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The failure of the Christian mission to the Jews
It has been argued that, despite the evidence of Acts to the contrary, the Christian movement made very little impression upon the Jewish people.

Its Jewish membership probably never exceeded 1 000 at any point in the first century, and by the 50s the Jewish members were quite likely exceeded in number by their Gentile counterparts. This figure might seem inconceivably low, but it gains plausibility if we consider the actual size of the Christian movement in the first century. Most scholars of Christian origins tend to exaggerate the size and importance of the early Christian church. This is understandable in the light of the discipline’s intense concentration on the New Testament texts. By confining ourselves in particular to the letters of Paul, the Gospels and Acts, it is all too easy to create a limited and false impression of the ancient world and the place of the Christians within it. Yet the reality is that for all of the first century the Christians were a tiny and insignificant socio-religious movement within the Graeco-Roman world (Hopkins 1998:195-196). Christianity did of course grow considerably in later centuries and it eventually became the religion of the Roman empire, but we should take care not to retroject its later size and importance into the initial decades of its existence.

It has been argued that this Jewish Christian sect (3,000 +) was in danger of being wiped out as they were being persecuted. The Acts of the Apostles depicts instances of early Christian persecution by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious court at the time, however the historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles is disputed. Peter and John were imprisoned by a "Jewish leadership" ("the priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees") who were "much annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the dead". The Sadducees in particular rejected the Pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Saint Stephen was tried by a Sanhedrin (Jewish Supreme Court) for blasphemy against Moses and God and was stoned to death, under the watch of Paul of Tarsus, before his conversion.