Blogging Towards Sunday, July 13, 2025

Acts 17:1-10a & 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10& 4:1-2, 9-12

Our story in Acts today tells of the emergence of the church in the Greek town of Thessalonica (Thessaloniki today) most likely in 49-50 ad.  Paul and Silas are accused of disturbing the peace, political subversion – treason – what the text calls “turning the world upside down.” Threatened by the town rulers, they’re forced to leave the city before finishing their work.  First Thessalonians was written around 50-51 ad. It is widely believed to be one of the earliest letters written by the Apostle Paul, and possibly the first book of the New Testament to be written. The letter was written from Corinth during Paul’s second missionary journey, to encourage the nascent church in Thessalonica that Paul had to leave early than intended.
 

Under the Roman Emperor Nero (54-68) the first persecution of  the Christians occurred.  They were called a ‘new and mischievous superstition’ and blamed for the great fire of 64 in Rome. Followers of the Way of Jesus  were  viewed with great suspicion as a group with ‘degraded and shameful practices’, who held to ‘a foreign and deadly superstition’; and  had ‘antisocial tendencies’.   We see this suspicion in the story of Acts 17, and the persecution that the early Thessalonian church continued to face and to which Paul speaks in his letter.

It’s from ancient Roman writers Suetonius and Tacitus, that we learn the most of how the Romans viewed and condemned Christians for odium generis humani or ‘hatred of the human race.’

First the Christians (and Jews) were associated as adherents of a single monotheistic creed, springing from the same root and potentially hostile to Graeco-Roman society. proclaimed.  Some saw this proclamation of one God as illegal, a rejection of the old gods – who might very well punish the empire for such disloyalty. This was also seen as treason, for the emperor and former emperors were recognized and worshipped as gods.

Christians were considered revolutionaries, showing no respect for traditional values and mores. It was not the novelty, organization, or theology of Christianity that irritated the pagans, but rather the pretension to live apart, to break with traditional piety, even gradually to overcome all that was not Christian. Facts commonly held against Christianity was the nature and origin of so many of its converts—slaves, notions of equality in a highly hierarchical class based society, the inclusion of women. Some Romans thought Christians practiced cannibalism because the sacrament of the Eucharist called for believers to symbolically eat the flesh and blood of Christ. Others believed that Christians practiced incest because they preached loving their brothers and sisters.

(taken from the essay Why Early Christians Were Persecuted by the Romans by Bruce Eastwood)
 
 
Questions for Reflection & Examen:
 
•       What engaged, enraged, or surprised you in these texts?

·       Acts 17 tells of persecution because the apostles are seen as turning the world upside down.  How might one have thought that?

·       How might people today in 2025 think that about Christians?

·       What are the authors of our readings, Luke and Paul, possibly trying to tell us as the church today ?