The Questor

The Wild Gospel..… …..the Adventure begins Until now, most of the action with regard to the new church had taken place in and around Palestine. But the Message of Jesus was beginning to spread out into the wider world. Within ten years of the death of Jesus, people from countries other than Palestine were spreading it even further.

Some men from Cyprus and North Africa decided to go to Antioch in Syria and preach the Message there. These men had originally been Jews and they started off preaching to the Jews in their synagogues. But they soon moved on to preaching to non-Jews. That was quite something because Antioch was the Las Vegas of its day. It was the third largest city after Rome and Alexandria and was a place of pleasure seeking and loose morals – encouraged by the worship of Daphne whose priestesses were sacred prostitutes. So the Message of Jesus was seriously counter cultural. Against all the odds, their preaching was successful and many people became believers. And it was in Antioch that they first became known as Christians, Christ-folk.

The news of their success reached the ears of the church leaders in Jerusalem and they felt the need to check it out. So they sent wise old Barnabas, who had spoken up for Saul when he first came back to Jerusalem. He was blown away by what he found and set about encouraging the people there to keep up the good work. But he felt that there was a need for strong leadership and he figured that the ideal man for the job was Saul. So he went to Tarsus to look for him – remember that was Saul’s home town and the place he’d gone to after he left Jerusalem.

In the local church in Antioch there were men who were gifted in prophecy. After Saul and Barnabas had been in Antioch for some time, the prophets discerned through their prayers and fasting, that God wanted them to release these two men from their local commitments to spread the Message more widely. So they gave them their blessing and let them go. They sailed from the port of Seleucia to Cyprus taking with them a young man named John Mark who was destined later to write the Gospel of Mark.

Barnabas was a native of Cyprus, so that must have been helpful. Interestingly it was here that Saul became known as Paul. In those days most people were known by their Hebrew name or the Greek version of it. For Saul, the Greek version was Paul. It’s not known why he changed, but maybe he felt that since his mission was to the wider community, he might as well use the Greek version of his name.

They went through the whole island as far as

Paphos. There they came up against a sorcerer who was in the pay of the Roman governor, Sergius Paulus. The sorcerer opposed them and tried to turn the governor against them. So Paul told him that he would go blind for a period because he had stood up against God.