Christianity struggled to develop—till this skeptic turned a believer

After Jesus’ dying in A.D. 33 , his early followers started slowly spreading out from Jerusalem to seek out sanctuary in locations akin to Cyrus, Phoenicia, Damascus, and Antioch. The authors of the New Testomony, like St. Luke the Evangelist who’s believed to have penned the ebook Acts of the Apostles round A.D. 80, inform the struggles believers and the early church confronted of their nascent days. In Acts, Luke tells the story of St. Stephen, the primary Christian martyr to be gruesomely executed in A.D. 36. Stephen’s stoning, Luke says, prompted different followers to flee in order to not fall sufferer to comparable persecutions. So, what does the Bible say about how this weak religion acquired jumpstarted, finally evolving into the world’s most populous faith with some 2.3 billion followers right now?

(Biblical stories of Jesus’ birth reveal intriguing clues about his times.)

Acts of the Apostles tells the story of 1 man, Saul of Tarsus, who performed an enormous function in spreading early Christianity. Devoutly Jewish and a Roman citizen, he was an unlikely proponent of this new religion. It describes how he witnessed the mob scene round Stephen’s dying, and got here to consider it was his solemn responsibility to persecute Christians, going as far as to tug Christian women and men to jail, punishing them to disclaim their religion. He obtained permission from the excessive priest in Jerusalem to pursue and arrest fleeing Christians. On his method to Damascus, Syria, nevertheless, a light-weight from heaven flashed round him. He fell to the bottom and heard the voice of the resurrected Jesus saying, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). From that second on, Saul (later known as Paul) devoted himself to the Apostolic mission.