A pastor got arrested.

In the earliest days of the Christian church, there lived a man named John. This was not the one called John the Baptist. He died before Jesus was crucified. Almost certainly he was not the Apostle named John, the youngest apostle, the one Jesus loved most. That one left a different trail of ministry which culminated in a very different book, The Gospel of John.

All that we know about "our" John is that sometime between twenty and fifty years after Jesus was crucified, maybe even later, John was the pastor of seven congregations of the early Christian church.

These congregations were begun through the ministry of Paul, a man who was a Roman citizen. Paul was a Jew who spent his early adulthood searching out Christians and dealing with them. Some of them were killed.

Jesus appeared to Paul one day, and after a few years of study and meditation, Paul began preaching about Jesus. Very quickly, he took the message beyond the Jewish people to the people of his wider world, bringing the message of the good news of Christ to the world beyond Judaism.

Paul would go to an area, find a place to stay, usually with a friendly member of the local synagogue, and then preach about the Risen Lord. He began a church in Ephesus this way. Other churches around Ephesus quickly sprang up, begun by Paul or through his ministry. If you look at chapters two and three of Revelation, you will see that they consist of letters to seven churches; the churches at Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. In the back section of most Bibles is a set of maps. On one of those maps you will find the places where those churches were. Starting with Ephesus, they proceed in a loop, leading back to Ephesus.

We'd call this a circuit, today.

We know that John grew up in the Jewish faith, in a world governed temporally by Rome. His mind was totally occupied by those words which comprised Jewish scripture, the Law, the history, the prophets. His writing contains hundreds of references to those works. No recent convert could have come by the natural, automatic use of those scriptures that he evidences in the Revelation. Those were ideas and images he grew up with.

But he grew up in a Roman world, where the culture was of Greece, what we call Hellenistic. He wrote in Greek. He was fully familiar with the current theories of his time about how creation was held together; what we would call science today.

Nor could he have been a very young man. In addition to the kind of knowledge all well educated Jewish boys got, he seems to have been to "graduate school." In his portrayal of what had been revealed to him, he evidences the deep knowledge and thought processes of the educated mystic and the scribe. These things are not just learned by the brain. They must be absorbed by the whole being, over time, to finally manifest as knowledge.

And we can know, if we but look, that this pastor was very much influenced by the Apostle Paul. His ideas and messages in Revelation are restatement and amplification of much of what Paul left us in a few surviving letters and in his theological work, Romans.

Paul, as I said earlier, would start churches and then move on. At some point, John became the pastor of one group of these early congregations of the Christian church.

We don't know when he first came to know Christ, as we do with Paul. We don't have tales of his trials and tribulations, except as they may be referred to briefly in the letters in Revelation.

One or two of his congregations were under attack from members of nearby synagogues. In another one or two congregations, he had to counter harmful watering-down (adulterating) influences from within the groups. One congregation was active, strong in mind and spirit, but losing its heart - the love it had at the beginning. One was going through the motions, playing it safe while acting the faithful congregation. It was accused of being luke - warm, the worst possible thing to be. And one, the least of the groups, seemingly, was standing fast; remaining faithful, and enduring patiently all that the world was able to throw at them.

He seems to have had his hands full. I can't keep up with the problems and blind-side blows of one! And he had seven churches.

But he wasn't without resource.

The earliest Christians, especially the leaders, seemed to have been in very close touch with Christ. We get powerful glimpses in just casual comments made be Paul and others in the New Testament; comments about being guided, taught, stopped from doing certain things, and loved.

So John, an early Christian leader, received guidance from Christ in his day- to-day ministry. This was a contact that was very tangible; there was nothing tentative or doubtful about it. And it got him in trouble.

At the beginning of his book, he states that he was in prison for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Perhaps I should mention now how serious the people of John's culture took testimony. Think of it in the court room rather than the religious sense. The ancient but living tradition of the Hebrews was that two witnesses testifying could condemn a person to death. Testifying was serious. False testimony was equal to murder. And please remember the significance of two witnesses.

When John testified that Jesus witnessed to him about something, it was just as real as if he had witnessed an armed robbery. Only in this case, the robber's uncle was the judge, and his cousins were the jury. But those details didn't change what he saw!

So, John was arrested. We don't know for certain what the exact charge was, but the most likely charge was that he spoke for a new religion. You see, at a certain point in time, Rome drew a line in the sand of religious freedom.

Roman law declared that there was to be freedom of religion for all of the religions that were already practiced in the Empire, but there could be no new religions. After all, if new peoples being incorporated into the Empire couldn't find something they liked in the hundreds of religions already present...

How this affected John, and all early Christians, was that at first the Christians were all Jews, and Christianity was legally a branch of Judaism. It was protected. But very quickly, non-Jews were brought into the faith, and eventually it was decided by the church leaders that new Christians didn't have to become Jewish first.

You can begin to see the problem. But Rome wouldn't have ever noticed such fine distinctions if certain members of the Jewish establishment hadn't blown the whistle. The letters to two of the churches mention that they are having trouble with nearby synagogues, and this was probably the issue.

So, this is all that we can say about John to this point. He was a pastor of seven Christian churches that formed a circuit in Asia Minor. He was well educated, brought up within the Jewish faith, and trained further in Jewish occult disciplines; things that today we would call meditation, numerology, and metaphysics.

Also, he was probably in prison for working to start a new religion.

Some of these "educated guesses" about John come from the history of the time, but most are deduced from his own words in the Revelation. We have just begun to get acquainted with this most important early Christian leader. Now, we will look at what happened to him while he was in prison on the Island of Patmos.

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