The Earliest Christian Churches

We cannot tell precisely how or when the Christian movement spread outside Palestine and began preaching to Gentiles. One possibility is that it gained a hearing among members of the Greek-speaking (‘Hellenist’) synagogue in Jerusalem (Acts 6:5) and through them converted pilgrims at major Jewish feasts (Acts 2:5).

We first encounter Paul about 35 ce at Damascus in Syria, attempting to use the disciplinary procedures of the synagogue to dissuade Christian Jews from consorting with Gentiles (Gal. 1:13). His objections to the new movement were probably of a practical rather than doctrinal kind. It was guilty of unfair competition with his own sect. For it offered to the Gentiles, as a privilege of the End-time, full membership in the community through water-baptism without the accompanying rite of cir­cumcision, and thus undermined the basis of the Pharisaic, proselytising mission. Paul’s visionary experience of the crucified and glorified Messiah of Christian preaching vindicated the claims of those he was persecuting, and the movement suddenly acquired in him a brilliant and energetic apologist, the extent of whose work and influence soon outstripped that of its original leadership.

What do we know about Paul? If we possessed only the Acts of the Apostles, we should have almost as much difficulty in answering this question of Paul as we do ofjesus. Fortunately, in this case primary evidence is available in Paul’s genuine letters. Acts, for example, presents him to us as both a Roman citizen and a graduate of Gamaliel's school inJerusalem, equally at home in the Greco-Roman andjewish worlds.

His career as a Christian missionary spanned the first three decades of church history. At first he stayed within his own native region of Cilicia and Syria (Gal. 1:21). But after a meeting with Peter, John and James the Lord’s brother at Jerusalem in 49 ce he branched out further afield. They approved his vocation to preach the gospel to the Gentiles in the cities around the Aegean, with the proviso that he should organise a financial collection in support of the poor and persecuted churches in Judea—the Christian equivalent, as it were, of the Temple Tax (Gal. 2:1-10; for a rather different version of events see Acts 15:1-29). For the following ten years, he and his associates built up congregations in Macedonia, Achaea, on the coast of Asia Minor and inland. In order to keep control of such a wide area, he resorted to writing pastoral letters to his communities advising them on the problems they faced; for instance, the different conclusions being drawn from beliefin the nearness of Christ’s return (1 Thess. 4:13; 1 Cor. 15:12), the contrasts in social status (1 Cor. ll:18f) or religious background (1 Cor. 10:32) of different groups in the same congregation, excessive enthusiasm or asceticism (1 Cor. 12:1; Col. 2:23), competition from rival Christian mis­sionaries (2 Cor. 11:4f; Phil. 1:15), and above all, the resurgence ofPharisaic persecution, imitating the tactics Paul himself had used in Syria, and attempt­ing to sabotage the success of the Gentile mission (Gal.

While concrete issues like these predominate in his letters, Paul continually reverts to the essential gospel that the End-time has begun with Jesus’ resurrection. The Church, therefore, cannot be just another sect or philosophy, for it is already in its corporate and sacramental life an anticipation of the age to come; it is destined soon to embrace all Israel and the fullness of the Gentiles (Rom. ll:25f) in one humanity redeemed in Christ (Gal. 3:28). For Paul, Jesus’ resurrection replaces the Jewish Law as the final revelation of God’s righteousness; and characteristics formerly attributed to the Law are transferred instead to the person of Christ. He is pre-existent, active in creation, the history of salvation and ultimate redemption, the bringer of freedom, life and light (cf. 2 Cor. 4:4—6; Phil. 2:6-11). Paul’s contribution to the development of Christian thought rests chiefly in his concepts of the Church as the Body of Christ, and of Christ as the Last Adam and Wisdom of God.

As he feared (Rom. 15:31), Paul was denounced by unbelieving Jews, as he tried to deliver the collection in Jerusalem, was arrested, and after a lengthy imprisonment in Caesarea was shipped to Rome. Whether he was ever brought to trial there, or was caught up in the Neronian purge, or was released to continue his mission, or died undramatically in prison of illness and old age, we do not know.

Paul’s career is simply the best documented segment of a much wider expansion of Christianity in the first generation. Con­gregations were being established at the same time in Rome, Alexandria and in the oriental Jewish Dispersion. Within Paul’s own sphere of influence, parallel missions were operating, like those of Peter and of the group which eventually produced thejohannine literature. By the end of the first genera­tion, therefore, the movement had penetrated into the chief provinces of the Empire, and into many levels of society. It had no central organisation, but was a loose federation of local congregations and independent missions, held together by a common eschatological faith.

For all its Jewish roots, Christianity was a highly attractive religious option for non-Jews, dissatisfied with the sterility and political cynicism of state religion and excluded from the sectional and elitist constituencies of the philosophical sects and mystery cults. For them, Christ­ianity offered a non-violent but revolutionary message, which corresponded well to the instability of the times and the helplessness felt by ordinary people. It built upon the appeal of Israel’s ethical monotheism, but replaced the cultural drawbacks like circumcision, dietary regulations and animal sacrifice, with intense devotion to the person of the risen Saviour. It trans­formed a potentially damaging point, the execution of Jesus on a Roman cross, into a major asset, by making it the prime example of the mystery of God’s compassion. It offered to those who, for whatever reason, saw them­selves as socially disadvantaged, the security and identity of fellowship and the faith that they belonged in the centre of the divine purpose for the world.

The outline we have just given of the early develop­ment of Christianity has been rejected by several scholars in the modern period, and it is appropriate here to add a note of caution. Reacting against the over-idealised picture of Church harmony in the Acts of the Apostles, they have gone to the opposite extreme, and posited deep divisions in the move­ment from the very beginning. Alongside the form which Christian faith took in the case of Paul, two other distinct types have been detected, Jewish Christianity and Gnosticism. Second-century catholic orthodoxy, then, is seen as a fusion of certain elements of all three, while the main tendencies continued directly into various ‘heresies’. This radical hypothesis, however, depends so heavily on reading what it presupposes behind and between the lines of the surviving New Testament literature, and on tracing back later developments necessarily into the earlier period, that it can never be substan­tiated.

The more plausible, alternative view followed here is that early Christianity, for all its local variations in language, culture and organisation, retained an essential unity around its eschatological gospel; and that it only began to separate into distinct forms as it entered its second generation and awoke to the realisation that the End was to be delayed. The attempts to cope with the consequences of this unexpected survival into the ‘post-apostolic’ era covered a wide spectrum. For various reasons, not all of them purely doctrinal, some of these developed into the ‘heresies’ of the second and later centuries; the rest achieved a degree of recognition, signalled by their ultimate inclusion in the New Testament canon, and marked the boundaries of legitimate diversity within catholic orthodoxy.

Although its long-term effects for the structure of Christian doctrine were considerable, the delay of the Parousia did not, it must be emphasised, cause an immediate crisis of confidence. The certainty that the last days had begun with the resurrection of Jesus was not shaken by his failure to return within the lifetime of the Apostles. For one thing, the motif of unaccountable delay in God’s intervention was a regular feature in the story of Israel. Furthermore, Jesus’ own teaching was equivocal on this very point; and Paul had long since counselled the over-excited to adopt a reverent agnosticism. The fall of the Temple in 70 ce in the first instance reinforced the belief that at last the End was near. It was some time before it became necessary to revise the programme in this regard (Luke 21:21—4).

Eschatology, in the post-apostolic period, becomes less a means of interpreting the course of history, and more the ground and sanction for ethical exhortation. The prospect of ultimate judgement was morally if not temporally certain. Matthew allegorises several of the parables along these lines (see 13:24-30), and Luke inserts example stories in which the imminent death of an individual substitutes for public End-expectation (see 12:16-20). While eschatology was retained as the indispensable framework of Christian ethics, it was no longer able alone to determine its content. Marriage (Eph. 5:21ff) and civic duty (1 Pet. 2:13ff) had to be rehabilitated alongside the ideals of celibacy and martyrdom. It would be mistaken to interpret these changes simply as a decline from radicalism into social con­formity, for imminent eschatology could induce passivity, as in the case of attitudes to slavery, where a more down-to-earth approach could lead to actual changes in the social structure, at least within the confines of the Christian community.

The earliest Church had rejected Israel’s Law as the chief focus of its spirituality, but, in spite of some strong rhetoric from Paul, had allowed its influence tacitly to continue as an ethical code, through pressure from Christian Jews in the community. However, with the failure of the mission to the Jews in the post-apostolic period, the composition of the Church became increasingly Gentile, and Christian moral standards required explicit restatement. At the same time, the hostility between post-70Judaism and Christianity meant that no open concessions to thejewish tradition could be made. So Matthew’s Gospel, for example, has to walk a tightrope between moral exhortation and anti-Pharisaic polemic. And those who refused, on the authority of Paul, to adjust to the new situation and relearn the language of obedience to commandments, had to be silenced in his own name (2 Tim. 2:14—19) or one of comparable weight (Jas2:18f). The same phenomenon, of simultaneous Judaisation and anti-Judaism, is apparent elsewhere. In this period we witness the beginning of a long development in Christianity of standard orders of ministry, the structures of church government and disci­pline, set forms of liturgy and prayer, an ecclesiastical calendar, places of worship and pilgrimage, a Christian canon of Old Testament Scripture and methods for interpreting it, and a parallel New Testament canon. Thus, in competition with Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity reinvented equivalents for the religious institutions of Israel which had disappeared in the first-century crisis.

As we have seen, the delay of the Parousia gradually forced the Church to come to terms with the problems of ethics and its institutional life. Not surprisingly, when its own internal unity was threatened, chiefly by extremist solutions to the problems it was facing, it was tempted to meet the challenge out of these resources. Loyalty to the hierarchy and the test of practical morality often substitute for theological argument with dissidents (see Titus 1:8-16; 2John 6; 3John 9). But at a higher level, criteria for legitimate development do emerge from the later con­troversies with Jewish opponents and Christian heretics—the historical criteria of apostolic tradition and the finality of Christ. The two volumes of Luke-Acts are the clearest instance of this twofold appeal.

Apostolic tradition is not to be thought of as an authoritative body of doctrine. Paul’s letters, for example, yield no such thing. When the attempt was made, in the middle of the second century by Marcion, to reduce them to a theologically coherent system, the result was rejected as heresy. Tradition consisted rather of a willingness to identify with the Church’s own historical past, at the same time as trusting to the Spirit to guide it into the future. The fashion for writing pseudonymous letters, Ephesians, the Pastorals, 1 Peter, James, 2 Peter and Jude, is a graphic expression of this appeal in practice. Whatever needed to be said to preserve the health and unity of the contemporary Church was placed under the aegis of its founding fathers. The function of this criterion was to be a safeguard against discontinuity and radical innovation, and a brake on the free exercise of charismatic authority. It was rather a blunt instrument in its original form, which demanded and received considerable refinement as the Christian cen­turies proceeded.

The finality of Christ was already for Paul the one test of genuine apostolate (1 Cor. 3:11). In the later period it became, more than it was for him, a historical criterion. This is perhaps the main difference between the apostolic and the post-apostolic age, that while the one looked forward, to future verification of its claims about Jesus, the other turned back to history to justify those claims. The Synoptic Evangelists may well have been motivated principally by their own contemporary concerns, but the medium in which they chose to express them was that of historical narrative. The identity between the earthly Jesus and the transcendent glory of the risen Christ was to be maintained, however difficult the conjunction of humanity and divinity might be to understand. When, as in the case of the Fourth Gospel, post-Easter preaching and apologetic largely replace the tradition of Jesus’ own words, the historical realism of the Passion and the theological assertion that the word became flesh (1:14) provide the counterbalance. In the other great work of creative doctrine from the post-apostolic age, the Epistle to the Hebrews, a conscious attempt is made to lay equal stress on the historical and eternal, the human and divine aspects of the person of Christ (1:1-3; 2:14—18). The Christological criterion was not as precise as it had to become later. It left many questions still open for discussion, like how exactly the oneness with God of the risen Christ could be reconciled with monothe­ism, or the oneness with man of the earthly Jesus reconciled with his sinless­ness. But the degree of clarity that was achieved in this period removed any further threat to the structure of Christian faith from continued disappoint­ment of Parousia hope. The revelation of God in Christ was already com­plete; his future coming would only confirm, it would not change or add to it. Christology also provided the answer to the question of the relations between the Church and reconstituted Rabbinic Judaism; a decisive break had occurred, for all their similarities, between Christ-centred and Law-centred forms of Israel’s religion.