PART II - CHRISTIANITY

Summary

The members of the early church in Jerusalem were all Jews or proselytes, such as Nicolas of Antioch (Acts 6:5). They were found continually in the Temple (Acts 2:46; 5:42) and it was not until the persecution following the death of Stephen that they dispersed to take the message further afield. On the face of it they were, like the Essenes, just another sect within Judaism. As such, they came under the sheltering umbrella of the sanction accorded to Judaism as an official religion.

When Paul went abroad he won many converts among those who had been on the fringe and now eagerly embraced a cult which had all the attractive features of Judaism and which promised personal salvation without imposing circumcision and irksome food regulations. His success in promulgating teaching which many orthodox Jews must have thought downright blasphemy provoked jealousy and hostility. Such Jews were concerned to dissociate themselves and to prejudice the authorities against the Christians as dangerous revolutionaries. These Jews of the Diaspora in the regions of the eastern Mediterranean were numerous and prosperous, well-established communities within cities where they had been settled for generations. Their pagan neighbours accepted them and their odd habits as a fact of life, even if tensions sometimes arose.

The wonder is that the tiny Christian churches survived and increased. Jewish members might be tempted to relapse under the comforting shield of Judaism with its legal immunity, but pagan converts had no natural or national links with Jews.