Have you ever read the Acts of the Apostles? I mean, just read it like a story, all in one sitting?
You’re allowed to read scripture like that. In fact, I think it’s a really good way of appreciating just how amazing the early church was.
I have no patience with people who tell me that the New Testament’s letters and books were written one, two or three hundred years after the events they described.
They always tell us it was written by a “community” which was “discerning” something or other.
Are you kidding me? If the early church had tried to engage in any “discernment” processes, it would have been wiped out on Pentecost Sunday.
Acts is the most astonishing story. It was also probably the first successful sequel since Homer’s Odyssey.
In it, a band of people, utterly convinced that an itinerant prophet has risen from the dead, proceed to cause a huge amount of trouble across many different countries.
It kicks off with an inexplicable religious experience, after which the original group explode into the street in a crowded capital city and start preaching in foreign languages.
They make a big group of converts to their new religion but then the trouble starts in earnest. They’re a breakaway group from a bigger faith community, and their elders and betters are furious with them.
So furious, in fact, that they start trying to wipe them out. Everyone has to go on the run. From here it’s a bit like Lord of the Rings in that we follow different people on different journeys.
One of the group gets teleported to an entirely different city after explaining the new religion to a senior public servant.
Someone else gets beheaded. Someone else gets stoned to death. People see visions that freak them out, but then turn out to make a lot of sense.
And there’s a major plot twist when their main persecutor converts to the new religion. Is he a double agent? Can they trust him? Keep reading to find out.
Eventually the narrator of the story gets carried away and forgets he’s meant to be describing a community’s experiences. He starts saying “we,” and you realise he’s telling you about things he witnessed himself.
He’s joined forces with the convert, who is rapidly turning into the main character of the rest of the story. This guy is a natural; brilliant, charismatic, and with an unstoppable spirit of adventure.
But right now, they have everyone piling on against them. They’ve got the rival religion out to kill them all, which has sneakily tried to involve the state authorities to help them.
Did I mention all of this was happening in a series of colonised city-states that didn’t really like their imperial overlords? So there’s that as well.
Our heroes never know when they walk into a town whether they’ll be welcomed or run out on the rail. There’s arrests, trials, plots to attempt murder, and prison breakouts.
At one stage the lead character escapes by being let down over a wall in a basket. The group also gets stoned by angry mobs, and shipwrecked and almost drowned.
And yet somehow, their belief in the itinerant prophet’s divine origin is catching on. In some places it might be just one or two people who start believing when they hear about it.
In other towns, whole households join them. The converts seem completely random. They’re all just ordinary people from the melting pot of the Empire.
The little band of troublemakers often fail in their mission, very publicly. But they never give up. Not even when the main character is arrested and is likely to be executed.
The last we hear of him—in another major plot twist—is that he’s upset his latest trial by using the legal trick of appealing to the emperor. So now he has to be sent to the capital city under armed guard.
When he finally gets there, the story ends. He just ends up living under house arrest for two years.
It is the most unlikely story you will ever read. This entire enterprise should have failed. It was a disaster from the very beginning.
Absolutely everyone was against them, and what’s more, their enemies had all the weapons, all the money, and all the power.
And yet here we are, in a country undreamed of in their day, speaking a language that didn’t exist, and believing the same things that they taught us.
This all has to be true. Nothing this outrageous would ever have happened in fiction.