Everything in this series starts from an empty tomb and a group of frightened people who had watched their teacher die. Within a few weeks they were standing in public saying He was alive, and thousands believed them. This part covers about a year — and almost everything that follows for the next seventy is set in motion in it.

Forty days

Luke says Jesus showed Himself alive to them over forty days, “by many convincing proofs.” That phrase is worth noticing. These were not people looking for a reason to believe; they were people who had to be convinced, and were.

Then He was taken from them. Two men in white ask the disciples why they are standing there staring at the sky — He will come back the same way. They walk down the Mount of Olives into the city and wait, because that is what He told them to do.

Acts 1:1–11 · Luke 24:36–53 · 1 Corinthians 15:3–8

The hundred and twenty

The whole church, at this moment, is about a hundred and twenty people in an upstairs room. Peter is there, and the rest of the eleven, and the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and His brothers — brothers who, during His ministry, had not believed in Him. Something changed their minds.

They pray, and they choose Matthias to take the place Judas left, because they understand themselves to be twelve for a reason. Then nothing happens for ten days. They wait.

Acts 1:12–26

Pentecost

Pentecost was already a festival — fifty days after Passover, a harvest feast that drew Jews from all over the Roman world to Jerusalem. So the city was full of people who had come a long way and spoke a great many languages. That is the crowd this happened in front of.

Wind, fire, and every visitor hearing the wonders of God in the language he was born into. Some are amazed and some say the men are drunk, which is the first recorded reaction to the church and a fairly human one.

Peter stands up. This is the man who six weeks earlier had denied he knew Jesus in front of a servant girl. He preaches from Joel and from the Psalms, tells the crowd plainly that the Jesus they crucified has been made both Lord and Christ, and about three thousand are baptized that day.

Acts 2:1–41

They were Jews, not yet Christians

This is the thing most easily missed, and it explains a great deal of what comes later.

Nobody in that upstairs room thought he had joined a new religion. They were Jews who believed the Messiah had come. They went to the temple daily, kept the feasts, prayed the prayers — and broke bread in one another’s homes and shared what they had. Luke says they had glad and generous hearts, and enjoyed the favor of everyone around them. For a little while, the whole movement looks like a renewal within Judaism.

The name “Christian” does not appear for another ten years, and not in Jerusalem. The hard question of whether a Gentile could belong without becoming a Jew first has not even been asked yet. When it is asked, it nearly splits the church — and much of Paul’s mail is written into that argument.

Acts 2:42–47

The first miracle, and the first trouble

Peter and John heal a man lame from birth at the temple gate, a man the whole city had walked past for years. A crowd gathers, Peter preaches again, and this time the authorities arrest them. The Sanhedrin — the same council that condemned Jesus — orders them to stop speaking in that name. Peter answers that they cannot help speaking of what they have seen and heard.

Not everything inside the community is admirable, and Luke does not tidy it up. Ananias and Sapphira sell property, hold part of the money back, and lie about it; the lie, not the money, is the point, and the outcome is severe enough that fear comes over the whole church. Honesty about the young church’s failures is one of the marks of Acts as history.

Acts 3:1–4:22 · 5:1–42

Seven men to wait on tables

Growth brings the first internal complaint: the Greek-speaking widows are being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. The apostles do not dismiss it. Seven men are chosen to handle it, so that the twelve can keep to prayer and preaching — the beginning of what the church would later call deacons, and a sensible piece of organization born from a real grievance.

All seven have Greek names. One of them is Stephen.

Acts 6:1–7

Stephen is about to change everything, and not in a way anyone would have chosen. That is the next part.