I would like to test an idea here.

The usual picture has Paul founding the Gentile churches and Peter founding the church in Rome. The sources point somewhere else.

The first church in Jerusalem had two wings, the Aramaic-speaking Hebrews and the Greek-speaking Hellenists (Acts 6:1). After Stephen, a leader of the Greek speakers, was killed, a persecution scattered “all except the apostles” (Acts 8:1). The Greek speakers were driven out. The Aramaic-speaking apostles stayed.

Damascus had believers before Paul arrived. He went there to arrest them.

Antioch was founded by the exiles. Acts 11:19-20 says that those scattered after the death of Stephen reached Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch. Some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, preached to Greeks. Paul was still in Cilicia.

Rome had a church before either apostle arrived. Around 57 Paul writes to it as a church that he has never visited. He greets Andronicus and Junia, who were “in Christ before me”. Suetonius records unrest among the Jews of Rome under Claudius, over one “Chrestus”, around 49. Paul greets more than twenty people in Rome and never mentions Peter. The claim that Peter and Paul founded the Roman church appears only around 170 to 180, with Dionysius of Corinth and Irenaeus.

Paul came to both churches a decade or more after they began.

He did found churches of his own, in Galatia, Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth. He says so in letters to the very people who could have contradicted him. The senior communities, with the deepest roots and the greatest prestige, were never his.

So who did found them? The exiled Greek speakers did. Paul inherited their mission a decade later. Peter came to Rome late.

Where does this fail? Which piece of evidence would others weigh differently?

I set out the full argument, with each claim graded by strength, on the website of my podcast, Christianity Unearthed: christianityunearthed.com/resources/the-hidden-arc-evidence

Tom