christiancourier.com wrote:
</i><b>A Religious Explosion</b></i>
For some reason – that scarcely can be explained on ordinary bases – the religion of Christ exploded on the landscape of first-century society. Jesus had only a handful of men (the apostles) who functioned as the leaders of his cause. From this tiny seed came the mighty Christian movement.
On the day of its birth the community of believers consisted of a minimum of 3,000 persons (<b>Acts 2:41</b>). If the numeral 3,000 constituted only those immersed that day, and not those disciples previously baptized by John the Baptist (<b>Mt. 3:5-6</b>) and the Lord’s disciples (<b>Jn. 4:1-2</b>), the total was significantly larger. Within a relatively short period of time, the number of saints was computed at 5,000 adult men (<b>Acts 4:4</b>), not to mention the thousands of women who likewise were added to the body of believers.
It has been estimated that by the time Stephen was martyred (<b>Acts 7:60</b>), the Jerusalem church consisted of no fewer than 20,000 souls (<b>Kistemaker, p. 148</b>). This represented more than one-third of the estimated 55,000 citizens in Jerusalem at that time (<b>Jeremias, p. 83</b>).
Beyond that, the gospel rapidly spread from Palestine into Africa (<b>Acts 8</b>), Syria (<b>Acts 9</b>), Asia Minor (<b>Acts 13ff</b>), and finally into Europe (<b>Acts 16ff</b>). Paul, whose tireless travels spanned some 12,000 miles, evangelized from Jerusalem to Rome – and perhaps as far as Spain (<b>Rom. 15:24,28</b>).
<b>Clement of Rome</b> (c. A.D. 95) says that Paul reached “the boundary of the west” (<b>1 Clement 5</b>), which could be an allusion to Spain. Both <b>Irenaeus</b> (<b>Against Heresies, 1.10.2</b>) and <b>Tertullian</b> (<b>Against Jews, 7</b>) confirm the presence of Christians in Spain in the 2nd century A.D.
Christianity swept over the Roman empire like a tidal wave. The New Testament pays tribute to this phenomenal growth. The Christians were charged with having “turned the world upside down” (<b>Acts 17:6</b>). Their “sound went out into all the earth” (<b>Rom. 10:18</b>); and was “bearing fruit” everywhere (<b>Col. 1:6</b>).
<b>Historian Will Durant</b> (following the lead of <b>Edward Gibbon</b>) argued that by A.D. 300, a quarter of the eastern segment of the empire was Christian, while about one twentieth of the western division was similarly identified (<b>p. 603</b>). Those figures are now considered to be too conservative.
<b>E.M. Blaiklock</b> has noted that studies of the <b>catacombs beneath the city of Rome</b> (about 600 miles of galleries) contain somewhere between 1,750,000 and 4,000,000 “Christian” graves. He estimates that in the middle Empire at least twenty percent of Rome’s citizenry was made up of Christians – and at times the percentage was greater even. [Note: These tombs reflect an association with the Christian cause, though many of those buried doubtless had digressed from the pristine format.] The catacombs represent ten generations of believers (<b>p. 159</b>). This would suggest that the city of Rome itself had somewhere between 175,000 to 400,000 Christians – each generation spanned! This is staggering.
The testimony of <b>Tertullian</b> (c. A.D. 160-220) is most dramatic: “Men proclaim that the state is beset with us. Every age, condition, and rank is coming over to us. We are only of yesterday, but already we fill the world” (<b>Apology, 37.4</b>).
Moreover, as we shall subsequently observe, this wild-fire growth was achieved under the most adverse circumstances. Again, the question cries out for an answer: What was the cause to which this amazing growth may be attributed? What <i>natural</i> circumstances can account for this?
There is another powerful fact that may be mentioned briefly at this point. The initial impact of the gospel was within the Jewish community. The nucleus of the early church was Hebrew. As indicated above, many thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. It is an indisputable historical fact, however, that the Jews were strict monotheists. To them, there was but one deity. And yet, without controversy is the fact that Jesus made the claim of being divine (<b>cf. Jn. 5:18; 8:58; 10:30</b>). Surely only the strongest sort of evidence would persuade a Jewish mind to acknowledge the humble Nazarene as “God” (<b>cf. Jn. 20:28</b>).
Source:
http://www.christiancourier.com/feature/july99.htm
(Emphasis added by Loaves)
