The Early Church

The I.B.Tauris History of the Christian Church

Morwenna Ludlow

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857735591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

How did the early Christians manage to establish a religion and institution which, despite persecution, flourished and grew? How did their initial experience of being a despised minority in the Roman Empire shape their sense of privileged identity and uniqueness? And how was it that - at least at the outset - the first believers were able to exist alongside the same shared traditions, rituals and beliefs of the Jews, despite the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah?The Christian community was born out of paradox: its faith in a man who was also the 'anointed one' (or Christ) of God; and its growth and development often echoed those complex and contradictory origins. Morwenna Ludlow discusses the fragile context as well as the emerging core beliefs of the early Church (including divine creation, salvation, eschatology, the humanity and divinity of Christ and the inter-relationships of the Trinity) between 50-600 CE. She also examines the process of Christian self-definition in response to groups on the edge of the Church, such as Gnostics, Marcionites, Montanists and Manichaeans, as well as in relation to Judaism.
Bringing to vivid life the remarkable history of the early Church, in all its conflict and struggle, the author shows why such a successful faith was able to rise out of such improbable and unpromising beginnings.

CHAPTER 1

From Jesus Christ to the Church

(MID-FIRST TO MID-
SECOND CENTURIES)

Those who welcomed [Peter’s] message were baptized. … They devoted
themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread
and the prayers. … All who believed were together and had all things in
common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the
proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together
in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and
generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And
day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
(Acts 2.41–7)

So Luke describes the reaction to Peter’s preaching on the day of Pente-cost. Although many particular aspects of Luke’s narrative have been challenged, the words above are probably a reasonable description of the general character of the earliest Christian community.¹ It was based in Jerusalem and centred around the teaching and leadership of those who had been closest to Jesus before his death. Despite Jesus’ crucifixion, his followers shared a strong belief that his death was not the end; some of them had had vivid experiences of the living Jesus, and many felt that they were possessors of the special gift of God’s Spirit or power. The followers of Jesus were full of optimism and hope for a divinely given new life, and the community was growing. The group was marked not only by its beliefs about Jesus but by common worship, prayer and a shared community meal. Its members also shared their possessions in order to help fellow-believers who were in need. They believed that their community signified a new departure for its members – each believer’s new beginning was marked by baptism – yet they continued to worship in the Temple.

The undivided fellowship depicted in this account appears not to have lasted long. Perhaps it never exhibited the Paradise-like state that Luke appears to evoke in his narrative. To some, the 500 years that followed might seem to be characterized more by fracture, schism and disagreement than the spirit of loving fellowship. Nevertheless, throughout the period covered by this book Christian communities continued to be united – however loosely – by the same elements: by their hope in what God had worked for them through Jesus Christ; by gathering around certain individuals who were seen as continuing the work of the Apostles; by baptism, the sharing of bread and wine, and the offering of prayers and hymns; by the aspiration to an ethic that supported the poor and needy, both in their communities and beyond. The earliest evidence for all these factors will be examined in this chapter.

There were, however, obvious differences between the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem and the communities of later centuries. Jesus’ earliest followers were all Jews: they unquestioningly accepted a monotheistic belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and they would have considered their faith in Jesus’ teaching to be largely continuous with that.² The degree of continuity between the beliefs of the first Christians and contemporary Judaism is highly contested by New Testament scholars. It certainly differed somewhat from person to person, not least because the Judaism of the first century was not a monolithic or uniform religion. Jews differed, for example, in their interpretations of the Law, and in the degree to which they were affected by Hellenic culture. Nevertheless, one can assume that for many Christians, baptism probably marked a renewed commitment to God or a new understanding of God’s relationship to Israel, rather than a ‘conversion’ in the modern sense. Even the descriptions of Paul’s ‘conversion experience’, which seem to indicate a dramatic break with his past, may best be understood as an experience of a new, albeit life-changing, calling rather than a conversion from one set of religious beliefs to another.³

The relationship between Christianity and Judaism became increasingly more complex, however, as Jesus’ followers began to accept Gentiles into their fellowship without demanding the usual markers which determined one as a Jew (notably circumcision and the following of certain food laws). For this reason, the question of the continuity of belief in Jesus with Judaism became a point of debate for the early Christians themselves: to what extent was Christianity a reinterpretation of Judaism and to what extent should Christians define themselves against it? Precisely these questions emerge from a reading of the earliest Christian writings. For the earliest followers of Jesus, as for other Jews, ‘the Scriptures’ meant the Hebrew Bible – essentially the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms and sometimes the books of Wisdom. The earliest Christian writings vividly show the tension between ancient tradition and the new witness of the Apostles, as the authors reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures in the light of their convictions about Jesus and, indeed, interpreted the meaning of Jesus in the light of the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Some of these Christian writings were later accepted by Christians as together forming a new ‘testament’ or witness to complement the ‘old’ testament of the Hebrew Bible. The formal ‘canon’ of the New Testament came about only as a result of a long and gradual process of acceptance over several hundred years, not being definitively fixed until the mid- to late fourth century. The earliest written evidence of Christian communities is in the letters of Paul (written in the 50s CE), but the first anthology of Paul’s letters was apparently not in circulation until around 100CE. Collections of Jesus’ sayings circulated first in oral, then in written form. One such collection, known today as ‘Q’, was incorporated into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (both written towards the end of the first century CE). Another collection underlay the second-century Gospel of Thomas, which did not become part of the eventual Christian canon. Other sayings of Jesus seem to have been preserved through early Christian liturgy – for example, the Didache’s quotation of the Lord’s Prayer – or the teaching of those about to be baptized, recorded in 1 Clement:

For he said: ‘Show mercy, that you may be shown mercy; forgive that it may be forgiven you. As you do, so it will be done to you; as you give, so it will be given to you; as you judge, so you will be judged; as you show kindness, so will kindness be shown to you; the amount you dispense will be the amount you receive.’ ⁴

The similarity between some of these words and those of the Gospels is evident and it is sometimes difficult to know whether an author was quoting words from a collection of sayings or whether he was alluding to one of the Gospels (authors often quoted text from memory and were often rather relaxed about the accuracy of their quotation).

It seems likely, then, that from about the 50s CE there were various, rather fluid, written collections of Jesus’ sayings, which formed the basis for the Gospels as we know them and which existed for a while alongside them.⁵ They seem to have faded out of use as the Gospels became transmitted beyond the communities in which they were originally written. This seems to have happened around the turn of the first and second centuries. The story is slightly different for each of the four Gospels which are now canonical. Mark, written around 70CE, was the earliest Gospel and, with Q, was one of the sources of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew (towards the end of the first century CE). These latter two Gospels began to circulate among Christian communities in Asia Minor and Greece: for example, they were both known to Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, whereas Ignatius of

Antioch, writing a generation earlier, seems to rely mostly on oral traditions for his material about Jesus.⁶ The Gospel of Mark was known to Marcion and to Justin writing in Rome in the mid-second century and probably circulated in Egypt around the same time, but it was not as widely used in this period as Matthew and Luke. The Gospel of John was written around 90–100CE in Ephesus; it was apparently not known by Polycarp, but was accepted by Irenaeus as one of the four Gospels a generation later and was also used in Egypt during the second half of the second century.

Until Irenaeus’ forthright arguments for a four-fold Gospel around a hundred years later, there seems to have been a fair degree of uncertainty in the Christian communities about the idea of a plurality of Gospel texts. Famously, Marcion argued for the acceptance of Luke alone (and an severely edited version at that); Justin may have used or compiled a synopsis of Matthew, Mark and Luke.⁷ Justin’s pupil Tatian made a fusion of the four Gospels, the Diatessaron, which was used by Syriac-speaking Christians as their standard Gospel text for many years. Marcion’s version enjoyed popularity among his own followers, but on the whole these unified Gospel synopses were rejected by Christians from the end of the second century onwards. One of the more remarkable aspects of early Christianity is the choice of a multiplicity of Gospel witnesses, despite the availability of amalgamated editions.⁸

The reasons for this choice perhaps lie in the nature of the Gospel texts themselves. Neither in the writings of the New Testament nor in those of the Apostolic Fathers can one find an absolutely exhaustive history or biography of Jesus (although perhaps Luke comes closest in this respect). Nor can one find a systematically worked-out theological doctrine of who Jesus was and what he did. To think that somehow there should be is to impose our modern assumptions about the nature and purpose of religious texts on to these works. On the other hand, to assume that there could not be relatively complex reflection in those kinds of text simply because they were early (and thus ‘primitive’) is to misunderstand their purpose and to underestimate their authors. Many of the earliest Christian writings (both in the canon and outside it) were letters written to specific individuals or communities for a specific reason. The Gospels, even if written as a more general kind of witness to the life and teachings of Jesus, were not intended to be exhaustive historical or theological accounts. Their narrative form draws their audience in, invites one to engage and become involved with the story; the story was assumed to be in a profound sense truthful, but was not intended to be a blow-by-blow history. This is because the Gospels – like Paul’s letters – were generally intended to be read or heard by people who already knew something about Jesus Christ. The impact of differences of theological emphasis or contradictions between the narratives was thus considerably lessened by the fact that the texts were being read in communities which were already associated together by certain core beliefs and practices. This explains the otherwise odd fact that the most reliable texts of the Gospel of Mark end not with resurrection appearances (as the other Gospels do), but with the empty tomb.⁹

Even the texts that bear a closer relation to theological treatises, like Hebrews, assume a readership familiar with the basic themes of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Because Jesus’ followers first spread their faith in him by word of mouth, these earliest texts represent a further stage of reflection on what the significance of that faith was. They are therefore reflective, sometimes argumentative or defensive, but very rarely present a summary basis of Christian faith. As suits their various purposes, their language is often highly figurative, not least because the Christian writers were seeking to express belief in Jesus in terms they had inherited from their culture, both Jewish and Hellenic. Most importantly, they used the Hebrew Bible, which was itself a very complex collection of images and ideas. Christian texts of the first and early second centuries pick up on these images, develop and adapt them in a variety of imaginative ways. (See the use of Jewish titles for Christ and the adaptation of concepts such as sacrifice, discussed below.) Indeed, it is helpful to view these early Christian writings, at least in some respects, as works of Scriptural interpretation – that is, of course, interpretations of the Hebrew Bible.¹⁰

These early Christian texts, therefore, are a difficult source for the historian. They emerged from different communities and individual texts circulated in various parts of the Mediterranean region at different times. Their relationship to each other and to the Hebrew Bible is not at all straightforward. Their genre and style are complex: the most appropriate description of the earliest written thought about Jesus Christ is that it is more a ‘kaleidoscope of imagery’ than a carefully worked-out theology.¹¹ However, there is an extreme lack of archaeological evidence and very little literary evidence from sources outside the Christian community for what they believed and how they lived. For all their complexities, then, the early Christian writings are our best evidence. For all their failings, they do reveal an inter-linked family of Christian communities which shared certain common beliefs about Jesus and common ways of representing those beliefs in their rituals and their moral codes.

What, then, did the first Christian communities believe about Jesus Christ? Although the very earliest Christian texts, especially Paul’s letters,¹² are more interested in Christ’s death and resurrection than in other circumstances of his life, there is general agreement in them on the basic facts of his biography. Jesus was born of a human mother and grew up in a Jewish family in Palestine.¹³ The Gospels of Matthew and Luke added birth narratives to this basic account, perhaps to emphasize Jesus’ real humanity. The Gospels view Jesus’ baptism by John as the beginning of his ministry and describe him travelling to preach, teach and heal. Even Paul, who has little biographical detail about Jesus, clearly felt that it was important that Jesus was a teacher and exemplar of a holy life, for he quotes some of Jesus’ teachings and regards it as the duty of the Christian to imitate Jesus’ way of living, especially Jesus’ obedience to the Father, his meekness, gentleness and concern for the weak and the poor.¹⁴ This is also an important theme in the Apostolic Fathers: for example, readers were urged to imitate ‘the pattern’ of Jesus’ humility and his goodness.¹⁵ As Christians became more susceptible to arrest and persecution by the Roman authorities, this imitation could stretch even to imitating Jesus’ death. This theme is particularly prominent in Ignatius and Polycarp: ‘Let us then be imitators of his endurance, and if we suffer for his name’s sake let us glorify him. For this is the example which he gave us in himself.’ ¹⁶ It is likely that Paul became a hero figure – and himself an example to imitate – prec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Map: The Early Christian World, First to Sixth Centuries
• Preface
• 1. From Jesus Christ to the Church (Mid-First to Mid-Second Centuries)
• 2. Hopes and Fears (Second Century)
• 3. Negotiating Boundaries: Varieties of Christianity in Rome and the West (Second to Third Centuries)
• 4. Alexandria and Carthage: The Development of Christian Culture (Second to Third Centuries)
• 5. Church and Empire: Diocletian, Constantine and the Controversy over Arius (Third to Fourth Centuries)
• 6. God and Humankind in Eastern Theology: Alexandria, Cappadocia, Nisibis and Edessa (Fourth Century)
• 7. Saints and the City (Fourth to Fifth Centuries)
• 8. God and Humankind in Western Theology: Ambrose and Augustine (Fourth to Fifth Centuries)
• 9. Christology: A Tale of Three Cities (Fifth Century)
• 10. Epilogue (Fifth to Sixth Centuries)
• Notes
• Bibliography