Who was the most important person in early Christianity after Jesus? There is no obvious “most important” person, but Peter, James, Paul the Apostle, and Constantine the Great were all extremely important.
Obviously, Christianity wouldn’t exist without Jesus Christ, but in the early days, the likelihood that it would become the global religion it did was slight. And it is also good to realize that Christianity didn’t begin as a separate religion. Jesus and his earliest followers were Jewish, and the movement initially developed within Judaism. We can’t say what would or wouldn’t have happened without certain people, but it is safe to say that without the four people I mentioned, Christianity today would be a lot different.
We’ll get to Constantine later. Let’s look at Peter, James, and Paul. Historians generally accept that Peter, James, and Paul were real people. The strongest early evidence actually comes from Paul’s own letters, written only a few decades after Jesus’s death. Paul obviously provides evidence for his own existence, but he also writes about meeting both Peter and James. James is also mentioned later by the Jewish historian Josephus. Romans did make a lot of documents, but many of them don’t survive, and it is not unusual to have no written documents. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The sources in the Bible don’t post the three figures in a completely flattering light, which is also evidence that they were real.
Let’s look at Peter, James, and Paul first. Peter is often known as Jesus’s closest follower. After Jesus died, he went on to become a leading figure in the movement. He knew all of the disciples, other followers, and it was natural for him to continue Jesus’s teachings. He became a missionary and carried Jesus’s word around the area. He was also one of the leaders of the early church. James was one of Jesus’s brothers. He didn’t follow Jesus during his life, but after his death, he rose up to become a leader of the Jerusalem community. James eventually appears to have become the principal leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem, while Peter travelled more widely. For some reason, Peter is the person that is remembered. The Catholic Church traditionally regards Peter as the first bishop of Rome and sees the authority of the popes as succeeding his. Both of these people were vital to the early movement because they held it together and continued to carry its message. Without either of them, all of the groups might have just faded away. It is important to remember that all of these leaders and all of the followers of Jesus were Jewish, as was Jesus himself.
Paul, born as Saul, never met Jesus. He was a Roman citizen and also Jewish. His story begins when he has a moment of conversion. He says that he saw a revelation of Jesus and that made him a follower. Peter and James are important for holding the early movement together. Paul is important for changing what the religion was and making it more accessible to people. Without him, it may have just stayed as a small local movement.
As people carried the word of Jesus out of the immediate area, they started to preach to non-Jewish people. If people wanted to follow Jesus and the new religion, they needed to become Jewish. That was quite a big barrier. Paul, and several other followers, believed that non-Jewish people didn’t need to convert to Judaism to follow Jesus. This was finalized at the Council of Jerusalem in 49 AD. Paul didn’t singlehandedly do this, but he was an important part.
Paul continued travelling through the eastern Roman Empire, establishing and supporting communities made up largely of Gentile converts. He also wrote letters to these communities, discussing their problems and explaining his understanding of Jesus and what his death and resurrection meant. And many of these letters survive, which has really elevated his status. They are some of the earliest surviving Christian writings. His ideas concerning Christ’s death and resurrection, salvation, faith, sin, relations between Jews and Gentiles, and the nature of Christian communities became foundational to later Christian theology. By the middle of the second century, Pauline teaching had become enormously influential. Because of this, he changed the course of the early church.
And we have to look at Constantine the Great. He was a Roman emperor in the 4th century AD. B Christians had periodically suffered persecution under Roman authorities, including the particularly severe Great Persecution that began in 303. In 312, Constantine converted to Christianity. Whatever his reasons are unknown, but this made Christianity into a favored and protected religion. It wouldn’t become the official religion of the Roman Empire until Theodosius I in 380, but he protected the early church. He also made it more organized. In 325, Constantine summoned bishops from across the empire to the Council of Nicaea to address major disagreements within the church, particularly the controversy over the relationship between Jesus and God the Father. The council produced the original Nicene Creed, although the theological disputes continued for decades. He was using the Roman state to organize a Christian religion and this brought a lot more stability.
Without James and Peter, the existing groups of followers of Christ may have continued to spread his word. Without Paul, Christianity would almost certainly have developed differently. Without Constantine, its relationship with the Roman Empire would have developed very differently. But Christianity was already spreading before Paul began his missions, and it had already survived for nearly three centuries before Constantine converted. None of these four men created Christianity, but they all profoundly changed the religion that came after them.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James,_brother_of_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Peter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great
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