There's over 7 billion people on this floating rock we call Earth and one out of three of those identify as Christians.

How did something so massive and so widespread begin?

Hey, this is John at the Bible Project. Today we're starting a new series on the Book of Acts.

Last year we put out a video series on Gospel Luke.

Luke, who wrote that Gospel, also wrote a sequel of sorts about the life and movement of the early church, a book we call Acts.

Luke has even created the main movements of Acts to map on to keep movements in the Gospel of Luke.

Christianity today is big, it's complex, it's all over the world, but it hasn't always been that way.

What was Christianity like as it began before the movement went viral?

Book of Acts wants to tell us that it started with this crew and upper room of disenfranchised suspect.

Messianic Jews, it's remarkable. Just like every book of the Bible, the Book of Acts is literary genius.

It's not simply a diary of events of the early Christians.

Its purpose is theological, it's to tell us something deep and meaningful about what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

The Book of Acts is telling me that if I've given my allegiance to Jesus, I'm a part of a Messianic Jewish sect that started as a persecuted religious minority movement in ancient Jerusalem.

That's a living heritage.

So today on the show, we go back to the roots of Christianity.

Thanks for joining us, here we go.

So at some point a year ago or so, we were going to do a video on Luke and we had a conversation on Luke, which is on the podcast.

Yep.

I think it was just a couple of hours long conversation.

Yeah, that's right.

One of the things that stood out to me was that Luke intentionally really slowed down the stories and puts you in there.

There was a lot of relational dynamics that were really important.

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