3).
Paul's position requires more explanation, since it broke so sharply with his own Pharisaic formation. Scholars have offered various accounts, but a broadly convergent reading runs as follows. Paul's Damascus road experience convinced him that God had already vindicated Jesus as Messiah independently of the law, which reframed for Paul the entire purpose of the Mosaic covenant (Wright, 2018, pp. 63–75). Compounding this, Paul's own missionary experience among Gentile “God-fearers” attached to Diaspora synagogues showed him Gentiles receiving what he took to be manifestations of the Holy Spirit — conviction, ecstatic speech, moral transformation — without having submitted to circumcision or dietary law.
For Paul, the theological conclusion followed the empirical observation: if God was visibly at work among the uncircumcised, then circumcision could not be the precondition of covenant membership he had once assumed it to be (Sanders, discussed in Hengel, 1983, pp. 64–67; Bruce, 1977, pp. 154–161). His theology of grace was, on this reading, less an abstract philosophical preference than a retrospective account of what he believed he had already witnessed in the field.
The disagreement between the two men came to a head twice. The first, and more personally bruising, was the incident at Antioch, which Paul recounts with evident irritation in his letter to the Galatians. Peter had been eating freely with Gentile believers in the mixed church at Antioch until, Paul writes, “certain men came from James,” after which Peter “drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision faction” (Galatians 2:11–12). Paul's response was to rebuke Peter publicly, accusing him of hypocrisy and of compelling Gentiles, by his changed conduct, to live as Jews (Galatians 2:14). The New Testament does not record Peter's reply, an asymmetry historians have long noted: we have only Paul's side of this quarrel (Hengel, 1983, p. 111).
The second and more formal reckoning came at the Jerusalem Council, conventionally dated to around AD 48–49, convened specifically to settle whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised and to keep the law of Moses (Acts 15:1–5). After debate, the Jerusalem leadership with James, the cousin not brother of Jesus (no word for cousin exists in Hebrew, Aramaic or Russian), delivering the decisive judgment, ruled that Gentile believers should not be required to be circumcised, subject only to a short list of restrictions concerning food and sexual morality (Acts 15:19–20). This was, in substance, a victory for the position Paul had been arguing, even if the accompanying restrictions represented a partial concession to Jewish sensibilities rather than an unqualified endorsement of Pauline liberty (Bruce, 1977, pp. 172–178).
Whatever residual friction remained between the two men personally, later church tradition remembers them as reconciled, and both the Roman church and the broader tradition commemorate them jointly on a single feast day, a symbolic resolution of what had been, in the 40s and 50s AD, a genuine and consequential dispute (Schaff, 1889, pp. 328–331).
Paul understood his commission in explicitly prophetic terms: he had been “set apart before I was born” to proclaim Christ “among the Gentiles” (Galatians 1:15–16). This sense of eschatological urgency that the Gentile nations had to be gathered in before history reached its appointed end; gives Paul's undertaking its restless, driven character. Acts and Paul's own letters describe a strategy, whether fully deliberate or improvised under circumstance, of travelling the great Roman roads and sea lanes to reach provincial capitals and trading cities: Pisidian Antioch, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus. In each new city Paul is depicted as approaching first the local synagogue and its circle of Gentile sympathisers, the “God-fearers,” before turning to a wider Gentile audience once friction with the synagogue authorities made that first avenue difficult (Acts 13:14–46; Meeks, 1983, pp. 9–16).
He travelled with a shifting team; Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, the married couple Priscilla and Aquila and supported himself, at least in part, through his trade as a leatherworker or tentmaker, a detail that mattered to him as proof he was no religious parasite (1 Corinthians 9:1–18; 1 Thessalonians 2:9).
Across three missionary journeys spanning roughly AD 46 to 57, Acts credits Paul with founding or substantially building congregations across Cyprus, southern and central Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia (Acts 13–20). In Galatia, churches at Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe would later become the audience for Paul's most polemical letter, written against those urging circumcision on Gentile converts. In Macedonia, Philippi produced Paul's warmest surviving correspondence and, in the merchant Lydia, one of his earliest recorded European converts (Acts 16:11–15).
Thessalonica yielded a community Paul plainly regarded with particular affection, unsettled as it was by anxiety over the fate of believers who had already died before Christ's anticipated return (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18). Corinth, a brash and cosmopolitan port city rebuilt by Rome after its destruction a century earlier, produced the most fractious of Paul's congregations and consequently his most substantial pastoral correspondence.
Ephesus, where Paul is said to have remained for some two to three years, became a major regional centre for the wider Pauline mission and the site of a serious public disturbance instigated by silversmiths whose trade in cult statuary was threatened by his preaching (Acts 19:1–41; Meeks, 1983, pp. 55–63). Paul had never visited Rome when he wrote to the congregation there, making Romans not a response to a known local crisis but the closest thing to a systematic statement of his gospel that survives (Bruce, 1977, pp. 320–325).
Thirteen letters in the New Testament bear Paul's name, though modern scholarship generally accepts seven as certainly his: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and the brief personal note to Philemon. The remaining six — Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and the three Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus) — are regarded with varying degrees of scholarly doubt, whether as later compositions written in Paul's name by disciples working within his tradition, a common and not obviously dishonest literary convention in antiquity, or as genuinely his (Meeks, 1983, pp. 5–7; Ehrman, 2006, pp. 84–91).
Their importance is difficult to overstate. Written between roughly AD 50 and the early 60s, Paul's undisputed letters are almost certainly the earliest Christian documents to survive, predating the composition of any of the four Gospels by a decade or more. They therefore offer the single closest textual window onto the beliefs, practices, and internal disputes of the first Christian generation, composed not as abstract theology but as urgent, occasional responses to the practical difficulties of infant congregations — sexual ethics, factionalism, the status of spiritual gifts, disputes over food, the resurrection of the dead. Out of these occasional responses, and above all from Romans, later Christian tradition constructed its core theological vocabulary: justification, grace, sin, the body of Christ, the relationship between old covenant and new. Whatever else may be said of them, Paul's letters supplied the raw material from which later councils and creeds built their formal doctrine (Wright, 2018, pp. 355–370).
Several converging factors explain why the Pauline model of Christianity, rather than the more Jerusalem-centred and law-observant model associated with Peter and James, became the pattern on which the later universal Church was built. First, and most simply, Paul's decision to admit Gentiles without requiring circumcision removed the single largest practical barrier to the movement's growth; a religion that demanded adult male circumcision of its converts was never likely to spread far beyond its ethnic point of origin (Brown, 2003, pp. 15–19).
Second, the Jewish War of AD 66–70 and the destruction of Jerusalem removed, quite literally, the geographical and institutional centre of the law-observant Jewish-Christian movement that Peter and James had led; the Pauline, Gentile-facing congregations of Asia Minor, Greece, and eventually Rome survived that catastrophe largely undamaged, and it was from among them that Christianity's subsequent leadership was drawn (Frend, 1965, pp. 158–163).
Third, Paul had already supplied the movement with a portable, replicable form of organisation the household-based congregation, meeting under local overseers and deacons, bound to sister congregations through circulating letters and a shared collection for the relief of the Jerusalem poor which proved well suited to an empire-wide religion in a way that a single geographically fixed holy city was not (Meeks, 1983, pp. 74–84). By the time later tradition situated the martyrdoms of both Peter and Paul in Rome itself, the city's church could claim the authority of both apostolic strands at once, a claim that did much to secure Rome's later primacy within the wider Christian world (Schaff, 1889, pp. 359–362; Holland, 2019, pp. 96–99).
Beyond Peter and Paul, the New Testament and early Christian tradition preserve a patchwork record, of very uneven historical reliability, of other leading figures in the movement's first decades. James, the brother of Jesus, led the Jerusalem church as a scrupulously law-observant figure until his execution, reported by the Jewish historian Josephus, in AD 62 (Eusebius, 1989, II.23).
John, associated by tradition with the Fourth Gospel, three epistles, and Revelation, is placed by later writers at Ephesus in his later years. Barnabas, a Cypriot Levite, was Paul's early sponsor and travelling companion before the two split over the reliability of the younger John Mark (Acts 15:36–39).
Mark himself, traditionally the author of the earliest Gospel, is associated by Eusebius with Peter's preaching in Rome and, in later and more legendary tradition, with the founding of the church in Alexandria (Eusebius, 1989, II.15–16).
Luke, a physician and Paul's sometime travelling companion, is credited with the Gospel bearing his name and with Acts itself, our principal narrative source for this entire period. Apollos, an eloquent, Alexandrian-trained Jewish teacher, appears briefly but suggestively in Acts and 1 Corinthians as a rival focus of loyalty within the Corinthian church, evidence that Paul's authority, even in congregations he had founded, was never uncontested (Acts 18:24–28; 1 Corinthians 1:12).
Traditions placing Thomas in Parthia or India and Andrew in Scythia or Greece rest on later apocryphal literature rather than first-century evidence and should be treated as pious legend rather than history (Ehrman, 2006, pp. 217–224).
For most of the first century, Roman hostility toward Christians was local, sporadic, and socially rather than administratively driven: Christians were an obscure, often misunderstood sect, viewed with suspicion for their refusal to honour the traditional gods and, by extension, for a supposed disloyalty to the empire itself.
The one clear exception, and the episode most directly relevant to the fates of Peter and Paul, was Nero's persecution following the great fire that devastated Rome in July of AD 64. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing half a century later, records that Nero, to deflect suspicion that he himself had ordered the fire, “fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace,” adding that an immense multitude were convicted, less on the specific charge of arson than on “hatred of the human race” (Tacitus, Annals 15.44, cited in Frend, 1965, pp. 162–165).
Christian tradition, though not Tacitus, places the deaths of both Peter and Paul within this persecution: Peter said to have been crucified, reportedly head downward at his own request, and Paul, as a Roman citizen, beheaded rather than crucified (Grant, 1994, pp. 197–204; Grant, 1976, pp. 142–145). A further, more contested tradition associates a second wave of pressure on Christians with the reign of Domitian toward the century's end, though the evidence here is thinner and more disputed than for the Neronian persecution (Lane Fox, 1986, pp. 419–428). It is worth stressing that nothing resembling a coordinated, empire-wide policy of persecution existed in this period; that development belonged to the third century.
What the first century Church faced instead was worse in one sense and better in another — an unpredictable, localised hostility that could flare into lethal violence under a hostile emperor or an angry mob, but that never rose, in this earliest period, to the level of systematic imperial policy (Brown, 2003, pp. 20–24).
The quarrel and eventual reconciliation of Peter and Paul is more than an antiquarian curiosity. It marks the point at which the Jesus movement ceased to be a reform tendency within Judaism and became, in practice if not yet in name, a distinct religion capable of embracing the whole of the Roman world. Later folios in this series will follow the consequences of that decision as they unfold across the second and third centuries, culminating in the empire-wide persecutions and the eventual conversion of Constantine.
The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (1989) Nashville: Thomas Nelson. — The primary first-century textual source for the New Testament events, letters, and speeches discussed throughout this folio.
Brown, P. (2003) The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. — A survey of how Christianity remade the social and religious landscape of the late Roman and early medieval West.
Bruce, F.F. (1977) Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. — A detailed historical and theological biography of Paul grounded in the New Testament and Greco-Roman background.
Ehrman, B.D. (2006) Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — A critical study separating the historically attested lives of these three figures from later legendary accretion.
Eusebius (1989) The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine. Translated by G.A. Williamson, revised by A. Louth. London: Penguin. — The fourth-century foundational narrative history of the early Church, our principal source for many apostolic traditions.
Frend, W.H.C. (1965) Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — The standard scholarly study of Roman persecution of Christians from its Jewish antecedents through late antiquity.
Grant, M. (1976) Saint Paul. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. — A classicist's biography situating Paul firmly within the political and social world of the first-century Roman Mediterranean.
Grant, M. (1994) Saint Peter: A Biography. New York: Scribner. — A companion biography assessing what can be historically established about Peter's life and death.
Hengel, M. (1983) Between Jesus and Paul: Studies in the Earliest History of Christianity. Translated by J. Bowden. London: SCM Press. — Close scholarly studies of the theological and social developments bridging Jesus and the Pauline mission.
Holland, T. (2019) Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. London: Little, Brown. — A wide-ranging account of Christianity's long-term reshaping of Western moral and cultural assumptions.
Lane Fox, R. (1986) Pagans and Christians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. — A social and religious history of the encounter between traditional Greco-Roman paganism and the growing Christian movement.
Meeks, W.A. (1983) The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press. — A landmark social history of the Pauline congregations as urban, household-based communities.
Schaff, P. (1889) History of the Christian Church, Volume I: Apostolic Christianity, A.D. 1–100. 3rd edn. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. — A comprehensive nineteenth-century Protestant history of the apostolic age, still widely cited for its documentary detail.
Wright, N.T. (2018) Paul: A Biography. New York: HarperOne. — A major recent biography arguing for the theological and personal coherence of Paul's life and mission.