the lost century in history
as Edward Gibbon wrote in
The History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire
"The scanty materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel
the cloud that hangs over the first age of the church .
Jesse Lyman Hurlbert in
The story of the christian church
the age just after the book of acts he calls "..the age of shadows.."
"of all the periods in the churches history, it is the one about which we know
the least about. For fifty years after St. Paul's life a curtain hangs over the church,
through which we strive vainly to look;
William McLaughlin in
The Course of Christian History
"But Christianity itself had been in the process of transformation as it progressed
and at the close of the period was in many respects
quite different from the apostolic Christianity."
Samuel G. Green in
A handbook of church History
"The thirty years which followed the close of the New Testement canon and the
destruction of Jerusalem, are in truth the most obscure in the history of the church.
When we emerge in the second century, we are to a great extent in a changed world."
William fitzgerald in
lectures on ecclesiastical History
"over this period of transition, which immediatly succeeds upon
the era properly called apostolic, great obscurity hangs."
Philip Schaff in
History of the Christian Church
"The remaining thirty years of the first century are involved in mysterious darkness,
illuminated only by the writings of John. This is a period of church history about which
we know least and would like to know most."
"Simon Magus unquestionably adulterated Christianity with pagon ideas and practices
and gave himself out for an emanation of God."
"This heresy in the second century spread over the whole church, east and west,
in the various schools of agnosticism."
- - -Satan was doing everything he could to destroy the Work of God and his new church,
and in little more than two decades, God’s people were turning to another gospel.
this was the time of the Roman Empire , and in around 117 AD, at its greatest extent.
streched from Britian clear to modern day Turkey, and it ruled with the rod of iron.