Bart has talked about how slowly Christianity took to become a major religious force. OK, check.
We also know that Paul was persecuting Christians at the time of his conversion, just three years or so after the crucifixion.
My question is that if Christianity was so slow to grow, then in the first year or two after Jesus was crucified it couldn’t have had many followers yet (a few dozen? a few hundred?). If so, it was not yet a growing concern, then:
- How did Paul come to even hear about Christianity?
- Why was this rag-tag religion so reviled by Paul? (Since, at this point, there wasn’t much to worry about). This leads me to ask if it is possible that Christianity was much larger in the early days than previously thought? If so, then it would make sense to have Paul running around persecuting those that he saw as a threat.
- Why, after his conversion, as a faithful Jew, did he expend so much effort to reach the Gentiles? Is it because he wasn’t getting any traction in the Jewish community?
This is a question that has always bothered me, and hopefully, someone here who is smarter on these issues than I can shed some light on my questions. Thank you!
That really puts some meat onto the bones of my understanding of the timeline. Thank you!
This leads to another question. We all know that Paul “persecuted” Christians, but I don’t have idea what this means!
Does it mean that he:
- Flipped Christians the bird when passing them in the street?
- Physically attacked them?
- Worked as an official agent of Rome to have them incarcerated?
“Persecution” is a slippery term to us today, but did it mean something more specific back then?
Somewhere lost in the sands of Egypt ancient pottery jars are buried storing a batch of previously unknown but authentic letters of Paul wherein he reveals the answers to all our questions!
Acts makes it sound like Saul of Tarsus saw a light and fell off his horse, and when he got up and dusted himself off he had become Paul the apostle. I’m exaggerating but only a bit. Paul’s letters hint at a more complicated process. For example isn’t it likely that Paul had some sort of overwhelming visionary experience and only later after much thought came to see it as an appearance of the risen Christ? There are a lot of unaccounted for years between the probable time of Paul’s “conversion” and the writing of the surviving authentic letters.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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