The Expansion of Christianity - Christianity and the Celts

Timothy Yates

• Publisher: Lion Scholar
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912552238
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

This is an accessible two-part introduction to Christianity's expansion.

The Expansion of Christianity

Christianity developed from its beginnings as a persecuted sect in an outpost of the Roman empire to become the largest religion on earth. This narrative focuses on missionary pioneers, and also examines individual continents to assess how Christian mission has moved forward despite many periods of retreat. Timothy Yates's account provides a rich and enlightening introduction to the development of this major worldwide faith.

Christianity and the Celts

In recent years the term 'Celt' has become synonymous with mystery and the 'other-worldly'. Ted Olsen digs beneath the layers of romanticization to introduce readers to the world of the Celts and its key figures. The author focuses on the principal characters from Ireland and beyond, highlighting their missionary fervour and monastic ideals. In bringing a distant period of history vividly to life, this account is an engaging portrait of men and women whose ability to intrigue and fascinate is as strong as it ever was.

PART 1

THE EXPANSION OF CHRISTIANITY

INTRODUCTION

This account attempts to describe how Christianity expanded across the world. It does not claim to be a complete history of the church from AD 1 to AD 2000. It concentrates on pioneers, Peter and Paul in the 1st century, Columba and Aidan in the Celtic period, and on great missionary figures such as Willibrord and Boniface, Francis Xavier and Robert de Nobili, John Eliot and David Brainerd, William Carey, Robert Moffatt and David Livingstone, Mary Slessor and Florence Young to name a selection. The approach taken is geographical, chapters after the first dealing with continents; and chronological, so that some sense of development in each area of the world is presented in a time sequence.

One of the many deficiencies of such a treatment is that, with the concentration on expansion, those considerable reverses experienced by the Christian world, most particularly from Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries, have received little coverage. Something that should not be forgotten is that Christian expansion has not been a continual success story. The great historian of Christian expansion, Kenneth Latourette, put forward the so-called wave theory, by which, despite retreat in periods of its history, to his eye each wave of Christianity reached further than the last.

Certainly in the 20th century Christianity became worldwide in the sense that churches were planted in every major ethnic group in the world, leading one archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, in the 1940s to call this ‘the great new fact of our time’. According to the figures in the World Christian Encyclopedia, the statistician David Barrett estimates that there are now some 2,000 million Christians in the world, some 33 per cent of the whole world population. Whereas decline has been experienced in Europe, there has been remarkable growth in the continent of Africa in the 20th century, from some 10 million in 1900 to over 200 million in 2000.

For centuries Christianity was quite as much an Asian religion as it was European. The existence of churches in Egypt and in Ethiopia from the earliest times until today is a reminder also that Christianity retained a foothold in Africa even after the collapse of the North African church of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine before the assaults of tribes from Europe and the forces of Islam. For our age it is important to describe the roots of Asian and African Christianity in the early centuries before the age of the explorers led to the expansion of Europeanized Christianity after 1500.

CHAPTER 1

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD

Christianity begins with Jesus of Nazareth. In regard to expansion, the Gospels suggest that Jesus himself put strict limits on his own mission. To a non-Jewish woman, he said, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matthew 15:24). There are signs, however, that he envisaged wider effects from his mission. For example, in response to the faith of a Roman soldier he was prompted to say, ‘people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God’, while Jews may not. This suggests that non-Jews, Romans and others would become members of God’s ‘kingdom’, even to the exclusion of the chosen race of the Old Testament.

Nevertheless, it was not until after the crucifixion and the preaching of the resurrection that Christianity began to grow beyond Jesus’ personal following of the 12 apostles, the 72 disciples of his mission and the rest of the movement’s adherents of his lifetime. His execution fell in the time of Pontius Pilate’s governorship, whom we know from extra-biblical sources to have been governor of Judea during AD 26–36. We do not know the precise date of the crucifixion but AD 30 or 33 have been advanced as likely. Figures such as Jesus’ forerunner, John the Baptist, and Pilate himself appear in non-biblical histories like those of Josephus (AD c. 37–c. 100) or Tacitus (AD c. 55–c. 113).

For the expansion of the church in its early years we are, however, heavily dependent on Luke, who wrote two volumes, possibly aimed at a representative Roman enquirer given the name of Theophilus (God-beloved), known to us as the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. The second volume took the story of the Christian movement from the mid-30s to the mid-60s of the 1st century, a crucial period of its development.

Two early historians

John surnamed the Baptist … was a good man and exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practise justice towards their fellows and piety towards God and so doing to join in baptism … a consecration of the body implying that the soul was cleansed by right behaviour.

Josephus, Antiquities, 18.117–118

Nero fastened the guilt [for the fire of Rome] and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a deadly superstition, thus choked for a moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil but also in the City.

Tacitus, Annals, XV.44.2–8

Whatever subsequent generations have accepted or rejected, the early Christians believed that the crucified Jesus had been raised from death by an act of God. Luke gives us sample speeches, rather in the manner of the great Greek historian, Thucydides, which seek to convey the basic Christian message as he believed it to have been presented. Peter, leader of the apostolic band, in the first account we have of a Christian sermon given to an audience of Jews, emphasized that God had raised the crucified Jesus: ‘This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.’ Jesus was the Messiah of Jewish expectation: ‘God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified’ (Acts 2:36). Offensive as this message must have been to devout Jews, assembled in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost, in Luke’s account 3,000 people became Christians on that day and were baptized. The emphasis on the resurrection was to remain central as the movement spread, so that it featured equally in addressing a sophisticated audience of Greeks in Athens. The early preachers saw themselves as ‘witnesses’, people who had firsthand evidence of an act of God and, in Peter’s case, experience of eating and drinking with the risen Jesus (Acts 10:41).

Luke’s programme

For some time in the 30s Christianity remained a sub-sect of Judaism. Luke recorded that a number of Jewish priests joined the movement. Nevertheless, in Luke’s own understanding there was to be a programme of expansion. The risen Christ had told his followers that their witness to him was to extend from Jerusalem to wider Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). By far the largest leap for the young movement was from Jew to non-Jew or Gentile. Luke showed the intermediate step to the Samaritans, regarded as heretics by orthodox Jews; and to a Jewish proselyte (convert) and Ethiopian African, who was a fringe adherent of Judaism (Acts 8). The main emphasis in Acts was to be on the Gentile mission. Luke himself was a Gentile, probably a Syrian. He developed his theme by way of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, a story told three times in the book as a form of emphasis (Acts 9; 22; 26); and also through the story of Peter and Cornelius, a Roman soldier and centurion, told twice (Acts 10; 11). In this story Luke provided a beginning for Gentiles that was equivalent to what the day of Pentecost had been for Jews – Gentiles too experienced the Holy Spirit as a result of Peter’s preaching about Jesus and joined the church by baptism.

‘[Luke] first saw that the new Israel like the old was destined to have its history and recognized that sacred history must be related to the history of the world. The life of the church is not to be a frenzied proclamation … but a steady programme of expansion throughout the world.’

Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions

If the early part of Acts can be called the acts of Peter, the later chapters are the acts of Paul. Paul’s dramatic conversion has been dated as early as AD 34. The story itself reveals that there were already Christians in Syria and Damascus.

‘I was travelling to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, when at midday along the road … I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” I asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The Lord answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”’

Paul before King Agrippa, Acts 26:12–15

There was also a strong enough church in Antioch in Syria for Christians there to be called by that name for the first time (up to then they may have been called only those of ‘the Way’, as a sub-sect of Judaism [Acts 24:14]). Saul himself, as a former persecutor of Christians, faced the danger that he would still be regarded as an agent provocateur. It took the generosity of spirit of Barnabas, whom Luke tells us was a Jewish Cypriot, to recruit him as a Christian teacher for the growing church. It was from Antioch that what could be called the first ‘overseas’ mission took place, when Saul and Barnabas were sent by the local church to Cyprus and conducted a preaching tour across the island from Salamis to Paphos.

Paul the missionary

Gradually, Saul, by now ‘Paul’, replaced Barnabas as the missionary leader: ‘Barnabas and Saul’ became ‘Paul and Barnabas’. Paul appeared to have a definite strategy as he moved around the Mediterranean world. Many upright Gentiles, represented in Luke’s writings by the Ethiopian treasurer and the Roman centurion Cornelius, were attracted by the high moral standards and teaching of the Jewish synagogues and religion. This Gentile fringe, already instructed in the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament, provided Paul with a natural platform for the Christian gospel. Paul would visit the synagogues of the Jewish dispersion as a first point of entry, as at the other Antioch in Pisidia in modern Turkey and nearby Iconium. Luke showed that this resulted ultimately in hostility from the Jewish communities but also that, as at Iconium, ‘a great number of both Jews and Greeks’ became Christians.

Through the 40s and 50s, Paul spent much time as an itinerant Christian preacher, teacher and leader. An important point of departure was his decision, which Luke attributes to the Holy Spirit and a dream or vision of a Greek man from Macedonia, to cross over to mainland Europe rather than pursue his mission to northern Turkey. In Greece he went from Philippi, the town named after Alexander the Great’s father, to Thessalonica and then to Athens and Corinth. We know from his first letter to the Thessalonian Christians (which vies with Galatians as his earliest letter), written probably in AD 49, that his preaching to these Greeks called on them to give up the worship of idols in order to serve instead ‘the living and true God’ and his Son Jesus ‘whom he raised from the dead’ (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10). Christianity challenged the polytheism of the ancient world, whether Zeus (Jupiter) and Hermes (Mercury) at Lystra or the goddess Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus.

In Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part 1: The Expansion of Christianity
• Part 2: Christianity and the Celts
• Further Reading
• Text Acknowledgements
• Index