Season 2 · Episode 23
Full episode description
Part Two of The Hidden Arc. That gap in the paperwork is the reason Christianity looks the way it does. James leads a large and still growing Jewish church in Jerusalem until a high priest finds a few months with no Roman governor in the country. Meanwhile in Rome, the church nobody founded is waiting for a visitor who arrives at the end of his life.
This episode walks:
- the three positions on the Gentile question, and the middle one that history erased along with Barnabas
- James the brother of Jesus, who was not one of the Twelve and led the Jerusalem church for nearly two decades
- the priesthood at war with itself over tithes, with the chief priests seizing the threshing floors while poorer priests starved
- the killing of James in 62, in the gap between governors, and the high priest who lost his office three months later
- Rome, where Paul greets twenty-six people by name in the year 57 and Peter is not among them
- why no Roman writer calls anyone bishop of Rome for generations, and when the claim finally hardens
- the eight years from 62 to 70 that removed James, Peter, Paul and the mother city itself
- what a movement does when the place every question went to is rubble
Peter is not the founder of Roman Christianity. He is its most valuable posthumous acquisition.
Not from tradition. From evidence.