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Since the beginning, God had been providentially working in history to restore the fellowship between himself and fallen man. God's plan of salvation require a world prepared for the arrival of his son. Christ was sent into a world in which the good news of the gospel could travel quickly. By the time of Caesar Augustus, much of the known world was under Roman rule, and two centuries of peace and order had begun

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By the time of jesus birth, many jews were scattered throughout the Roman Empire. These Jews gathered at local places of worship known as synagogues, where they read the Olde Testament Scriptures. For centuries the Jews had pored over the prophecies of the Old Testament in which God promised that a Savior would come to set His people free form sin and death. Since the 500s B.c and the return form Babylonian captivity, Jews had been living in the city of Jerusalem and other areas of Palestine.

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In A.D. 64 during the reign of Nero, the christians experienced the first major persecution by the Romans. According to early tradition, the apostle Paul was beheades by Nero at Rome during this persecution; he was not tortured because the was still a Roman citizen. The apostle Peter was also martyred during this time; condemned to be crucified. The second great persecution was with the Emperor Domitian demanded to be worshiped. The Christians, while acknowledging the authority of Caesar and willing to pray for the emperor refused to pray to the emperor. Such worship violated scriptural principles. It was Domitian who exiled the apostle John to the Isle of Patmos in the Aegean Sea.

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Jesus appointed 12 men, the apostoles, to carry on his work of preaching and teaching after his death, resurrection, and ascension. He promised them that He would biult his Church and would send the Holy Spirit after his departure. The first christian chucrhces - local assemblies or bodies of believers - possessed God's Word through the Old Testament Scriptures.These books, verbally inspired by God in their entirety and penned by apostoles or by men who had an extremely close relationship to an apostle. By the A.D 100 all the 27 books of the New Testament had been written

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After the close of the Apostoluc Age, God raised up a number of godly and able men to expound on the Scriptures, defend the faithm and champion the cause of Christ. These preachers were called the church fathers. Many christians writers were apologists, those who attempted to reasonably defend Christianity against pagan defamations. Christians apologists of the early church period included Aristides and Justin Martyr.

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To combat the spread of heresies, the early christians wrote statements of their beliefs in the form of creeds, or confessions of faith.The earlisest creed was the Apostle's creed, was developed in the second and fifth centuries. The Nicene Creed was adopted by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. Later church councils, at Constantinople at Ephesus and at Chalcedon completed the work of the council of Nicaea.

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Before the Council of Nicaea, the church had no organizational unity, although independent churches or maintained fraternal relations and possessed a doctrinal and spiritual unity in the gospel. Christianity became the favored religion of the Roman Empire, and later under Emperor Theodosius I became the only legal faith, the state religion of the Roman Empire.

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The tenth and greatest persecution came under the emperor, Diocletian and his co-emperor Maximian. In 303, he outlawed Christianity and ordered a systematic search that swept hundreds of biblical manuscripts in Asia minor and Syria. All Christians assemblies were prohibited, and all church biuldings were destroyed. They wanted to eradicate Christianity form the face of the earth. Diocletian and Maximian both retired in 305, resulting in a protracted struggle for control of the Empire.