Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia
Choose a topic from Vol 2:
Yes, insofar as He came to give us that more perfect religion which the Jewish religion had foreshadowed.
Acts III., 1, would tell you that Peter and John went to the Temple at the ninth hour of prayer. But why? To tell the Jews, whom they knew to be gathered there, that they had denied the Holy One, and killed the Author of Life; but that He had risen from the dead, and that they must accept the new religion of Christ. Whereupon Peter and John were arrested and thrown into prison. That would scarcely have occurred had they gone there merely to share in the ordinary Jewish worship as of old. Again, Acts V., 42, tell us that "every day they ceased not, in the Temple and from house to house, to teach and preach Jesus Christ." They were certainly devoting themselves to the founding of a new Church.
In the beginning, of course, the spread of Christianity was due to the conversion of individuals drawn from various nations in the East. Thus, in Acts II., 9-10, we have a catalog of various types, "Parthians and Medes, and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome. Jews, also, and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians." But whilst the Church absorbed units from the various Gentile peoples, the first nation which officially adopted the Christian religion was that of the Romans. And this occurred after the Edict of the Emperor Constantine in 313 A. D., granting tolerance to Christians, and putting an end to the pagan persecutions.