A.D. 29. After the day of Pentecost the disciples went everywhere gladly preaching the word, while great success attended their ministry. In a very short time a second church was planted at Samaria, and soon another at Antioch. Persecutions were now inflicted upon the Christians everywhere, and Saul was on his way to Damascus, with authority to arrest men and women, and breathing out threatenings and slaughter against all Christians, when he was suddenly stricken down and made to cry out for mercy. Being converted to the Christian faith, he attached himself to the church at Antioch.
Paul became at once enthused with the spirit of missions, and the church at Antioch, by direct command of God, set him and Barnabas apart to this work. They immediately set out to bear hence the gospel of Christ to the regions beyond. During this journey they visited Lystra, where Timothy was converted. Soon churches were planted at Philippi, Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Colosse, Rome and Galatia.
These churches were all modeled after the church at Jerusalem, being:
First. Independent in their organic relations, one from another.
Second. They acknowledged no head but Christ, and owned no Lawgiver but him.
Third. The members of these churches were baptized believers.
Fourth. They administered baptism by immersion only.
Fifth. They denied sacramental salvation.
Sixth. They held to equality of membership.
Seventh. They held to freedom of conscience and to religious liberty.
These principles were so repugnant to the wishes of the rulers, and to those who occupied high places, that they stirred up the common people against the disciples of Christ, and many of them were put to death, and others were scattered abroad, but everywhere they went they continued to preach the word.
Thus at this early period in the history of the churches, “the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church,” and every effort to stamp out the fires of Christianity, served only to rekindle them. Nero was at this time, A.D. 66, emperor of Rome, and by his orders the Apostle Paul was put to death. He, who had at one time been so bitter in his denunciations of Christianity, after a long life of active labor in the service of Christ, sealed his testimony with his blood.
The services in the Temple, in Jerusalem, had all this time gone on uninterrupted, but shortly after this time the city was besieged by Titus, in command of the Roman soldiers, in their war with the Jews, and so great was the destruction of lives in the city from pestilence and famine that there was no proper person, says Jones, the historian, to offer the sacrifices, and on the 17th day of July, A.D. 70, the sacrifices ceased. It has been estimated that the Jews lost one million five hundred thousand lives during this war.
We find that Polycarp became the pastor of the church at Smyrna, in A.D. 81. This was just fourteen years before the apostle John was banished to the Isle of Patmos, which occurred in A.D. 95. Polycarp had received his instruction from this apostle, who was one of the immediate disciples of Christ, and continued as pastor of this single church for a period of eighty-five years, or down to A.D. 166, when hoary with age, but strong in faith, this soldier of the cross was burned alive for his loyalty to Christ. Justin Martyr and others were beheaded the same year. This was under the reign of Marcus Aurelius Antonius, emperor of Rome. Terrible persecutions were visited upon Christians at this time, but the tide of Christianity swept on, for behind it was the hand of Him who had said the gates of hell should not prevail against his church.
In A.D. 200, Irenaeus suffered martyrdom at the hands of the opposers of Christianity. He was at this time pastor, or bishop, of the church at Lyons, France, (then Gallia). The terms bishop and pastor at that time signified the same thing. A bishop was pastor of a single church, or had the oversight of a single congregation, and was in every way amenable to the church and subject alike, with the private members, to its discipline.
Mosheim, vol. 1, page 39, says:
“Let none, however, confound the bishops of this primitive and golden period of the church with those of whom we read in the following ages; for though they were both distinguished by the same name, yet they differed in many respects. A bishop during the first and second century was a person who had the care of one Christian assembly, which at that time was, generally speaking, small enough to be contained in a private house. In this assembly he acted not so much with the authority of a master, as with the zeal and diligence of a faithful servant.”
Mosheim’s testimony to the independence of the churches, and the subordinate office of bishop, during the first two centuries, is highly credible, inasmuch as he was a Lutheran and a historian of high reputation.
Robinson, in his Ecclesiastical Researches, says: “During the first three centuries, congregations all over the East subsisted in separate, independent bodies, unsupported by government, and consequently without any secular power over one another. All this time, they were baptized [Baptist] churches, and though all the Fathers of the first four ages down to Jerome (A.D. 370) were of Greece, Syria and Africa, and though they give great numbers of histories of the baptism of adults, yet there is not one record of the baptism of a child till the year 370.”
The testimony of these historians establishes three important facts. (1) The independence of the churches. (2) The subordinate character of the bishops or pastors. (3) The baptism of believers, as opposed to infant baptism.
In the beginning of the second century Pliny, who was governor of Bithynia, put Christians to death merely on the ground of their professing Christianity. He simply asked the question, “Are you a Christian? ” and if they avowed it, he asked the question a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment, when, if they persisted, he immediately ordered their execution. Trajan was at this time emperor of Rome, and by his orders Ignatius, who was pastor at Antioch, was sent to Rome and exposed to the fury of the wild beasts in the theatre and by them devoured. About the same time, A.D. 115, Simon, after repeated scourgings, was crucified at the advanced age of one hundred and twenty years.
This was a fulfillment of the words of Christ addressed to Peter, “When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkdest whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old thou shalt stretch forth thy hands and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.”—John 21:18.
We have found the church at Smyrna in existence at Polycarp’s death, A.D. 166, and have no means of knowing anything about the further history of this church, but find a church in existence at Lyons, A.D. 180, under the pastoral care of Irenaeus, a Greek, who, before he accepted the pastorate at Lyons, had lived at Smyrna, and had enjoyed the religious instructions of Polycarp, who himself had been a disciple of John. He continued to be the pastor of this church until A.D. 200, when he suffered martyrdom.
Only a little later than this, or about A.D. 200, or 215, at the latest, we find a church in existence at Carthage, Africa, which continued to exist, as a single church, for a period of two hundred years, or until A.D. 400.