Church History (Vol.1-3). J. H. Kurtz
Apostolate had been again by means of the lot raised to the significant number of twelve, amid miraculous manifestations, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the waiting disciples as they were assembled together on the day of Pentecost, ten days after the Ascension of the Lord. It was the birthday of the church, and its first members were won by the preaching of Peter to the wondering multitude. By means of the ministry of the Apostles, who at first restricted themselves to Jerusalem, the church grew daily. A keen persecution, however, on the part of the Jews, beginning with the execution of the deacon Stephen, scattered them apart, so that the knowledge of the gospel was carried throughout all Palestine, and down into Phœnicia and Syria. Philip preached with peculiarly happy results in Samaria. Peter soon began a course of visitation through the land of Jews, and at Cæsarea received into the church by baptism the first Gentile family, that of Cornelius, having been prepared for this beforehand by a vision. At the same time there arose independently at Antioch in Syria a Christian congregation, composed of Jews and Gentiles, through the great eagerness of the Gentiles for salvation. The Levite Barnabas, a man of strong faith, was sent down from Jerusalem, took upon himself the care of this church, and strengthened his own ministry by securing Paul, the converted Pharisee, as his colleague. This great man, some years before, by the appearing of Christ to him on the way to Damascus, had been changed from a fanatical persecutor into a zealous friend and promoter of the interests of the church. Thus it came about that the Apostolic mission broke up into two different sections, one of which was purely Jewish and had for its centre and starting point the mother church at Jerusalem, while the other, issuing from Antioch, addressed itself to a mixed audience, and preeminently to the Gentiles.
It is difficult to determine with chronological exactness either the beginning (§ 13, 1) or the close of the Apostolic Age. Still we cannot be far wrong in taking A.D. 30 as the beginning and A.D. 70 as the close of that period. The last perfectly certain and uncontested date of the Apostolic Age is the martyrdom of the Apostle Paul in A.D. 64, or perhaps A.D. 67, see § 15, 1. We have it on good evidence that James the elder died about A.D. 44, and James the Just about A.D. 63 (§ 16, 3), that Peter suffered martyrdom contemporaneously with Paul (§ 16, 1), that about the same time or not long after the most of the other Apostles had been in all probability already taken home, at least in regard to their life and work after the days of Paul, we have not the slightest information that can lay any claim to be regarded as historical. The Apostle John forms the only exception to this statement. According to important witnesses from the middle and end of the second century (§ 16, 2), he entered upon his special field of labour in Asia Minor after the death of Paul, and continued to live and labour there, with the temporary interruption of an exile in Patmos, down to the time of Trajan, A.D. 98–117. But the insufficient data which we possess regarding the nature, character, extent, success, and consequences of his Apostolic activity there are partly, if not in themselves altogether incredible, interesting only as anecdotes, and partly wholly fabulous, and therefore little fitted to justify us, simply on their account, in assigning the end of the first or the beginning of the second century as the close of the Apostolic Age. We are thus brought back again to the year of Paul’s death as indicating approximately the close of that period. But seeing that the precise year of this occurrence is matter of discussion, the adoption of the round number 70 may be recommended, all the more as with this year, in which the last remnant of Jewish national independence was lost, the opposition between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, which had prevailed throughout the Apostolic Age, makes its appearance under a new phase (§ 28).
§ 15. The Ministry of the Apostle Paul.
Set apart to the work by the church by prayer and laying on of hands, Paul and Barnabas started from Antioch on their first missionary journey to Asia Minor, A.D. 48–50. Notwithstanding much opposition and actual persecution on the part of the enraged Jews, he founded mixed churches, composed principally of Gentile Christians, comprising congregations at Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. When Paul undertook his second missionary journey, A.D. 52–55, Barnabas separated himself from him because of his refusal to accept the company of his nephew John Mark, who had deserted them during their first journey, and along with Mark embarked upon an independent mission, beginning with his native country Cyprus; of the success of this mission nothing is known. Paul, on the other hand, accompanied by Silas and Luke, with whom at a later period Timothy also was associated, passed through Asia Minor, and would thereafter have returned to Antioch had not a vision by night at Troas led him to take ship for Europe. There he founded churches at Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, and Corinth, and then returned through Asia Minor to Syria. Without any lengthened interval he entered upon his third missionary journey, A.D. 55–58, accompanied by Luke, Titus, and Timothy. The centre of his ministerial activity during this period was Ephesus, where he founded a church with a large membership. His success was extraordinary, so that the very existence of heathenism in Asia Minor was seriously imperilled. Driven away by the uprising of a heathen mob, he travelled through Macedonia, pressed on to Illyricum, visited the churches of Greece, and then went to Jerusalem, for the performance of a vow. Here his life, threatened by the excited Jews, was saved by his being put in prison by the Roman captain, and then sent down to Cæsarea, A.D. 58. An appeal to Cæsar, to which as a Roman citizen he was entitled, resulted in his being sent to Rome, where he, beginning with the spring of A.D. 61, lived and preached for several years, enduring a mild form of imprisonment. The further course of his life and ministry remains singularly uncertain. Of the later labours and fortunes of Paul’s fellow-workers we know absolutely nothing.
It may be accepted as a well authenticated and incontestable fact that Paul suffered martyrdom at Rome under Nero. This is established by the testimony of Clement of Rome—μαρτυρήσας ἐπὶ τῶν ἡγουμένων οὕτως ἀπηλλάγη τοῦ κοσμοῦ—and is further explained and confirmed by Dionysius of Corinth, quoted in Eusebius, and by Irenæus, Tertullian, Caius of Rome (§ 16, 1). On the other hand it is disputed whether it may have happened during the imprisonment spoken about in the Acts of the Apostles, or during a subsequent imprisonment. According to the tradition of the church given currency to by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., ii. 22), which even in our own time has been maintained by many capable scholars, Paul was released from his first Roman imprisonment shortly before the outburst of Nero’s persecution of the Christians in A.D. 64 (§ 22, 1), and made a fourth missionary journey which was brought to a close by his being a second time arrested and subsequently beheaded at Rome in A.D. 67. The proofs, however, that are offered in support of this assertion are of a very doubtful character. Paul certainly in A.D. 58 had the intention (Rom. xv. 24, 28) after a short visit to Rome to proceed to Spain; and when from his prison in Rome he wrote to Philemon (v. 22) and to the Philippians (i. 25; ii. 24), he believed that his cherished hope of yet regaining his liberty would be realised; but there is no further mention of a journey into Spain, for apparently other altogether different plans of travel are in his mind. And indeed circumstances may easily be conceived as arising to blast such hopes and produce in him that spirit of hopeless resignation, which he gives expression to in 2 Tim. iv. 6 ff. But the words of Clement of Rome, chap. 5: δικαιοσύνην διδάξας ὅλον τὸν κόσμον καὶ ἐπὶ τὸ τέρμα τῆς δύσεως ἐλθών, etc., are too indefinite and rhetorical to be taken as a certain testimony on behalf of a Spanish missionary journey. The incomplete reference in the Muratorian Fragment (§ 36, 8) to a profectio Pauli ab Urbe ad Spaniam proficiscentis may be thought to afford more direct testimony, but probably it is nothing more than a reminiscence of Rom. xv. 24, 28. Much more important, nay almost conclusive, in the opposite direction, is the entire absence, not only from all the patristic, but also from all the apocryphal, literature of the second and third centuries, of any allusion to a fourth missionary journey or a second imprisonment of the Apostle. The assertion of Eusebius introduced by a vague λόγος ἔχει can scarcely be regarded as outweighing this objection. Consequently the majority of modern investigators have decided in favour of the theory of one imprisonment. But then the important question arises as to whether the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, claiming to be Pauline, with the journeys referred to or presupposed in them, and the residences of the Apostle and his two assistants, can find a place in