During the time between the resurrection of Jesus and the time that Constantine became the emperor of Rome, Christianity grew a lot and gained a lotta influence. Constantine reportedly didn’t embrace Christianity because he was all that interested in becoming a Christian personally. He embraced Christianity to unify the Roman Empire. The significance of that is staggering. He had to find something that most people in the empire had in common, and it wasn’t the Roman gods anymore. It was Christianity, the very faith that the empire had tried to eradicate and stamp out. And that was due to the significant spread of Christianity in its most difficult years.
Christianity made its greatest strides...when Christians faced tremendous hardship...during the nearly 300 years before the Bible ever even existed. Christianity grew from the time of Jesus to the time of Constantine not on the back of “the Bible says.” The Hebrew scriptures weren’t combined with the New Testament documents until about 350 years after Jesus’ birth. Before the OT and the NT were combined and titled ‘the Bible’, Christianity had already replaced the entire pantheon of Roman, Barbarian, and most Egyptian gods and was the state religion of the Roman Empire itself. Before anyone had ever held ‘the Bible’ in their hands. And it would be close to the invention of the printing press before anyone...unless they were a priest...ever held one in their hands.
1st, 2nd, and 3rd century Christians didn’t choose to follow Jesus because of an infallible OT or a non-contradicting NT; they didn’t choose to follow Jesus because of ‘the Bible’ that didn’t even exist yet. They were followers of Jesus because He rose from the dead. For the first 300 years, the focus was centered on an event, not on a book. The focus wasn’t “is the Bible true”...the focus was “did Jesus rise from the dead”...? And Matthew…who was an eyewitness…said He did, and documented it separately; and so did Mark, who spent time with Peter and got Peter’s eyewitness account, and documented it separately; and so did John…who was an eyewitness… and documented separately an account of Jesus’ life; Peter was an eyewitness and knew Jesus rose from the dead, and later on wrote letters separately to the churches to say so; and James…who was one of the earliest witnesses of his brother’s resurrection and became one of the pillars of the church…said so; Luke came along a little later, and thoroughly investigated these events and talked to as many eyewitnesses as possible, and put together a separate account; and then a fire-breathing Pharisee named Paul, who was was gonna put the Jesus movement out of business, met the resurrected Jesus and knew He rose from the dead, and he became a raving fan and dedicated his life to taking the Gospel of Jesus to the Gentiles all over the Roman world, and he wrote about it separately.
There’s no explanation for the success of the early church if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead. The success of the early church was not due to the Bible…there was no ‘the Bible’ at this time. The success of the church was totally due to eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection. Fortunately those who were closest to the event, those who were eyewitnesses of the event, documented it. But they didn’t document what they believed, they documented what they saw. The focus, to me, isn’t the Bible; the focus is, and always has been, Jesus. Christianity didn’t disrupt the Roman Empire because of the Bible; Christianity disrupted the Roman Empire because of a resurrected Savior.
