Page 66 - LD215 History of the Church in Africa A4 final

A History of the Church in Africa

while still others were chained and…put to death by the
sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute,
persecuted and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them.
They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes
in the ground. (11:35–38)

Tacitus wrote the following concerning persecution:

To kill the rumours, Nero charged and tortured some people hated
for their evil practices—the group popularly known as “Christians.”…
Their deadly superstition had been suppressed temporarily, but
was beginning to spring up again—not just in Judea but even
in Rome itself where all kinds of sordid and shameful activities
are attracted and catch on. First those, who confessed to being
Christians were arrested. Then, on information obtained from
them, hundreds were convicted, more for their anti-social beliefs
than for fire raising. In their deaths they were made a mockery.
They were covered in skins of wild animals, torn to death by dogs,
crucified or set on fire—so that when darkness fell they burned
like torches in the night.… As a result, although they were guilty of
being Christians and deserved death, people began to feel sorry for
them. (Annals, 15.44)

Christians in the early church anticipated the second coming of Jesus.
They believed the kingdom of God was on its way. They also believed
that Christ was the Messiah, which meant that He would come back
to establish a kingdom of righteousness. First Thessalonians, which is
thought to be the first of Paul’s epistles, was written around A.D. 50.
In that letter, Paul addressed the issue of those who had died in the
Christian community. He assured the Christian community that these
believers had not died in vain since they would be raised to eternal life
just as Jesus had been:

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud
command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet
call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we
who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with
them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be
with the Lord forever. (1 Thessalonians 4:16–18)

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