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| Series Theme: Apologetics | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Title: 11. Questions about the Early Church & PERSECUTION (The Physical Opposition)
A series that helps consider the foundations for faith
Contents for Overview:
Introductory Comments • It is important to know about the early Church. 1. What were the Main Problems facing the Early Church ? • Setting the scene for what follows. 2. What were the times of Persecution in those early Centuries? • Identifying the periods of persecution/ 3. How do these affect our Beliefs in the Historicity of the Early Church ? • Understanding builds faith. Introductory Comments
On this particular page we'll be looking at some of the difficulties of the early centuries of the Christian Church, particularly the persecutions that occurred in the centuries after Jesus' ascension and the passing of the Twelve.
On the following pages we'll see the Competitors that challenged the faith, the Heresies that sought to undermine the faith, and the people of the early centuries of church history who God used to overcome these problems. For the time being we focus on the persecutions.
1. What were the Main Problems facing the Early Church?
Answer:
The centuries following Jesus were characterised by persecutions, competition and heresies
Without doubt these were centuries of all-out spiritual warfare with the enemy seeking to inhibit church growth, yet the opposite happened:
In what follows we will consider the first of these attacks.
2. What were the times of Persecution in those early Centuries?
Answer:
Sometimes historians suggest that persecution of the Christians by the Romans fall into the following main periods:
To see fuller details of those who were martyred go to Christian Classic Ethereal Library - http://www.ccel.org/ and look under author for “Foxe” for Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Alternatively try Christian Martyrs by Robert Backhouse.
3. How do these affect our Beliefs in the Historicity of the Early Church?
Answer:
There are those somewhat unwise people who question the very historicity of Jesus Christ. That we consider elsewhere on these pages, but what these later years indicate (and it is very clearly attested to) is that spreading all over the area we now call the Middle East, was an increasing number of people called Christians – from Lyons in the west in Gaul, in Rome, in many of the towns of Asia Minor and in the great metropolis of Alexandria in Africa.
More than this, as we'll see on the following pages, the leaders were quite clear as to their beliefs in the historical person of Jesus Christ, and wrote at great length about his being and about the doctrines of the church, and this on top of the witness of hundreds if not thousands who died for their certainty of their faith, builds a massive foundation of belief for us.
This phenomena of a rapidly spreading church that is clear about its beliefs and willing to die for them, is not only almost unique in history but is numerically so great as demands the attention of any person of intellectual integrity to look into these things.
Again, we must suggest, there would be absolutely no point in so many of these men dying for their beliefs, unless they were utterly convinced of the truthfulness of them.
The fact of the persecutions, so many Roman emperors being threatened by this new faith, and the fact of so many dying for their faith, attests to the historical certainty of the existence of the early church and its founder, Jesus Christ.
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