ESay
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- Mar 14, 2015
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Well I think that is the result of how the Bible is written and pieced together. Most of the 27 books of the New Testament are written by, attributed to, or about the Apostle Paul. Paul's mission was to spread the word to Gentiles across the empire while the other apostles focused on the Jews. Paul was a very educated man and he was very successful in his ministry so we have writings of Paul where for the others we don't. We ave letters that claim to be written by John, and Peter, and Jude, etc but the vast majority of scholars view them as pseudepigraphic. So in addition to having documents from Paul and none from the others, we also see Paul working with a much larger geographical area. Thus we get the illusion that Christianity didn't take hold in Jerusalem or Judea. But actually according to Acts it caught on very strongly among the Jewish population. Additionally, one of Paul's main responsibilities was to gather a collection for the converted Jewish population in Jerusaem. This pre-supposes that there was one as it makes no sense to gather a collection for a population that did not exist.
Look, I am not arguing that there were no followers among Jewish population. Unfortunately, I don’t have any statistics about how many Christ-followers were in Judea in the first decades after Jesus’ death. I think the number wasn’t high in comparison with a whole population, but it is only my own opinion. And the majority of disciples stayed at a home land, but they didn’t have much success there, did they? How can it be explained? Their abilities and knowledge were poor, they met with fierce opposition? I don’t know exactly, to tell the truth. But it is very suspicious that having Jesus’ miracles in their support, they didn’t get much.
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