He is brutally crucified by the Romans as a trouble-maker at the instigation of the priests in the temple. His followers come together at the Pentecost and, after powerful revelations, declare that Jesus has appeared to them. They are checked by the more moderate Pharisees. The sect survives and grows. The Jesus movement gains adherents and a new twist with Paul.
Controversy is introduced to the early church.
The disputes grow and divisions deepen. Akers provides ample historical detail to show how the persecution of Christianity proved unsurviveable in Jerusalem but not in Rome and why Pauline Christianity was able to eventually become the official state religion of the Roman Empire in less than 300 years. Basically, this occurred because the church embraced a few of the empire's values, such as a tolerance of personal materialism, an acceptance of patriotically based violence, and eating the standard diet of the culture which included meat. The faults I found in this book were an occasional poorly developed argument and some incompleteness in the indexing and footnoting. These defects, however, are more than offset by a clear, consistent presentation of facts gathered from an impressive array of ancient authors including Flavius Josephus, Epiphanius, Clement, Jerome, Origen and others as well as citations of the views of several modern scholars of early Christianity.