1010 Thrive

In Episode 20, Demetrius the silversmith described what happened when Paul’s teaching collided with the religious and economic life of Ephesus. Paul persuaded people that gods made by human hands were not truly gods, threatening a trade built around silver shrines of Artemis. Demetrius insisted that his concern was not simply financial. Artemis, her temple, the livelihood of the craftsmen, and the...

In Episode 19, Priscilla described meeting Paul in Corinth after she and her husband Aquila had been expelled from Rome under Claudius. Their shared trade brought them together, but work soon became friendship and partnership in ministry. Priscilla remembered Paul arriving in weakness and uncertainty, while she and Aquila offered him work, stability, and companionship as people who understood what...

In Episode 18, the court heard from Dionysius of Athens, a member of the Areopagus who encountered Paul after Epicurean and Stoic philosophers brought him there to explain his teaching. Rather than beginning with Jewish Scripture, Paul began with something Athens itself acknowledged it did not understand: an altar “to an unknown god.” From there, he proclaimed the God who made the world, gives lif...

In Episode 17, the court heard from Demetrius bar Ezra, a Jewish leader from Thessalonica who had opposed Paul’s preaching there. Demetrius described how Paul reasoned from the Scriptures that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead and that Jesus was that Messiah. When some Jews and many Gentiles were persuaded, Paul’s opponents brought his supporters before the city authorities and made...

In Episode 16, the court heard from the Philippian jailer who had placed Paul and Silas in the inner prison after their beating. During the night, he heard the two prisoners praying and singing hymns. Around midnight, an earthquake shook the prison, opened the doors and loosened the prisoners’ bonds. Believing the prisoners had escaped, the jailer prepared to take his own life until Paul called fr...

In Episode 15, the court heard from Chara, an enslaved girl in Philippi whose owners had profited from a spirit of divination operating through her. After she followed Paul and his companions for many days, Paul commanded the spirit to leave her in the name of Jesus Christ. It left immediately, ending her owners’ source of income and provoking the confrontation that resulted in Paul and Silas bein...

In Episode 14, the court heard from Lydia, a merchant from Thyatira who encountered Paul beside a river outside Philippi. Already a worshiper of the God of Israel, Lydia described how Paul’s teaching about Jesus helped her understand what she had long been seeking. She and her household were baptized, and she opened her home to Paul and his companions. Varro focused on what happened afterward. Lyd...

Episode 13 introduced Timothy of Lystra, a young disciple who had seen what Paul’s mission could cost before agreeing to join it. Timothy had been in Lystra when Paul was stoned and saw the condition in which he returned to the city. When Paul later came back and invited Timothy to travel with him, Timothy accepted despite understanding that the work was dangerous. He explained that what first dre...

Episode 12 brought John Mark before the court to examine a failure within Paul’s own missionary circle. Mark admitted that during the first journey with Paul and Barnabas, he had been unprepared for the severity of the hardships they encountered. Fear and discouragement overwhelmed him, and at Pamphylia he left them and returned to Jerusalem. When Barnabas later wanted to take Mark on another jour...

Episode 11 brought one of the most consequential witnesses yet into the tribunal: Peter, who entered under Roman guard with his wrists bound. Varro questioned him about the dispute that had once threatened to divide the early Christian movement over whether Gentile converts needed to become Jews. Peter traced his own change in understanding to Cornelius, a Roman centurion whose household heard Pet...

Episode 10 returned the trial to the city of Lystra through the testimony of Dion, a citizen who had witnessed one of the most dramatic episodes of Paul’s first missionary journey. Dion described a man crippled from birth who had never walked. After listening to Paul preach, the man was commanded to stand and suddenly rose to his feet. The astonished crowd concluded that the gods had come among th...

Episode 9 brought a very different witness before the tribunal: Sergius Paulus, the former Roman proconsul of Cyprus. Sergius described himself as a man dissatisfied with the religious world around him. He could perform the prescribed sacrifices and observe the rituals of Roman religion, yet still leave with the same unanswered questions. When reports reached him about Paul and Barnabas, he summon...

Episode 8 introduced Barnabas, the man who took a chance on Paul when the believers in Jerusalem were still afraid of their former persecutor. Barnabas described how the disciples initially distrusted Saul’s claim of conversion and feared that approaching them might be another means of identifying Christians for arrest. After listening to Saul and learning what had happened in Damascus, Barnabas b...

Episode 7 brought Ananias of Damascus before the tribunal, giving the court its first witness to the immediate aftermath of Paul’s encounter on the Damascus road. Ananias acknowledged that he had not seen what happened on the road itself. What he could testify to was what he found afterward: Saul, the feared persecutor of Christians, had arrived in Damascus blind and fasting. Despite knowing why S...

Paul himself takes the stand to give the account toward which the entire first week has been moving. He explains that he was traveling to Damascus with authority to arrest followers of Jesus and return them to Jerusalem. He was not searching for a new faith and was not questioning his mission. Near Damascus, however, a brilliant light overwhelmed him, he fell to the ground, and he heard a voice as...

Miriam of Jerusalem gives the tribunal its most personal account yet of Saul’s persecution. She was among the believers arrested when Saul participated in a raid on a Christian gathering. Her testimony shows that his persecution was neither impulsive nor haphazard. Saul was organized, systematic, and thorough, pursuing women as well as men and helping create the fear that scattered believers beyon...

Claudia Marcella, a Roman freedwoman, takes the stand to describe something she witnessed decades earlier in Jerusalem: the stoning of Stephen. She remembers Stephen being driven outside the city and killed while a young Saul stood nearby with the garments of those carrying out the execution. Paul does not hide behind the fact that he did not personally throw the stones. He acknowledges openly tha...

The tribunal next hears from Yosef bar Shimon, a Pharisee who studied alongside Saul under the renowned teacher Gamaliel. Yosef remembers Saul as an exceptional student: intensely devout, intellectually rigorous, and unwilling to treat theological questions as merely academic. Once Saul believed that a conclusion was true, he acted upon it. Varro begins to establish a pattern that will become incr...

The tribunal turns to Paul’s beginnings through the testimony of Demetrios, a prosperous merchant who knew him in Tarsus when he was still called Saul. Demetrios describes Tarsus as a cosmopolitan city where Greek, Roman, and Jewish cultures met. Saul grew up comfortably navigating those different worlds. He was Jewish in conviction, Roman by citizenship, and familiar with Greek language, philosop...

Rome is still reeling from the devastating fire of AD 64, and Nero’s government has turned its attention toward the growing Christian movement. Into this atmosphere comes Paul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen, Jewish teacher, missionary, and prisoner whose preaching has carried the name of Jesus throughout much of the eastern Empire. The prosecution is led by Varro, an experienced Roman advocate who see...

As the last surviving member of the Twelve, John reflects on what it means not merely to survive but to “remain” as a calling. In youth, he wanted action, prominence, and a place near the center of the kingdom he expected Jesus to establish. Decades later, he understands that the center was never the dramatic moment but the truth to which those moments pointed, and that truth requires witnesses wi...

Now an old man exiled on Patmos, John takes over the story that his mother can no longer tell. He has outlived Salome, James, Peter, and most of the companions who shared the years with Jesus, and he finds himself the last surviving member of the Twelve. Yet he refuses to turn that fact into a complaint. Exile under Domitian has separated him from the churches and the active ministry that occupied...

Salome recalls the last time she saw John before his calling carried him beyond the life they had shared. Knowing instinctively that this would be their final meeting face to face, she tells him plainly that she is proud, not primarily of his Gospel or ministry, but of the person he became. She finally understands what Zebedee had done years earlier when he allowed their sons to leave the family f...

Salome reads John's Gospel and immediately recognizes the mind of the son she raised. Where the other Gospel writers begin with genealogy, prophecy, or historical investigation, John reaches beyond creation itself to introduce Jesus as the eternal Word. His selection and treatment of events reveal the same contemplative quality Salome had observed since his childhood. Cana becomes part of a larger...

Salome begins by reflecting on John's unusual way of describing himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” She sees in that phrase not self-importance but John's lifelong tendency to place attention on what he had received rather than on himself. From childhood, John had possessed an unusual capacity to listen, ponder, and resist forcing difficult questions into easy answers. Under Jesus, that te...