HE history of the New Testament church, after the book of Acts concludes (to the beginning of the second century), is one of the most obscure and has never been correctly understood. Yet, it is the most important period in all of church history to comprehend!

      Did you know that the apostles James, Peter, John, and Paul were all still alive when the story in Acts abruptly breaks off? What was their fate thereafter and why weren’t we given the details of their deaths? It is almost like someone deliberately prevented us from knowing the truth by removing the last chapter. Indeed, it is like watching a cliff-hanger movie and suddenly the film breaks just at the point of the most suspenseful part of the story. Had the missing details of the 60's alone been revealed, it would have changed our entire understanding of the birth of the New Testament.

      But the real tragedy is that without this missing piece of the story, many have incorrectly concluded that the apostles simply continued with their expectation that Jesus would return in their lifetimes right on down to the end of the first century. This false notion has spawned a series of other false assumptions, the biggest of which is that the apostles saw no need to canonize a New Testament in their lifetime. What would be the point if Jesus was to return in their generation, so goes the reasoning? Therefore, the New Testament is treated as an after thought that the “church” the apostles left behind would of necessity produce in a long, agonizing process called “Gradual Acceptance.” Unfortunately for this theory, all of this is false.

      We are now prepared to show that dramatic events arose after the book of Acts breaks off that compelled the apostles to change their minds in a very dynamic way concerning the return of Jesus ——and change their minds they did!

      After the death of the apostle James in 62 C.E., the apostle Paul, then later Peter and John, made significant changes to their messages. Once the apostles realized that the second coming was way beyond their day, they took immediate action to preserve their writings for a future church. What forced their urgency? They predicted a coming apostasy within the church. They then refocused their entire direction to secure their writings for the future in a specific way that would safe guard their message from that coming apostasy.

      The crucial year that the apostle Paul changed his mind concerning Jesus’ return can now be pinpointed to the very year of 63 C.E. A corrected Pauline chronology (finally!) declares that all seven of Paul’s imprisonments mentioned by Clement can now be identified and correctly dated. It was during Paul’s sixth imprisonment at Ephesus in 63 C.E. (beyond the period of Acts), that Paul received his important revelation of the “Mystery.” Scholars have completely overlooked the huge significance of this great revelation. The significance is that after this revelation, Paul changed his mind on many theological and prophetical beliefs that he had previously held.

      The Apostle Peter finally revamped his thinking, in line with Paul’s, in 66 C.E., with the witnessing of the miraculous events in Jerusalem recorded by Josephus for that year. Both Peter and Paul then became extremely concerned over, and then warned about, a coming apostasy in the church and felt compelled to secure their writings for the future church against such apostasy. Internal evidence indicates that the apostle Paul in Rome sent Peter’s secretary, John Mark, on a “service” mission in 65 C. E., first to bring to Paul in Rome his collected writings, but then to go back to Jerusalem to bring the Apostle Peter to Rome to help him secure his writings for the future of the church. When Peter writes his First Epistle, he is still in Jerusalem, and John Mark has now joined up with him there, sending greetings from the “sister church” in Rome (Babylon), from where he had just come. Peter then goes to Rome with John Mark in 66 C. E., meets with Paul in prison, and then later on endorses “all” of Paul’s writings as “Scripture” after Paul’s martyrdom the following year. That was the first body of literature to be canonized.

      The writing styles of both Paul and Peter show a significant difference after the year of 63/66 C. E. respectively. Scholars, believing that Paul and Peter would still hold onto their belief that the Parousia would occur in their lifetimes, and that they were martyred right after the book of Acts ends, feel compelled to accept post-apostolic authorship. What they have missed is that significant events, such as the death of James, the seeming failure of prophecy, and a growing apostasy in the church, forced both Paul, and then later Peter, to rethink the time of the end. With that change in mind, these apostles changed their whole direction and purpose. They then became concerned with establishing churches, ordaining ministers, and settling in for the long

haul. Most importantly, with this realization, was their paramount belief that the church should have an authoritative body of literature from the apostles, that ONLY they could produce. The binding authority that was given Peter by Jesus was for that very distinct purpose of binding up the testimony of the disciples.

      The New Testament evidence declares emphatically (by virtue of the Transfiguration event!) that only Peter and John had the final say in producing a New Testament canon of literature. No one in post apostolic times even came close to having such authority — a fact that many scholars don’t even question. Indeed, if later church authorities ever had a hand in forming a canon of New Testament literature, the makeup of the New Testament would certainly have included such books as 1 Clement, Barnabas, and so many other books, and may have eliminated such books as Hebrews, Titus, James, 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation.

      By the end of the first century a full codex of the present New Testament (except the order of the books) was deposited by the apostle John’s “elders” for safe keeping in the greatest library in all of Judea---the great Library of Caesarea. The "Gradual Acceptance" theory on how the canon was formed is an unsubstantiated invention of modern scholars. They look to the bickering controversies within the church of the second, third, and forth centuries about which books to accept or not to accept, oblivious to the fact that the "canon" was already a completed work, safely tucked away in a professional scriptorium all along, just like the works of Josephus and all other famous works of the time—another point that scholars have collectively never considered.

      The apostles finally came to understand that they had the responsibility to "bind" up their words, just as Isaiah prophesied, and that the “Word” was to go forth out of Judea—not Rome, not Alexandria, not Antioch.

      Ignatius, writing early in the second century, referred to the writings of the apostles as already being in an "archives." Archives? What "archives?" Irenaeus referred to the Gospel that was first proclaimed in public and then “at a later period by the will of God handed down to us in the SCRIPTURES.” He is the first Christian author who argued against the Gnostics from the already existing New Testament Scriptures as a whole on a large scale.

      The great third century scholar, Origen, went from Alexandria to Caesarea, where he then changed his mind about certain doubtful New Testament books that he held while in Alexandria. What was it that changed his mind? Origen there mentions all books of the New Testament, excludes others, and maintained that the Scriptures were “complete.”

      In 303, Diocletian confiscated Christian property, and burned their sacred books. Yet, the master copy in the Library of Caesarea escaped this persecution. The authorities knew that the Christians had an identifiable collection of holy writings in their midst and even they knew exactly which books they were.

      Eusebius, in the fourth century, stated that the sources for his History of the Church were from the great Library of Caesarea.  It is from this library that he produced 50 bibles for Emperor Constantine based upon an exemplar that was in that Library. Obviously, Constantine knew that there already existed a body of literature that constituted the Christian canon of Scripture. He did not ask the church to decide what the canon was, he merely wished to replace copies of the New Testament that had been destroyed in previous persecutions. Codex Vaticanus may very well be one of those bibles and may even be only three layers deep from the original. In any event, the absurd theory that the New Testament was born out of a three hundred year process of distillation  from copies, of copies,  etc., and a constant re-editing of the text, ignores this evidence and only looks to the corrupt texts that clearly have been tampered with by the competing religious factions during this time. The apostles knew that this would happen and that is why they took the necessary steps to archive their writings as a completed body of literature for the future church.

      Read now the fresh evidence that will finally make sense out of one of the biggest mysteries of the Bible —— the time period of Beyond Acts! It truly is the next best thing to actually having the final conclusion to the book of Acts itself.