When the Apostle Paul wrote his great letter to the church in Rome, he was addressing only several dozen Christian converts, who would have gathered in homes in the city's poorest districts. Surrounding this humble church, hundreds of thousands of pagan Romans, many of them hostile to the Jewish religion and its offshoots, made up the largest and most powerful city in the world. How could so few Christian believers, with no historic tradition to guide them and overwhelming cultural pressure to abandon their faith, become the first building block to an eruption of Christian converts in the decades to follow? How could this fledgling group even have survived the sweeping public executions of Christians that would come by order of the Emperor Nero just a few years later? The answer to those questions is contained in the content of Paul's letter. "Those who have never been told of him will see," the apostle writes, quoting the prophet Isaiah. The story of Christianity in Rome defies historical explanation or precedent. It is a story of God's power to save.