Session 1: Survival and Spread | Our Family Story: Charting Again the History of Jesus’ Church

All right.

It's good to see everyone.

Welcome from around the world.

We are one.

We are one in the body of Christ.

A little bit of a review as we get started with this.

What I'm thinking about this particular learning session is that we're opening the family albums.

Most of us have pictures, whether on our phones or from cameras, and actually, you know, printed out pictures and maybe photo albums.

We try to remember some of our past events, and we try to remember some of our family who are with us or who are no longer with us and even ancestors.

And this particular learning session is all about all of us together going back to the beginnings of our photo album in the Body of Christ.

We know the story, the story of the Bible.

We've gone over that in covenant documents, reading the Bible again for the first time.

The textbook is not as important in these sessions as I think it was in those sessions.

I have poured my life into sort of this overview of the Bible and the one story that's there.

Now we begin to take that story and see how it begins to spread and multiply.

So there are really many stories that are coming out of this.

I think that Bruce Shelley's book, The Church History in Plain Language, is very good, but it's not essential to what we're going to be doing.

I'm going to try to give eight sessions in which we follow the development of the church and see its spread and growth and multiplicity, but keeping an attention on what is the heart of the church, what is its relationship with Jesus, and how is it expressing this message of faith that Jesus left us with and will return to make all things new.

In retrospect, remember that when we talk about the message of the Bible, I suggested that there were really six M words in the English language.

Those of you who are primarily speakers of other languages, you'll have to find your own way to communicate this.

But I think there were six particular words in the English language that summarize the whole of the message of the Bible.

Four of them connected to the Old Testament, and then two that were added with the New Testament.

These four words I have suggested are the mission of God.

One of our favorite verses in any language is John 3, verse 16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever lived uh believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

So there is in the Bible from beginning to end the idea that God is on a mission, and the mission is to bring all of the kids back home.

We are made in the image of God, just as we are image bearers of our parents biologically, and we give our image to our children.

There is this connection.

And so in the beginning of Genesis, there's this connection between the creator, God, who makes the world as a home for those who are God's family, those made in the image of God, humankind.

We also know that the story takes a pretty dark turn when there's trouble in the family and tensions, and even children leaving home so that they're lost or they can't find home anymore.

And the mission of God is to bring the kids back home.

The method, here's the second M-word in the Old Testament, is that of choosing once the human race, once the children of God are scattering across particularly three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe.

There is movement later on to the Americas and the islands and other places, but those are the three dominant places, to choose one particular family, the family of Abraham, and to bring that family into a unique and close relationship with the Creator, shape that family by way of the Sinai covenant, and plant that family on the bridge between the three great continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, at a time when most people were traveling through that pathway in their migrations and their trade routes, their communication lines, their seeking of another place and another home.

And the method by which the mission of God is accomplished is for this community to live as if the things of God, the things of home, the things of our Heavenly Father matter, so that others like uh the Queen of Sheba and Rahab and Ruth and others will come and say, You've got something we don't have, and bring all the children back home.

The third M that I often use in the English language is that of managers.

This community of witness needs managers, leaders, and we have a chain of leaders there.

We have Moses and then we have Joshua, then we have the elders who follow Joshua, and then in the book of Judges, we have the judges individually appointed at various times to bring the community together.

And then when the judges uh reach a culmination in the life of Samuel, we have the transition to the kings.

They wanted a king, Saul, David, Solomon, probably David and Solomon, the apex of that.

And then at that time, after uh Solomon, there was kind of a uh getting off the rails, uh wandering away from the things of the covenant.

And that's when this sixth group pops up, and that's the prophets.

And that will bring us to the end of the old testament.

So we have the mission of God and the method through the nation of Israel and the managers of that, but then the fourth M-word is the meltdown.

That this story of the Old Testament and God's reaching out to the nations of the world, all of God's kids, through the nation of Israel, seems to come to a bit of an untimely end.

The nations of the ancient Near East, the Assyrians and the Babylonians in particular, they destroy huge swathes of the people of God and carry others off into captivity.

And it seems like the whole mission of God is basically failing.

And that's where we pop into the New Testament because there are two more things that happen.

On the one hand, God has to jump into the story, God's own self.

That's the miracle.

There's my fifth M-word, the miracle of Jesus coming, where Israel was not capable of sustaining the missional effort to bring all of God's kids home.

Uh, what happens is that God comes personally in Jesus and accomplishes what needs to be accomplished for that.

Now, the prophets of the Old Testament had seen Jesus coming.

Well, they had seen God's intervention in human history.

They remembered what God did before in Egypt, uh, taking God's people out, saving them and giving them identity and a place to live.

And they said, it's going to take that once again.

And they kept calling it the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord.

And they figured that it would all happen at one time, the judgment on the nations and on evil, wiping out this uh uh this contamination of human life, and then the sparing of a remnant community that would stay true to God and be the children of God, and then also the beginning of the eternal perfect age in which whatever God intended back at the beginning would now become a reality once again.

What they did not see is that Jesus, instead of coming to do it all at one time, he split the thing in two so that Jesus is the day of the Lord, but then he goes back to glory and promises that he will return and finish the job.

It's not that he was not successful, but that in the graciousness of God, rather than bringing all of the judgment at one time, that has been uh separated so that we live in an age where the gospel can spread, and that's the news of the Christian church.

That's how this story of Jesus is getting spread.

That's the graciousness of God.

And we live in the in-between times, and we can see that in a number of ways in the New Testament, which continue to use that term, the um uh the day of the Lord, as both Jesus' first coming and Jesus' second coming.

But that brings me to my sixth M word, and that's the mutation.

There was a sense among the prophets that there would be one day of the Lord.

The mutation is that the thing has shifted and become two days, two events, two bookends to this time.

And um, what has happened also is that the strategy of the mission has changed.

Whereas the first strategy, the Old Testament strategy, was here's the nation, here's the nation that's been shaped and trained by Yahweh in the covenant.

Come and see this nation.

This nation stands as the billboard to the other societies of earth, wanting to bring all the kids of God home.

In the second phase of this, the New Testament phase, the um mission is now sent out.

And so the church becomes not localized in one place in Jerusalem or in Palestine, but now is dispersed among the uh nations of the world.

And that's the age we live in.

And so that brings us to this story of the photo album of the Christian church, the body of Christ.

Jesus is in heaven, but his body exists here on earth in this metaphorical way that we call the church.

That's the language of the New Testament, and we are the ones who continue to be Christ.

That's why in Antioch, the Christians, the followers of Jesus were called Christians, little Christs.

We are the ones who are spreading that across the world.

So this course is about that, or this learning session is about that.

How does the thing grow?

Now, the world was very well prepared for the coming of Christianity.

Um, you can say that uh there was a convergence of things within the world of the Mediterranean.

You can say a variety of things.

Uh, you can say that perhaps God was behind this.

And we know that from the book of Daniel, for instance, when Nebuchadnezzar had that dream about this tall statue on the middle of a plain that had a head of gold and chest and shoulders of silver and thighs of bronze and then legs of iron and feet of iron and clay mixed, that Daniel was able to interpret this for Nebuchadnezzar as five successive kingdoms, four kingdoms of this world, and then a unique kingdom that would come during the time of the fourth kingdom.

And Daniel even identified these things in a way that we can begin to see them historically.

He said that Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar were the head of gold, but following them would come another kingdom, and we know that the Babylonians were destroyed by the Persians, and then there would be a third kingdom, and we know that the Persian kingdom was taken over by the Greeks, and then there would be one more kingdom, and that would be a kingdom of iron, a kingdom of hardness and and and strength, and that was the kingdom of Rome that took over the kingdom of Greece.

And it was during the time of the kingdom of Rome that a little pebble came made without hands.

This is the story in Daniel chapter 2, that this little pebble was created not by human will but by divine initiative, but it grew to be a kingdom that would smash the other kingdoms and would grow to be the biggest kingdom on planet Earth.

Daniel 2 · chapter mention

And what do we have?

In our day, in spite of the ups and downs of the Christian church and the testimonies of God's people and the movements of the nations, the single largest human organization in the entire world, it's not NATO, it's not any particular country that claims dominance, it is the Christian church.

In every country, in every community, in every people, in every language around this globe, the single largest human community and organization is the Christian church, which is the body of Christ.

And that becomes the message of the New Testament.

So we have that story in the Bible, and now we have it beginning to unfold.

Now, the early Christians they moved into that world, a world that had been significantly prepared by these former kingdoms, because these kingdoms wanted to have stable rule across vast distances.

And they did that in several ways.

The Romans in particular brought it to culmination with a wide system of roads.

They made travel accessible.

Now, this was before there were planes, trains, and automobiles, and everybody walked, but they had roads to walk on.

And the Romans particularly liked to send their armies, not by way of ships, although they did that.

The Greeks did that more.

They wanted roads.

They wanted stable roads and they wanted, they wanted guard houses every so often, and they wanted to be able to protect this land that they had.

Well, that might have been good for the Roman Empire, and it certainly was, but it was also good for Christianity in that travel had become accessible and communication lines were opened throughout the entire empire.

The Roman Empire was the largest empire at its time, and it stretched all the way from the British Isles over to China.

Parts of China and India were under Roman rule at least for a time.

There was a big pushback during those days.

The Persian Empire sort of resurfaced during that time, and there was a tension between Rome and Persia at that time, and that's kind of an ongoing thing.

But the Roman Empire stretched all the way, and even where the Persian Empire resurged for a while, what happened is that the trade continued, and the trade was primarily when it went to the east, part of the Silk Road.

So you have all of the roads of the Roman Empire to the west, and you have the Silk Road to the east, and then you have the trade routes down into Africa, into Ethiopia and beyond.

And what you have by the end of the second century is that the gospel of Jesus Christ has penetrated nearly every one of the major civilizations on Africa and Asia and European continents.

There will be a vast spread later on, but that will be the initial part of it.

And it's carried by simple people who simply know Jesus and love Jesus and for one reason or another are being spread across the face of society.

Now, the message that they brought it had some real big surprises to it.

And the first of those surprises was Jesus rising from the dead.

We see this already in the New Testament.

The Christians came in and they said Jesus rose from the dead.

This was their first big bang.

This is the thing.

This doesn't happen.

People don't go to their funerals and then walk away from their funerals.

They are buried, they're gone.

But for Jesus, the big story was that he got up after dying and was alive again.

And that said something about a divine initiative, a message from heaven, uh a miracle.

Um, what exactly is going on?

And then there was a further thing that Jesus had gone to heaven, Jesus is God, and Jesus would return.

So there is a start of an urgency.

If this is true, it changes everything.

And if Jesus is coming again, we better get on board now.

So there was a great urgency.

Sometimes I like to summarize the message and character of the early church in terms of things that I can remember.

And here's another word in the English language.

And again, those of you who have cultures in which you express yourself best in other languages will have to kind of find other words or terms or little devices to remember these things.

But sometimes we think about finding our direction and we look at the skies.

This has been the historic way that those who travel and those who are on the high seas, we look at the stars.

And in the northern hemisphere, we look at the north star.

The north star, it seems to be pretty stable in the sky.

And so the north star becomes sort of our grounding point from the north star, we can see everything else.

In the southern hemisphere, um, I learned about the southern cross.

I've seen the southern cross, um, but I haven't seen it much, but I have seen a little bit, and maybe that will be the thing.

But thinking about the North Star, here in the Northern Hemisphere, we also think about the North Pole, and we think about cold temperatures, especially during the winter, and we think of Arctic air.

Well, I want to use that word Arctic, A-R-C-T-I-C.

And I want to suggest six words that were part of the early message of the Christians linked to those uh those initials.

A, there was acceptance in Jesus.

This is one thing we see regularly in the stories of the New Testament.

Jesus accepts Zacchaeus as he is.

Yes, he wants to transform Zacchaeus.

Jesus accepts Paul even as an opponent in order to transform him.

Jesus accepts Mary Magdalene.

Jesus accepts the woman who was caught in adultery.

Jesus accepts people.

And the first great part of the message of the early church was acceptance.

God loves you, God cares about you even as you are.

You don't need to stay as you are, but Jesus loves you as you are.

Acceptance.

The second thing was release.

This is the R word, A R.

And release is the idea of forgiveness.

You'll see throughout the New Testament that the pronunciation, the proclamation of the early church is that of forgiveness of sins.

We all carry baggage with us.

We are all caught up in things that sometimes keep us awake at night, or things that we re- regret in the future, things that we did in the past, things that we are not proud of, things that we wish had gone different ways in our lives.

And at the heart of the gospel of Jesus is forgiveness or release.

So there's acceptance and there's release from the past.

And then comes the third thing that I'm talking about, see, and that's community.

One of the critical things that we find in the New Testament and that is expressed historically because of the Christian church is that there's a body of believers.

My brother just moved from one place to another, clear across the country, still the same country, but they found immediately when they went to the new place where they're living, they found sisters and brothers in Jesus who don't know them because of their stories, but who trust them and care about them because they are also followers of Jesus Christ.

There's community.

We ourselves in these learning sessions, we exist across many countries and continents.

And the reality is that we trust one another, even if we don't know one another personally, because we truly believe that those who are deeply connected to Jesus can be trusted with our lives and our destinies, will care about us and will always make room for us in hospitality.

That's the third thing, uh, community, acceptance and release, and community.

Then the T is transformation.

And that's where the message of the Christians was that you can become something more than you thought you were.

You were only this person, but you are actually a daughter of God.

You are a son of God, you are a princess or a prince, not because you can put on airs and make yourself better than anybody else, but because you actually are cared for by the Heavenly Father, by the one who matters most.

Your life has meaning because of this transformation.

And that brings us to the fifth word, and that's the I word, and that's inspiration.

Here's the power of the Holy Spirit.

So we have acceptance and release or forgiveness, and then we have community where we're cared and gathered, and then we have transformation of our lives, and there's power to do that because of the Holy Spirit, the coming of the Holy Spirit.

And the final word of the six words is that of culmination or consummation.

There's an end to the story.

Sometimes if stories take too long and they don't get to an end, we begin to lose interest.

But the big thing about the Christian story is Jesus is coming again.

There is a goal, there is an endpoint, and there is a renewal of all of creation.

So there's a trajectory in which we live.

And those become the essences of the message of the early Christians.

Now, the first ones to speak about that were the 12 disciples of Jesus.

Well, 12.

We have to be careful there, don't we?

Jesus talked to the crowds, and Jesus had disciples, and then Jesus had the 12 who were with him for three years.

And one of those, and within that 12, there were the three who were his closest buddies, Peter, James, and John.

But among the 12, there was one who betrayed him, probably trying to push him more quickly into some kind of earthly leadership role of empire over against the Romans.

But whatever it was, Judas betrayed his friend Jesus.

And when he realized that that had failed miserably, he took his own life.

So now there were 11.

At the start of the book of Acts, we see that the disciples place someone else in that community of twelve, sort of reflecting the 12 tribes of the Old Testament.

Here's the 12 leadership uh entities of the New Testament.

We'll see in the book of Revelation, for instance, that around the throne of God in the vision of John, there are 24 thrones.

And these are connected to the 12 and the 12 of God's people across all times.

God always has a people, but there is a unique phase to this people of God that starts in the New Testament under the 12.

What we'll find in the book of Acts is that the person who was selected to fill in Judas's role, Matthias, he's never mentioned again.

But by the grace of God, there is almost a divine substitution, and that becomes Saul, who becomes Paul.

He becomes the twelfth apostle in sort of acting it out in the days of the early church.

Now, the time of Pentecost is somewhere around 30 to 35 A.D.

And within 30 years, within three decades, every one of those disciples of Jesus will be killed, except for one.

Every other one will be killed.

And there are various stories in the early church and places where they went.

Matthew spent time up in Syria and then seems to have been called down to Ethiopia to bring the gospel there.

He was kind of the caretaker of Christians, Jewish Christians in particular, and then the Ethiopian Christians.

And while he was in Ethiopia, some say he was sawn in two, echoing something we read in the uh uh in the heroes of faith in Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

Um others met different fates.

Bartholomew, and Nathaniel, he has two names there.

He was crucified on a cross, probably somewhere in what we would call Turkey today or Asia Minor then.

We do know stories about some of them.

One of Jesus' closest buddies, James.

There was Peter, James, and John.

These were brothers, and by Acts chapter 12, James has already been killed because of his testimonies about Jesus.

Acts 12 · chapter mention

We know that Paul himself went eventually around the Mediterranean world, probably as far as Spain, and then during the time of Nero, he was brought back to Rome, and he lost his life by beheading because of Nero's persecutions.

Peter lost his life during that same time.

Paul was beheaded because he was a Roman citizen and had that as the quick and easy way to die.

Peter was crucified in a swamp and a garbage dump, uh, now called the Vatican.

It was called the Vatican II, Vatican then, but that's why the Vatican is where the Vatican is, and St.

Peter's Basilica is located there in the swamp and the garbage dump outside the ancient city walls of Rome, where Peter was crucified.

And when they brought him to the place of crucifixion, he said that he was not worthy of being killed in the same manner as his Lord, and so they crucified him upside down.

We know that Thomas went to India, and he brought with him, we are told, some of the paintings, or at least one painting of Mother Mary and baby Jesus painted by Dr.

Luke, and that he went to southern India and while he was beginning the uh early days of the Christian church in southern India, that he was killed.

And there is uh to some reports a continued presence of a picture that uh uh Dr.

Luke painted, um, that Mark, I mean, that uh um uh Thomas took to India at that time.

We don't know of the destinies of all of the apostles.

There are bits and pieces that we can glean, but their deaths precipitated the spreading of the uh Christians from Jerusalem.

The church starts in Jerusalem and then it spreads beyond that.

And it is spread in significant measure by the persecutions of those who don't want this new uh expression of identity and religious perspective to survive.

First among those were the Jews, the fellow Jews.

We read about some of the persecutions in the New Testament, particularly in the book of Acts.

And then there are a few other stories that we get.

There are two things in particular that are part of the spread of the Jewish Christians.

One is the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD, and here there's a crazy story.

Josephus tells us, and others tell us, that in the mid-60s, um, the Christian church was large in Jerusalem, but a prophet, we don't know his name, stood up during one of the worship services and said, I have received a prophecy that this place is going to be destroyed, and we had better get out of town.

And so virtually the entire Christian congregation went out of Jerusalem and crossed over the Jordan River to what we would call uh Jordan, the nation of Jordan today, to a town, a little town with the name Pella.

Now, that may not seem like much of a thing to many people, but in reformed circles in North America, it does mean something because in the 1800s there was a movement of Dutch Reformed people out of Europe, some of them coming to the United States, some going to other places around the globe.

But some of those who came to the United States went to St.

Louis, uh went to New Orleans down on the uh Gulf of Mexico, and then came up the Mississippi River to St.

Louis and then traveled across land to what we now call Iowa in the really the midsection of the United States, and they established a community there out on the bald prairies where there was virtually nothing except grass and some animals, and they called the town Pella, same as the group that came out of Jerusalem and escaped the destruction of Jerusalem.

Well, many Jewish Christians or many Jews who were not Christians, they resented the fact that they fell under the uh the great uh fist of Rome, destroying the city while the Christians escaped.

And some said, you know, we don't like those people.

It only accentuated a bit later in the early 100s, in 132, there was a rebellion among the Jews that survived in Palestine under a man named Barkukbah.

And he fashioned himself, he perceived of himself as the Messiah that God was sending to restore the fate of the uh ancient nation of Israel, the Jews who were there.

He was Messiah.

Did he learn some of this from what the Christians were saying about Jesus?

There isn't a clear picture of that, but Barkokba wanted to take up arms against the Romans who continued to occupy Palestine even after Jerusalem and the temple had been destroyed.

And he started a massive armed rebellion.

Here's the thing: most of the Christians were Jewish, but the Christians did not believe that Barkokbah was the Messiah, and the Christians at that time were essentially pacifists, so that they would not take up arms along with the other Jews who were fomenting a rebellion.

And that drew a line of separation once again between Jews who believed in Jesus as Messiah and Jews who didn't believe in Jesus as Messiah.

That rebellion eventually died, Bar Kokba died, and so some of that went away.

And for really hundreds of years, uh the Jews became uh wanderers among other civilizations, and and the Christian church largely moved into the Gentile world under the leadership of Paul initially, but then others as well.

And by uh the second century, the Christian church was at least half non-Jewish.

And by the third century and the fourth century, it was uh much more non-Jewish than it was Jewish, but that was a transition over time.

Now, what happened when the Christians emerged into the Roman Empire was a bit of a different thing.

There were several reasons why Romans didn't particularly like Christianity and initiated a number of persecutions.

Within the first century, there are three growing persecutions.

One happens in around 48 or 49 AD, and that's when the news about Jesus as Messiah gets transferred into Rome.

And there's arguments in the Jewish community.

Most of the Jews in Rome lived in one particular spot nearby one another, one neighborhood, and they were arguing about whether Yeshua ben Nazareth, Jesus of Nazareth, was in fact Messiah.

And because their conversations took on heightened um uh sound, and because they became somewhat antagonistic toward one another, Emperor Claudius at that time, he kicked all of the Jews out of Rome, those who believed in Jesus as Messiah and those who didn't.

And we read about that in the New Testament because when Paul on his second mission journey comes to Corinth, someone he sets up shop with in the marketplace, there's a couple named Aquila and Priscilla, and we're told they recently came from Rome because Emperor Claudius had kicked all the Jews out of Rome.

So part of the story of the church involves the actions of a Roman Empire, emperor, trying to get rid of the mad nonsense of these arguments in Rome.

And Aquila and Priscilla show up right next door in the marketplace to Paul and become part of the uh leadership team of the early church.

They'll appear again in the page in the 16th chapter of the letter to the Romans when they have returned to Rome once again and become leaders there.

So one of the things that's going on, a second um uh period of persecution in the uh by the Romans in the first century was that under Nero, um Nero wanted to rebuild Rome, and it had huge sections that were very um mangled and very poor, and the buildings were nothing but ramshackle things, and everybody knew he wanted to rebuild Rome.

And if he wanted to rebuild Rome in the manner that he talked about it, he would have to get rid of all of that.

And so there was a time in which um uh they felt threatened, and even the possibility that Nero was going to destroy, uh, burn, or somehow get rid of that huge section of Rome.

Well, then the fire started.

Uh, July of 64, the fire started.

And very quickly people began to say, I'll bet Nero started those fires.

He didn't do it himself, but he got people to do it.

Well, Nero felt the heat coming back on him.

It burned a huge section of Rome, but he uh diverted attention by pointing to the Christians and said, They did it, and for the next four years there would be intense persecutions, most of them in Italy and most of them in Rome, but hundreds of thousands of Christians died during those, well, let's put it, tens of thousands of Christians died during those times, and horribly so.

There were no electric lights.

Uh, this was a world in which there was night and there was day, and you worked during the day and you slept at night, but Nero liked to party at night.

And so one of the ways in which he got rid of Christians was by getting them arrested.

Then he would tie them to poles and he would put tar over them and he would light them up, and they became actually the street lights of Rome during the night so that he could carry on chariot races.

I mean, that and going to the Colosseum and being hacked by the gladiators and being eaten by the animals.

This was sport in Rome at that time, and it lasted for four years from July of 64 all the way until June of 68.

And then the pressures began to push back, and Nero took his own life in June of 68, and those persecutions ended.

But during those persecutions, Peter died, he was crucified in probably 64 or 65, and Paul was beheaded probably in late 67 or early 68.

So two of the key leaders of the Christian church were taken out during that time.

There was a third period during the first century, and that was under uh Domitian.

Uh, Domitian, after Nero died, the kingdom went into chaos, the Roman Empire went into chaos, and historians talk about the year of the four emperors.

And successively, within one year, four people tried to take over the rule of Rome.

Only the fourth one survived.

Um, that he managed to um uh take over the Roman Empire because he was one of the greatest military leaders of that time, Vespasian.

Uh, he lasted for a decade and did pretty good in stabilizing the Roman Empire.

Then he was killed.

Um, his son Titus, who had destroyed Jerusalem, had been the commander who destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., Titus took over, and for two years he was there, and then a bunch of things happened, and he died mysteriously, probably poison.

And it was his brother Domitian who took over next.

And Domitian will be in power from 81 A.D.

until 96 A.D., almost the rest of the first century.

He will be the one.

All of the other disciples of Jesus were dead by about 60, by the end of the 60s, during the time of Nero's persecution.

One person remained among Jesus' original disciples.

That was Jesus' good buddy John, and John survived and never was killed by others.

He died a natural death very near the end of the first century.

But Domitian wanted to get him out of the way.

And there are stories about different ways Domitian tried to get rid of him.

Part of it included exiling him to the island of Patmos, where John saw the visions of Revelation, and he probably wrote the Gospel of John there and the ones that we call first, second, and third John, encountering the early stages of Gnosticism ripping at the church at that time.

So those were the major persecutions.

More went on into the second century, many in the second century, they became more focused, particularly because of several things.

Why did the Romans not appreciate Christians?

Well, increasingly it was for a number of reasons.

First of all, there was miscommunication.

There were things that were said about Christians that simply were not true, but they were used by others to try to cast dispersions on Christians.

Like, well, they're cannibals.

They eat and drink the body and blood of others.

Well, you know, reflections on communion, eating the body and drinking the blood.

They were called cannibals by some.

There were others that talked about Christians um having incestuous relationships because they called one another sister and brother, and then they said, I love you, I love you.

Isn't that an incestuous relationship?

So those were kinds of rumors and false stories that were circulated about Christians.

There were those who said they were atheists.

Why would people say Christians are atheists?

Because throughout the bulk of the history of humankind, whenever there are religions that develop, they have visible expressions of the gods, Dagon, the fish god of the Philistines, or the image that Nebuchadnezzar raised, or the different uh expressions of deities that are raised in various religions around the world.

And Christians, following in the steps of their forebears, the Israelites, people of the Jews, they did not make images of their God.

Remember what happened at Mount Sinai when the golden calf was made, and that from that time on you shall not make for yourselves any graven images.

No images among Christians.

Therefore, they must not have gods, therefore they are atheists.

That was another story that was told.

Another thing was that they lived separated lives.

We have this in the United States right now, where certain groups in society, and this is not unusual, and it happens in other countries around the world, but in this particular time and place, there have been aspersions cast about, for instance, those who have immigrated to Minnesota from Somalia, and they are identified as a separated group.

Well, that has been true of other groups.

They can be uh Mexicans in the United States, or they can be the African slaves.

Every country has had, every culture has had its group.

The Jews of Europe during Hitler's time.

There are groups that live separated lifestyles and they become the targets of the majority societies.

They're not like us, therefore they don't have a right to exist.

And Christians lived separated lifestyles because of that.

They were easily identified and they were brought under persecution and often killed.

During the second century, the uh 100s, there were literally hundreds of thousands of people killed, and probably as many, if not more, during the third century, that would be the 200s.

So we're looking at the first 300 years of the Christian church, and increasingly there was a mounting up of persecution against these people.

One of the ways in which this separated lifestyle came into expression was in the community festivals of every particular city.

In Rome, especially, they centered on the birthdays of the emperors.

But every city had its festival.

In Ephesus, there were the yearly celebrations of Artemis or Diana.

They had a temple there to this god, one of the Wonders of the ancient world.

It was true, it's true in places like Holland, Michigan, where we have tulip time.

And what would happen during these public celebrations is that animals would be killed and there would be great feeding of the crowds.

Now, the thing in those societies is that taking a life was much more of a religious thing than we have come to expect in our world.

So much so that even if you kill an animal for these kinds of public celebrations, you have to bring in the religious leaders of the city and have them bless the animal and thank the gods for this provision.

And so the animals are killed under the blessing of other gods.

And Christians, we see this from Acts chapter 15, where Gentiles are not have to do not have to become Jews in order to become Christians, but they're advised not to eat the blood of animals or not to eat meat that has not had the blood drained out of it.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

And that is what often happens, meat offered to idols.

We'll see that in 1 Corinthians 8.

We see it again in Romans 14 and 15.

And there's a discussion in the early church.

Can we participate in those celebrations?

Do we not participate in those celebrations?

What happens is that the Christians generally live separated from that, particularly where some in the new Christian communities used to be priests and priestesses at those shrines, and now they would separate themselves from it.

And that was led to one more thing that was part of the Roman attack on Christianity, and that's that the Romans were very religious.

They were pretty non-religious or non-ethical in the way that society eventually developed.

But with regard to superstitious ideas, the Romans were very religious and they believed in the gods.

They kind of gathered the gods.

If you look at the primary gods of the ancient Greeks and the primary gods of the ancient Romans, they are virtually identical because the Romans kept conquering peoples and kept drawing their gods into the large pantheon of the deities that support our regime.

We're the strongest and the gods are always on our side.

Now, as the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire about the time that Jesus came into this world, the emperors increasingly needed to, by force, keep these multiple countries and societies under the Roman umbrella.

And they added to the mix not only will observe your gods and your gods, and your gods are good too, but then they consolidated it in one particular strategy, particularly in the second and third centuries.

The emperor was the chief god.

So you have to pay homage to me, you have to worship me as a god, you have to make sacrifices to me as a god.

And the Christians refused to do that.

In fact, one of the people I'm going to be talking about in a minute, who is from Carthage, there was a time when the emperor declared that all of the leaders of all religious sects had to offer sacrifices to the Roman emperor.

And in Carthage, um they would not do that, and they were killed.

Um Cyprian was killed at that time.

He was the one who taught Augustine.

He was killed because he refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods.

So those were the reasons why the persecution spread throughout the empire.

Now, in that context, um the recognition of Christianity also began to blossom so that even though there was great persecution, Christianity spread rapidly.

And there were a variety of reasons for that.

One is because these people actually lived what they believed.

They believed in God, they believed in Jesus, they believed that Jesus was coming again, they really lived what they believed, and people said, huh, I don't know that I have that.

What have you got that I don't have?

Secondly, Christians, in spite of the fact that they were persecuted, people knew you could trust them.

They were honest, good people.

In a world where, you know, we can get our way if we just tell a little lie or a big lie.

Christians were basically honest.

And their lifestyle was something that people who didn't like the movement admired in individuals.

A third thing is that these people practiced disciplines that others did not, such as caring for the poor, caring for the outcast, caring for the sick and the marginalized.

Christianity would grow with the idea of hospital care, hospitality, and hospitals.

This emerges out of the Christian community.

Care for lepers, care for those with diseases nobody else wants to touch.

And get this care for unwanted babies.

In places like Ephesus, where there was a great um tourist attraction around the temple of Artemis or Diana, part of it involved fertility cult rites, which meant that men had sex with prostitutes at the shrine.

And to be a prostitute meant you had to be ready.

And what would happen is you would get pregnant, then you were taken out of the action, you know, and you wanted to get back because you got favors from those that you had sex with.

So babies were born and thrown away.

And you know who tended to look after them?

Ephesus was a great center for that, but Rome also and Corinth, it was Christians who looked after unwanted babies and actually nurtured them to life again.

So Christians were admired too, even as there was official persecution against them.

Now, what happened is that in this mix of admiration and persecution, Christianity spread, and there was a kind of refining of the group because you couldn't be a Christian simply because you wanted to be one in name.

You had to really believe this stuff and you had to commit because you were likely to die.

And reports of the martyrs' deaths became huge stories that were circulated.

That's why I suggested maybe you read The Martyrdom of Polycarp.

Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, which is just north of Ephesus on the Aegean Sea.

Polycarp was trained by John, Jesus' best buddy, one of the disciples.

John, near the end of his life, trained young Polycarp to be a leader in the church, and Polycarp would become one of the great stories of faith and faithfulness, as he was eventually burned at the stake because of his Christian faith.

But another thing began to happen, and that's that some people stood up and said, you've got to take this stuff more seriously.

And there were four in particular that in the second and third centuries, that is in the 100s and the 200s, became what we know as the apologists, the first Christian apologists.

And these four, I want to give you their names, and you can check out their stories another time, other places, but they were basically an evangelist and a philosopher and a lawyer and a pastor.

Four.

An evangelist, a philosopher, a lawyer, and a pastor.

The first one, born right around the end of the first century, right around the time that John died, is Justin.

He would be called Justin Martyr.

But he was born in what was called Nabloose.

It's called Nabloos today, but it was originally Shechem in the center of Palestine.

And in the New Testament times, it was called Sychar.

Remember Jesus visiting with the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4?

John 4 · chapter mention

That's the place Justin was born there.

He was born into a non-Christian family, and about in the middle of his life, he became a Christian.

Now he tried a variety of ways in which to understand the meaning of life.

He was very concerned about what life means.

And he tried being a philosopher and a teacher, and he tried this philosophy and that track, philosophy of Pythagoras, and uh the Stoics and others.

And then he happened to have a conversation with an elder from a church, and his name was Trifo, and it blew his mind.

Here was a guy who was not aiming to be a leader in society or be the most educated person, but he had a wisdom that was bigger than everybody else.

And in his dialogue with Trifo, um, Justin explains how he found Jesus.

He believed in Jesus so strongly that he eventually moved to Rome itself and began to talk with the politicians, including Marcus Aurelius and others, and say, You really got to know about uh the Christians.

And then a person who was kind of a no-good but very popular figure started making fun of Justin, and Justin got to have his head chopped off, and uh that was the end of Justin.

But we call him Justin Martyr.

Um, he was the evangelist who took the gospel directly to the seat of power and tried to explain the things of Christ.

He said two things.

One, he said that the wisdom of the Bible is the wisdom that eventually the uh Greek philosophers would pick up.

So they were not original, it was older than that.

And secondly, he said that the wisdom of the people of God is revealed wisdom, not just educate education.

So he said those two things.

Now, that was the line that was taken then by number two in this series of four, the uh philosopher Clement, lived in Alexandria, northeast corner of um Africa in Egypt, and he was um trained in Greek philosophy.

Um, Plato and Socrates, and then Aristotle, and he believed all of these guys, and he was a great teacher of philosophy, but he became a Christian too, and then he began to say to his fellow philosophers there's wisdom here which is older and better than in Greek philosophy.

And Clement of Alexandria would become one of the key leaders trying to communicate a bridge between the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of Christianity.

And don't write these people off as if they don't know anything, because they really do know something, and what they know can change your life.

He was the philosopher.

So we have Justin, the evangelist, who moves from Palestine to Rome.

We have Clement of Alexandria who takes the wisdom of the philosophers and then says, even better is the wisdom of Jesus, the wisdom of the scriptures, the wisdom of the ancient prophets, and all of our supposed wisdom ultimately comes from them.

The third was a lawyer, and here we move west along North Africa, we move west along the Mediterranean Sea to Carthage, and we run into Tertullian.

Tertullian was trained to be a lawyer, um, he was trained in logic, and he became a leader in trying to define Christianity.

Now, some of his definitions wouldn't last, and he later on got caught up in sort of an early form of Pentecostalism that's called Montanism, where there was ecstatic experiences and people going off into the mountains and having certain forms of orgies and things like that.

So it really took a strange turn.

But for Tertullian, before those things happened, in the legal status of his mind, the definitions of his mind, he began to identify uh this the uh ins and the outs of Christianity.

How do we talk about God?

How do we talk about Jesus?

What is orthodoxy and what is not orthodoxy?

And some of the early definitions of heresy come to us from Tertullian.

Um, it would go in some strange ways because he began to think about things that uh eventually were declared as heresy itself by the church.

But in his early days, Tertullian helped shape the language that was used by Christian theology.

So we have the evangelists from the center of Palestine, Justin, who goes over to Rome and says to the emperors and to the political machine, you gotta listen to these people.

We have Clement in Alexandria who dabbles or is deep into Greek philosophy and says Christianity is better than this stuff.

You've got Tertullian who comes to Christianity with a legal mind and starts laying out definitions of what's in and what's out.

And then the fourth of those is a pastor, and this is Origen back in Alexandria again.

He was taught by Clement of Alexandria, and now his name is Origen, and he begins to pastor those who are going through persecution.

He himself will die under persecution, but he's the one who did a lot of scriptural study.

He has uh produced more than 6,000 individual pieces of sort of commentary on different parts of scripture.

And one of the things that he became increasingly uh fascinated by is what is the nature of the spiritual realm and why do some become angels and some become demons, and what's that all about?

Some become humans, and so he got really fascinated with that and took them off track later on.

But Origen is one who became the uh kind of uh pastor to those who were persecuted and himself died as a persecuted person.

Um, but they gave shape to a public articulation of Christianity, which will become big in the next century when we move next time into what happened when Constantine took over the world of that day.

Now, I hope these things have helped you think through how the church transitioned from the New Testament into the flow of history around the Mediterranean world.

We'll get into a lot more later on, but I I want to end with this thing that my mom used to say.

She caught this uh poem at some point, and it was very personal, but we could say it about the church too.

My life is but a weaving between my God and me.

I do not choose the colors, he worketh steadily.

Often he weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride forget he sees the upper and I the underside.

Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly will God unroll the canvas and explain the reasons why the dark threads are as needed in the skillful weaver's hand as the threads of gold and silver in the pattern he has planned.

If we look at the first three centuries of the Christian church, we see an amazing weaving of dark threads and golden threads that come together and will sustain what becomes the church as we know it.

Let's leave it at that and we'll pick it up next week.