Persecution of Christians in the New Testament Persecution of Christians in the New Testament The persecution of Christians in the New Testament is an important part of the Early Christian narrative which depicts the early Church as being persecuted for their heterodox beliefs by a Jewish establishment in what was then the Roman province of Judea. The New Testament, especially the Gospel of John (c. 90–100 AD), has traditionally been interpreted as relating Christian accounts of the Pharisee rejection of Jesus and accusations of the Pharisee responsibility for his crucifixion. The Acts of the Apostles depicts instances of early Christian persecution by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious
Hebrew Gospel hypothesis (1915) in its article "Gospel of the Hebrews" noted that Nicholson cannot be said ...[to] have carried conviction to the minds of New Testament scholars." Rudolf Handmann (1888) proposed an Aramaic Gospel of the Hebrews but reasoned that this was not the Hebrew Matthew and there never was a Hebrew Ur-Matthew. James R. Edwards, in "The Hebrew Gospel and the development of the synoptic tradition" (2009), suggested that a lost Hebrew Ur-Matthew is the common source of both the Jewish-Christian Gospels and the unique L source material (material not sourced from Mark or Q) in the Gospel of Luke. A