Our recital in detail of the events connected with the rise and progress of Christianity begins with the year of our Lord 62. In that year the writer of the "Acts of the Apostles" lays down his pen, and for the history of the Church of Christ in the years immediately following that date we are dependent, as far as regards inspired sources, on scattered notices which we gather mainly from the Pastoral Epistles of Paul, from the two Epistles of Peter, especially the first, from the writings of John—his Gospel and Epistles, belonging to the last years of the century, and his Apocalypse"—and from certain other writings included in the New Testament Canon, such as the Epistle to the Hebrews.
But after A. D. 62, when the memoirs of the "Acts of the Apostles" were closed, we possess no continuous chronicle by an inspired writer, such as we find in the first three Gospels and in the "Acts," of the Church's foundation, work, and progress. The task of the compiler really begins from that year (A. D. 62), when we believe that Paul was released from his Roman imprisonment, and for a period of some five or six more years resumed his missionary labors. Of those labors we possess little or no trustworthy information. Tradition is unanimous in asserting that the appeal which the Apostle made in the Court House at Caesarea to the Emperor terminated successfully; that he was acquitted of the charges laid against him by his Jewish enemies, and that after his acquittal he again resumed his old work, and —in the language of his disciple Clement, who was afterwards Bishop of the Roman Church—preached the Gospel in the East and West, instructing the whole world (i.e. the Roman Empire) in righteousness; travelling even to the extremity of the West before his martyrdom. This martyrdom, according to universal tradition, took place at Rome about A. D. 67-8. We shall presently relate the terrible calamities which befell the Roman Christians between A. D. 62-3 and A. D. 67-8. It was no doubt in the course of these dread events that the great teacher laid down his own life.
But up to A. D. 62 the Divine story enshrined in the New Testament Canon relates the beginning of Christianity. The Synoptical Gospels known as Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of the first three years: these are too sacred for ordinary analysis. They deal with only one life, but it is that of the Divine Founder of the religion which all the world is by degrees to embrace—not rapidly as men count years, but surely, each succeeding decade enrolling fresh recruits for the Christian army. Then the "Acts of the Apostles" speaks of the progress of the religion after the first three years; it tells of the Ascension morning and after. The two termini of the "Acts" are A. D. 33 and A. D. 62. It is a wonderful book inspired by the Divine Wisdom; but, differing from the Gospels, it does not defy analysis, for the persons whose "acts" are related in it are mere mortals; men, many of them highly blessed, owing to the work entrusted to them, but men of like passions with ourselves.
On the morrow of the Ascension of our Lord the Christian Church numbered a few hundreds—certainly not a thousand. Three thousand, then five thousand, were added by the preaching of Peter after the first Pentecost. The number gradually increased. It has been roughly computed that three hundred years after Christ about two persons in every three hundred of the population of the globe were Christian. Now in A. D. 1901 the proportion is said to be over two in seven.
The "Acts" takes up the story on the morrow of the Resurrection of the Lord—on the morrow of the wonderful event which was really the commencement of Christianity. At the rock tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea, in the eyes of the friends and foes of Jesus, the strange career of the Great Master appeared to be closed forever. In spite of the words of the crucified Teacher, no one appeared to have even dreamed of a resurrection of the loved or hated Jesus; seemingly all was at an end.
The Evangelists in their closing chapters, the author of the "Acts" in his beautiful memoir, serene and unimpassioned, tell the true story of their disappointment, disillusion, cowardice, despair, which passed into intense joyful surprise. They conceal nothing.
Again, the astonishment, vexation, dismay of the Sanhedrin and of the Jewish rulers is portrayed with the same quiet and passionless truthfulness. The governing body of the Hebrew people had worked their will upon the Teacher they hated. They had done Him to death. His followers, whom they looked upon as persons of humble origin, of little learning, and of no particular ability, were dispersed; they could afford to treat such men and women with contemptuous neglect. The influential men in the Sanhedrin knew of Peter and John, they were acquainted with the Maries, but they did not care to secure their persons—they were not worth a second thought; they would quietly disappear into the mass of the people whence they came, now that their Leader was gone. These able and unscrupulous persons, Annas, Caiaphas, and the others, judged, and judged correctly, that the whole movement centered in the person of Jesus; and now that He was out of the way surely the movement had collapsed, was stamped out, crushed, extinguished and for ever!
When the startling intelligence was brought to the Sanhedrin chiefs that the group of despised and illiterate Galileans, of whom they had expected never to hear again, were teaching and even preaching with splendid eloquence hard by the sacred Temple, and were positively making converts by thousands, great indeed must have been their surprise and dismay. Something had evidently happened which had changed these timorous, saddened men into fearless preachers of a condemned religion and a dead Master. What had transformed illiterate fishermen and peasants into impassioned, eloquent, and even learned teachers and preachers? It was the Resurrection of Jesus which had effected the former; it was the elapse of the Spirit in the Divine Breath of Pentecost which produced the latter startling phenomenon.
From the morrow of the Resurrection and after Pentecost the opposition of the Sanhedrin and of the rulers of the Jews to the new sect of Christians (we use the well-known appellation, though it belongs to a somewhat later date) was fitful and uncertain; now showing itself chiefly in measures of extreme severity and harshness, now paying apparently little heed to the vast developing power. Evidently from the "Acts" narrative, various feelings, perplexity and some awe, as well as jealousy and hate, were at work among the Sanhedrin and the influential Jews. At all events, the fitful opposition produced little if any effect on the fortunes of the fast growing community of believers in the crucified and risen Jesus. The main interest in the story of the "Acts" is concentrated upon the development of the Church or community of Christians.
For a considerable period it remained a strictly Hebrew Church; but gradually, and partly through supernatural agencies, the consciousness of their world-wide mission came to the Christian leaders. For several years after the Pentecost miracle the commanding personality of Peter gave him the first place in the community. With him, however, we find constantly associated John, the Disciple whom Jesus especially loved. It was to Peter that the revelation, which worked so mighty an influence on the Christian religion, came—the revelation which Isaiah centuries before had plainly foreshadowed in his striking words: "It is a light thing that thou shouldest be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou may est be My salvation unto the end of the earth." (Isaiah xlix. 6.)
Christianity during its first years of existence made extraordinary and rapid progress, but exclusively in the Jewish world. It was not, indeed, by any means confined to Jerusalem or to Palestine; for it numbered among its converts Jews dwelling in such centers as Antioch and probably at Rome; but it was, as it has been well termed, an expanded Judaism. It was preached by Jews, and was addressed to Jews; it was limited, national, exclusive. But all this, apparently, after some three years, was changed, the borderland of Samaria, between Judaism and heathendom, being then included in the great Christian fold—Peter and John, on the Samaritan" mission, still representing the Apostolic College.
But a far more important development of Christian work was entrusted in the first place to the famous Apostolic leader: the Church of Jesus must become a world-wide Church.
A Divine revelation contained in a striking vision disclosed to Peter that all the rights and privileges of the Christian Church might be, ought to be, offered to the whole heathen world. In the Roman city of Caesarea took place the baptism and admission of the heathen soldier, the Roman Cornelius; the old barrier between the Jew and the Gentile was broken down; henceforth in the Christian community there was no distinction between the Jew, the child of the chosen people, and the Gentile of the great world which lay outside the old charmed circle of the Children of Israel.
This action of Peter in admitting the great Gentile world into the Christian community was formally approved at Jerusalem by a Council of Apostles and Brethren, some eight or nine years after the first Pentecost.
The first great section of the "Acts of the Apostles" may be said to be closed by this all-important development of Christian work. From this epoch, the chief work in the now widely extended Church passes into other hands than those of Peter. A master mind appears on the stage, and a trained and cultured Jewish scholar occupies the chief place in the work of preaching Jesus to the vast world which lay outside the Holy Land. Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, an important personage in the official world of Jerusalem, is the prominent person henceforth in the book of the "Acts": his mission journeys, which extended through the populous districts of Asia Minor and Greece, the opposition he met with, his striking successes, his first arrest by the Roman Government at the instigation of the Jews, and his subsequent arrival at Rome, fill up most of the remainder—the larger half, indeed, of the inspired book of the "Acts." The time occupied in the "Acts" recital covers about thirty years, perhaps scarcely so much. The following table of the rough dates of some of the principal events of these thirty years will give an idea of the time taken up by these early endeavors, developments, changes in the Christian Church. But it must be borne in mind that the exact chronology of this period, especially in the earlier portion, is somewhat uncertain.
Chronology of the Acts.
The public Ministry of Jesus Christ commenced... 30
The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus ... 33
The first Pentecost and its miracle ... 33
Preaching of Peter and John to the Samaritans ... 35-6
Baptism and formal admission of the Roman centurion Cornelius to the Christian Church, by Peter, approved by Council of Apostles and Brethren at Jerusalem ... ... ... ... 41-2
First missionary journey of Paul to Cyprus, Pamphylia, Pisidia, Lycaonia ... 45-6
Paul's missionary work among the Gentiles form ally approved by a Council of Apostles and Elders at Jerusalem 49-50
Paul's second journey in Galatia, Lycaonia, Macedonia, Attica (Athens), Corinth 51-4
Paul's third journey in Galatia, Proconsular Asia (Ephesus), Macedonia, Corinth, Achaia ... 54-8
Paul's arrest at Jerusalem, imprisonment at Caesarea, journey to Rome 58-9
Paul's Roman imprisonment, acquittal and release; close of "Acts" 60-3
Such is the "Acts of the Apostles," a book compiled according to the universal tradition of Christianity by Luke, an intimate friend and a companion of Paul, and received among the inspired books of the New Testament by all the Churches at a very early date. Its extreme importance as a history of the Church during the thirty years which followed the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus cannot be overrated. It is penetrated, permeated with the supernatural—accounts of miracles, revelations, visions, supernatural appearances of the Lord, and occasionally of Beings not belonging to this world of ours, Beings called angels, like golden threads run through the whole tapestry of the work of the "Acts." They cannot be separated from it. They form a necessary part of it.
The writer is intensely anxious to give a true picture of the time. Nothing is concealed or veiled. The weakness doubts, fears, mistakes of the human actors are faithful recorded. Well-nigh a third of these early pages of Christian history are filled with the account of the missionary travels of that great teacher who was entrusted by the Holy Spirit to carry the first message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentile world. These journeys beyond the frontiers of the Land of Promise are dwelt upon with considerable detail. The manner of reception of the Divine message in important centers, such as in Ephesus, in the Pisidian Antioch, in Athens, Corinth, Thessalonica, Rome, is described with more or less fullness.
This weighty section of the earliest Christian history—the "Travel Document" as it has been termed—has been woven into the general story by the writer of the "Acts," little changed evidently from the original document composed no doubt by Paul himself, or written under his immediate influence. The great space allotted in the "Acts" to this "Travel Document" is an indication of the vast importance attached by the early Christians tathe movements which opened the portals of the Church to world lying outside the sacred and hitherto rigidly marked enclosure of the Chosen People.
We have found that in the first years Christianity was but an expanded Judaism, preached by Jews and addressed to Jews. The Christian Church of the first days was a purely Hebrew Church. The Messiah was a Jew of the purest race; His disciples were earnest, we should say, even bigoted Jews; for several years no Gentile seems to have been admitted into the sacred circle of Apostles and their disciples. Even after the breaking down of the immemorial wall which surrounded the earliest Christian Church as it had done the Jewish Synagogue, we find Paul the Apostle of the Gentiles telling his wondrous story first in the synagogues of cities such as Ephesus, Corinth, and Pisidian Antioch. It was from these Jewish centers that he seems, certainly for a long while, to have gathered his converts for the main part.
This book, which contains the history of the Catholic Church during the thirty years which followed the Resurrection of the Lord, was, as we have said, received into the Canon of Holy Scripture from the earliest times. Its authenticity and genuineness have never been disputed. It is contained in the oldest version made in the second century, viz. the Peschitta-Syriac—a revision of the old Syriac version, probably made and used within the Apostolic age—and in the Old Latin, made and used certainly before A. D. 170. The great Christian writers who flourished towards the end of the second century, Irenaeus (a hearer of Polycarp) in Gaul, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of Carthage, frequently and expressly quote this book. It is not too much to say that from the close of the first century onwards the Catholic Church has ever, without a dissenting voice, accepted as inspired the testimony of the "Acts of the Apostles."