Early Church History

I asked Mr. Foster if he had some ideas for sermons. I asked him what I should cover. I said, well, I could even cover one of the classes that I do at ABC. I teach ten classes at ABC on early church history. He said, that might be interesting. People wonder, what do they teach at ABC? What goes on at ABC? I thought I'd take one class on early church history. This is class number five out of the ten, and go through it and show you what we do teach there, what we do cover. I doubt it's a lot of new information for you, but you can see how we do conduct classes. It's a pretty intense learning experience for a lot of these young people, especially.

To spend six, seven, eight hours a day in intense Bible immersion is quite an experience for them.

The class I teach before this one is about how Jesus created a church, why he came to create a church, why he did that, and the purpose of the church, and what the church is supposed to be. Then, I started talking about, after his death and resurrection, this church began to grow.

Why did it grow, and why did it immediately have problems? I mean, it immediately had internal problems within days, within a few weeks after his death, and how those problems continued to grow, and what happened in the second century, and that were other classes. But this just deals with, between Jesus' death and resurrection, the foundation of the church there in Acts, and then what happened, and how we can understand the New Testament better.

So let's start in Matthew 28.

Verse 16. Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, So this is what the apostles were told, the original apostles to go do. This has been part of the instructions to the church ever since.

Now we read that. And we say, okay, well this is what the church is supposed to be doing today. Well, let's go back to that time period. And there's eleven men, and Jesus appears to them, and they know who he is, and he says, now here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in the world, every place, all nations. And in another place he said, now you start in Jerusalem, then go to Judea, then go to Samaria, then go to the whole world.

Now remember, this is eleven men with no resources, no mass communication, no, you know, sort of the classical education. You look at their background, you know, tax collector, fisherman, they're not the type of men you think, I'm going to send you out to change the world. And there's only eleven of you, and they did. And of course we know what happened in Jerusalem, a church, the church exploded in Jerusalem. Hundreds of people, then thousands, three thousand people were baptized in one day.

And then they expanded out. They went to all through Judea, and they had problems. Then they went to Samaria, and they had real problems, because right away in Samaria, a false Christianity formed. You read about in Acts chapter 8. And then they started to expand out to the world. And they began, especially with the Apostle Paul, to plant churches all over the Roman Empire. How did that happen? How did eleven men be told, go start churches, and then by the time you get to the end of the New Testament, there are hundreds of churches all over the Roman Empire. They didn't have cars or airplanes. They didn't have newspapers. They didn't have books.

Well, they had codex. But the way we know it, things had to be written down in scrolls and passed out and handed around and delivered by hand. How did that happen? Well, that's what we're going to talk about. How did the church grow? And some of the immediate internal issues they dealt with. Right away. When they're told to go out and preach to the world, there's a couple things that have already happened that allows this to take place. You know, if someone said, in 1930, go preach the gospel to the world, well, you'd use radio and magazines.

And the mail system. I mean, you have a way to do that. What were they to do? Well, first of all, you have the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire had taken all these dozens and dozens of tribal areas and different nations and different empires, and it had brought them together. And it created tens of thousands of miles of roads.

In fact, what you're looking at here is actually part of an ancient Roman road that still exists today. Now, that may not seem like much to people who have lots of roads, but if you had to travel 500 miles through desert or through forest, and how would you get there? Well, there would be pathways, and they weren't very safe. They built roads so that you could take horses.

The roads are wide enough, interesting enough. The width of the road is so that Roman chariots, in other words, the army could get there fast. They could line up chariots on these roads and put them 5,000 miles in another place in what at that time was considered unbelievably fast time. And so here you have a road system. You have a postal system because of this. When you get to Revelation, Revelation 2 and 3, and you have the churches, all those churches, which were in modern-day Turkey, they were on a postal route, and the order in which they are listed is the order in which the letter would have arrived on the postal route.

So John could write a letter, and it could be sent to those churches. Before the Roman Empire, that wasn't possible. You might write a letter and get it someplace else. You didn't want to mess with the male, because the Roman government would come after you. So the very power of the Roman Empire gave them the ability to do things that wasn't there before.

Also, Rome gave a remarkable... their culture created a belief that all religions are equal. So, religions didn't get a lot of persecution. Now, the reason that the Jews received a lot of persecution was because they kept saying all religions aren't equal.

The Romans had no problem with the Jewish religion. They gave special laws for the Jews. The Jewish Temple wasn't required to pay taxes to the Roman government. There were all kinds of special laws given to the Jews. But the Jews were still persecuted because it was like these people just won't accept everybody else. Where the truth was, as a pagan throughout the Roman Empire, you could believe any number of gods or goddesses you wanted. You could literally worship Isis, Zeus... Isis comes from Egypt, Zeus from Greece, which was of course also worshipped by the Romans under a different name, and you could be part of the Mithra mystery religion. You could be all those things at the same time, and nobody cared.

But the Jews kept saying, none of the rest of you, your religions, are valid.

But they still gave... they still said, okay, we'll put up with you. The reason they stopped putting up with them is the Jews revolted and tried to overthrow the Roman Empire in two wars. And they were bloody wars. The Christians come along, and at first they're just seen as a Jewish sect. So nobody messes with them either. Ah, they're just another bunch of crazy Jews. But then they start to expand out until much of the church isn't Jewish anymore. Lots of non-Jews are coming into the church. And now they're saying, wait a minute, this is the only religion. And that's when the Romans persecuted them. No, you've got to love everybody here. All religions are equal. And when they said they weren't, they became persecuted. We'll talk about that in a minute.

Another thing that happened is that this is very, very important. You know, every place you go in the world today, you find somebody who speaks English. Now, in July, we spent nine days in Germany and Belgium. And every place I went, I'd walk up and people started talking in German. All I had to say was, Sprinkles of English? Oh, yeah! And they would talk in perfect English. Well, Greek was that language then. The Greek language had been spread throughout the empire. Then no matter where you went, no matter what language was spoken, people spoke Greek. And it's very interesting. They didn't speak Latin. Remember, the Romans spoke Latin. But God didn't have Latin as the language that spread across the empire. It was Greek, and there's a lot of reasons for that. So the Greek language creates a culture where people learn through Greek literature. Most things that people read are written in Greek. And they think, okay, well, that's interesting. That's important. But, you know, the Bible was written in Hebrew. I mean, because the New Testament wasn't written yet. Back in the 3rd century B.C., the Jews had decided they needed to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Because so many people, even then, were speaking Greek. And it was the language of education. It was the language of education. So they translated into Greek, the Septuagint. In your Bible margins, sometimes, you'll see a little number, and you look in the margin, you'll see LXX. How many of you have ever noticed that in your Bible? Okay, some of you. LXX. What's LXX mean? Anybody know? Septuagint. Septuagint. Because it means 70. It means 70. The Septuagint means 70. That's because there's somewhere between 70 and 72 people that worked on it. 72 doesn't sound so great, but 70 sounded great. So they called it the 70. So these scholars, 70 to 72 Jewish scholars, translated 250 years before Christ. They translate the Bible into Greek. Now, there are synagogues all over the place. We'll get that into a minute. All over the empire, where nobody speaks Hebrew except maybe your rabbi.

Now, he would train men to speak Hebrew, but it wasn't the common language. But they all had the Septuagint. What's interesting about the Septuagint is you see it quoted in the New Testament in a lot of places. I'll show you one place. Matthew 12-21. Yeah, LXX is Roman numerals, by the way. How does that mean 70? That's the Roman numerals. Verse 18 begins a quote from the book of Isaiah. And then you get down to verse 21, And in his name, Gentiles will trust. So in his name, Gentiles will trust. Well, let's go to Isaiah 42.

And most of that is... I mean, anytime you have a translation from one language into another, you're going to have slight variances. But most of this Isaiah 42 is quoted real, real close, except for one verse. Isaiah 42, verse 4. It says, Now that is what the Mesuritic text says. If you pick up any Hebrew Bible today that's translated into English, that's what it'll say.

But that's not what it says in the quote in the New Testament. But the quote in the New Testament is from the Septuagint. It's from the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So it basically means the same thing, that he's going to go all over the place, right? But it is different. One mentions specifically Gentiles, and the other just mentions land. It's different. It has the same meaning. And you will find numerous places in the New Testament that if you read it, you go back to the Old Testament, and you look at the quote, and there'll be a slight difference. And many of those cases, it's because they're actually quoting from the Greek New Testament.

The Greek New Testament, or Greek Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament, the Greek Bible was all over the place. This allowed the Bible to reach non-Jews. Because it's a language they knew. They couldn't pick up a scroll of Isaiah and Hebrew and read it. They could pick up a scroll of Isaiah in Greek, and they could read it. So 250 years before Jesus comes, this Greek-language Bible is spreading all over the Roman Empire. So here we have this Septuagint. Next slide. What we have now is the realization that this Greek Bible, you say, well, okay, the average pagan doesn't have a Bible, right?

And the overwhelming majority of people in the Roman Empire is pagan. The Jews were, they estimate, a very large, it's amazing how large the Jewish population was at the time. They estimate it's between 6 and 8 million people in the Roman Empire. That's 10% of the population. But that means that 90% of the population have no interest in the God of the Jews. Now remember, that doesn't mean they didn't believe in the God of the Jews.

He was just one of the many gods. He just wasn't very powerful because the Roman gods beat him. The Roman gods defeated him when the Roman army defeated the Jews. So they believed in him. And if you want to worship Yahweh, that's okay. But why do you people say it's the only God? Why can't you just get along?

This was sort of the Roman view. Religion, just everybody get along and everybody do sacrifices to the emperor. So that all the gods are favoring the emperor. Well, the Jews wouldn't even do that. They wouldn't sacrifice for the emperor. These people are just so stubborn. But what we have are these synagogues all over the place. All around the Mediterranean, up into what is Europe, there's synagogues. Mainly in the cities, and this is why Christianity, at very first it took a long time to get beyond this, it is a city religion. There's not a lot of country folk in Christianity at the beginning.

Because there's not a lot of Jewish country folk. They all live in the cities. And they all live close to each other. And they all set up businesses. They all tend to be very successful. And there's one reason why Jews were resented by people all over the empire, because these people seem to work together and make money. So you have synagogues. And in the synagogues, Jews could go and find the Bible. Now, Paul is sent out.

He goes beyond Jerusalem, beyond Judea, beyond Samaria. And he has to preach the gospel. What in the world do you do? I mean, where do you go? Does he get a sandwich board and just walk up and down the streets? I mean, what does he do? Well, if you look through the book of Acts, over and over again, it tells us what he did.

Acts 13. Acts 13. We think, how in the world can we reach the world? We have a little television program and a little magazine. We have booklets. We have a fairly large web presence. I mean, we've had, at times, up to a million new hits a month. Not the average, but we've hit that peak sometimes. And yet, in all that, we're not reaching the world. We're reaching a little piece of the world. How are these guys supposed to do this? Well, they had to reach their little piece. And here's how he started Acts 13. Now, when Paul and his party set sail from Paphos, they came to Perga in Pamphylia, and John departing from them returned to Jerusalem.

But when they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch and Pisidia, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and sat down. And after the reading of the Law and the Prophets, the reading of the Law and the Prophets, the reading of the Bible, probably in Hebrew and Greek, the rulers of the synagogue said to them, saying, Men and brethren, if you have any word of exhortation for the people, say on. And you go through Chapter 14 and Chapter 17 and a couple places in Chapter 17 and Chapter 18 and Chapter 19, you find the same thing.

They went to the synagogue. This is where the church started. The church started in the synagogues. Because the word was there. Christianity was based in... it started with what we call the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible. And that's where they found the truth. Now it would be expanded, of course, with the New Testament being added. But remember, they didn't have the New Testament.

By the end of the book of Acts, they have bits and pieces of it. And that's why the Christians would eventually begin starting their own book as they began to gather the writings that God had inspired during that time. So you have a synagogue system, you have a book, you have roads, you have a postal system. All this allows 11 men, and then Paul and a few men he's raised, start to go out. I mean, just a handful of people. But everybody they teach, they go tell somebody else.

Now they're told to go to the world. The problem is, they're all Jews going to a Jewish audience, except for one thing. All these synagogues that are just spread all over the world has created contact with many non-Jews. And there were many non-Jews that were being attracted to Judaism. And there were two types of people. We'll show the next slide here. So these Gentiles are coming into the church. Gentiles means non-Jew, non-Israelite. And they're starting to worship the one true God, and they're giving up paganism. But as they come in, there's actually two different classifications of non-Jews. Proselytes and God fears. And if you look through the book of Acts, you will see both mentioned.

Remember in Acts, when the Holy Spirit is poured out, it says there are Jews and it gives all the listing of all the different countries. But it doesn't just say Jews. It says, and Proselytes. Proselytes were Gentiles who would come in and become fully Jewish. They were circumcised, they were baptized in some kind of ceremony. Not maybe exactly like John's, but there was a type of baptism. And usually they had performed some sacrifice. And they ritually were just like the Jews. But there was another type of Gentile who would come into the Judaism. And they were called God fears.

Remember Peter saying to Cornelius, and if you look at that, he's called a God fear. He is converted to the worship of God, Yahweh. And Peter goes to see him. And he says, oh, you're not even supposed to come into my house. Now, that's not part of the Bible, by the way. That's part of Jewish tradition. That's oral law. You're not allowed to come into my house. And Peter said, well, God told me I should come into your house. He goes into the house of this God fear, and God pours out his spirit on Cornelius and his family.

He's known, if you read the passage, he's known for being a man who gave lots of money, who supported Judaism, believed in God. He would have kept the Sabbath. God fears kept the Sabbath, the Holy Days. God fears would not eat pork, but they may not eat kosher. And they didn't do all the rituals. So when they went into a synagogue, there was a different place for them. Gentiles that went into the synagogue had to sit in a separate room than Jewish men. But then Jewish women had to sit in a different place, too. In the temple in Jerusalem, there was a wall.

And there were signs. They have actually excavated one of the signs. And also there's ancient writers that tell us about the signs. There were signs that said, any Gentile, they call them strangers, any stranger that goes beyond this point will die. You could not, as a Gentile, go beyond that point in the temple, or they would kill you. Now you think about Paul in the temple late in his life. He goes to do a ceremony, and he has somebody with him, and someone jumps up and says, that's the man who preaches against the temple all over the world, and he's brought a Gentile with him.

And remember what they did? They grabbed him, and they were going to kill him. The only reason they didn't kill him was because the Romans had a garrison attached, because there was so much trouble at the temple all the time, a garrison attached there, and they looked out and yelled, hey, they're rioting again, and some Roman soldiers came out and saved him. But the point is, why are they going to kill Paul?

He had taken a Gentile beyond that wall. That's why the Bible talks about Christ came to tear down the walls. You know, this middle wall of separation. It's to tear down the walls between Jew and Gentile. That wall's got to go. And that wall was in the temple. So they go into the temple. There's these God fears. You read through the book of Acts, and you'll see that Jews responded to Paul, but more God fears and proselytes responded to Paul. They already, you know, if you were a God fear, you already weren't circumcised. And Paul said, well, you don't have to be circumcised. And you don't have to sit in another room with us.

You can sit with us. And now you can see why the Christians got kicked out of the synagogues. They kept preaching Jesus was the Messiah, and they kept preaching that God fears and proselytes, and Jews were all the same before God. So they kicked him out. But these God fears and proselytes lay the foundation of the church so that it's not entirely Jewish. They're the ones who go tell their friends, and now you have large numbers of Gentiles coming into the church, which is good and it's bad.

Because they're not God fears or proselytes that already know about things like you don't go to temple prostitutes, which was a problem you see in Corinth. You begin to go through now and look at the Bible, whether it's at the beginning of the book of Acts, or right at the beginning, they had a problem in the church, I mean right at the beginning, between Jews who followed a Hebrew culture and Jews who followed a Greek culture, and Acts 6 is about a fight in the church over that.

So they had internal social problems. They're just normal and abuban beings. So these internal social problems, but now they would face another set of problems. And this is when you look through the whole book of the New Testament, you begin to see these problems. Let's see the next slide. The second thing you have is one, secular Judaism. Right? The Pharisees, the Sadducees. Is that the right slide? Is there one slide back, or did I skip a slide?

Oh, you're not to it yet, okay. You have secular Judaism. Well, you see that? Many, many Pharisees came into the church. Why? The Pharisees were looking for the Messiah. They accepted Jesus as the Messiah. And then they said, whoa, whoa, whoa, Jesus is the Messiah, and we are the people of God. So that means any Gentiles that come in, we have to make them just like us. And Paul said, no, we don't. They don't have to do all the things we do. They have to keep the law, but they don't have to do all these other customs, especially sacrifices, I mean, and all those things.

So you have this controversy in the church that raged the whole time Paul was alive about circumcision. You know when Paul died, there was still a group of Christians who forced people to be circumcised? You know why we know about it? Four hundred years later, they still exist. They're still mentioned by historians 400 years later. They're still Christians that say, no, you have to be circumcised, because that's what the Bible says. They believed in Christ. They kept the Sabbath. But they still enforced circumcision. So that didn't even die out in the first century. It was a sect inside the group that eventually removed itself from the group and forced circumcision.

So what you have at the beginning of Christianity here is these debates and wars and how do we define things? How do we define baptism in relationship to Jesus Christ? You and I take that, right? You and I take that, we understand that. Wait a minute. baptism was... Well, John taught us baptism was repentance. Yes. Paul says, but you're baptized into Christ. What does that mean? Those concepts are common to us. You're the first person to read Romans and you're thinking, what does that mean? They're having to define all these new concepts, although they're all in the Old Testament. But they're not, you know, opened up.

They're not fully expressed until you get to the New. And it is very difficult for us to understand what it was to be a Jew in the church in 57 AD. It was Jewish, but it wasn't Jewish.

And you thought, you felt like the church is becoming so liberal, it's destroying its Judaism. And so they saw Paul as the greatest liberal that ever lived. It was just unbelievable to them. Not all of them. God fears the Protestantites for saying, we get this. And some Jews did too, because lots of Jews stayed in the church. But the battles... I mean, Paul gets so angry at one point that he says, he calls the people who force circumcision, basically, he says, you're the people of the mutilation.

That's a horrible thing, especially for a Jew, say, about other Jews. You keep trying to force this. That Pharisee, the circumcision parties, it was in the church. And they kept fighting it out and working it out. And over time they did. They also now had another set of problems. Paganism brought in by Gentile converts. Read 1 and 2 Corinthians. It is a church overwhelmed by paganism. And they're trying to fight it. They're trying to figure out what to do. And so Paul has to give them all these instructions. They also had early Gnostic influences like Simon.

That would really come up in the second century. It's hard to understand, unless you've studied gnosises of the pull that it had, but it was an attempt to take paganism and certain biblical ideas and mix them together. The result is that by 150 AD it's estimated that up to half of people who called themselves were Christians weren't Christians at all. They were Gnostics. Half of the people who called themselves Christians by 150 AD weren't even, but we would even consider Christians.

They believed in multiple gods. They had all kinds of beliefs, but they called themselves Christians. And you're a Christian, a real Christian, a true Christian, and you're watching this development. Of course, fortunately, I mean by 150, nobody was left that had known Jesus.

Everybody had died by that point. You also have Greek and Roman culture and philosophy, and you can't downplay that. Especially when you get into the Middle Ages, Greek philosophy had more influence on the development of Catholicism than anything else. They all studied Greek philosophers, many of them before they even read a Bible. And so they interpreted the Bible through Greek philosophy, which changed everything, but that's a future time.

So now we have this church that is going on through the 30s and all this great growth and excitement and internal issues. And then, you know, this false group comes up, the Samaritans, but they're little groups, they don't worry about them too much. Then the 40s and the 50s, and they got all these internal problems that never seemed to, you know, and then they're fighting over these things. Read 1 Corinthians, and you wouldn't even have gone into that church. You would have walked in, saw it, and walked out. It was that dysfunctional of a place. It's called the Church of God, but it was horrible.

But it did seem to work itself out. I mean, God worked with them, and for a while it seems to have worked itself out.

But they tried, they kept trying to stay together. We are Christians. Of course, they're being now persecuted by the Romans and the Jews. That tends you to, you know, persecution tends to keep people together.

So they struggled. They tried. But there were even different doctrinal issues. Different doctrines were at times believed. That's why Paul, you look how he attacks. Well, this person believes the resurrection has already happened. They're wrong. The resurrection is yet to come. He starts thinking about that, and you think, wait a minute. He's talking about somebody in the church. So then they start throwing people out of the church. They literally have to come up with, if these people believe this, you have to ask them to leave.

At the beginning, no one even thought of that. I mean, I don't know, for years and years no one even thought of that. Then they actually had to start throwing people out. And so you see all kinds of writings. Paul gives instructions to Timothy. You see other writings of, well, you just ask, get that person, ask, tell them they have to leave. That wasn't something that was in the earliest part of the church, but it had to happen as the church became more and more conflicted over these ideas.

How conflicted was it? Read 3 John. John, an apostle of Christ, sends an emissary to a group, to a church, and they kick him out. They say, we want nothing to do with John. We want nothing to do with John?

So the church had become not every congregation, but it had become dysfunctional as time went on. Not for the first couple of decades. For the first couple of decades it was great. They even rejoiced when they were persecuted.

Of course, it seems like they also believed Christ was coming back.

Once they lost the concept, wait a minute, you mean Christ may not come back in my lifetime? I think that deteriorated it, too. But you have these four pressures. So you have the normal social pressures inside, the normal doctrinal pressures inside. How do we define everything? And they just argued and fought, and every, you know, how do we do this, how do we do that? I mean, the letter of James is trying to balance out Romans.

In fact, parts of Romans and Galatians specifically, and James are so different, that there are scholars that think there were two Christianities in the first century. Two totally different groups. Now they weren't, because when you really study them, they're just saying the same thing. One is just saying a different part of the process. There's a process involved in what God is doing. But some of them, well, there had to be two different Christianities. They were so different. No, they weren't. But it shows there was conflict.

And so what you see in the Church is this remarkable ability for some to work through the conflict, to work through the doctrines that would be led by God. But not everybody was going down that route.

It was going all over the place. That's not our viewpoint in the New Testament. Then explain why.

Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy are all letters to troubled places. Every single... Well, I have to say, 1st Thessalonians doesn't seem to be as much, but 2nd Thessalonians does. They're all troubled places. Churches with problems.

And the apostles are saying, here's how you work them out.

There are specific instructions. Here's how you work it out.

Do not devour one another, it says.

That's an interesting... That's still shocking to me. Don't eat each other.

That's literally what it means. Do not eat each other. It's like you're chopping. So he tells it, hey, stop chopping on each other. Stop eating each other.

So the church is surviving. It's doing okay. We're up in the 60s. They're solving most of their problems. They really are. There's only a few people they've had to put out, at least that we know of. The church has grown. It's a little bit dysfunctional at times. They have some different doctrines being taught from different places. But most of it, the core of it's there. There's lots of people. They're dedicated. Jews and Gentiles are getting along, sort of. It's okay. It's functioning.

And then something terrible happens.

Nero comes along.

Roman emperors, many of them were famous during the time of the church as being insane. Caligula, Nero, and others.

Not all Roman emperors were insane, but there was a group of them that were.

And Nero was one of the worst.

Nero comes along and decides not to expand the empire anymore. He wanted to educate the empire into arts, so that everybody could play music and paint and do sculpture and be happy. And we just all sort of lived together. And of course, he was considered the greatest artist, well, no. He considered himself the greatest artist. Nobody else did.

In fact, in his singing career, he made it, people would leave. So he made it illegal for people to leave when he was singing.

And there's more than one case where someone died while he was singing, and then when they carried them out, they revived.

There's ancient Roman accounts of that. People just sort of woke up. They thought they were dead, and they woke up, and I feel better now, and they'd leave.

I mean, he made singing an Olympic sport, and they'd make sure he wanted all the time.

It's hard to explain how evil the man became.

He was a bisexual. He committed incest. He was a child molester. I mean, everything you could think of, he was involved in. One of his favorite pastimes was to disguise himself as just a common person.

And since he trained to be a warrior, he'd go out and just beat up people in the street, or go to bars and seduce women, as if he wasn't the emperor, until one day he was caught by a man who was with his wife, and the man almost beat him to death. So from that point on, when he'd go out in disguise, he'd always have a couple Roman soldiers in the background hiding off, and if anybody had costed him, they would kill them.

So he tortured people. He almost bankrupted the Roman Empire, building his own houses. He had one house, and it had three hallways, and each hallway was a mile long.

In the Vatican, I saw one of his bathtubs. You could probably put 30 people in it. So, I mean, Nero just slowly became more and more insane and more cruel. He tried to murder... I'll tell you this story. I won't tell you too much about Nero. We only have five minutes. I may go just a couple minutes over. Nero tried to kill his mother. He tried to poison her three times. She drank the poison and somehow survived.

He built a giant bed as a gift. It was a canopy bed that weighed hundreds of pounds, so that when she got out, it rolled over. It would collapse, and it did, and she crawled out of it, and she was fine. He finally built a ship and gave it to her as a gift, and she went out and met a train, and it was designed that one of the sailors just knocked out a couple plugs, and the thing fell apart, and she swam the shore. It's like a bad movie, you know? Finally, he hired an assassin, and he killed her. So in 64 AD, Rome catches on fire. Ten out of the fourteen precincts burned to the ground, and they're the poor precincts. What had happened in Rome is so many people, there were over a million people packed in Rome. They couldn't all live in houses, so if you're rich or middle class, you get to live in a house. The poor people lived in apartment buildings, six stories high, and these apartment buildings were not very clean. I mean, you had your animals, there wasn't any indoor plumbing. If you wanted to take a bath, they had public baths, so everybody could go take a bath, and they did have public plumbing outside, but you know, you just use your chamber pot and throw it out the window.

So when it caught fire, it burnt, and Nero did nothing to stop it. He did send out soldiers, but what they basically did is they looted. So what happened was, hundreds of people died, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their homes. And so this rumor started that he started it. He wanted to do some new building projects, so he just burned over half of Rome to the ground. And he had to do something to stop the rumor, because it was going to grow into a rebellion. So as Suetonius, who's a writer from the first century, wrote, The Christians, men given to a new and weakened superstition, were put to death with grievous torments.

The intelligent Romans knew the Christians didn't do this, but he was able to tell everybody, basically, the Christians believe their God is going to destroy the earth with fire. And that's why they set this, because they're against us. And so, he killed them, and that took the Romans, who were ready to lynch him, that calmed them down. Remember, like I said, all the educated Romans, this isn't true. In fact, the next slide is Tacitus here. He lived during this time period. He was a child, but he lived during this time period. He wrote, and they didn't do this. Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius's reign by the governor of Judea Pontius Pilate. But in spite of this, Tipperius set back the deadly superstition that had broken out of fresh, not only in Judea, where the mischief had started, but even in Rome, all he created in shameful practices, collect and flourish in the capital. Do you know why this quote is so important? People who like to say that Jesus isn't mentioned outside the Bible, or he's the number of places.

This place actually mentions Pontius Pilate, which you can find very little mention of him in history. Nobody doubts Tacitus. It's amazing. All historians say, oh yeah, Tacitus is right, but the Bible probably isn't. It supports the Bible. Nero took thousands. Anybody who claimed to be a Christian, some of them would have been Christians that we would have recognized, some of them would have not been Christians we recognized, because the church was still fragmenting. And he tortured them to death. He gave grand parties at night where he would use Christians to create torches to light the party as everybody got drunk. This fragmented Christianity even more. It drove it to where churches were scattered. They lost contact with each other. Because they were persecuted, you could die. So you might be in a little church in someone's house, because a lot of churches met in people's houses, and you didn't associate with anybody, because you sure didn't want people to know you were a Christian. So the next village may have a Christian community, but they don't know you exist. People lose contact. So Christianity begins to become scattered and out of contact with each other.

Which is very interesting, because that means there are Christian churches without a Bible, or with only parts of the Bible. You might be up in Gaul someplace, which is France, and you have an entire Septuagint. And you have the book of Matthew and a couple of Paul's letters. And that's all you ever got, because you're now so isolated. And you're trying to build your Christianity on that.

Now, God's working through people. It is amazing. You can find in the second century, there's a huge battle in the Catholic Church, because there's a whole group of people in what's Turkey today, thousands of them that say, we will not give up. The Passover on the 14th. And we will not give up. The Days of Unleavened Bread. And we will not keep Easter. They end up excommunicating each other. The bishop of Rome excommunicates them, and they say, that's okay, because we excommunicate you.

So there's pockets of people that keep, but understand how difficult it becomes to be a Christian in the second century, because now you're all scattered. And different churches are literally forming with totally different ideas. So there's entirely pagan churches calling themselves Christian.

And then the second thing fragmented the Church. And that's the next slide, and that's in 70 AD.

In 70 AD, because the Jews decide to overthrow the Roman Empire, because the Messiah is coming. There's this messianic fever. They decide to overthrow the Roman Empire. Josephus, who is a Jewish general, is captured and taken to Rome. He comes back and tries to tell everybody, you have no idea how powerful these people are. We cannot defeat them. But for three and a half years, they fight, and then they destroy Rome. Rome is the headquarters church. Rome is the place where, like Acts 15, okay, when the problems get big enough, we gather here and we fix it, because they had doctoral issues. We fix them in Acts 15 by coming together in Jerusalem. The entire structure of the church, as Jerusalem is the headquarters church, where Jesus had been, where the apostles all came from, it's all gone.

What's really interesting is that we know, and there are numerous historical accounts, is that there is a group of Christians inside Jerusalem in 70 AD. And they leave.

They leave because the doors of the temple are opened, and even the Romans tell this story. Not only the Jews, the Romans tell this story. The doors of the temple are opened, and a voice tells them to leave.

And they leave. And hundreds of years later, we find in Pella, not far from Jerusalem, a group of Christians who are still there, who claim to be the direct descendants of the Christians who were in Jerusalem.

They're still there hundreds of years later. Sort of out of contact with everybody else, but that's where they ran to. And that's where they were.

But what does that do if you're in Ephesus? What does that do if you're in North Africa or Egypt? I mean, we know churches are coming up all over the place. Are they in Ethiopia?

Well, what happens is, is now we have congregations developing differently.

Eventually, entire churches. There's a Coptic church. There's an Ethiopian church. There's an Eastern church, which is Greek in nature. There's a Roman church, which is Latin in nature. And they can't even get along. They excommunicate each other. You know, the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholics end up excommunicating each other, because they can't get along.

It's interesting, at the end of the first century, that hasn't started yet. But we get an understanding when we go to Revelation 2 and 3. We have a letter written to seven churches. They're all the churches of God. They hadn't deteriorated to the point where they weren't the church of God anymore. Because what Christianity became by 150 was not the church of God anymore.

By what it became by 300, when it became the Catholic church, was not the church of God anymore. It was something totally different. But there, at the end of that first century, the letter's written to seven churches. And you go and... we look at that, and we should at the prophetic meaning of those seven churches. But what's really fascinating is the study of those seven churches, for what they were when they received the letter from John. If you sat in Pergamos and you received that letter from John, what would it have meant to you? Now, what he describes is seven churches all headed in not quite the same direction, but all same congregations. I mean, they're just seven congregations. That's all they are. They don't have a lot of contact with each other. They have some. But, you know, if you live 30 miles away from another city, and you've got to walk to get there, you don't go there very often. I mean, if you have business, you have a horse, you might go. But, you know, I mean, you just don't go. People don't travel like they do today, even though there's nice Roman roads that get you there. You just don't travel. You farm. You live in your town. And he writes to Ephesus and he says, you got it. You stood up against the wrong apostles. You stood up against the false teachers. And you go back and you read the book of Ephesians, and he told them, there's false teachers. You go back to Acts and he tells them, there's false teachers coming among you, and some of them are even elders. And here it is decades later, and he says, you did that. You stood up against the false teachers. But you know what? You've lost your first love. The love of God, the love of truth, the love of each other, you're doctrinally correct. They were, they were doctrinally correct. But you've lost something. And then he goes to Smyrna, and he tells the church of Smyrna, you are a people that are persecuted, and you're weak, and you're poor, but you've got it all together. This is a good church, but boy, this church goes through a lot. The church of Smyrna went through all kinds of trials and problems. They're the ones that probably all the other churches looked at and said, God isn't blessing them, they must be a bad church. They mustn't be the bad church because they're getting persecuted, and they live in poverty. Because some of these churches were very wealthy. And God says, no, you have it all together. You're spiritually all together. He goes to Pergamos and Thyatira, and it's very interesting. Now remember, John is still alive. He's the last of the apostles. So this, you know, this is only 60 years, a little over 60 years after the death of Jesus.

And the church has expanded and exploded and gone all over the world, and all these good things have happened. And yet, there's something happening, a deterioration happening in it. And he tells them, in Pergamos and Thyatira, you have all kinds of wrong doctrines. Wrong doctrines and immorality. There was a lot of lawlessness. There was a lot of sin in those churches. By the way, we still know Corinth existed at this time because we have a letter just about five years after John wrote this that someone wrote a letter to the church of Corinth. And guess what? He was describing almost the exact same problems they had when Paul wrote to him. They were still there, but they were sort of muddling through it. In fact, the letter encourages them to please bring back all their ministers who they've just kicked out. They just kicked out all their ministers. And so the letter says, you need to bring your ministers back, or this isn't going to get any better.

You have Sardis, which is a church that's absolutely dead. Everybody comes. Everybody's there. They would meet every Sabbath. The churches were some Sabbath-keeper. They would have gone through the Passover. They would have kept doing the things they were supposed to do. But in their daily lives, they weren't out committing murder and robbery. But there was nothing there between them and God. He said, they're a dead church. You get to Philadelphia, and he praises that church for being a faithful church. Not a very strong church, but a faithful church, as he praises them.

Then you get to Laodicea. And it's interesting, Laodicea is not accused of false doctrine. Laodicea is accused, and the problem with that church is, is that they have become so comfortable with themselves that they're absolutely driven by self-righteousness. Just driven by self-righteousness. The belief that, hey, we're okay with God. And like I said, they don't seem to have any false doctrine.

And yet they received one of the most stern warnings of all the churches that he talked to at that time period, because they just were so self-righteous. They were rich, increased with goods, and eat of nothing. Now what's interesting is, those seven churches actually existed, and they're all very close to each other. And you have a letter written by John not long before he dies. And he's going to give all this prophecy, and there's a prophetic element, because those seven churches have a strong prophetic message.

But they also existed at that time of seven churches. And that gives us an understanding, gives a little snapshot of what the church was like in 100 A.D. You're going to reproduce those seven churches all over the Roman Empire. Some of them were healthy, some of them weren't. Some of them had this problem, some of them had that problem. Some of them had false doctrine. And we do know, like I said, there are many of the churches, there were an extent in 100 A.D., did not stay Christian.

They either died out, or they became part of a false Christianity. But there were ones who did. There were ones who did. And you find them crop up through history as a footnote. The Quatrudecilans, the one who kept the 14th, the Passover on the 14th, and also believed in the resurrection. They also believed that when you died, you went to sleep.

Now we don't know much about them, but we do know that. They kept the 14th, they kept the Days of Unleavened Bread. They believed when you died that you went to sleep and you came up in a resurrection, and Christ was returning to set up the millennium. Okay, they believed that. We don't know much more because the writings of these people, many of them, of these groups got destroyed. The winners wrote, the losers get their writings destroyed. But those five things are pretty important. He said, well, wow, what happened to them? Well, they keep cropping up.

And 325 at the Nicene Council, we've all heard of the Nicene Council, right? Where they create sort of a Trinity doctrine. It's not totally Trinity. It's sort of a half-Trinity doctrine. There are a number of other things they dealt with.

You know what one of them was? These people who keep wanting to keep Easter on the 14th of Abib. We've got to stop these people. A whole council of, you know, not called by the Pope. He wasn't strong enough to do it yet. He was called by the Emperor, who was an unbaptized... He claimed to be Christian, but he wasn't baptized. He didn't get baptized just before he died because he was afraid he would sin, like murdering his wife, which he did.

You know, he had the freedom to murder his wife if he wanted to. So he waited to... before he died before he got baptized. But he's the one who decided to officially use the Roman power of the Empire to stamp out the keeping of the Passover on the 14th. You know what? They crop up later. They just keep popping up. They can't stomp them out. It's the name of the Sabbath keepers. They keep popping up. Okay, kill those people. Then they pop up someplace else. But the church becomes...

But you can imagine, if we can imagine how difficult it was, it was also very sad if you were a person who lived at the time of John. I can't imagine how sad John was. He thought Christ was coming back in his lifetime. And then he realized he wasn't. He's an old man in his 90s. And this is the end of his life. Everybody basically knew in his life had died. And he's writing a letter to these churches. He thought, you think people can't keep this together? And some of them did. God is never going to stop his work. And that's what we find in that first century.

In fact, that's what you find throughout when you study church history. God never stops his work. He always has people that he's working with. He's always in the midst of what has now become an enormously false Christianity. And he's still going to do his work, and the church still exists today.

And to be called into what God is doing in the church today, Dr. Henderson talked about grace. You and I are in this church, the Church of God because of grace. It's not because God looked at anyone and said, Whoa, I can't pass that one up. It's not how this works. We're here because of the grace of God. And we should be very mindful of that. Because, like Martin Luther didn't get, you can remove yourself from the grace of God. That's a scary thing. You can remove yourself from justification. God doesn't expect it. He doesn't want it. But we can do it. So anyways, that's the first class, or no, that's the fifth class, of the ten classes. Like I said, I was talking to Mr. Foster, and he said, Why don't you give the class? He said, Then people know a little bit what we teach at ABC. So I hope you found that helpful. And I'm sorry I wanted a little overtime.