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One

The Beginning — Pentecost and the Spread of the Gospel

“You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.”¹

Jesus Christ

The fisherman had experienced a range of emotions over the last few months. Years ago, he had met the man who changed his life, who gave it meaning — the man who gave his authority to the fisherman and commanded him to lead a new community that would change the course of human history. Little did the fisherman know that hundreds of men would follow in his shoes and his name would be remembered and recalled for thousands of years. None of that occupied the fisherman’s mind at the moment. Instead, he was focused on the crowd in front of him: several thousand people from around the known world, enraptured by his tale of the Christ, by a miracle of the Holy Spirit hearing him in their native language. Peter had experienced every emotion during his friendship with Jesus. He had learned from the Master, lived and eaten with him, and loved him. Weakened by fear and consumed by self-preservation, he had denied knowing the man who had given him everything. But the Christ had forgiven him, and that act of mercy motivated Peter. He recalled vividly the day he heard the Master’s body was not in the tomb and how he ran as fast as he could to see for himself the emptiness. Then, Jesus appeared to him and the other apostles and spent time with them, and then he left again. But he promised to send the Spirit, and when the Spirit came ten days later, Peter and the others were changed men. No longer afraid of the Jews, they were emboldened for the epic adventure Jesus called them to undertake. It began in Jerusalem in front of a large crowd, where the once simple fisherman proclaimed Jesus Christ crucified, died, and resurrected.

Every story has a beginning. Our family history begins some two thousand years ago in the imperial Roman province of Judea, an unimportant backwater in the imperial system. It was a place of frequent violence and home to a group of people who, unique in the Empire, were allowed to worship their one God. If asked, no one alive at the time would have thought that a motley collection of “nobodies” could lead a cultural and religious revolution that would change the Empire and sweep the world. In the first century A.D., a document known as the Acts of Caesar Augustus was published in order to honor the emperor and encourage others to imitate his virtues.² In the same century, a physician named Luke wrote another document with a similar title. It recorded the actions of a band of brothers — witnesses to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit — who spread his Good News throughout the world and provided a blueprint of life in the new kingdom.

A Replacement for the Betrayer

Peter and the other apostles knew that in the new kingdom they were not merely witnesses to the deeds of Jesus — they were also endowed with authority as representatives of Christ. The college of apostles had been incomplete since the death of Judas the betrayer. Someone was needed to restore the college to its fullness and take Judas’s place. The Eleven, recognizing their office as not merely organizational but also priestly,³ cast lots in accordance with the Davidic custom, where priestly duties were assigned by lot. The lot fell on Matthias, who had been one of the earliest disciples of Jesus. The college was now complete, and the apostles waited the promised sending of the Spirit.

Pentecost — Birthday of the Church

Under the Old Covenant, the feast of Pentecost celebrated the giving of the Law by God to the Jewish people through Moses (the Torah) fifty days after the first Passover. Ten days after Jesus ascended into heaven (fifty after his resurrection) a group of 120 disciples, including the apostles and the Blessed Mother, gathered in Jerusalem. We know the story from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles: they heard a mighty wind and were shocked when tongues of fire descended on them. They began speaking in other languages. This event alludes to the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament, when human communication was garbled because of mankind’s sinfulness. But now, in the New Covenant, God restored the community of humanity in a shared language of the Gospel in the Church.⁴ Tradition holds that the event took place in the Upper Room where Jesus and the apostles celebrated the Last Supper; however, an alternative theory proposes that the location was actually the Temple.⁵ Filled with the Spirit, the apostles began preaching, which the assembled diverse crowd heard in their own native languages. This miracle captured the attention of the crowd, and Peter began the Church’s evangelization efforts by proclaiming Jesus Christ crucified, died, and resurrected. After hearing Peter’s testimony, the people asked him what they should do. He invited them to repent and be baptized. The Acts of the Apostles records that three thousand souls were added to the membership of the Church on the day of Pentecost.⁶

The First Martyrs

As the Christian family grew in numbers, so did the pastoral needs of the community. The apostles knew their own chief mission was preaching, so they ordained seven men “full of the Spirit and of wisdom” to serve the needs of the community as deacons.⁷ Stephen, one of the seven, was later arrested by the Jewish authorities for allegedly teaching against Moses — that is, the Law — and the Temple. Brought before the high priest and the Sanhedrin, Stephen presented a catechesis of Christ, illustrating that “the mystery of the Cross stands at the center of the history of salvation as recounted in the Old Testament … that Jesus, Crucified and Risen, is truly the goal of all this history.”⁸ Enraged by Stephen’s testimony, the assembly rushed him outside the city and stoned him, while a man named Saul watched over their garments. Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, forgave his attackers before he died.

The first apostle to give the ultimate witness of love for Christ and the Church was Saint James the Greater, the son of Zebedee and brother of Saint John the Beloved. The Roman Emperor Claudius (r. A.D. 41–54) made Herod Agrippa (r. A.D. 41–44), king of the Jews; shortly thereafter, Herod began a persecution of the Church in Jerusalem in order to quash a movement that reverenced a different King. He ordered the beheading of James and the imprisonment of Peter, who was miraculously freed.⁹ Tradition holds that before his martyrdom in Jerusalem, James embarked on a missionary journey to the far reaches of the western Mediterranean and brought the Gospel to the shores of the Roman province of Hispania. Tradition further attests that after his death in Judea, the relics of James were miraculously translated to Spain, where they were discovered in the ninth century. Eventually, a grand cathedral arose at the spot, known as Santiago de Compostela, which has remained a popular pilgrimage destination since the Middle Ages.¹⁰

The Spread of the Gospel

Jesus Christ never intended his saving message to remain only in the Roman province of Judea. Motivated by the command of Christ and emboldened by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the apostles left Jerusalem to spread the Gospel into the world.¹¹ Amazingly, these men traveled not only throughout the expansive Roman Empire, which had organized the known world and provided well-kept roads for travelers, but also beyond its borders. Tradition holds that John the Beloved traveled throughout Asia Minor, Andrew preached in Greece and modern-day Ukraine, Bartholomew went south to Arabia and perhaps India as well, Jude made his way to Mesopotamia and perhaps Armenia and Iran, Matthew may have traveled to Ethiopia, Philip journeyed to Asia Minor, Simon trekked to Iran, and Thomas spread the Good News in southern Iran and India.¹² Although it is interesting to note how far the apostles traveled, and to imagine the hardships they endured for love of Christ, it is vital for us to focus on what they did: preach. Their preaching was not to spread an idea or philosophy, since the Christian faith is neither of those things; rather, they gave witness to the person of Jesus. The Christian faith is ultimately the belief in the person of Jesus Christ and the modification of one’s life to reflect his teachings. The apostles, Christ’s closest friends on earth, concentrated on telling as many people as possible about the God-man whom they knew and loved.

The Greatest Missionary

When we read the Scriptures, we notice repeated examples of God taking the seemingly insignificant and endowing it with great significance, or taking the weak to humble the strong, or asking the unlikely to undergo a great mission. One of the best examples of that divine strategy is the calling of Saint Paul as the Church’s greatest missionary.

Saul, a Pharisee, was a zealous defender of the Jewish faith. Born in the city of Tarsus in the southeast corner of Asia Minor, Saul was well-educated, spoke Greek and Hebrew, and held Roman citizenship. Saul, filled with zeal to crush the blaspheming (in his eyes) followers of Jesus, was given the mission by the high priest to persecute Christians in Damascus, a city in Syria with a sizable Jewish population. So, Saul embarked on a journey to Damascus where, along the way, as we read in Acts, he encountered the Lord in a dramatic and shocking way. Profoundly changed by this encounter, Saul transformed from persecutor to missionary, and over the rest of his life he suffered for the Faith with repeated imprisonments, floggings, beatings, shipwrecks, and stoning.¹³ Ultimately, he made three missionary journeys to strategic centers of Roman rule, preaching first to the Jewish communities and, after rejection by the Jews, focusing on the Gentiles.¹⁴

Saul’s first missionary journey took place on the island of Cyprus, where he also changed his name to Paul. In the ancient world, Jews frequently had Greek names along with their given Jewish names. Saul’s name was similar to the Greek saulos, a derogatory word for the way prostitutes walk.¹⁵ Recognizing that his Jewish name might pose difficulties in preaching to the Gentiles, Saul changed his name to Paul, perhaps in honor of the Roman governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus, who converted as a result of Paul’s preaching.¹⁶ Paul’s second missionary journey encompassed several locations, including Galatia, Philippi, Thessalonica, and the city of Corinth, which had been initially established by Julius Caesar as a Roman colony where freed slaves and army veterans settled. Paul’s last missionary journey was a three-year stay at Ephesus.

Paul’s missionary activity produced three vital effects in the early Church. First, his tireless journeying spread the Faith throughout the Roman Empire in centers of political and economic importance, which allowed for the rapid growth of the Church as the Faith spread easily along the Roman roads and waterways of commerce and government business. Second, Paul did not simply preach the Gospel and leave the new converts to their own devices. Rather, he chose and mentored men, known as “elders” (in Greek, presbuteroi, from which the word “presbyters,” or “priests,” derives) to lead their communities, providing continuity and an established hierarchical foundation. Third, Paul kept in contact with his nascent Christian communities by writing letters, which comprise thirteen of the twenty-seven inspired books in the New Testament. Paul’s missionary journeys successfully solidified the Faith in the Roman world. His success was grounded in the saving message of Jesus itself and was aided by Paul’s versatility and adaptability; “he had the power to translate the Palestinian Gospel into language intelligible to the Greek world.”¹⁷ We cannot overstate the importance of Paul to the history of the Church. The Apostle to the Gentiles was “the greatest of converts, the greatest of disciples, greatest of missionaries [and] the follower in whom more than any other is mirrored the Master.”¹⁸

A Gentile Converts

The presence of Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire helped the early Church grow by providing groups in major centers where the first Christian missionaries could bring the Gospel. The earliest members and converts to the Faith were Jews, and the early Christians were very conscious of their connection to Judaism. But Paul’s experience had proved that the Faith met resistance in the Jewish synagogues of the Roman Empire, so his missionary focus shifted to the Gentiles, who eagerly responded to the message and became members of the Church. One early Gentile conversion is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and involves a vision received by Peter.

The Jewish people were a separated people in the ancient world. Their kosher laws forbade the eating of foods common in the Gentile world, which had produced a division between Jew and Gentile. When Peter was near the city of Joppa, he fell into a trance while waiting for something to eat. He saw the sky open and a blanket coming down from heaven filled with animals. A voice commanded him to get up and eat, but Peter refused, for the food was unclean. The scene repeated itself three times before the vision ended. Eventually, Peter realized that the larger meaning of the vision was that the divide between Jews and Gentiles was over because of Christ. The purpose of the dietary laws, to remind the Jewish people of their salvation from slavery in Egypt by the Lord, was abrogated by the New Covenant of Christ. After the vision, men sent by a Roman centurion came to the house where Peter was staying and asked him to come to Caesarea. The centurion had received a visit by an angel, directing him to send for Peter.¹⁹

A Roman centurion was akin to a noncommissioned officer in our modern militaries. To be a centurion, a soldier was required to have at least sixteen years of military service. These officers were the backbone of the Roman military structure. A Roman legion, comprised nominally of five thousand soldiers, was organized into ten cohorts with six “centuries” per cohort. Within a century, a centurion commanded eighty men (originally, it was one hundred, hence the term “centurion”).²⁰ Cornelius, the centurion who sent for Peter, was a member of the Italian cohort, and therefore a foreigner, but was known as a “God-fearing” man by the Jews. When Peter entered his home, Cornelius fell on his knees before him. He told Peter about his angelic visitor. Peter then realized the importance of his own vision of unclean food — there was to be no partiality between Jew and Gentile in the New Covenant. Peter preached about Christ to Cornelius’s household, during which the Holy Spirit descended upon the inhabitants and all were baptized. The conversion of Cornelius the centurion was a monumental event in the life of the Church. It signified that the Gospel was meant not just for Jews but for the whole world. The conversion brought division within the Church, which faced an important test in her early life.

The Council of Jerusalem

Throughout Church history, the Church faced many important questions, the answers to which impacted her life for centuries. In the early days, the first question was what to do with the Gentiles. Paul’s missionary activity and Peter’s visit to Cornelius’s household, among other evangelization efforts, brought Gentile converts to the Faith. However, some believed these new Christians should adopt the Jewish dietary restrictions and the law of circumcision. This group, known as the Circumcision Party, was angry that Peter ate with Gentiles, and criticized him upon his return to Jerusalem. In an attempt to placate the Circumcision Party, when Peter later went to Antioch, he refused to eat with the Gentile converts there. Paul, in a spirit of fraternal correction, rebuked Peter for this action.²¹ The issue became a debate as groups formed around James the Less, bishop of Jerusalem, who believed that all Christians should follow the Jewish customs, and Paul, who argued that Christ had fulfilled the Law and instituted the New Covenant, thereby abrogating the need to follow the dietary restrictions and circumcision of the Old Covenant.

In an effort to resolve the conflict, the apostles gathered in Jerusalem, where, after some debate, Peter spoke in favor of not requiring the Gentiles to be circumcised and abide by the dietary restrictions. James agreed, but proposed that Gentile converts follow the traditional law of “strangers among the Jews” as given by Moses — that is, do not eat meat offered to false gods or the flesh of strangled animals, and refrain from engaging in temple prostitution.²² James’s amendment was accepted, and the apostles promulgated their decision by sending Paul, Barnabas, and a few other men with letters to Antioch to inform the Christian community in the city. The Council of Jerusalem set the procedure for how disagreements and questions of importance would be settled by the Church’s leadership: collegiality with Petrine leadership.

In these first decades, the family of God had undergone an amazing transformation. What began as a small sect within a recognized group in the Roman Empire evolved into a separate community. Commanded by the Lord to take the Gospel to the four corners of the world, the Church’s mission of evangelization resulted in converts from every walk of life and nationality embracing Christ and joining the new family of God. An important question concerning the addition of the Gentiles was settled through an exercise of apostolic leadership. The family was small but growing and would soon come into contact with the world’s only superpower.

1. Acts 1:8

2. Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins, Walking with God: A Journey through the Bible (West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2010), 262.

3. Ibid., 264.

4. Ibid., 266.

5. This makes sense when reading the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles, which describes a large number of people hearing the apostles speaking in their native languages — such a number would not have fit inside the Upper Room. Cisterns were also near the Temple, which could have been used for the baptisms that occurred after Peter’s preaching. See Gray and Cavins, 265.

6. Acts 2:41.

7. Acts 6:3.

8. Benedict XVI, Wednesday General Audience on Stephen the Protomartyr, January 10, 2007, in Jesus, the Apostles, and the Early Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 136.

9. Acts 12.

10. James became the patron saint of Spain, known as “the Moor-slayer,” as his intercession was invoked throughout the Reconquista, the centuries-long war of liberation by Catholic forces against the Muslim occupiers.

11. The Church used to celebrate the feast of the Dispersion of the Apostles liturgically on July 15.

12. See Warren H. Carroll, The Founding of Christendom: A History of Christendom, vol. 1 (Front Royal, VA: Christendom College Press, 1985), 406.

13. See 2 Cor 11:23–29.

14. Paul’s focus on the strategic centers of Roman rule is found in Gray and Cavins, 282.

15. Gray and Cavins, 275.

16. Ibid.

17. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, revised edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 20.

18. Philip Hughes, A History of the Church: Volume 1: The Church and the World in which the Church was Founded, second edition (London: Sheed and Ward, 1998), 20.

19. Acts 10:1–8.

20. For the Roman legion military structure, see Adrian Goldsworthy, The Complete Roman Army (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 46–47.

21. See Galatians 2. This episode is sometimes overblown by Protestants, who use it to illustrate 1) that Peter’s primacy was not respected in the early Church or his leadership was suspect, because he gave in to the Circumcision Party; and 2) that Paul was the real leader of the early Church. Paul’s rebuke of Peter is nothing more than fraternal correction, which even popes are liable to experience.

22. See Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 21.