Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill First Appearance of Christianity in the Eastern Provinces Historically Christianity originated as an offshoot from Judaism, and it is probably an undisputed fact that to all outside the Jewish communities, perhaps at first even to the Jews themselves outside Judaea, Christianity was regarded merely as a Jewish sect. It is no less certain that the first spread of Christianity was aided and conditioned by the extent and number of the Jewish communities scattered over the provinces of Syria and Asia Minor. That the earliest converts in Jerusalem, rising with extreme rapidity from 120 1 to 3,000,2 and then to 5,000 3—the large number being accounted for by the fact that multitudes of Jews from all parts of the empire happened to be at Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost4—still continued to worship in the Temple is expressly attested.5 The fact that Stephen was brought before the Sanhedrim 8 proves that in the eyes of that body he was a recusant Jew, over whom, therefore, they had the right of jurisdiction, while the certainly illegal action of putting him to death could only have been overlooked by the Roman government because they regarded it as one of those regrettable incidents which the internal animosities among the Jews sometimes occasioned, and at which it was better to connivethan to interfere with. The persecution, a purely Jewish one, which followed was the first means of spreading the new sect through the cities of Judaea and Samaria,7 and then to such places as Damascus,8 Cyprus, and Antioch fl—all places where there were large Jewish communities, and in which it is expressly stated that the refugees " spake the word to none save to the Jews only." 10 So, too, a few years later, when through the missionary activity of Paul, the new religion—for such it was gradu...