Rome built roads around the Mediterranean, but she paved the way for Christianity in another sense, too. Rome looted all of the old temples of the Greeks and then in 70 CE she also destroyed the Jerusalem temple, the one built more than 500 years before under the direction of Ezra at the return of the Jews from captivity in Babylon.

To the plundered peoples of the world, this  cultural devastation begged to be explained in terms of divine anger on an international scale. What prophet could have foretold such desecration of the holy places? Could it have been Jesus? Some of Jesus' followers said that, like Jeremiah, Jesus had predicted the Jewish temple's destruction. Some claimed that Jesus was the only hero who really was coming back from the dead any more, after the Romans occupation. 

But who was this Jesus? Like Socrates he left no writings to speak directly for him. As Socrates' students imitated dead Socrates in different ways--some as skeptics, some as cynics, some as epicures, idealists or mystics across a broad range of interpretations--so early followers of Jesus produced various models of their leader. And at least as vigorously as Socratics disputed one another, Christian preachers from the beginning squared off over these different Jesuses. Hostility toward rival preachers shows up already in Paul (cir. 6 AD - cir 67 AD, see general bio on Paul see footnote 4 below.) Paul described those who disagreed with his views as "perverters of the gospel," "accursed by God," or worse (e.g., Galatians 1:7-8; Philippians 3:2-11). 

There are conflicting groups of followers, so which is the right one? Whose Socrates or whose Jesus, if any, is to be believed? The Jesus problem is particularly thorny because Jesus had no Plato, Xenophon or other literate biographer among his immediate followers. Although Jesus died in about 30 AD, none of the New Testament gospels were composed until at least a generation later. The gospels according to Mark (cir. 65-70 AD), Matthew and Luke (both cir. 80-85 AD) and John (cir. 90-95 AD) all were written by people who knew Jesus imaginatively, through stories told about him. All other surviving written gospels (apocryphal texts that were excluded from the official canon of the New Testament) appear to have been written in the second century AD or even later. The epistles of Paul to various new Christian congregations in the old Hellenistic world were composed before the written gospels, but the earliest of these letters, 1 Thessalonians, is thought to date back only to 50 AD.  Paul never met Jesus, and he was very unimpressed with the teachings of Jesus' apostles Peter and James (the brother of Jesus), who he apparently did meet in person (see Galatians 1:15; 2:9-11).  The Jesus that Paul claimed to know was resurrected "Christ," who appeared to him in the sky one day.

So Jesus' story must have been entirely oral in the beginning, unless early written records were destroyed. The first Christians may have kept Jesus secret, since ancient cults often kept their gods' and heroes' mysteries to themselves, not to be revealed outside the cult. (If you wanted to know, then you had to join.) But maybe they did not preserve Jesus' story in writing for the benefit of future generations because there weren't going to be any future generations. If the world was about to end, almost any day; as many imagined, then it may have seemed pointless to write, even if any belivers knew how to write.  

Only at most ten or fifteen percent of the population of the Roman Empire could read, and far fewer could write, so popular cults at this time still had to be transmitted mostly by word of mouth. Yet oral Christian story-telling apparently did not rely upon music, verse, or other mnemonic devices to preserve the words from one telling to the next.  The Christian gospels are written in prose and show no evidence of having been adapted from verse. Early Christian hymns must have helped to unite the thoughts of believers, but these apparently were only short lyrics, not extended narratives that told Jesus' story or repeated his teachings in detail. Apparently these songs were intended for communal singing, as modern hymns are; they weren't professional recital texts, like songs of the Homeric rhapsodes. 

The mechanics of early Christian prophecy can be glimpsed in some of Paul's letters and in The Book of Acts, the earliest surviving history of the early Christians. All four New Testament gospels show it prominently too, in the baptism of Jesus by the prophet John the Baptizer, the point at which Jesus discovers his spirit (his "Father" in heaven) and therefore can separate from John and begin to prophesy on his own.

How did Christianity lose its original character as a cult of prophets? Eventually in the course of time, questions must have arisen from the proliferation of inconsistent and contradictory accounts of Jesus. What exactly was the truth? Who was Jesus, really? Shouldn't all believers agree on an answer? Shouldn't there be one unified cult?

By the second and third centuries, many Christians came to see the need to police the story-telling, the Holy Spirit notwithstanding. This attitude became dominant when Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire in 312 AD. Church fathers took up arms against a variety of "heresies" (that is, views about God and Jesus differing from their own views), and for their followers they bound up the word of the Lord into a single authorized book in which only four gospels, letters of Paul and other miscellaneous writings were included. The papacy, the Nicene creed of Christian belief, and other institutions and standards of the church also came into being, and the original idea faded that all baptized Christians can prophesy through inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Dogmatic priestly religion separated from popular prophetic art.

Acts describes baptized Christians as "witnesses" to Jesus. Witnessing was made possible only through the Holy Spirit, which was received popularly in baptism (Acts 1:3). It was not recalling historical Jesus. It was testifying to his presence after his death. Sighting the resurrected Jesus was one form of witnessing, but unexplained events of various kinds could be taken for "signs" of Jesus' presence. When the sick unexpectedly recovered from illness, for example, Christian witnesses were quick to attribute the recoveries to the power of Jesus. Sometimes the apostles themselves were said to have performed miraculous healing "in the name of Jesus." So Peter is said to have cured a lame man (Acts 3:1) and also to have recovered a faithful woman named Tabitha from death (Acts 9:36). To accept such apparent miracles as true, and as signs of Jesus, was to witness Jesus. 

Large numbers of Greeks eventually became witnesses. These were the people of Hesiod and Homer, after all, and you will recall how these poets had described unexplained phenomena, including volcanoes and plagues, in terms of activities of Zeus, Apollo and other gods. Among Greeks, Jesus was another  explanation for cures and other mysterious events. Yet the likeness of Jesus to Zeus or Apollo probably would not have occurred to Peter or any of the apostles in Jerusalem, before the cult attempted to attract members from the Greco-Roman world of strange and foreign gods.

According to Acts, within a few months after Jesus' death, Peter and the disciples in Jerusalem withdrew from preaching into a life of prayer and meditation, but they hired Hellenist preachers -- that is, Hellenized Jews -- to support their commune through public preaching. All or most of the disciples probably were speakers of Aramaic, an ancient Persian language often regarded by anti-Persian biased Greeks as barbarian and corrupted with magical superstition, and so the services of Greek-speakers would have been needed to preach in the Greek-speaking world. Central aspects of Christianity, as it is known today, may have arisen only when Hellenists translated it. One change probably was the name of the religion. "Christ" is the word for ""the anointed one" in Greek. Although we can't say for sure, it seems very unlikely that anybody in Peter's commune in Jerusalem would have used this alien word. Perhaps, the original followers referred to Jesus as "Messiah," a roughly equivalent Hebrew term, but nobody knows because all of the earliest source literature is Greek.    

The Christian mass or Lord's Supper also bears an apparent Hellenic imprint. It is hardly the same as the Passover feast that Jesus, as a devout Jew, would have celebrated. Its central mystery is of the kind found in traditional Hellenic hero rites, in which the dead were made present to believers at communion meals. As the New Testament indicates, Peter and his Jewish-Christian followers would not eat with non-Jews. Jewish exclusivity in dining was a serious obstacle to Jesus-worship among Greeks, who traditionally met the spirits only at dinner. The cultural barrier may have come down only when Greeks began to give resurrection banquets for Jesus, along the recognizable lines of traditional Hellenic hero meals. 

Acts gives credit to Peter as the first Jew to dine with Near Eastern gentiles (see Acts 10:1 - 11:18.), but in one of his letters, Paul claims that he "received" the Lord's Supper from the Lord and "delivered" it to his congregation at Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:23-30) -- language suggesting that the Christian communion meal was his invention. [See the full quotation from Paul, in the right hand column of this page.] In any case, in early Hellenism, sacrificers believed that they were eating their ancestors, who fertilized the soil which had fed the animals being sacrificed; hence the need to appease the "heroes" with offerings. Christians similarly ate the body of the dead Jesus, but they did not have to offer him libations of wine. They brought wine to the dinner, as usual, but then they drank all of it instead of "offering" any to the dead by pouring it out as libations on the earth for them.  Drinking "the blood of Christ" to the last drop in this way was regarded by many pagans as a practice fit for vampires or for impious drunkards who refused to part with any of their wine. 

Very mindful of differences between Hellenes and Jews, Paul  generally reconciled them in ways that were more Greek than Jewish. With regard to the Jewish practice of circumcision and observance of kosher dietetic laws, for example, Paul directed his gentile followers to disregard the Jewish practice. Gentile men must have been relieved(!), but these exemptions bothered all who thought that, to become an authentic Jesus follower, the obvious first step was conversion to Judaism and adherence to Jewish law. Paul eventually won this argument when the followers of his Christ outnumbered the followers of Peter's messiah, and political power shifted away from Jerusalem toward the new Greco-Roman majority. 

Christian scriptures characterize Paul's life as a series of run ins with unenlightened Jewish establishment figures. Nevertheless, Paul never renounced his Jewish faith, and his broad mission was essentially Jewish, as a prophet of the Lord. Like earlier prophets, he impersonated "the word of the Lord," had visions, criticized those in authority as hypocrites, and tried to win true believers from the masses. He especially modeled himself after the ancient Jewish prophet Isaiah (cir. 760 - 690 BC). Isaiah's book was Paul's mentor; we can understand Paul's life and read his writings as attempts to fulfill Isaiah's prophecies. 

In Paul's time, Isaiah and the other canonical Hebrew prophets had an important practical advantage over Jesus. They were in the book. Paul couldn't know precisely what Jesus had said -- the gospels weren't written yet -- but he could read the Jewish scriptures and learn what the canonical prophets had said. Nobody said more than Isaiah about bringing worship of the Lord to foreign nations. 

Isaiah had lived at a time when it looked as if the Jewish state would be wiped out by Assyrian invaders, so he had imagined that dark changes were afoot in the spirit world, and it was his line of work to see what they were. What he saw in his prophesying was the Last Judgment, a dreadful day, very soon to arrive, when the angry Lord would judge the entire world once and for all -- not only Israel and Judah (the two kingdoms of Jews in those days) but all nations. Regardless of national origin, people who did not worship the Lord would be consumed in unquenchable fire. It seemed to be happening already in Isaiah's time when Israel (the northern Jewish kingdom, later to be called Samaria) was being torched by Assyrians and ten of the twelve Jewish tribes were about to become lost:

Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land is devoured in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. Isaiah 1:7

Only the Lord's faithful minority would escape the flames to come, but salvation at least would be global. All people of every nation would be saved who heard and followed the word of the Lord.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 
                                                                              Isaiah 2:2-4

Isaiah's reputation for accurate prediction received a boost in the middle of the first century AD, when Paul and his fellow missionaries finally undertook the international missionary project that Isaiah had envisioned more than 600 years earlier. Paul's preaching career fulfilled the words of Isaiah by carrying "the word of the LORD from Jerusalem" to Hellenists in Asia Minor, mainland Greece and Macedonia. The primary message that Paul took to these foreigners was Isaiah's message, that the Last Judgment was at hand. This may have been Jesus' primary teaching also, but historically speaking it is difficult to be sure about that.

At least as he is presented in the gospels, Jesus taught that the kingdom of heaven surely would arrive within the disciples' own lifetimes (Mark 13:30; Luke 9:27). This was also Paul's urgent message, even though confusingly some of the disciples already had died. In hindsight, Paul's prophecy was almost as premature as Isaiah's, but some people clearly believed it, and clearly the lives of some believers were seriously disrupted as a result.

The Thessalonians practiced communal sharing of food, but some of the zealous souls quit work and became demoralizing burdens on the producing members of the commune. Why toil if the end is so near? Other followers of Paul's completely lost interest in marriage, children and family life. On the other hand, some decided to indulge their senses with sexual excesses and other pleasures. Elsewhere, slaves ran away but then, when the world didn't end, realized that they were in deep trouble.

Obviously, many individuals didn't believe Paul's prophecies. And yet many did. At least one congregation supported Paul financially, and others may have, too. Several gave him donations to take back to the original commune of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem -- the poor "saints," as Paul called them when raising funds.  

Paul had no political or social authority whatsoever in communities where he preached doomsday. On the contrary, some people despised him as a Jew while others saw him as a turncoat from Jewish orthodoxy. Yet through prophecy alone -- his inspiring  words -- he converted Hellenists, even in such traditional Hellenic strongholds as Thessaly, Achaia, and Athens. [Thessaly was Achilles' homeland of Phthia; in Plato's dialogues this is also the place where Crito's friends could have harbored Socrates in exile, if only Socrates had agreed to go.] The success of Paul's mission is very remarkable, even if in the process Paul had to turn Jesus into Christ and dispute with Peter and James.

Central to Paul's presentation of himself to the Hellenes as an inspired preacher was his story that he had directly encountered Christ -- resurrected Christ, not the historical person Jesus. Paul refers to this supernatural episode no less than three times in his surviving letters, and Acts mentions it three other times (Acts 9:1-9, 22:3-16, and 26:9-18, Galatians 1:11-17 and 1 Corinthians 9:1 and 15:8-11). The incident had happened one day when Paul was traveling on the road to Damascus (in modern Syria, far from the Hellenic homelands). Suddenly there was Christ up in the air overhead, calling Paul by name and rebuking him for persecuting Christians. It knocked him down and temporarily blinded him. From this experience, Paul saw that the end was beginning! Jesus already had been raised and transformed in a mysterious new body. Everybody else surely would follow.

To believe Paul, similar sightings of risen Christ already had occurred to the first believers in Judea:

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:
And that he was seen of Cephas [Peter], then of the twelve [disciples]:
After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.
And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.
For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. (1 Corinthians 15:3-10, emphasis added. See also Paul's idea of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:39.)

Paul witnessed Christ, as Peter and the others in Jerusalem had witnessed Christ. This was Paul's claim to direct inspiration, independent of the disciples who had known and worked with Jesus. It was the claim of a prophet to spiritual knowledge.

Because there is no evidence apart from Paul's testimonies and the brief descriptions in Acts, questions about what really happened to Paul on the road to Damascus can't be answered definitively. Paul's admirers and detractors reach different conclusions about it. But whatever actually took place, Paul became an opposite of his former self. He stopped persecuting followers of Jesus and devoted the rest of his life to founding Christian communities. This conversion became a model for transformation of the Hellenists that Paul hoped to convert. He was going to gain everlasting life through the Last Judgment, and they could be saved, too, through belief in his words.

Why did so many Greeks believe Paul? Several suggestions have already been made on this page, but the question is not easily answered. It could have helped Paul considerably that Hellenic and Hebrew literature were full of deep-rooted parallels. Greeks who knew nothing of Isaiah or other Jewish doomsday prophets could have understood that Christ was a hero, and Paul was a prophetic medium who could invoke Christ, as he claimed had happened involuntarily on the road to Damascus. They could have accepted Paul's communion meal as a hero ritual that called up the spirit of dead Jesus and that saved them, too, either from death or in death. They could have seen Paul's Last Judgment, not as a restatement of Isaiah but as a culmination of Hellenic sacrifice when all of the heroes would arise from their graves to claim the gifts that were owed to them and to bless the faithful people who had made appropriate sacrifice offerings. Would Paul's arrival in town perhaps mean that he might make Christ appear? And if Christ appeared, would it be the end of the world?

Acts of the Apostles
reading The Book of Acts

Acts was written in about 80-85 AD to tell about Paul's missionary work and related events in early Christian history, from the aftermath of Jesus' crucifixion (cir. 30 AD) until the time of Paul's journey to Rome (cir. 60 AD). This is an international story of the spread of the cult of Jesus to the Greco-Roman world, a Hellenist foundation myth for Christianity. As such, it serves a similar cultural purpose to the foundation literature concerning the origin of the Platonic Academy, Homeric Alexandria, Virgilian Rome, Muhammadan Mecca, the Hesiodic Helicon etc.

Acts is also a continuation of the gospel according to Luke, written by the same anonymous Greek author and for the same unknown audience. (It is addressed to one Theophilus, meaning "lover of God.") The two books are full of parallel episodes, and they may have become separated simply because the whole story originally was contained on two standard 32-foot scrolls. 

Luke is known by scholars as the gospel to the Gentiles, because of its Hellenist features. It substitutes Greek names for Hebrew and Aramaic names, it is interested in non-Jewish Christians and international salvation (2:30-32, 3:38, 4:16-30, 13:28-30, 14:15-24, 17:11-19, 24:47-48), and it demonstrates incomplete knowledge of Palestinian geography, history and customs. It is also Homeric in its omniscient point of view (recall the omniscience of Homer's Muse); God's plans are announced by angelic messengers, and many of the characters, even the shepherds tending their flocks by night on the night of Jesus' nativity, know in advance how the story will turn out (Luke 2:8; recall the present existence of "the" future in Homer).

According to Luke, as well as Paul, the future can be seen when one is under the influence of the Holy Spirit. To become Christian is to gain access to the spirit, which can provide the gift of prophecy, including the power to see the end of world which is coming soon. The inspired may see risen Jesus, as Paul and many others did, or they may see other "signs" that signify the approach of the Last Judgment. Christianity for Luke, as for Paul, is a cult of prophecy.

One of the striking episodes in Luke's gospel (not found in other gospels) occurs when Elizabeth, a wise woman pregnant with John the Baptizer, is visited by Mary, pregnant with Jesus, and Elizabeth suddenly becomes prophetic, empowered by the Holy Spirit to say the first "Hail, Mary."

And it came to pass, that, when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
And she spoke out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.
And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.
                       Luke 1:41-45 (emphasis added)

John does not need to be born, let alone born-again, to see how things are going to be in the future. He can prophesy while he is still a fetus in the belly, at least when his mother is filled with the Holy Spirit. 

Prophecy is central to Luke's account. As the story unfolds it is almost as if Jesus' mother is John rather than Mary, and as if John's mother is Isaiah rather than Elizabeth. The biological mothers quickly disappear from the story, but John's life and teachings fulfill the words of Isaiah (Luke 3:1-6), and Jesus in turn lives out the predictions of John. Jesus' spiritual life comes into being only when John baptizes him.

Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened,
And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.
                           Luke 3:21-22 (emphasis added)

From this point Jesus' ministry begins. The implication is that even Jesus needed baptism under the direction of a prophet to gain access to the Holy Spirit and the gift of prophecy or awareness of the end times.

The transmission of the Holy Spirit by baptism is repeated in Acts, when dead Jesus promises his mute and amazed followers in Jerusalem: "John indeed baptized in water, but you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit not many days from now" (Acts 1:5). This dry baptism that inaugurates Christian preaching abroad occurs on Pentecost, when tongues of flame descend on each of the apostles, giving them the power to speak languages understood outside of Palestine. This event overcomes the linguistic damage done at the destruction of the Tower of Babel [recall lesson 4], and it makes possible the realization of Isaiah's multicultural vision that the word of the Lord should go forth into the world from Jerusalem.

Non-believers present at this Christian Pentecost think that the Christians are drunk, but Peter reminds them that it's only 9 a.m., and he launches into a sermon explaining that the Christians are acting as everybody is supposed to act when the last days have come, according to the prophet Joel:

Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.
      Your young men will see visions.
      Your old men will dream dreams.

Yes and on my servants and handmaidens in those days,
      I will pour out my Spirit, and they will prophesy.

I will show wonders in the sky above,
      And signs on the earth beneath;
      Blood, and fire, and billows of smoke.
             Acts 2:17-19 (compare Joel 2:28)

In their babbling and prophesying, the apostles are making it appear to be the end of the world. Peter supplies the explanation, including discussion of the "signs" or miracles that Jesus worked during his time on earth and, most importantly, Jesus' resurrection from the dead. The apostles keep count on how many people are persuaded by their acts: from this episode they convinced about 3,000 to believe (Acts 2:41).

All of these acts can be found in the Book of Acts, depending on the reader's perception of the events that it describes. Looking at the Pentecost "miracle," for example, one easily might see a picture of social manipulation via managed illusion, as the apostles stage a public event to trick devout Jewish pilgrims into thinking that the end times have come. (Everybody's prophesying; ergo, according to scripture, the world must be coming to end.) That's a non-believer's perspective, which sees only the theatrical kind of acting. 

But look at this same Pentecost episode from a believer's point of view, and there are no apparent insincerities or histrionics. The apostles can be seen as honestly trying to save their fellows from a catastrophe that (they really think) is about to occur, so that a little dramatization is justified by the good intentions. If the apostles are convinced that the end already has begun, then they are acting appropriately, the way that the scriptures say people in fact will act when the end arrives. Perhaps they believe in the book to such an extent that they simply do what it says.

Still another way to view this Pentecost scene is to be agnostic about what the apostles' thoughts and motives because Luke describes only appearances: on the surface it looked as if people were prophesying, and it looked as if 3,000 spectators believed them. In this view, personal thoughts and motives might be beside the point because the Holy Spirit is in change of events. The apostles might not be self-directed; the spirit may have taken over. The Pentecost may be happening spontaneously, regardless of anybody's intentions, good or bad. This interpretation would illustrate prophetic self induction, described previously.

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1800 BCE? Abraham

1400 BCE? Moses

1200 BCE. Fall of Troy, Thebes, and pre-Hellenic cities. End of the Bronze Age.

950 BCE? Solomon constructs the first Jewish temple at Jerusalem.

753 BCE? Rome founded.

750 BCE? Conventional date for Homer. [But an original Homer or Trojan War writer probably flourished at about 1200 BC. ]

722 BCE. Isaiah. Assyrians conquer northern Jewish kingdom of Israel.

587 BCE. Jeremiah. Babylonians conquer southern Jewish kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem. Solomon's Temple is destroyed, and Jews are taken in captivity to Babylon.

515 BCE. The Jerusalem Temple is rebuilt in the period of Ezra, after the Jewish exile in Babylon is ended by Cyrus the Great's  Persian conquest of the Babylonians. (Archaic Age temples are built in the Greek world by this time also.)

510 BCE. Beginning of Roman Republic (Etruscan or early Roman kings expelled).

399 BCE. Death of Socrates.

333-323 BCE. Conquests of Alexander the Great.

300-198 BCE. Palestine under the rule of the Hellenistic Ptolemies.

198-142 BCE. Palestine under the rule of Hellenistic Syrians.

142-37 BCE. Palestine briefly under independent Jewish rule of the Maccabees.

63 BCE. Conquest of Palestine by Rome under Pompey the Great.

44 BCE. Assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome.

40-4 BCE. Herod the Great  serves as King of Jews under the Romans.

19 BCE. Death of the poet Virgil. His unfinished epic poem The Aeneid, the official foundation myth of Rome, is published posthumously.

4 BCE? Jesus born

CE 14-37. Tiberius (adopted son of Augustus) is second emperor of Rome.

CE. 18-36. Caiaphas, high priest in Jerusalem.

CE 25-36. Pilate, Roman Governor of Judea.

CE 30? Jesus crucified.

CE 33? Conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus.

CE 43. Roman conquest of Britain begins.

CE 46-57. Paul's missionary journeys in the old Hellenic world of Asia Minor and the Greek peninsula (epistles written cir. 50-60 AD).

CE 56-117. Life of Tacitus (major Roman historian).

CE 61. Queen Boudicca rebels against Rome and massacres Roman legions in Britain. 

CE 64. Rome burns, allegedly while the Emperor Nero sings of the burning of Troy. Christians had called for the burning of Rome, and Nero evidently blamed the Christians for starting the fire. According to second century Christian sources, which may or may not be reliable, Nero ordered a retaliation in which Peter and Paul were among those killed.

CE 65? Gospel according to Mark.

CE 66-70. Jewish revolt against Rome. Vespasian leads legions against the Jews in Judea. The Jewish leader Josephus surrenders to the Romans at Jotapata. The Roman army destroys the Second Temple in Jerusalem. (Josephus later became the foremost Jewish historian of antiquity).

CE 79. Mount Vesuvius erupts, burying Pompeii and Herculaneum.

CE 80. Roman Collosseum is completed.

CE 80-85? Gospels according to Matthew and Luke, and The Book of Acts written.

CE 90-95. Gospel according to John written.

CE 110-130? Gospels according to Peter and Thomas, and The Infancy Gospel of Thomas written probably at this time. (Other apocryphal gospels apparently were written still later than these.)

CE 187. Iranaeus, a Greek who became Bishop of Lyons in Gaul, writes Against Heresies, one of the main works marking the drive toward religious orthodoxy within Christianity. 

CE 312. Emperor Constantine the Great converts to Christianity, marking the beginning of Christianity's status as the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Persecutions of non-Christians in the Roman Empire begin. Standardized practices and beliefs are enforced.

CE 400. Augustine's Confessions written.

CE 410. Rome is sacked by Alaric, the first of the "barbarians" to pillage the city. Augustine begins The City of God to refute pagans who blame the fall of Rome on Christianity. The fall of Rome has usually been considered to be the event that ends the classical period and begins the Middle Ages in European history, but the eastern empire was not destroyed by the fall of Rome.

CE 529. Plato's Academy is destroyed by Christian Emperor Justinian, apparently to suppress non-Christian ideas.

Even though Christianity operates by models of action, not by rules of law, Christian preachers regularly describe the models in abstract terms: what's right to do, what's wrong to do. All violations of model behavior are correctable by abandoning the wrong acts and performing the right ones.  The wrong are forgiven.

Paul is also noted for having been a persecutor of Christians, prior to his "conversion" experience. Yet Paul never converted in the sense of dropping Judaism in favor of Christianity. He always thought of himself as a Jew, even after he assumed the view that Jesus was the son of the Lord. The first Christians in Palestine thought of themselves as Jews, not as members of a different religion. Relations between Christian-Jews and nonChristian-Jews apparently were strained from the beginning, but the schism apparently was not completed for several decades after the death of Jesus.

Paul's exact role in persecuting Christians, prior to his conversion, is unknown. It was unlawful for Jews in the Roman Empire of Paul's day to inflict corporal punishment for any spiritual offense. The stoning of Steven, for example, assuming that it happened as Acts says, would have been illegal. (Acts 7:59 claims that Paul was present at this event.) But local Roman administrators may have looked the other way when Jewish priests or aristocrats broke laws. Joining the lowly persecuted Christians may have been Paul's way of cleansing his feelings of guilt by becoming one of the victims (a truly Hellenic behavior!). Certainly he seems to have relished being imprisoned on a regular basis. Obedience to political laws appears to have little importance for him; obedience to the Christ model, even when it meant law-breaking, was paramount.

Paul found women very active in the early Greek churches, even as congregational leaders, possibly because priestesses had been common in the old Hellenic world, or because women were allowed to have money in Hellenist society (unlike many traditional societies at the time), or possibly because Jesus had cultivated women, along with sinners and other downtrodden and despised people, the "last" who soon would become "first" in the reversed social order of the Kingdom of Heaven. Paul is sometimes accused of patriarchal leanings that eventually turned the church into an old boy's club, but these modern criticisms may not be completely fair. While Paul advised women to be silent in the assembly and to cover their heads, he also accepted women as church leaders, saints and fund raisers. 

For some further reading on Paul, see: R. Banks, Idea of a Community: The Early House Churches in Their Historical Setting (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980)(discusses Paul as a builder of communities); R. Jewett, A Chronology of Paul's Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979)(attempts to reconstruct Paul's life); A.J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1989)(comparing Paul to popular Stoic and Cynic traditions in classical philosophy); J.H. Neyrey, Paul In Other Words: A Cultural Reading of his Letters (Louisville: Westminster/Knox Press, 1990)(a reading in terms of cultural anthropology); S.K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1986)(shows how the letters in the New Testament are influenced by classical rhetoric).

In the beginning the commune consists of about 120 persons, perhaps an estimate that each of the twelve disciples was supported by ten converts at the conclusion of Jesus' ministry (Acts 1:12). The commune could not have been supported by taxes or tithing requirements like those of the Sadducees at the Jerusalem temple. Whatever their religious differences were, the serious conflict between the early Christian preachers and the temple priests must have had a practical economic basis, as both groups sought support from the same community of practicing Jews in Jerusalem.

Within a few years after the death of Jesus, the Sadducees brought a man named Stephen to trial for blasphemy. As Acts tells the story, Stephen told them at the trial that the Lord "does not dwell in temples made with hands" (meaning, the Jerusalem Temple) and that the Jewish priests had persecuted all of the Lord's prophets throughout Jewish history. Things apparently got out of hand at that point, and Stephen was taken out and promptly stoned to death. 

One consequence of this martyrdom is that Stephen's fellows (Acts calls them "Hellenists") fled in fear into the countryside where they had to earn their daily bread by preaching to strangers.

Note here that the apostles themselves were not persecuted at the time of Stephen's death; the Sadducees already had decided to leave the apostles alone, according to Acts 5:33-40. It's the "Hellenists" who were driven out of the city at Stephen's death to become the first wave of international preachers of "Christianity." They were the troublemakers from the Sadducee point of view, evidently--or at least this is the story as Luke presents it. 

Who were these Hellenists? We might guess that they were some of the reformed Jews of their day, Jews who spoke Greek and adopted Greco-Roman lifestyles, so they could move in international circles, in contrast to other more conservative Jews who resisted Hellenization. To believe the story in Acts, infighting between these Hellenist Jews and the Sadducees (priests of the Jewish temple) drove the Hellenists to the apostles of Jesus within a year or two after Jesus' death. They turned to the apostles because the Sadducees would not make economic provision for their widows, the story says. (Why the Sadducees should have provided for these widows, the story doesn't say.) The apostles agreed to take the widows into their commune, on the slight condition that the Hellenists would contribute seven men who could preach. The deal was sealed with the laying on of hands (Acts 6:5).

Why weren't the apostles themselves going out to do the preaching? Why did they need the Hellenists to do the work? The original disciples appear to have withdrawn from preaching and communal duties to devote their life to prayer (Acts 6:2). Was their silence a tradeoff for peace with the Sadducees, as the Sadducees indeed had demanded (Acts 5:40)? In Acts, Peter's public preaching in Jerusalem seems to stop as soon as the Sadducees' have ordered him to be silent about Jesus, and no further "persecutions" of Peter and his people are mentioned until much later on. 

If the apostles had been censored effectively by the Sadducees, it probably would have been the apostles who approached the Hellenists, not the Hellenists who approached the apostles, to make a deal. If the apostles weren't preaching, they urgently would have needed people to support the commune in Jerusalem by preaching on their behalf. The alternatives would have been to disband the commune and go back to fishing or else to defy the powerful Pharisees and risk deadly persecution again.

The agreement between the apostles and the Hellenists must have had advantages for both sides. Presumably, the Hellenists could have supported their widows by preaching on their own. The fact that they agreed to preach for the apostles indicates that there must have been substantial economic value in Jesus' message (enough to share) and that the apostles controlled that value. These circumstances suggest that nobody at this early date officially could speak for Jesus unless the cult authorized the preacher by the laying on of hands.

The benefit of the deal for the apostles likely would have been economic support for the commune. It's hard to see in practical terms what else it could have been. In this view of the situation, while the disciples prayed at home, their contract preachers worked the crowds outside, taking up collections and receiving contributions whenever anybody renounced the world to follow Jesus. Converts were expected to sell their assets and contribute all of the proceeds to the common pool, retaining no money in their own names (Acts 4:32). Luke is brutally frank about the consequences of individuals gaining or keeping any private ownership of property. These acts deserved punishment by death, he clearly believes, at least in the case of Judas (Acts 1:16) and Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1). As in Homer, God takes care of the killings.

Perhaps the most interesting point about the Hellenists in Acts is that they started preaching for the commune AFTER Jesus already had lived and died, all of the apostles' reported sightings of the resurrected Jesus (except Paul's) already had occurred, the reported miracle of the Pentecost had taken place, and all of the conflicts between Peter and the Temple priests were over and done (including Peter's healing of the lame man and run-in with the temple officials, the apostles' imprisonment and escape from prison led by an angel). These are all of the primary "miracles" that come down to us through the tradition of the Greek preachers, including the gospels of the Greek New Testament and Acts itself. 

If Luke's account is correct, there seem to be two possibilities. The Hellenists could have received these stories about Jesus and his cult while being trained by the apostles to preach for the commune, or else the Hellenists invented the stories afterwards on directly receipt from the Holy Spirit. Which was it?  Did the apostles distort their accounts of past events, or did the Hellenists do so? Or did the miracles happen as Acts claims? How can we know?