Early Christianity: The World of the Apostle Paul

Christianity did not begin as a new religion announced to the world. It began as a movement within the Judaism of its own day, in a Mediterranean world knit together by Roman roads, Greek speech and scattered Jewish communities. To read the letters and journeys of the Apostle Paul without that world in view is to miss much of what they mean. This article sketches that world — Second Temple Judaism, the Jewish diaspora, the Roman Empire under Claudius and Nero, the pivotal city of Antioch, and the Council of Jerusalem that opened the faith to the gentiles — in the same neutral and cited register as the rest of this reference. Claims are labelled by their evidentiary weight: (Scripture) for what the New Testament text states, (Tradition) for what later Christian tradition holds, and (Scholarship) for the reconstructions of modern historians. Dates are given as ranges, because the chronology of the first Christian generation is a careful reconstruction anchored on only a handful of fixed points, not a settled record.

A movement within Second Temple Judaism

The earliest followers of Jesus did not think of themselves as members of a separate faith. Their movement emerged within Second Temple Judaism — the Judaism of the long period from the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple in the late sixth century BC to its destruction by Rome in AD 70. That Judaism was not monolithic. It was internally diverse, with distinct parties and schools: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and others, each with its own reading of the Law, its own view of the resurrection, and its own posture toward Rome. (Scholarship)

Paul is himself the clearest first-person witness to this world, because he belonged to it before he ever preached Christ. He describes his pedigree with precision: "circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; according to the law, a Pharisee" (Philippians 3:5, Douay-Rheims). (Scripture) Years later, on trial before the Sanhedrin, he still claims that identity in the present tense: "Men, brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees" (Acts 23:6). (Scripture) By the account of the Acts of the Apostles he had been educated in Jerusalem "at the feet of Gamaliel" (Acts 22:3), the Pharisaic teacher named in Gamaliel. (Scripture)

The point matters for reading everything that follows. The first believers kept the Sabbath, worshipped in the Temple and the synagogues, and read the Hebrew scriptures. What made them distinctive was a claim about Jesus of Nazareth, not a rejection of Judaism. Only gradually, and not without conflict, did the movement become a distinct and largely gentile religion — a process the New Testament itself records mid-course rather than in hindsight. (Scholarship)

The Jewish diaspora: the network Paul travelled

By the first century AD, Jews lived in large numbers far outside Judea, in established communities across the Mediterranean — in Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, and dozens of lesser cities. This scattering, the Greek *diaspora*, had taken shape over centuries through both forced deportation and, more often, voluntary migration; by Paul's day most diaspora Jews lived abroad by long settlement, in communities organised around the synagogue. (Scholarship)

Tarsus itself — the city Paul calls "no mean city" (Acts 21:39) — was such a diaspora setting: a Greek-speaking Roman provincial capital with a resident Jewish community. To place it, see our guide to where Tarsus is. A boy raised there would have grown up bilingual in the languages of two worlds, at home in both the synagogue and the Greco-Roman street.

This diaspora network became the infrastructure of the gentile mission. On arriving in a new city Paul characteristically went first to the synagogue (for example Acts 13:14; 14:1). Luke records the pattern plainly at Thessalonica: there was "a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul, according to his custom, went in unto them, and for three sabbath days he reasoned with them out of the scriptures" (Acts 17:1-2). (Scripture) In those synagogues he found not only Jews but gentile "God-fearers" — sympathisers already drawn to Jewish monotheism and ethics without full conversion. They were, in a sense, an audience prepared in advance, and much of the early gentile response came from among them. (Scholarship) The diaspora did not merely dot the map with communities; it supplied roads of language, hospitality and shared scripture along which the message could travel.

An empire of roads and cities: Claudius and Nero

Paul's active ministry, roughly the AD 40s to 60s, unfolded under two emperors: Claudius (reigned AD 41-54) and Nero (reigned AD 54-68). The Roman Empire that framed his work was, for a missionary, a paradoxical gift — a single political space with common coinage, protected sea lanes, and a road system that made sustained long-distance travel possible for a private citizen. Paul's Roman citizenship, which Acts presents as his from birth (Acts 22:28), gave him legal standing, a measure of protection, and the right, in the end, to appeal his case to Caesar (Acts 25:11). (Scripture)

Two imperial episodes touch the New Testament record directly, and both are worth stating carefully.

The first is the expulsion of Jews from Rome under Claudius, usually dated about AD 49. The Roman biographer Suetonius reports that Claudius expelled Jews from Rome because of disturbances made "at the instigation of Chrestus." Many scholars read *Chrestus* as a garbled form of *Christus* — that is, as a distorted echo of disputes over Christ within the synagogues of Rome — though this reading is an inference, not a certainty, and a minority take *Chrestus* at face value as an otherwise unknown agitator. (Scholarship) Acts appears to corroborate the expulsion itself: at Corinth Paul meets the Jewish couple Aquila and Priscilla, "lately come from Italy... because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome" (Acts 18:2). (Scripture) After Claudius died in AD 54 the edict lapsed, and Jewish believers returned to a city where gentile believers had meanwhile grown more prominent — the mixed community Paul later addresses in his Letter to the Romans, written in the later 50s. (Scholarship)

The second is the Neronian persecution of AD 64. After the great fire of Rome that year, the historian Tacitus records that Nero fastened the blame on the Christians of the city and had them put to death. (Scholarship) It is against this background that early Christian sources place the deaths of both Peter and Paul at Rome, a tradition discussed below. The persecution was, on the evidence, a local and imperial episode rather than a systematic empire-wide campaign, and its details are debated; what the sources agree on is that by the mid-60s the name "Christian" could be a capital charge in the capital itself. (Scholarship)

Antioch: where the disciples were first called Christians

If any single city outside Jerusalem shaped the early movement, it was [Antioch](/library/places/antioch) on the Orontes — the great Roman-Syrian metropolis, today Antakya in Hatay Province, southern Turkiye. After the persecution that followed the stoning of Stephen, Greek-speaking believers fled Jerusalem and carried their message north; some, at Antioch, began preaching to gentiles as well as Jews. (Scripture)

It was to that promising but unsteady situation that Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus, brought Paul. Barnabas had earlier vouched for the newly converted Saul before the wary Jerusalem believers (Acts 9:27); now he sought him out in Tarsus and brought him to Antioch to teach. Luke marks the moment with a famous sentence: they "conversed there in the church a whole year; and they taught a great multitude, so that at Antioch the disciples were first named Christians" (Acts 11:26). (Scripture) The label was most likely coined by outsiders — the Greek *Christos* fitted with a Latin *-ianus* ending, "partisans of Christ" — and it stuck. (Scholarship)

Antioch became the operational base of the gentile mission. Paul's missionary journeys launch from it and return to it (Acts 13:1-3; 14:26-28; 15:35). From here the movement pressed outward and, from here, its hardest internal question would soon be carried up to Jerusalem for a reckoning.

The turning point: the Council of Jerusalem

As gentiles came to faith in growing numbers, a genuine crisis arose. Did a gentile who believed in the Jewish Messiah first have to become, in effect, a Jew — to be circumcised and to keep the whole Law of Moses? The question was not incidental; it touched the identity of the movement and the terms of table fellowship between Jewish and gentile believers.

The matter came to a head at the Council of Jerusalem, usually dated about AD 48-50. Acts 15 describes a meeting of apostles and elders that decided gentile converts did not have to be circumcised or keep the Mosaic Law, asking of them only that they "abstain from the pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood" — the so-called apostolic decree (Acts 15:19-20, 28-29). (Scripture) Paul gives his own first-person account of a Jerusalem meeting in Galatians 2:1-10, and many scholars identify the two as the same event, though the identification is debated and the two accounts differ in emphasis and detail. (Scripture; the identification is Scholarship-debated.)

Whatever the precise relationship of the two texts, the outcome is widely regarded as the hinge on which the movement turned — from a renewal movement within Judaism into a universal faith open to gentiles on their own terms. (Scholarship) It freed the gentile mission from the requirement of the Law and, in doing so, set the trajectory that Paul's journeys and letters would follow for the next decade. Read more about how the region that produced Paul is honoured today in why Tarsus.

The spread through Asia Minor and beyond

From Antioch the faith spread across Asia Minor — the peninsula of modern Turkiye — and then into Greece. Paul's first journey carried him through Cyprus and into the highlands of the south: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe (Acts 13-14). His second and third journeys reached the Aegean and the Greek mainland: Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea, Athens, Corinth, and above all Ephesus, where he was based for some two to three years (Acts 19). (Scripture)

The pattern was consistent. Paul planted communities in the cities, not the countryside; he worked outward from the synagogue and the God-fearers; he supported himself by his trade so as not to burden his converts; and he stayed in contact by letter. Most of his undisputed letters — Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon — were written on these journeys and during the imprisonments that followed. On the standard dating they are the earliest surviving Christian writings of any kind, composed before the Gospels reached their written form. (Scholarship)

By the mid-60s the movement had a foothold in most of the major cities of the eastern Mediterranean and in Rome itself. It was still small, still argued over, and still in many places barely distinguished from the diaspora synagogue in the eyes of Roman officials. But its shape — urban, networked, gentile as well as Jewish, and held together by shared letters and travelling teachers — was already set. That shape is Paul's most visible legacy in the world he moved through.

Peter and Paul, and a feast on the 29th of June

The two apostles most associated with the founding generation at Rome are Peter and Paul, and Christian tradition links their deaths to the Neronian years described above. The traditions differ in detail: Paul, a Roman citizen, is remembered as beheaded, a death that spared him crucifixion, while Peter is remembered as crucified. (Tradition) The earliest witnesses place both martyrdoms at Rome under Nero, in the period from about AD 64 to 67, though no source fixes a single certain year. (Tradition; the precise dating is Scholarship-debated.)

The joint commemoration of the two on 29 June is of ancient origin. In the Roman calendar it appears already in the mid-fourth century — in the chronograph of AD 354 — with roots reaching back into the third century; the date marks, by tradition, either the anniversary of their martyrdom or the translation of their relics. (Tradition) In the Roman Catholic calendar it ranks as a Solemnity, the highest class of feast, titled the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul; the Eastern churches keep 29 June as a great feast marking the end of the Apostles' Fast. Uniting the two apostles on one day expresses the unity of the apostolic foundation — Peter among the Twelve, Paul the apostle to the gentiles.

That feast is the reason a pilgrimage anchored on 29 June carries a particular resonance in Tarsus. The place where Paul's life *began* is honoured on the day the wider Church remembers the *completion* of his mission. The full arc of the apostle — from a diaspora city in Cilicia to a martyr's grave at Rome — is held, for one day, in a single frame.

Why this world still draws pilgrims to Tarsus

Understanding the world of the first Christians is not a matter of antiquarian interest alone. It is the reason Tarsus remains a place of pilgrimage: it was in that diaspora city, in that empire of roads, that the apostle who did more than anyone after Jesus to carry the faith to the nations was born and formed. The synagogue network he travelled, the Roman citizenship he invoked, the Council that freed his mission, the city of Antioch where the name "Christian" was first heard — all of it converges on the figure whose birthplace Tarsus is honoured to be.

It is that convergence that St Paul Global Week marks. On 28-30 June 2027, around the 29 June Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, a faith-tourism gathering organised by Funny Tourism will bring pilgrims to Tarsus and Mersin, in the birthplace of the Apostle, with the Feast Day prayer programme broadcast live worldwide. You are warmly invited to explore the programme, to read why Tarsus, and — for church and community leaders who wish to bring a group — to learn about the Hosted Delegation Leaders programme or simply to get in touch.