Adequately to discuss this city would consume this volume. Bigbon devoted twenty years and five volumes to a treatment of the rise and decline of the power that headed up in Rome. Whoever can do so ought to visit Rome. I fain would have lingered longest in Rome. However, the history-making events of this period did not take place in the forum, but in a private dwelling, rented and occupied by a Christian prisoner.
Obscurity envelopes the founding of the church in Rome.
Sojourners from Rome were present at Pentecost, but the church was hardly founded by them. They may have won some disciples, but the Gentile character of the church is against the theory that they founded it. There is not a scintilla of evidence in the New Testament that Peter founded the church or that he was ever in the city. The tradition that Peter established the church, moreover, is contrary to the known facts in the New Testament. This was a church of the uncircumcision.