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2.5.1 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
Primitive Jewish Christianity
The Widening Field - Missionary Campaigns
The persecution that began with the execution of Stephen became the occasion of a vigorous missionary campaign, and thus resulted in the rapid and wide spread of Christianity. They that were scattered abroad, Luke tells us, went about preaching the Word in Judea and Samaria, and even as far away as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch. It was perhaps at this time, also, that the Gospel reached Lydia and Joppa, where Peter found disciples some time later. [Acts 9:32, 36 sq.]
This was not the beginning of missionary work outside of Jerusalem. The Gospel had been already carries at least to Damascus, and there can be little doubt that the fugitive disciples found believers to welcome them in many quarters. But Luke is nevertheless undoubtedly correct in representing the persecution as constituting an epoch in the history of missionary effort. For these Christians of Jerusalem, who had for so long enjoyed such intimate fellowship and communion with on another, who had together witnessed so many manifestations of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and who had so fully realized in their common life the ideal of the life within the kingdom to which they were constantly looking forward, could not fail to make their influence felt wherever they went, and to give a mighty impulse to the spread of the Gospel.
We are not to think of them as becoming travelling evangelists, and spending all their time in going from place to place spreading the Gospel. They had their daily bread to earn, and they doubtless settled down quietly among their own countrymen in this and that place, and lived the life of faithful, scrupulous Jews, just as they had done in Jerusalem, and just as their neighbors were doing. But at the same time they must have retained the ideal of the Christian life which they had seen realized in Jerusalem, and the little circles in which they gathered with others of like mind, and with those whom they succeeded in winning to their faith, could not fail to take on the character of the circle to which they had there belonged; and thus at an early day among the Jewish population of many cities, towns, and villages within and without Palestine, the same kind of Christian brotherhood was realized that had existed from the beginning in Jerusalem.
The flight of the disciples therefore did not mean merely the spread of a knowledge of the Gospel, it meant also the formation of little companies of Christian brethren, ekklesia, wherever they made their homes.
Of the missionary work of the disciples of Jerusalem, Luke gives us some examples in the eighth and following chapters, arranging them in such a way as to lead up gradually to the work of Paul, to which he devotes more than half his book, and in which his interest evidently chiefly centers.
With the seventh chapter he concludes the record of what he regards as the first of the three stages of the program mapped out in 1:8 “Ye shall be my witnesses, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”
The history of evangelistic work in Jerusalem, of the spread of Christianity and the growth of the church there, he does not refer to again. The significance of Jerusalem in his narrative, from this point on, lies in its relation to other churches. It is henceforth not the whole Christian church, but only the mother church. The field of operation becomes an ever-widening territory, which acknowledges Jerusalem, to be sure, as its capital and center, but which increasingly absorbs the interest and attention of the narrator, until Jerusalem itself and the fortunes of the church there are finally forgotten. Thus the execution of Stephen, with the persecution and the scattering of the disciples that ensued, marks a distinct division in the narrative of Luke and brings the first section of his history to a close.
The second section, which contains the record of the second stage of witness-bearing, opens with an account of the preaching of Philip, one of the Seven, in Samaria.
The Samaritans were a heterogeneous people of mixed Jewish and heathen blood, but their religion was genuinely Isralelitish, though representing a more primitive stage of development that the religion of the Jews proper. They worshipped Jehovah, practiced circumcision, observed the Sabbath and all the Jewish feast days, but their holy city was Gerizim instead of Jerusalem, and they rejected the entire Scripture canon except the Pentateuch.
They were commonly hated and despised by their Jewish neighbors, but they were not put on a level with the heathen. Their membership in the family of Israel, though not certain in each individual case, was distinctly recognized as possible, and the rabbinical regulations respecting the treatment to be accorded them by orthodox Jews were framed accordingly.
Their observance of the Jewish law was regarded as very defective by the Pharisees, but they were not treated as complete aliens, and social intercourse, even to the extent of eating with them, was pronounced entirely legitimate by the rabbinical authorities.
Philip’s work among them, therefore, did not involve any breach of Jewish law, or even an approach thereto; but at the same time it revealed an interest in the people of Samaria which the ordinary Jew could hardly be expected to possess, and to that degree marked a distinct advance upon the spirit of Judaism in general, an advance toward the broader sympathy of Jesus.
It is for this reason, no doubt, that Luke records the incident. It may not be altogether without significance that the step was taken by one who was very likely a Hellenist, and who, though he might be as strict an observer of the Jewish law as any one else, would naturally feel more of an interest in the outside world than most of his Palestinian brethren, and would be more inclined than they to carry the Gospel to the Samaritans.
The Samaritans, like the rest of the Jews, seem to have been expecting a Messiah [cf. e.g. John 4:25; and the of Weiss in Meyer’s Commentary, 8th edition. Cf. also Kautzsch’s article in Herzog, S. 348.], and Phillip’s proclamation of Jesus as the Christ was therefore understood by them, though he cannot have made use of Old Testament prophecy in the same way that Peter did in his preaching at Jerusalem.
Whether he found the way prepared form him by the brief sojourn of Jesus himself in Sychar some years before, we cannot tell. There is no hint of it in Luke’s account, but it may well be that there were still some with whom Jesus came in contact that remembered him, possibly some that had recognized him as the Messiah, and if so we can easily believe that hey were glad to hear more about him, and to give expression to their faith in him by receiving baptism.
However that may be, Philip’s work in Samaria was very successful, according to Luke, and may converts were baptized.
Used by permission of the publisher.
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