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.
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.