Opponents and Advocates of Orthodoxy

By about 130 ce the character of the Church was changing. Its mission had taken it far beyond the areas visited by Paul. It was beginning to attract pagans such as Justin Martyr (c.

Since 1945 a great deal has come to light concerning the Gnostic movement, following the discovery of fifty-two Gnostic texts in a Christian cemetery at Nag Hammadi, near Luxor in the middle Nile valley. Gnosis, or knowledge, was already beginning to be claimed as the way of salvation alongside or even in preference to baptism in the period immedi­ately after the Pauline mission (1 Tim. 6:20). The Gnostics were, as their name implies, individuals who took the gospel precept ‘Seek and ye shall find’ (Matt. 7:7) literally. Their quest for truth, if based on Jewish and Christian literature and ideas, sought to integrate every form of religious experience, derived from all sources, into their faith. They were prepared to loose Christianity from its historic links with Jewish prophecies relating to the Messiah and replace these with current Platonic and Stoic teaching through which the Scriptures would be interpreted. The incipient Christian hierarchy of bishops, priests and deacons, was replaced by the Gnostic teacher and his disciples. The salvation of the immortal soul replaced the concept of the resurrection of the body.

Yet for all their strange teaching, the Gnostic leaders, Basilides, Valentinus and Heracleon, dominated Christianity between 130 and 180; and Alexandria, where they were active, was the centre of the Church’s intellectual life. It was, however, realised at the time that even if Christianity could no longer ignore philosophy, so radical a break from the Jewish Scriptures did not represent the tradition of the Gospels, even as interpreted by Paul.

Outstanding both as a leader and disciple of Paul was Marcion (c. 85—c. 160), son of the Christian ‘bishop’ of Sinope on the Black Sea. Marcion accepted the Old Testament as the history of the Jews, but this had nothing to do with Christianity. Christ ‘had made all things new’ and the contradictions between the teaching of the Old and New Testaments argued against Jaweh being his father and the Old Testament being the word of God. The story of man’s redemption was contained in Luke’s Gospel, Christ ‘suddenly appearing’ in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar. Only Paul understood properly this message of redemption, and his letters together with Luke’s Gospel made up the Christian canon of Scripture. Marcion’s was a bold attempt to free Christianity fromjudaism but like that of the Gnostics, it was too radical for acceptance at this time.

During the second century the ‘Great Church’, as it was often called (after the Great Congregation of Old Israel referred to in Neh. 5:8 and Ps. 22:25), had to concentrate on two main problems. First, there was the need to defend itself against its growing number of adversaries, Gnostics, Jews and the increasingly hostile pagan majority. Secondly, it had to establish its own identity as a third (religious) race, independent ofjudaism and paganism, by systematising its beliefs, organisation and liturgy.

By 150, Christianity had become an identifiable cult organised on an urban basis under a bishop with a staff of clergy dependent on him. It was strongest in the towns of western Asia Minor, but like thejewish Dispersion before it, had spread among other Greek-speaking communities, including the lower and immigrant classes in Rome. Its members, however, were not popular. Refusing to worship the gods, they were regarded as ‘atheists’ and darker rumours circulated about happenings during the celebra­tion of their cult. The second half of the century witnessed sporadic but savage persecutions fuelled by popular suspicions and anger.

This movement culminated in the teaching of Irenaeus (c. 140-c. 197), an immigrant to Gaul from Asia Minor, who became bishop in Lyons after surviving the massacre there. His five books Against the Heresies (c. 185) were directed mainly against the Gnostics, and followers of Marcion (c. 85-160). In the course of his argument, he set out a Rule of Faith based on the confession of Trinitarian orthodoxy, the birth, ministry, death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the work of the Spirit, the coming Judgement, and the universality of this message. He asserted the validity of both Testaments to demonstrate (against the followers of Marcion) that the same God who created the world was the Father of Jesus Christ, and finally, church government must be in the hands of presbyters who stood in the succession of the Apostles andon whom the charisma of the Spirit had fallen. Though he left a loophole for the Spirit imparting itself to others, not least Christian prophets, Irenaeus, through his teaching on doctrine and organisa­tion and his stress on order and orthodoxy, deserves his title as the ‘first Catholic theologian’. By the end of the century, with its Rule of Faith respected in all major episcopal sees, the selection of the canon of New Testament Scripture almost completed, and a set pattern of eucharistic ser­vice, based on the biblical account of the Last Supper which stressed the memorial aspect of the Lord’s command and forgiveness of sins, the Christ­ian Church was probably the strongest single religious force in the Greco- Roman world, except for the religion of the immortal gods of Rome.