If you wanted to stop a movement, how would you do it? History gives a pretty reliable playbook: go after the leaders first. Scatter the people. Keep out the converts who might actually help it grow. Divide the group from the inside. And if none of that works, bring in the full weight of the government.

That playbook was used against the early church, every page of it. And yet when Luke sums up the result in Acts 12:24, it takes him one sentence: "But the word of God increased and multiplied."