Season 2 · Episode 22
Full episode description
Part One of The Hidden Arc, the three episodes that close Season 2. It goes back to one verse in the sixth chapter of Acts and finds the crack that decided everything after it. A quarrel about food and widows exposes two wings in the first church, divided by language rather than doctrine. When the persecution comes it takes one wing and leaves the other untouched. The scattered build the Gentile mission. Their persecutor inherits it.
This episode walks:
- the quarrel in Acts 6, where Greek-speaking widows go hungry and two wings of one church become visible
- the Seven appointed to settle it, every one of them bearing a Greek name, and Nicolas of Antioch who had not been born a Jew
- the Theodotus inscription, a stone dug out of a Jerusalem cistern in 1913, carved in Greek for Greek-speaking Jews within sight of the Temple
- Stephen, and the charge that the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands
- Acts 8:1, where a severe persecution scatters everyone except the apostles, and what that selection tells you about who was being hunted
- Paul the persecutor, a Greek-speaking Jew hunting Greek-speaking Jews inside the synagogue network he prayed in
- the machinery behind it, and why the letters he carried to Damascus were requests rather than warrants
- Antioch, built by the losers of the first persecution, and the mission Paul walked into a decade late and under suspicion
Paul did not invent the Gentile mission. He inherited it from his victims.
Not from tradition. From evidence.