Rome

Rome, the capital of the empire that ruled the New Testament world, became a goal of the apostle Paul and a centre of the early church. "I must also see Rome," he said (Acts 19:21).

Believers in the imperial city

A church existed in Rome before Paul ever arrived; to it he wrote his great letter to the Romans, the fullest statement of the gospel in the New Testament. He longed to visit and strengthen them (Romans 1:11–15).

Paul in Rome

Having appealed to Caesar, Paul was brought to Rome as a prisoner and, though under house arrest, "preached the kingdom of God... no man forbidding him" (Acts 28:16, 30–31). From Rome he wrote several of his prison letters.

Faith under empire

Roman believers lived at the heart of imperial power, and early tradition holds that both Paul and Peter were martyred in the city. Peter writes warmly of the church there under the veiled name "Babylon" (1 Peter 5:13).

First-century Rome was the largest city in the world, with perhaps a million inhabitants. The historian Suetonius records that the emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome over disturbances "at the instigation of Chrestus" — echoed in Acts 18:2, where Aquila and Priscilla had left Italy for that reason. The catacombs and later basilicas of Rome preserve the memory of the city’s early Christian community and the traditional burial sites of the apostles.