Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament ends with Paul of Tarsus in Rome, awaiting his trial before Nero Claudius Caesar, and encouraging the Christians of Rome. And that’s it. Its author Luke never tells us what came next; most scholars figure Luke didn’t know what came next, ’cause he wrote the book while Paul awaited trial. That’s likely so.
But when I was a kid, I wanted to know what happened next. How’d the trial go? And there, my Sunday school teacher was no help; nobody had told her how it went, and she hadn’t bothered to investigate.
So I did. Turns out it went well. Paul was released, and went back to traveling the Roman Empire and founding churches. But about a decade later he got arrested during the Neronian persecution (and possibly wrote 2 Timothy while awaiting trial), stood before Nero Caesar again, and this time things didn’t go his way. He was condemned and beheaded.
I shared this info with one of my youth pastors, who told me, “Well that probably happened. But we don’t know whether it happened.”
Why don’t we know?
“Because Catholics wrote it.”
This pastor believed as soon as the New Testament was finalized, Roman Catholics swooped in and took over Christianity big time. Everyone in the church, and everything they did after that, was “Catholic”—and therefore, to his mind, heretic—until Martin Luther gave ’em the finger in 1517. And while he was a huge fan of Luther doing that, he wasn’t so sure about Lutherans either. Dude had a lot of prejudices. So the stories of Paul after Acts were “Catholic,” and therefore not to be trusted. And the stories of the ancient church, the teachings of ancient and medieval Christians, and really all of Christianity’s first 15 centuries: “Catholic,” and not to be trusted.
Thanks to him, and most of the folks in that church, I was pretty much ignorant of Christian history—and okay with that, ’cause I imagined it was unreliable, ’cause heretics. I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge which my bible college had to fill in. By which point I had changed churches, had learned enough about Catholics to know better than to think them heretic, and most importantly had learned there were no “Roman Catholics” until the Orthodox/Catholic schism developed. All those ancient Christians who recorded the church’s earliest ideas, history, teachings, and testimonies: They were a fairly loose network of people who were trying to follow Jesus as best they could in the predominantly pagan, and occasionally murderous, culture of the Roman Empire.
The guy with the dorm room next to mine was an Orthodox Christian, and he had splurged on a 38-volume set of the ante-Nicene, Nicene, and post-Nicene fathers. This was before ebooks were a thing, and the print edition set him back at least a thousand dollars. (Which is why I was so jazzed when a CD-ROM version came out five years later, and was only $39.95!) “Borrow whatever you like,” he told me. “The school library isn’t always that accessible, so it’s good to have your own library.” True that. I borrowed his volumes regularly till he graduated at the end of my sophomore year.
The Word for Word Bible Comic: The Gospel of Matthew by Simon Amadeus Pillario. 
