The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

What is more, Polycarp refers, in his most famous phrase, to his eighty-six years of allegiance to Christ. Assuming with most commentators that this is accurate, and that it means he was born into a Christian family and baptized as an infant, this puts the date of his birth, into an already Christian family in Asia Minor, at AD 69/70. We must therefore hypothesize that there was an established, though probably small, Christian church, holding allegiance to the royal figure of Jesus, and denying the pagan gods, in Smyrna within forty years of the crucifixion. This is not particularly controversial. But it provides us with a remarkably solid fixed point. The Gentile mission of the church, seen as the summoning of non-Jews to a risky allegiance to a Jewish-style Messiah, was apparently already established in Asia Minor before the fall of Jerusalem; was recognized by the authorities as a dangerous and subversive superstition by the time Pliny was governor in Bithynia (around 110); and was dealt with as a matter of routine by the middle of the second century.