The early Christians were disruptors in the first century. Not only did the early Jesus movement upset the status quo among some Jewish people shortly after Pentecost, the movement also agitated Gentiles as the Good News of Jesus went beyond Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria through people like Philip, Peter, Paul and their co-workers.  New Testament scholar Kavin Rowe’s observations are helpful here:

“To say that the Christians ‘disturb the world’ — as many translations do — is to risk obscuring the gravity of the accusation. For the charge is not simply the complaint that the Christians are a social nuisance, but rather that the Christian mission is a force for sedition in an otherwise civilized world” (C. Kavin Rowe, World

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