The books of Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1&2 Thessalonians, 1&2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon were written by a guy named Paul.  You would think that a guy responsible for giving us so much of the New Testament would have been one of the first and closest  of Jesus’ followers.  Actually Paul started out just the opposite.  Paul was a very zealous Jew who was a persecutor of the church.  He ran around the Jewish world looking for Jewish converts to Christianity in order to kill them.  But Jesus got a hold of him and revolutionized his life.  He went from being a persecutor of Christians to being one of the greatest evangelists of all time.  Not only that he was given the assignment of bringing the good news of Jesus to the non-Jewish or Gentile world.  Barnabas, the uncle of John Mark or Mark who wrote the book of Mark, helped Paul get started in the task of telling non-Jews about Jesus.  Barnabas also introduced him to the believers in Jerusalem.

Paul made three journeys into the north-eastern portion of the Roman Empire to establish churches among the people there.  He usually would go to the local Jewish synagogue and explain how Jesus was the promised messiah and the fulfillment of all of the types or shadows in their Old Testament scriptures.  Some would believe but many did not.  Usually Paul was thrown out of the synagogue.  Then he would preach in other locations.  The first journey was from A.D 46-48.  On that trip he traveled with Barnabas and John Mark.  As the journey progressed Barnabas allowed Paul to take the leadership role.  Eventually Mark left the group, perhaps because they were taking the gospel more and more to Gentiles rather than Jews, perhaps because he did not care for the fact that Paul was taking over from his Uncle Barnabas, or perhaps for some other reason.  On this first journey Paul traveled from a town called Antioch in Syria to the island of Cyprus and then on the southern shore of Asia Minor (Modern day Turkey).  He then traveled around Asia Minor establishing churches there in the towns of Pisidian Antioch (not the Syrian one), Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe.  This portion of Asia Minor was the Roman Province of Galatia.

While back in his “home” church in Antioch some men came there from Judea, the area around Jerusalem.  They were teaching that you needed to keep the “custom of Moses” to be saved.  Although Paul had previously received approval for his ministry from Peter, James, and John (Galatians 2) he was now faced with more opposition.  The church in Antioch sent Paul back to Jerusalem to deal with the issue.  In Jerusalem the congregation and leaders of the church held a meeting where the issue of how the Old Testament law related to the church was decided.  This meeting is commonly called the Jerusalem Council and occurred in AD49.  (Acts 15)

From 49 to 52 A.D. Paul took a second journey around the Mediterranean world. He asked Barnabas to join him.  Barnabas wanted to take Mark along again but Paul was unwilling to let him go.  At this point Paul and Barnabas went their own ways, Paul with Silas on his second journey and Barnabas with Mark to Cyprus.  Mark disappears from the Biblical record for about ten years. On his second journey Paul had revisited churches he had started in Asia Minor with the good news from the Council in Jerusalem that Gentiles could be a part of the church and did not need to follow the old rituals of Judaism.  They did however need to be sensitive to the feeling of Jewish believers in Jesus who still felt compelled to follow some of the law of the Old Testament.  Then Paul was sent by the Holy Spirit to Macedonia, Achaia, and Greece to tell about Jesus there.  He spent about half of that second trip, 1.5 years, in and around Corinth.  When he left Corinth he traveled to Cencharea where he made some sort of vow that seemed to compel him to get to Jerusalem quickly (Acts 18:18-21).  He made a brief visit to the important regional city of Ephesus then returned by sea to Caesarea.  From there he went to Jerusalem to visit the church and finally returned to his home base in Antioch in Syria.

Paul took a third missionary journey lasting from A.D. 53-58. He revisited the churches which had been started in the upper regions of Phrygia and Galatia in Asia Minor then went on to Ephesus where he carried on a lengthy ministry of three years.  While in Ephesus he wrote three letters to the church in Corinth dealing with a variety of moral problems and issues about his authority as an apostle.  Many people in Ephesus turned to the Lord and away from their idolatry and occultism.  The impact on the local business was so great that a riot eventually broke out.  Paul saw the riot as a great opportunity to preach the gospel but the Ephesian believers convinced him that the situation was too dangerous.  After encouraging the Christians in Ephesus Paul left to visit the churches in Macedonia, Achaia, and Greece.  In Greece he spent three months in Corinth.  Paul felt that his work in the eastern part of the empire was finished.  He had brought the gospel to the gentiles in Asia Minor and the Greek peninsula.  From these churches the gospel was being carried to the further northern areas.

Paul was a pioneer at heart and set his sights on the western parts of the Roman empire.  A church had been established in Rome perhaps by Jews who had heard the message during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and had carried the good news back to the capital on their return.  In A.D. 49 Emperor Cladius expelled Jews from the capital city because of disturbances among them caused by a person named Chrestus.  This is probably a reference to Christ and the tension between Jews who believed in Jesus and those who did not.  Aquilla and Priscilla were part of this group of Jews who were expelled.  There were two important results of this purging of the capital city.  First the Roman church was left largely gentile without the leadership of the Jewish believers who had founded it and who would have had a perhaps better grasp of the truths involved.  Second Aquilla and Priscilla had moved to Corinth where Paul met them on his second journey.  In fact they joined him on his trip home at the end of that journey.  Paul’s third journey had been rewarding, he had spent much time in two major cities, Ephesus and Corinth and had been able to strengthen the churches in their regions.  He also had taken up an important offering from the churches of those regions for the impoverished church in Jerusalem.  He desperately wanted to go to Rome to encourage the believers there and be sent on by them to Spain to bring the good news there but he know that he must bring the offering to Jerusalem personally.  Hopefully this contact between the “Apostle to the Gentiles”, with material help from the largely gentile churches of Asia Minor and Greece, and strongly Jewish Christians in Jerusalem would bring these two factions of the early church together in greater unity.  So Paul was going to return to Jerusalem, a decidedly dangerous trip.  Before he left Corinth, perhaps with the dangers ahead of him in mind, he wrote a letter to the Roman church.  In the letter he spells out quite clearly the essentials of the good news about Jesus and the relationship of Jews and Gentiles to the kingdom God is building.  He knew he might never see them and might never make it to Spain in the west so he did what he could to strengthen them before he returned to Jerusalem.

As it turns out the trip was dangerous.  A plot was discovered before he left Corinth to kill him on the ship back to Jerusalem.  He traveled instead by land to Phillipi, then by sea to Troas.  He stopped in Miletus where he spoke to the Ephesian elders then traveled on to Caesarea.  In Caesarea he was warned that he would be put in jail if he returned to Jerusalem, but Paul never turned back, he was on a mission from God.  In Jerusalem he visited with the Jerusalem Church and then went to pay a vow at the temple.  At the temple certain Jews from Asia started a riot.  Paul was saved by the Roman leader in the city, Cladius Lysias.  When a plot to kill Paul was uncovered Cladius sent Paul at night to the Roman Governor, Felix, in Caesarea.  For two years Paul was imprisoned in Caesarea.  A new governor was appointed, Porcius Festus.  When Festus tried to get Paul to go back to Jerusalem for a trial he appealed to go to court in Rome, his right as a Roman citizen.  Eventually Paul was shipped off to Rome.  On the way he was shipwrecked on Malta.  He did reach Rome where he was greeted warmly by the Roman Christians.  He spent two years under house arrest in Rome chained to a Roman guard (60-63). During this time Paul wrote the letters to the Colossians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, and to Philemon.  In two of these he mentions Mark as a fellow laborer in Rome.  Evidently Paul and Mark’s differences were healed.   It is believed that it was at this time, A.D. 62 that Mark wrote his gospel, perhaps with the aid of his other great mentor, Peter, who may have been in Rome at the time.  At the end of this imprisonment in Rome Paul was released because his accusers never showed up to press charges.  After five years in jail he was a free man again, about A.D. 63.  Based on people, events, and circumstances contained in the books of I and II Timothy and Titus.  And from information from a letter written by an early Christian living in Rome named Clement (A.D. 96) it is believed that between 63-66 A.D. Paul revisited churches in Macedonia, Greece, and Asia Minor and even made a trip to Spain.  According to early church tradition Paul was beheaded in Rome by Caesar Nero in A.D. 67.