Ancient Roads From Christ to Constantine

MAN: Two thousand years ago, the world changed forever.

It all began with the birth of a baby boy.

But when this child became an adult, his brief teaching ministry transformed religious life.

[Group singing] Those who followed his teaching became known as Christians.

He became known as Jesus Christ, or, in Hebrew, Jesus the Messiah.

Today, his followers number over 2 billion across the globe.

My name is Jonathan Phillips, and I've often wondered what drew people to this new faith.

How did something so incredibly fragile survive in the face of overwhelming odds, especially the might of the Roman Empire?

Join me now as we travel on a 12,000-mile journey to enter the world of the early Christians, to hear their untold stories, and to witness how they struggled, persevered, and died -- all this to give birth to a faith that did much to shape who we are today.

As a history professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, I had everything I needed to research and plan what would amount to be a major expedition.

My travels will take me to seven nations and cities such as Jerusalem, Rome, Istanbul, and Athens.

But my journey into the world of the early Christians would begin much closer to home.

MAN: That's what we can look for.

These are actually personal documents.

PHILLIPS: I had heard that the oldest known parchment from the New Testament was housed in the city of Manchester in northern England.

I had no problem convincing my colleagues, the Reverend Andrew Taylor and Dr. David Gwynn, to come with me to see it.

The fragment, preserved in the sands of Egypt, came to Manchester in 1920.

It took 15 years for anyone to realize what it was -- the earliest extant text of any gospel ever found.

I felt a real sense of anticipation as I entered the John Rylands University Library.

This is just astounding, to think that this is 1,900 years old, and then here preserved the full panoply of modern technology for us to look at.

Yeah, and what I find extraordinary when I see things like this is trying to imagine those people so many generations back, who would have held that piece of paper in their hand.

And here is something which, even in its fragment, it speaks to huge generations of people today.

PHILLIPS: The fragment is, in fact, part of the trial of Jesus before Pilate at the very end of John's gospel, composed around 100 A.D.

The fragment itself is thought to be from around 140 A.D.

These accounts in all four gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- are known as the Passion Narratives, and they were the first written accounts of Jesus' life to survive.

The ancient text, an enticing glimpse into the world of the early Christians, spurred me to travel to the place where it all began, the Holy Land.

Here, the bustling modern city of Jerusalem still echoes with sights and sounds unchanged for centuries.

But nearby is another, much smaller, place.

And here our story begins.

[Band playing] It's December 24th, Christmas Eve, and the festivities begin early.

Palestinian Christians play host to pilgrims who throng to Bethlehem, where the gospels of Matthew and Luke place the birth of Jesus.

One of Christianity's holiest sites lies beneath the Church of the Nativity.

Here is the cave-like grotto where it is believed that Jesus was born.

The building that you see here was actually really built by the Emperor Justinian around 530.

We see the classical pillars that are used here stepping down the nave.

The Crusaders occupied it later.

Some of these mosaics date from the 12th century, and the roof is from the 15th.

Actually, the history of the building is in some ways irrelevant, because what it is is a focus for Christianity as the place of Christ's birth.

This semicircular stairway takes me underground to the place where tradition says Christ was born.

You can see pilgrims, devoted followers of Christianity, trying to pay their respects here.

A place of immense spiritual charge to millions and millions of Christians around the world.

[Women praying softly] And here, the actual place Christ is believed to have been born.

It's marked by this beautiful silver star, upon which it's written, "Here Jesus Christ was born to the Virgin Mary."

It's a very small, intense space, capturing such an intimate moment at the start of the life of Christ.

In the adjoining Church of St. Catherine, believers await Midnight Mass, which is held here every year.

[Priest chanting in Latin] PHILLIPS: Outside in Manger Square, the celebration is well under way.

[Applause] This is an evening with many more tones and textures than I'd anticipated.

I guess I had foreseen prayers and processions.

What I hadn't anticipated was thousands of young people gathered, celebrating the nativity of Christ.

The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell the story of the life of Jesus, but they are different in the images and incidents they use.

Luke, for example, tells us that the first people to hear the news of the birth of Jesus are a group of shepherds tending their flocks.

The birth of Jesus is good news to the poor.

Jesus is born in poverty, so we have a message that speaks immediately to the dispossessed and against the power structure of the day.

Matthew's gospel, on the other hand, also tells us that Jesus was visited by three kings in order to bring their gifts.

The birth of Jesus is also good news to the rich and powerful.

So everyone is addressed by this extraordinary event.

Near the Church of the Nativity is another important place in our story, the place linked to the visit of the Three Wise Men.

It's called the Milk Grotto.

Tradition says the stone walls in this cave turned white when Mary spilled a few drops of her milk while nursing Jesus.

The custodian is Brother Lawrence Bode.

After Jesus was born, the Holy Family was living here.

This is the house that St. Matthew writes about where the Magi brought the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Gold is a gift for a king.

God is now present among us, so we must honor him somehow.

How did they honor him?

With incense.

They brought incense to honor him.

And myrrh, which is a very strong medicine.

You'll find that myrrh represents death.

The myrrh is to indicate that Jesus is going to suffer immensely for our salvation.

PHILLIPS: A few miles from Bethlehem tower the walls of Jerusalem, the power center of Judea.

It's an irony that Jesus' birthplace of Bethlehem was only a few miles from Jerusalem.

Here was the temple.

Here was the center of Jewish life.

And here the Jews practiced their faith -- but only with the permission of the Roman authorities.

The Romans, in their turn, maintained power through their puppet ruler, King Herod.

He had heard of the birth and wanted baby Jesus brought to him.

BODE: They had to ask the scribes, the Jewish scribes, where this so-called Messiah would come from.

So, searching the Scriptures, they find the prophet telling us that Bethlehem Ephratah, a very small village outside of Jerusalem, not big enough to be part of Jerusalem, that is the place where the Messiah is to be born.

So Herod sends the Magi to Bethlehem.

PHILLIPS: This grotto beneath the Church of the Nativity commemorates the babies killed by King Herod.

According to the gospels, Herod saw the infant Jesus as a threat.

Matthew tells us that, having failed to convince the three kings to report back to him on Jesus' whereabouts, Herod initiated an infanticide.

All male children under the age of 2 were slaughtered.

BODE: What is said in the Scriptures is that St. Joseph is warned in a dream to get up quickly in the middle of the night, leaving the Bethlehem area and taking the baby to Egypt.

PHILLIPS: My journey so far has shown me that the birth of Jesus was surrounded by violence and political intrigue, the very opposite of what the birth of a child should bring.

Jesus and his family were forced to flee as refugees to Egypt, where they waited until they learned of the death of Herod.

After they went back to Nazareth, all we are told is that the boy grew into a man and followed the trade of his father as a carpenter.

The only account about his growing up is in Luke, around the time of his first visit to Jerusalem for Passover.

This visit would have marked Jesus' initiation into adulthood.

He travels to the Temple in Jerusalem with his family.

He gets left behind.

Mary and Joseph realize he's missing well on the road back home.

They return and discover him in the Temple in conversation with the Jewish teachers.

The incident is recorded as a way of saying that this young boy, soon to be a man, is going to teach a new way of understanding God to ancient Israel.

Tracing the life of Christ is incredibly difficult, not least because of the differences between the gospel accounts.

They're not biographies in the modern way that we understand them.

They were the product of oral histories, storytelling, written down a generation or so after his death.

They represent a later reflection on Christ's life, written for different cultures and different audiences.

That said, however, there is a core of ideas and episodes that tell us about belief in Jesus, and while later generations have each interpreted these in their own different ways and from different perspectives, they are fundamentally enduring and familiar.

While the other gospels start the story of Jesus with the Nativity, Mark begins his story at the River Jordan, which today forms the boundary between Jordan and Israel.

You need special permission from the Israeli authorities to get there.

The barbed wire and land mines are a stark reminder of just how volatile this area is.

When John the Baptist, here at the River Jordan, baptized Jesus, he saw the Holy Spirit descend on him like a dove, and he knew that Jesus was the Messiah.

This was a moment of tremendous importance, and that's why millions of pilgrims down the centuries have come here to reenact that moment.

The gospel of John says that before Jesus left the River Jordan, he encountered his future disciples Peter and his brother Andrew.

I followed Jesus' path towards the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum Bethsaida, and the surrounding area, where he began his ministry.

Along the way, I was drawn to a 2,000-year-old relic found in Tiberias called the "Jesus boat."

This fishing boat was discovered preserved in the silt when the sea's water receded in 1986, and it's a tantalizing connection with the age of Christ.

The fishing industry flourished on the Sea of Galilee during the time of Jesus.

Because it was such an integral part of life here, Jesus chose to pepper his message with images drawn from this context.

When he'd met the fishermen Andrew and Peter, he invited them to become "fishers of men."

He likened the kingdom of heaven to a giant net cast into the sea to gather all kinds.

In other words, he communicated his ideas in a language that was familiar and approachable.

Here is someone who is preaching that the kingdom of God has arrived, and it hasn't arrived at the Temple, it hasn't arrived with orthodoxy, it hasn't arrived with power, it's arrived in the countryside.

It's present in the person of Jesus, and it's available to anyone who happens to want to take advantage of it.

PHILLIPS: After gathering his 12 disciples, Jesus traveled throughout the Galilee area, preaching and healing.

His fame spread, and soon multitudes of people were bringing him their sick and infirm.

Tradition holds that a small mountain overlooking Capernaum, called the Hill of the Beatitudes, was the place where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us some of his most widely quoted sayings, including the eight Beatitudes, which define Christian ideals of love and humility, such as, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

Although Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount near the beginning of his ministry, its words defined early on almost the full essence of Christianity.

Jesus ended his sermon by telling his believers not just to listen to him, but also to live by his words.

TAYLOR: He uses imagery that would have been recognizable to his hearers, imagery to do with the land, to do with reaping harvests, everything that people understand, in order to say, "This is what the kingdom of God is like."

People out in the fields, they recognize that kind of imagery and say, "Yeah, this is something that's actually good news for us."

In the countryside, Galilee, the fishing villages, they are dependent upon the land or the sea for making some kind of living.

They have no power.

They live from day to day.

So, of course, in some respects, they're going to be far more amenable to a message that seems to open up the possibility of new hope for them.

[Child trills tongue] PHILLIPS: Capernaum was the largest of the Galilean fishing villages.

Jesus spent much time here giving its skeptical population ample opportunity to hear his words and see his works.

The gospel of Mark describes a brisk pace of events once Jesus entered Capernaum.

Immediately he came to this synagogue and began to preach that the kingdom of God was at hand.

He met a man possessed by a devil and quickly drove the unclean spirit out.

People were amazed.

What was this new doctrine?

By what authority did this man preach who even devils obeyed?

The fame of Jesus grew.

And as he settled here in Capernaum, it became the place of more miracles in his ministry than anywhere else.

Bethsaida, which means, "house of the fisherman," is located about a mile north of the Sea of Galilee, somewhere that seems an unlikely location for a fishing village, but some scientists believe the sea's waters were higher then, so the shore was much closer.

When word reached Bethsaida that Jesus was coming, the people lined the streets with their sick, hoping that he would heal them.

The Book of Mark records that when Jesus entered Bethsaida, the people brought him a blind man.

Jesus laid his hands on the individual and restored his sight.

In fact, many blind people are healed at various points in the gospels.

But the accounts are more than merely physical healing.

Restoring sight to the blind is also an image of new spiritual insight.

Nearby took place one of the most famous miracles of all, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the feeding of the 5,000.

Matthew tells us this story because it has overtones of the Last Supper, which in time becomes the Lord's Supper.

We're told that Jesus takes bread, blesses and breaks it, and then gives it to the assembled people.

Whatever the title individual Christian churches have given it throughout their history, it remains the central act of Christian life and faith.

In spite of these demonstrations of divine power, many here and in nearby Capernaum refuse to recant their sins.

And this brought them heavy condemnation from Jesus.

All the gospel writers say that the good news is more easily accepted by people traditionally regarded as outsiders -- the poor and the marginalized -- but also those people who were considered beyond the bounds of Judaism.

One such group were the Samaritans.

One hundred miles southwest of Bethsaida is Samaria, a tough, rugged landscape, then, as now, well off the beaten track.

When the ancient Assyrians attacked Israel, they scattered the 10 northern tribes, who became the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel."

The Jewish remnant in Samaria intermingled with the pagan Assyrians and became the Samaritans, who claimed to be Jewish.

In the time of Jesus, relations between Jews and Samaritans were, to put it mildly, highly antagonistic.

Some Jews even refused to pass through here in order to avoid meeting the inhabitants.

Yet Jesus took a much more positive approach.

The famous parable of the Good Samaritan or the story in the gospel of John where Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink of water from Jacob's well.

He convinced her and her fellow villagers that he was Christ, the savior of the world.

Our journey takes us back and forth from the great power center of Jerusalem out into the countryside and back to the city again.

When we read Mark, we find that Jesus stayed away from the city of Jerusalem until the end of his ministry, preferring to remain in the countryside, where his message was more readily received.

In Mark, the final, fateful journey begins to the north in Caesarea Philippi.

And it's there, about halfway through his gospel, that we find Jesus and his disciples.

This is the turning point in Mark's gospel, where the disciples begin to understand who Jesus really is.

This isn't their fault.

A feature of Mark has been to present them as slow to understand, at least until now.

And it's true that Jesus doesn't always make his message easy to understand, as well as sometimes being confrontational if the message doesn't get through.

TAYLOR: In some ways, the gospels also give us a pretty ambivalent picture of Jesus as well, as someone who is actually not adverse to telling people how it really is, and also telling his disciples that when he sends them out on some kind of mission, that if they don't get an immediate response, they are to shake the dust of that place off their feet and move on.

Just one of many examples where we find Jesus coming into conflict with individuals, not responding positively to them in the way that we thought -- cursing fig trees because they don't bear any fruit, for example, which is a very odd thing to do.

You know, it's not the fig tree's fault.

Cursing places because they haven't responded to his message.

So the overall picture, if you read the gospels from beginning to end, as, in many respects, they are meant to be read, is a very ambivalent picture of Jesus, not quite the mild reconciler that very often we'd like to think we have.

PHILLIPS: And it's at Caesarea Philippi that this sometimes difficult message begins to make sense.

This large spring is one of the sources of the River Jordan.

The pagans who worshipped Pan, the Greek god of victory and fear, considered this spring to be the gateway to the Underworld, and they performed orgiastic rituals and bizarre animal sacrifices.

The early inhabitants built a magnificent city here in honor of Pan.

Paganism was the dominant religion of what we now call Europe for well over 2,000 years.

It did fill people's needs, but there is a strong sense that, by the time of Christ, by the time the Christian message is spreading, paganism is no longer filling all the needs for all the people.

Roman paganism is polytheist.

It believes in many gods, many goddesses, not one all-powerful God.

Those gods and goddesses are not loving.

They do not care greatly for humanity.

Roman paganism is concerned much less with being loved by the gods and much more with preventing their anger, with fear that they will punish you.

The Romans lived in a very uncertain world, a world of earthquakes, of famine, of disease, which they could not explain.

So they explained it by the anger of those deities, and they tried to placate them.

PHILLIPS: Very little remains of the pagan site of Caesarea Philippi, and it was here that some of the most profound events in the gospels took place.

Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do people say I am?

And who do you say I am?"

Suggestions varied from John the Baptist to Elias.

It was Peter's response that was seminal.

He affirmed the divinity of Jesus when he stated, "Thou art Christ, son of the living God."

Jesus, in turn, gave Peter a commission that would prove to be world-changing.

He said, "Thou art Peter, "and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

In Mark, Peter's confession occurs almost exactly halfway through, in Chapter 8.

The remaining eight chapters depict Jesus on his way to Jerusalem for the fate that will meet him there and the central events of the Christian gospel.

When we read John, however, Jesus' ministry begins in Jerusalem.

In Mark, Jesus goes nowhere near Jerusalem until there's a turning point in the gospel where, having told everyone not to say a thing about who he is, Peter recognizes Jesus as being the Messiah.

And then they're off to Jerusalem.

The crisis point is coming.

Jerusalem is going to be where the final conflict happens between this new message of God and between orthodox religion as represented by the Jerusalem Temple and everything that you find there.

PHILLIPS: The gospels all show Jesus making his way to Jerusalem.

There's no doubt that he would have visited the capital, perhaps many times, and especially at Passover.

We've already seen Luke's account of Jesus visiting the Temple in Jerusalem as a boy of 12.

It was at that age that a boy became bar mitzvah, a son of the law, and a visit to Jerusalem for Passover would have been a celebration of his new status.

Yet, as we also saw, Jesus was left behind, to stay amongst the teachers, listening and asking them questions.

Yet, when Mary comes back and finds Jesus, she accuses him of treating his parents unthinkingly.

Yet his response is quite extraordinary.

And the Father's house is the Jerusalem Temple.

Jesus is there at the beginning of the gospel as a son of the law, and now, as we reach the final week of Jesus' life, Luke will place him there again as one who demonstrates a radically different understanding of the law.

The teachers of the law, who gave the child so much understanding, have now become those who don't understand for themselves.

God is doing something new, and Jesus, Luke wants to say, is God's new Temple, the new place of understanding between God and humanity.

The gospel of John tells us that Jesus continued on toward Judaism's most important city, Jerusalem.

Having studied the history of Jerusalem for most of his career, archaeologist Avner Goren joined me in the Old City.

Well, we're down here on this ancient street.

Can you tell me something about it?

PHILLIPS: I'm absolutely amazed at the sort of huge pieces of stone, you know, enormous archways.

I can see what looks like the sort of remains of an arch sticking out from the wall up there.

I mean, we're way below it anyway, so this arch would have gone right over us.

It's an incredibly impressive complex.

PHILLIPS: When was this arch built?

PHILLIPS: And what was the reason for it?

So it was actually here during the lifetime ofhrist?

PHILLIPS: I mean, as a building project, it's quite remarkable.

John sets up scenes of confrontation from the very beginning.

Judaism had fought for its own survival over many centuries.

Its central symbols, most notably the Temple, had been destroyed before, yet it still endured to be the key religion of the region.

What it now was by the time of Jesus was not something that it was prepared to give up easily, even if it was still a faith under the final authority of a foreign ruler, the Romans.

One of the great tensions also in Jesus's message is about the exact nature of this kingdom that he talks about.

And from what we can see, from what we can gather, this idea was misinterpreted by a lot of those who would otherwise want to follow him.

Lots of Jews saw the coming Messiah and the kingdom that he would bring in as something that would free them up from the oppression of the Romans... ...that they would be free at long last.

Jesus doesn't want to buy in to that message.

He wants to talk about the kingdom, yes, but it's a very different kind of entity altogether.

It's something which is not going to be founded on the basis of power and conflict.

PHILLIPS: A misunderstanding of who Jesus is and what he has come to preach is a common theme in the gospels.

In some ways, the social message takes over what had been a political message, and it's a very subtle turn at some times, at certain points, to say that we're going to change the world around us, but is that going to be a political change, or is that going to be a social change?

When we think of some of the earlier teachings of Jesus, or at least as they were understood in the first generation of the Jesus movement, they really are thinking that there's going to be a kingdom on earth, it's a political kingdom, and in some cases they really do expect the armies of God, the angelic armies, to come down and throw the bums out, meaning the Romans.

TAYLOR: You'll have to take into account the existence of this power center called Jerusalem.

That's the real contrast in the gospels -- between the rural outposts, if you like, where Jesus spends a good part of his ministry, and Jerusalem, which is the center of everything that, in some respect, seems to be under attack, at least from what he says and what he does.

So Jesus has a very ambivalent relationship with Jerusalem.

Jerusalem represents power.

It represents orthodox religion in all its forms.

And Jesus knows that eventually he's going to have to go there.

PHILLIPS: Jerusalem was the center of Jewish society and power, but by now it was also home to an occupying Roman force led by Pontius Pilate.

While many of the Jews chafed under this alien Roman rule, some of them, such as the tax collectors, sought to turn the situation to their own advantage.

It's no accident that the gospels are full of encounters between Jesus and these people.

In fact, he's even prepared to sit and eat with them.

In ancient Near Eastern society, as now, table fellowship was a sign of acceptance.

Jesus's table fellowship would have made him many friends and followers.

Three of his most trusted friends, who would also have supported him by supplying food and shelter, were Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha.

The gospel of John tells us that as Jesus traveled towards Jerusalem, he got word that his friend Lazarus was seriously ill.

In Bethany, Jesus met up with Martha and Mary, who told him that Lazarus was four days dead.

"Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb.

"It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it.

Jesus said, 'Take away the stone.'"

PHILLIPS: The Bible says that many of the Jews who had seen what Jesus did came to believe in him.

But others went to the Pharisees in Jerusalem and told them about the miracle.

The gospel of John describes a meeting of Pharisees and high priests who were concerned about the growing fame of Jesus.

"So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council and said..." PHILLIPS: According to John, Lazarus was also seen as a threat.

PHILLIPS: The Bible doesn't say whether or not the high priests succeeded in killing Lazarus.

But according to some traditions, Lazarus traveled to the island of Cyprus, where the Church of St. Lazarus venerates the site of his possible second and final tomb.

The gospel of John tells us that Jesus continued on to Judaism's most important city, Jerusalem.

But in Jerusalem, the works and miracles of Jesus were seen as a cause for concern.

Jesus and Jerusalem were on a collision course.

We've said before that the accounts of this last week, collectively known as the Passion Narratives, were the very first parts of the gospel to be written down.

Large sections of each book are given over to a single week in what, as far as we know, was a three-year ministry.

And this final week begins in the same place -- the triumphal entry on the day we now call Palm Sunday.

By riding in on a donkey, he evoked an Old Testament prophecy about the arrival of the Messiah.

He's going to be taking on Judaism -- orthodox Judaism -- with everything that it stands for.

He's also going to be taking on the imperial power, which is Rome.

It's a power to which Judaism has, in large measure, had to bow the knee.

A large part of orthodox Judaism's concerns are also the same concerns as Rome's, which is really to do its best to keep everyone in their place and just allow people to carry on their normal lives as long as they don't pose any threat to the powers that be.

Jesus comes along, and he is automatically that kind of threat.

PHILLIPS: When Jesus upended the tables of the money changers in the Temple, he intentionally took on the powers that be, both Jewish and Roman.

A challenge was thrown down.

MAN: That is a crucial event in Jesus's life.

It is a protest about how religious life is being exploited by certain factions within Judaism.

KREITZER: Money changers, who were obviously making political capital and, more importantly, economic capital, out of money-changing activities.

Interestingly, in the Synoptic gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that becomes one of the trigger events in his last week.

PHILLIPS: As if overturning the tables of the money changers was not enough, Jesus continued to agitate against the high priests with his words.

PHILLIPS: Jesus must have sensed his time was short.

All four gospels and 1 Corinthians describe his final meal with his disciples.

Why is the Last Supper so significant?

KREITZER: The Last Supper is significant because it is one of those crucial events that takes place in that last week of Jesus's life.

It shows the closeness that Jesus has with his disciples, his chosen band of followers.

It's part and parcel of the Jewish context of Jesus's life and ministry.

PHILLIPS: For many of us, our mental picture of the Last Supper is dominated by Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting.

With that in mind, it's an interesting exercise to try to imagine this taking place here in the room traditional holds it happened.

It's also a moment compellingly described in the gospel of Mark.

"When it was evening, he came with the twelve, "and when they had taken their places and were eating, "Jesus said, 'Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.'"

PHILLIPS: Here with its centuries-old olive trees is the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus often met the disciples.

It's most famous, of course, as the place where Jesus prayed the night before his arrest.

In a very human way, as we all must do, he contemplated his own mortality and then yielded to the ordeal ahead.

The following morning it was here, with a fateful kiss, Judas identified Jesus to the servants of the high priest.

TAYLOR: It has been suggested in the past that Judas, who betrays him, might well have been a disappointed revolutionary, someone who attached himself to Jesus believing that here, at long last, we were going to overthrow this oppressive Roman power.

He finally cottons on to the fact that this isn't going to happen, and maybe as a spur to get Jesus to act in that kind of political way, tries to bring about some sort of final conflict by going to the Jewish authorities, telling them that he will betray Jesus to them, in the hope that some kind of fight will ensue and the real battle will begin.

Of course, as we know, it all ends very differently.

PHILLIPS: According to the gospels, Jesus was arrested and taken to the high priest Caiaphas.

Tradition holds that it is here, below the house of the high priest, that Jesus was confined.

Other Sanhedrin members were present, including the powerful Annas.

We read that before sunrise and what we now know as Good Friday, Caiaphas and Annas interrogated Jesus... ...while later he was kept prisoner in what is now called the Sacred Pit.

While Jesus was detained inside, Peter was in the courtyard.

Peter was asked three times if he knew Jesus, and three times he denied that he did.

"The Lord turned and looked at Peter.

"Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, "how he had said to him, 'Before the cock crows today, "'you will deny me three times.'

He went out and wept bitterly."

PHILLIPS: The high priests charged him with blasphemy.

They took Jesus before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and accused him of a more serious charge with political consequences -- that he'd claimed to be the king of the Jews and that he opposed the payment of Roman taxes.

These charges alone were not grounds for execution, but Pilate, unwilling to create conflict with the Sanhedrin, left it to the Jewish people to decide Jesus's fate.

He offered a choice to the assembled crowd -- free Jesus or free a condemned rebel named Barabbas.

The crowd was incited by Sadducees and Pharisees alike not to free Jesus.

Instead, they shouted for the release of the rebel Barabbas.

Pilate freed Barabbas and handed Jesus over for crucifixion, the Roman method of criminal execution at the time.

According to Matthew, Pilate washed his hands in front of the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood."

Every year at Easter, thousands of Christians from all over the world throng to Jerusalem to relive the Passion.

The life of Jesus culminates in the Passion Narrative itself.

It's the death, the burial, and resurrection that's the most important Christian event, that's the focal point of all four gospels, really.

PHILLIPS: Bearing their crosses, they surge along the Via Dolorosa toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

[Bell ringing] [Man singing] PHILLIPS: Their destination is Christianity's holiest site, because the entire faith hinges on Jesus' death and resurrection.

And within the walls of the Holy Sepulchre is the tomb revered as the place of his burial and his rising.

[Man shouting] [Man singing] PHILLIPS: This is one of the most dramatic places on earth -- the tomb of Christ -- and I'm never, ever anything other than amazed at the wave of spiritual strength that you encounter when you come in here.

People have traveled from across the world, of all denominations, who this is their focus.

This is the place where Christ was buried and resurrected.

For three days, the disciples mourned for Jesus while his body lay in the tomb.

Then the tomb was found opened -- and empty.

The gospel of Matthew has a risen Jesus appear to Mary Magdalene and tells her to have the disciples meet him in Galilee.

When Jesus appears to the 11 disciples on a hill in Galilee, he gives them the great commission -- "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

GWYNN: The Apostles believed something miraculous had happened, because it is the only way to explain what they go out to do.

But why does the message survive?

There have been other men down the centuries, men and women, who have claimed to be a messiah.

Very few start religions that last, and none have started a religion that's swept the world like this.

So why does the message keep rolling?

In some ways, it must be inherent in the message Christ was teaching, the message that you will be saved, that if you live well in this world, there is a better life awaiting for you.

Part must rest in the morality, in the belief that if you act correctly, "love one another as I have loved you," if you treat people correctly, and that it made Christians support each other.

Part must rest in the environment in which the message expanded -- that there was room, there was space, for this message to take seed.

PHILLIPS: We've taken a brief tour of the gospels.

We've seen some of the challenges that Jesus posed to the beliefs and cultures of Jewish and Roman societies.

We've also come to understand that the gospels center upon the end of the story, with accounts of the last week of Jesus' life and his eventual death and resurrection.

These were the stories the first Christians told to one another.

They lived in an oral culture, an age centuries before printing presses.

this was a culture of storytelling, and it was only as the original eyewitnesses began to die off that there was an urgent need to get things properly recorded for future generations.

In spite of all the stories of Jesus' healing miracles, of the parables to guide us in daily life, everything comes back to the final week and what it meant.

Why did Jesus come to believe that he had to die?

And why did the early church come to believe that he had been miraculously raised from the dead?

Those questions came to assume overriding importance for the early church and especially for one man in particular.

He began his life as a faithful Jewish Pharisee called Saul, a man who persecuted the first Christians and was responsible for many deaths.

In time he would convert to the Way, as it was known, and changed his name to Paul.

Soon he would spread the faith with the same fervor as he had fought it.

Older than the New Testament's gospels are the letters that Paul wrote to the early Christian communities.

If we are to understand how Christianity grew from a small Jewish sect to become the official religion of the Roman Empire, we have to come to terms with Paul.

Many would argue that Christianity really begins with him.

In our next program, we will retrace Paul's bold quest to bring the Christian message to Asia and Europe... ...the quest which would see him imprisoned, beaten, and on the brink of death, as he made the God of one nation into a God for all peoples.

I'm Jonathan Phillips.

Join me next time as we continue our journey on the road from Christ to Constantine.