In Acts 21:9-28:31, we are given a detailed account of what happened to Paul from the time when he arrived back from his third long journey until he finally reached Rome, as a prisoner, several years later. P went to Jerusalem to greet James, called the brother of the Lord, by then was the leader of the Jerusalem Church. In Jerusalem he seized by hostile Jews who wanted to kill him; his arrest by Roman soldiers actually saved his life from an enraged mob. The Jews made legal accusations against Paul but the most important issue for the Roman commander who had arrested him was the fact that Paul had Roman citizenship and therefore had the right to Roman, not Jewish, justice, if he demanded this. While Paul was being held prisoner, he had a dream or vision one night that he should go to Rome to witness for Jesus Christ. For two years he was held a prisoner at Caesarea, under the governor Felix, but when Felix was replaced by Porcius Festus in A.D. 60 and Paul's case was brought to his notice, Paul used his rights of Roman citizenship to appeal for his case to be heard by the Emperor in Rome. As Paul had appealed to the highest court of the Roman empire, Festus had to send him to Rome. During the two years that he waited in Rome under house arrest, Paul continued to preach and witness to Jesus Christ, boldly and freely. At that point Luke's narrative ends. Christian tradition says that Paul died in Rome, possibly in A.D. 65 at the time of Nero's attack on the Christians.

Paul was one of the most astonishing Christians of the early Church and by the time he died had been responsible for establishing a large number of Christian communities. His letters to some of these new Churches are most important for our understanding of the early Church. But we must not think that without Paul the Christian faith would not have spread. Paul was God's servant and apostle -at a crucial time in Christian history, but we have seen that the whole outlook of the early Christians was a missionary outlook. Paul was used by God in an extraordinary way, but there were others, unknown to us, who carried the new faith to places which Paul was never able to visit. For example, Acts 8:26-40 refers to a nameless Ethiopian, either a Jew or a 'God fearer', who went back with the new faith to northern Africa. The Church was established in Mesopotamia, Egypt and North Africa, as well as in the lands on the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Later, Alexandria in Egypt was to become a most important Christian centre, but we do not know how the Church was first established there.