30 to 99 CE: Small Church, Big ideas
Before churches imported Roman hierarchical structures in an attempt to unify all believers under one set of dogmas, the only leadership model available (or appropriate) was an itinerant style of preaching and making ready for the return of Jesus. In its first 70 years or so, the church grew on the foundations of newly-written occasional letters and recitations that tried to distill and capture the truths of their departed leader. Questions were left unanswered by Jesus, so his early followers set to work interpreting the facts as they supposed them to be.
From his letter to the Romans, Paul reveals some of his thinking about the implications of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In chapter 3 we find the roots of the theory we now call "penal substitution," the idea that Christ's death was linked to punishment for past and present sins against God. However, Paul doesn't go as far as later interpreters, who found in Romans a legal-transactional event combined with propitiatory blood sacrifice.
Here's what Paul says in Romans 3:
"God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement [hilastérion- "a sin offering, by which the wrath of the deity shall be appeased"], through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus."
Did you expect Paul to say "He did this to make it possible for God to forgive our sins by punishing Jesus in our place…"?
Paul does not make this connection here. The purpose of the "sacrifice of atonement" is to reveal something about God, not engage in a legal transaction on our behalf. He's arguing a different point: that Jews and Gentiles are BOTH justified [dikaioó- absolved, pardoned, acquitted, placed in a category of acceptability] by means of the same thing, namely, assenting to the self-evident reality that the law was never meant to save. Only a positive response to the evidence of God's righteousness will do, and this is available to Jews and Gentiles.
This passage functions as an aside, subordinated to his long argument concerning how we are reconciled to God. Is it through the Jewish law? Circumcision? No, Paul argues. It's by exercising faith- believing a set of propositions about Jesus' purpose and mission. The point of his argument in Romans 3 is proving that faith, not law-keeping, is the way to move into a "justified" state. Redemption is activated for both Jewish law-keepers and pagan Gentiles when they place their faith in the atonement event.
In Paul's mind, the death of Jesus offers a way for anyone to participate mystically with Jesus in a death that affects our propensity to fail morally in ways like choosing the worship of idols or engaging in sexual behaviors outside traditional Jewish mores. This "death to sin" through baptism and confession allows us to make a clean break with our former selves and engage with a new self that demonstrates what we will be like in the Age to Come when God establishes a permanent arrangement in which all human beings achieve a higher plane of existence. For Paul this new way of life is expressed in Jewish and Roman ideal moral virtues in contrast to the out-of-control behavior of many Gentiles (see Romans 1:18 ff).
The "righteousness" part emphasizes that God's record of expected moral behavior is proven by his activity on our behalf.
But it's the resurrection that really gets Paul excited. Paul's good news is this: that the resurrection of Jesus proves that God is once again bringing life from death, just like he did with Abraham who produced great nations even though his reproductive years were far behind him. "Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God" (Rom. 4:19-20).
In Chapter 5 Paul concludes by drawing his readers' attention to the reconciliation that happens between God and people, to be received by us, as proven beyond a doubt by Jesus's emergence from the grave. Matthew Thiessen, in his book A Jewish Paul, summarizes:
Paul's letters frequently speak of resurrection because this is the heart of his message: Jesus's resurrection, which has just happened, and the imminent resurrection of all those who commit themselves to this good news and find themselves connected to the Messiah's fate (Rom. 6:5, 14; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 4:13-14). While the resurrection of the body waits, Paul believes, in the not-too-distant future, he claims that those who trust in the Messiah have already experienced a movement from death to life, one that can be tracked via one's moral life, as the preceding chapter argued.
Thiessen, A Jewish Paul Pg. 137
This is only one example of developments in the early church as adherents to this new Jewish sect tried to figure out the details of their new faith. Another one of Paul's main tenets was the imminence of the Parousia, or the appearance of Jesus to usher in the Last Day / Final judgement. His urgent concern was to assist as many as possible to hitch their wagon to this resurrected messiah and persist in that faith until the final curtain, which could drop any day now.
Paul is arguably our earliest "Christologist." Here's a basic outline of his ideas about who Jesus is:
He believed that Jesus functioned as God's way of breaking into the world of the first century as a harbinger of the End of the Age. He did think that Jesus was pre-existent in some way, and came to usher in the final period before the end of all things and the onset of the age to come.
YHWH sent him- Jesus was divine and incarnated as a human
He possessed the attributes of divinity, but wasn't the same as YHWH. Maybe something like an Old Testament "Angel of the Lord" (Malak). See Gal. 4:14
Acted as a broker of God's favor- offering a way to repent and avoid God's wrath, parallel to being ethnically Jewish and by extension, already on God's good side
Death and resurrection seem to be paired in Paul's thinking: the act of dying and rising offers justification the same way that Adam's disobedience condemned humankind to death
Christ's death provides a mystical way to participate with him through baptism. We are "united" with Jesus in a kind of death when we repent and become a new creature. Enacted by faith, a public proclamation and baptism
Death also positions Jesus as "Lord of both the dead and the living." (Romans 14)
Resurrection confirmed his position as the firstborn of many new glorified siblings (us), as a second Adam
How to access God's favor? Not by keeping the Jewish law unless you are Jewish, then it's not bad to keep it.
More ideas from Paul:
Galatians 4:4- " But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship." Pulled from its context in an argument about (what else?) the conflict between the law and faith, it looks here like Paul affirms the pre-existence of Jesus. Proof-texting was as common in the first century as it is in our day.
Wisdom as a hypostasis of God
In 1 Cor. 2:7, Paul makes this comment: "“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory…” a possible allusion to Proverbs 8, where Wisdom is personified and speaks, "“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.'"
We'll need the term hypostasis for later- the word has different meanings in different domains, but as an import into Christian theology from Neoplatonic thought, it refers to the necessary and sufficient elements that differentiate one existent thing from everything else. More specifically, it's the underlying reality or substance of an entity or person. It's not clear that "Wisdom" is made of the same kind of essence (hypostasis) as YHWH, although it does seem like she has some kind of pre-existence. A bouncy ball is not an apple because there are certain traits that make up each one's hypostasis. Apples and bouncy balls are both round in shape, though bouncy balls are usually more spherical than apples, and they bounce when dropped or thrown against a hard surface. They may be similar in some ways, but at the level of their hypostases, they are completely different.
Even so, close readings of Paul make it frustratingly difficult to sniff out with the precision we expect what he actually thought about the idea that Jesus was a kind of god-man. Dr. Bart Ehrman makes this point in his online blog:
Paul understood Christ to be the “rock” that provided life-giving water to the Israelites in the wilderness (1 Cor. 10:4) and pointed out that Paul stated that Christ, unlike the first Adam, came from “heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47). When Paul talks about God “sending” his son, he appears not to be speaking only metaphorically (like John the Baptist is said to have been “sent” from God in John 1:5, for example); instead, God actually sent Christ from the heavenly realm. As he put it in the letter to the Romans, “For what the law could not do, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3). It is interesting that Paul uses this term “likeness” – just as the Philippians poem did, when it spoke of Christ coming in the “appearance” of humans. It is the same Greek word in the two places. Did Paul want to avoid saying that Christ actually became human, but that he only came in a human “likeness”? It is hard to say.
From ehrmanblog.org
Now with this borrowed philosophical language, and driven by the urgent necessity to differentiate orthodoxy from the innumerable options challenging it, priests and bishops of the late first century began the long task of sorting out the right way to believe.
To Recap:
At the beginning, we have Jesus and a few followers who thought him to be a messiah sent by YHWH to set things right concerning the oppression of the Jewish nation. Hopes were high that Jesus was indeed the initiator of the end of time and had come to call his people into a repentant and ready state. He mentioned that the "Son of Man," an eschatological figure from Daniel and Ezekiel was involved, and his later biographers guessed that maybe he was actually the Son of Man.
Hopes were dashed when Jesus was crucified by a coalition of Jewish and Roman officials- a cursed death reserved for especially deviant or dangerous offenders.
In the information blackout just after this, rumors began to emerge that Jesus had actually returned from the dead, instructed his disciples for a time, then ascended into heaven to return again in a short while. The core idea of Jesus as a messiah was rescued and invested with new possibilities.
Jewish-Christian movements sprang up first in and near Jerusalem, spreading outward to Syria and the Transjordan. As best we can reconstruct, these groups consisted of believers in an end-stage eschatology, traditional Jewish ritual practices, and ascetic lifestyles.
Paul then came on the scene to posit his own interpretation of these events, based partly on his own experience of a resurrected Jesus. Despite his execution, Jesus could actually be the predicted messiah if you looked at his death and resurrection in a different way. The final judgement was yet to come, but in the meantime (which was short) there is a period in which Gentiles and Jews together can access the same movement from death to life in a mystical union with Christ.
Not long after Paul, we see a number of different written records appear that summarize the story. This indicates that oral reports and reflections had reached some higher echelons of Greco-Roman society in which almost all literature was produced and understood. The expensive and limited reach of the gospels (at first) took resources that were only available to composers with some means and the leisure to construct their highly rhetorical works. It's not difficult to see that they were written after no small measure of theologizing and commitments to particular viewpoints.
The book of Acts consists of Hellenistic author Luke following the trail of Peter, then Paul on their adventures in Jerusalem and around the Mediterranean. Luke's rhetorical goals seem to be to defend and legitimize the existence of small Christian communities planted mostly by Paul, and explaining what happened to the original Jerusalem church. While the gospel of Luke mentions the destruction of Jerusalem which occurred 70 CE, Acts only mentions a "persecution" that scatters the Jerusalem church locally in Judea and Samaria.
Acts also mentions the existence of "elders" in the Ephesian church. The word used is presbuteros, the same word used for a member of the Sanhedrin. The rudiments of a hierarchy were in effect at the time of the composition of Acts which scholars date to 80-90 CE.
Clear as Mud
From 30-100 CE questions just kept on emerging about who this Jesus might have been. Each gospel has a slightly different answer, the latest being John's with his certainty about a pre-existent divine person, incarnated as a human being. Mark seems to agree with an adoptionist view- that Jesus was an exalted human whose divinity was initiated at his baptism. We also have the appearance of a third divine person- the Holy Spirit- in the gospels and in Paul's writings!
The history of battling Christologies is a long and winding road and its beginnings in less-than-clear scriptures got things off to a confusing start.
By the end of the first century, when most of the New Testament was produced, we don't find a detailed Christology that persists through the ages. On the contrary, all of the infighting, intrigue, debates and fruitless attempts to clarify the truth about Jesus the Messiah arise from the pages of various "authoritative writings" that eventually made their way into our Bibles a few centuries later.
There were other writings as well. A sampling of works that were composed early on, but didn't make the canon include:
The Didache (50-120 CE)
Gospel of Thomas
Apocalypse of Adam
Gospel of Peter
Secret Mark
Epistle of Barnabas
1 Clement
We refer you to Early Christian Writings for an extensive library of source material.
The Didache is a short instruction manual on expected behaviors for Christians and how to do liturgy. It details a Jewish-style eucharist with no mention of atonement or forgiveness. It also deals with the problem of itinerant "Prophets, Apostles and teachers."
The Gospel of Thomas is series of sayings, some of which match with what we have in the gospels, others of which show some gnostic tendencies like, "And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death."
The Gospel of Peter, Epistle of Barnabas and even 1 Clement are considered by scholars to be pseudepigrapha- a kind of "fan fiction" about the Christian movement with mix-ins from popular belief systems of the day.
Remarkably, there appears to have been a rapid move toward a leadership structure as soon as it appeared that the promised Parousia would be delayed. The church had to settle in for a longer haul than Paul imagined. The picture is murky, but we can piece together some of the names of those who assumed responsibility for the churches in their vicinity. Thirty to forty years after Paul we find communities of house churches growing in urban centers in Roman provinces. The causes for rapid growth have been addressed elsewhere and is outside the scope of this article, but in the minds of Hellenized-Roman-Jewish-Pagan converts, the need for an administrative apparatus emerged.
For comparison, consider that Netflix did not exist until 1997 or 27 years before this article was first published. Now it's a normal part of everyday life and it made the jump from physical CD's through the mail to online streaming to producing its own content. Modern cars and air travel as we know them got their start at the turn of the 20th century, transforming the way humans travel in a mere 120 years. Space travel developed in a mere 60 years. Social innovations might propagate more quickly now in the time of light-speed communication, but it's not impossible for a formerly illicit and sometimes persecuted religious sect to join forces with the Roman Empire in 300 years' time.
In 1633 Galileo was convicted of heresy for his support of Copernicus's idea that the earth orbited the sun. in 1969, A spacecraft with humans aboard landed on the moon. In 336 years, beliefs about how the world works can change dramatically!
Beginning from the Jerusalem church with its strong Jewish flavor, eventually led by James, the brother of Jesus, to the small pockets of Paul's legacy in far-flung Roman and Greek towns from Antioch in Syria all the way to Rome, little assemblies of Messianic believers began to add up.
Christology was not yet the divisive issue it would become later. The earliest questions centered first on the urgent mission to convince local populations that the end of days was upon them, and that a Messiah had been sent to pioneer a way to avoid the wrath of the one true God of the Jews. Next in line was how to manage those converts while fending off opposition from local Jewish authorities and Roman Pagan distaste for what they saw as "atheism." Paul spends a lot of ink and probably oration on solving the problem of including both Jew and Gentile into one faith-based community. Results were mixed, as Gentile membership eventually eclipsed Jewish adherents.
The last half of the first century saw the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE, the core books of the New Testament composed, small house-sized ecclesia growing to multiple sites, some sporadic outbreaks of official and unofficial persecution, and the emergence of local leaders with positional authority to make decisions on behalf of the churches nearby. Scholar Rodney Stark's best determination was that Christians numbered possibly around 10,000 by the end of the first century, clustered around larger towns in which social networks of believers established small ecclesia.
After her initial startup, Christendom would soon enter a long period of wrangling about "The Truth." by this time, long traditions of philosophical "schools" vying for supremacy had blended with Roman political ways and means to create an instinct to formulate religious faith in precise ways. In this binary paradigm, it came down to orthodoxy versus heresy- what separated "true" Christian beliefs from Gnosticism, traditional paganism, Judaism, and all varieties of schismatic dissenters. The supposition that one's standing before a soon-to-judge-the-world God, who also saw things in black-and-white terms raised the temperature of the debate. For those responsible for leading their congregations away from faulty ideas and toward true ones, heaven and hell were on the table.
The Rise of Christology
From Paul onward, questions piled up. As the Jesus movement shifted to a Gentile base, the church left behind most of the wrangling about salvation for Jew versus Gentile. This project became a Gentile project driven by Gentile questions. While Jewish theological debate did lead to protest, division and break-off sects, the centering effects of Yahweh worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, ancient traditions and the unifying story of their national origins, and assuming an ethnic identity kept Jews on their own trajectory. The long-established authority of their written documents tended to keep theological ideas tethered to an identifiable playing field.
Not so for the diverse Greco-Roman "God-fearers" and pagans who made up the Gentile churches. Into these new ecclesia they brought a passion for orthodoxy, or right belief. The idea that one must subscribe to a correct set of facts about God and God's Messiah took center stage once the church lost some of its ancient Jewish moorings. What was at stake?
Blasphemy- Heresy could call into question the very reputation of God and infect the church with falsehood
If wrong ideas about God were allowed to take root in a church, it was completely possible that liturgy and forms of worship could be insulting to God or damaging to one's eternal destiny (precedent for this can be seen in Isaiah Ch. 1)
Conflicting notions about the nature of God and Christ couldn't be tolerated because there can only be one God and one truth. Contradiction was impossible.
Division and schism would make it difficult to govern the entire church as a unified institution- this again reflected directly on the church's ability to carry out its God-given mission. After Constantine, these became political problems as well
The original doctrines and practices of the church (as determined by later authorities) must be preserved. This was not simply intellectual, but practical as priests had to align their distribution of sacraments with what they considered revealed truth as received from older authorities
Satanic deception was understood to be an explanation for heresy and a rationale for opposing it
Why not allow different traditions like the Ebionites to continue in their beliefs and practices? Arguably, this Jewish sect reflected the very earliest expressions of messianic Judaism and to some would reflect something closer to what Jesus actually wanted to flourish. Known to us today only by polemical writings from their opponents, we don't have an exact account of their beliefs. What was so disagreeable that notables like Irenaeus, Eusebius and Origen took pains to campaign against them? Gleaning from anti-heretical treatises by these and other Church Fathers, we know that Ebionites practiced voluntary poverty, denied the divinity of Jesus including any kind of pre-existence and virgin birth; rather, he was adopted as God's son and Messiah due to his perfect obedience to the Mosaic law.
We may not know all the reasons why the dozens of Christianities were starved out, but there seemed to be a concern that "Judaizing" forces would upend their interpretations of Paul as a successionist (understanding God to have replaced the Jews as chosen people, conferring that designation on the Church). Certainly the reasons noted above were also factors and most of them have to do with power dynamics and gatekeeping authority.
Out of so many examples of anti-heretical writings, this brief snippet of Justin Martyr's Dialog with Trypho gives us a glimpse into the thinking of these "defenders of orthodoxy:"
There are, therefore, and there were many, my friends, who, coming forward in the name of Jesus, taught both to speak and act impious and blasphemous things… For some…teach to blaspheme the Maker of all things, and Christ, who was foretold by Him as coming, and the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob… we have nothing in common [with them], since we know them to be atheists, impious, unrighteous, and sinful, and confessors of Jesus in name only, instead of worshippers of Him. Yet they style themselves Christians, just as certain among the Gentiles inscribe the name of God upon the works of their own hands, and partake in nefarious and impious rites.
As the first of Jesus's disciples died off, the movement they left behind was anything but institutional. Experts on this period of the Christian movement are mostly in the dark with few tangible records to inform a reconstruction of events. We do have the book of Acts, the epistles, the book of Hebrews and other works that leave tantalizing clues and inferences, the lives and activities of the Christian rank and file is a mystery. It appears that the early church was a mostly urban phenomenon, for a number of reasons. For more on that see Wayne Meeks- The First Urban Christians. The sources we have indicate a diverse scattering of believers taking root in disparate cities around the Mediterranean.
By the fourth century outright battles raged as the Roman Empire and newly politicized Christendom joined forces. Athanasius in the late 350's spells out his opinion of one heresy in his book Four Discourses Against the Arians:
"But, whereas one heresy, and that the last, which has now risen as harbinger of Antichrist, the Arian, as it is called, considering that other heresies, her elder sisters, have been openly proscribed, in her craft and cunning, affects to array herself in Scripture language , like her father the devil, and is forcing her way back into the Church's paradise — that with the pretense of Christianity, her smooth sophistry (for reason she has none) may deceive men into wrong thoughts of Christ — nay, since she has already seduced certain of the foolish, not only to corrupt their ears, but even to take and eat with Eve, till in their ignorance which ensues they think bitter sweet, and admire this loathsome heresy… those whom it has deceived may repent; and, opening the eyes of their heart, may understand that darkness is not light, nor falsehood truth, nor Arianism good; nay, that those who call these men Christians are in great and grievous error, as neither having studied Scripture, nor understanding Christianity at all, and the faith which it contains."
As the church grew, even as a persecuted not-quite-legal religion, the risks and rewards of certain theological positions took on heights and depths never dreamed of by its original founders. What began as a tentative Jewish sect based on itinerant preaching and informal social networks morphed into multi-layered hierarchies with vast political power in a relatively short time. By the time Paul had finished his race in 64 or 65 CE, believers were already concerned that the end of the age had not occurred. It appeared as if the church needed to settle in for a longer stay than previously thought.
In the 250 years between Paul and Nicaea, there was plenty of time and opportunity to hammer away at the burning theological questions keeping Christendom deeply divided.
In the next article, we'll continue to trace our way along the trail from the first century to the twenty-first, peeking in at all the ways the church has changed its mind about who Jesus is. We'll see the arguments and factions develop as those early believers hammered out what they saw as the truth about Jesus.
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