Jesus, the apostles and the first church

Jesus was a Jew from Nazareth in Galilee, a small region under Roman-backed rule. Around his early thirties he began to preach, heal and gather disciples, announcing that the Kingdom of God was at hand. He taught through parables like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, ate with outcasts and sinners, and summed up the law in two commandments: love God, and love your neighbour as yourself. He chose twelve close followers, the apostles, among them a fisherman named Simon whom he called Peter.^•

Around 30 CE, during Passover in Jerusalem, Jesus shared a final meal with his disciples, taking bread and wine and saying, “This is my body… this is my blood.” He was arrested, handed to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and crucified, a death the Romans reserved for slaves and rebels. Historians agree on this much, and on the fact that his followers soon claimed that he had risen from the dead and appeared to them.^•

For Catholics, the resurrection is the centre of everything. Christians believe that through his death and rising, Jesus, the Son of God, reconciled humanity with God and defeated death. Fifty days later, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles, the moment the church traditionally dates as its birthday.^•

The new movement began as a Jewish group in Jerusalem led by Peter and by James, the brother of Jesus. Within a generation, missionaries, above all Paul of Tarsus, a former persecutor turned apostle, carried it to gentiles across the eastern Mediterranean. Paul’s letters, written in the 50s, are the oldest Christian writings to survive. The great question of the early years was whether gentile converts had to keep the Jewish law; a meeting in Jerusalem decided that they did not, and Christianity gradually became a separate religion.^•

Ancient tradition holds that both Peter and Paul died as martyrs in Rome under the emperor Nero, in the mid-60s: Peter crucified, according to legend upside down, and Paul beheaded. Excavations under St Peter’s Basilica in the twentieth century found a modest shrine from the mid-second century, built over a poor grave that early Christians honoured as Peter’s. That tradition is the foundation of Rome’s special place in Catholicism: the bishop of Rome, the pope, is the successor of Peter.^•

The four Gospels, written down in the following decades, give four portraits of Jesus. Catholics read them alongside tradition, the teaching handed down in the church, and believe both come from the same source. That pairing of scripture and tradition, and an authority to interpret them, would later be one of the great dividing lines with Protestants.^•

Why it matters today