By Bart D. Ehrman, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Scholars have long said, and non-scholars have often thought, that the earliest Christian communities were predominantly Jewish, until near the end of the 1st century, when Gentiles started to join in in increasing numbers. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. It appears that the Christian gospel never made significant inroads in ancient Jewish communities even early in the movement.
Very First Christians
The very first Christians, Jesus’s disciples and others connected with them, were Jewish and so were their early converts. The book of Acts also claims there were large numbers of Jewish converts at the very beginning. According to the book of Acts, on the day of Pentecost, less than two months after Jesus’s death, 3000 Jews converted. In the next few days, over 5,000 more converted. However, these numbers are surely exaggerated. At this rate there wouldn’t have been any non-Christians left in the city by the end of the year.
There is no other source from the time—Christian, Jewish, or Roman—that says anything about massive conversions to Christianity in the Jewish homeland, either in the early decades after Jesus’s death or at any other time.
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Sources of Information
Our best Jewish source of information for the 1st century in Israel itself is the Jewish historian, Josephus. Josephus spent most of his life in the country, especially his early life.
He detailed its history in many volumes devoted to political, cultural, military, and religious affairs of Jews in the land. In these volumes, he barely mentions Christians, giving them just one sentence in the 29 books of his surviving writings.
The Christian evidence for early missionary work among Jews is extremely sparse. The only Christian writings to survive from the first four decades of the church are the letters of Paul. Paul visited the church in Jerusalem on several occasions and he tells us about it. But it makes no reference to it being a large Christian community and, indeed, he does not speak of sizeable numbers of Jewish converts anywhere else in the world either.
Paul’s Letter to the Galatians
Paul does tell us in the letter to the Galatians that Peter was the missionary to the Jews as he was to the Gentiles, but he says nothing about the success of Peter’s mission or of anyone else’s mission to the Jews.
Paul’s own churches were predominantly Gentile by a large margin; that’s what we would expect of churches established by the Apostle to the Gentiles. But there are a couple of other indications that the ethnic backgrounds of the Christians of Paul’s communities were representative of the church at large. Most missionary successes, not just of Paul’s, but of everyone taking the message abroad, were among pagans instead of Jews early on.
It’s important to point out that even in Acts itself, the Jewish mission outside of Jerusalem has extremely limited success. Everywhere Paul goes, he’s firmly rejected by the Jews in one city to the next.
Ethnic Makeup of the Church in Rome
An even more important piece of evidence comes in Paul’s own letter to the church in Rome, a letter that’s unique among Paul surviving writings because it’s addressed to a church that Paul did not establish himself. In this letter, he tells us something of the church’s constituency. That is probably the last letter Paul wrote, at least of the ones that still survive.
In this letter, Paul indicates he’s writing to Christians in Rome because he wants to use their church as a base of operation for his mission to the far west. He needs them to support him. He indicates that he has never yet been to Rome, even though he’s long known of the church there.
This means that someone else started the Roman church, even though we don’t know who that might have been. Paul does know though a number of people in the church by hearsay. He greets 26 of these people by name. Again, it’s interesting to note that Peter is not among the 26 that he greets. So, maybe Peter wasn’t there. Certainly, Peter was not the founder of this church. Legend says of course that Peter founded the church in Rome.
Of these 26 people that Paul greets, six of them he explicitly identifies as his compatriots, that is, fellow Jews. Since that’s an identifying marker for six of them, that means the other 20 were pagans. So, even in the church that Paul did not find, 20 out of 26 of the people that we know about were pagan, former pagans. There’s no reason to think that the ethnic makeup of the church in Rome at the time was unusual for Christian communities. And that would mean that Christians propagating their faith had more success with pagans than with Jews.
Common Questions about Propagation of the Christian Faith
The best Jewish source of information for the 1st century in Israel is the Jewish historian, Josephus.
The Christian evidence for early missionary work among Jews is extremely sparse. The only Christian writings to survive from the first four decades of the church are the letters of Paul. Paul visited the church in Jerusalem on several occasions and he tells us about it. But it makes no reference to it being a large Christian community and, indeed, he does not speak of sizeable numbers of Jewish converts anywhere else in the world either.
Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is unique among Paul surviving writings because it’s addressed to a church that Paul did not establish himself. In this letter, Paul indicates he’s writing to Christians in Rome because he wants to use their church as a base of operation for his mission to the far west.
