Missions to Pagan Rome and the Gentiles
The Roman Empire of the time of Jesus and the early church dates from the Roman emperor Octavian's reorganization of the Roman Republic in 31 B.C. Octavian added Egypt to the collection of territories, like Greece and what is now called the Middle East, that were part of the previous Roman Republic.
discussion question
What does “fullness of time” mean?
Many biblical commentators have suggested that the Apostle Paul, in referring to his era as “the fullness of time” in which God chose to send the Messiah and establish his church, was suggesting that the Roman Empire was the right place at the right time for the Gospel (see Galatians 4:4 and Hebrews 1:2).
Octavian became Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor and the one still in power when Jesus was born, as recorded in Luke's Gospel: “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that the entire world should be taxed” (Luke 2:1). Augustus was the most powerful world ruler since Alexander the Great, who had conquered the known world (from Europe to India) 300 years earlier.
Like Greece four centuries earlier, Rome was devoutly pagan, with mythological deities renamed and resized to fit the Roman ethos from their earlier Grecian reigns, and a cult of the emperor as the divine lord. Pertinent to the church's growth is a look at the social conditions paganism fostered, which the population increasingly rejected as inhumane or morally defective as the Christian minority grew.
factum
The New Testament did not exist at this early date. Epistles like Paul's, Peter's, and John's, and individual Gospels and Acts appeared one by one and were sent around congregations. Reading aloud from these, as well as Old Testament passages, was part of worship in the early church, which was modeled after worship in the Jewish Temple and synagogues.
The early Christians' charity and compassion for their neighbors commended the Gospel to large segments of the population. One writer observes that when a plague decimated the population of the empire early in the church's history, the only people caring for both their own families and their neighbors, rather than running from the infectious population centers, were the Christians.
