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 – precisely because he was thought to have imitated Christ even to the point of a violent death.¹⁷

In addition to portraying Jesus the teacher as a model to be imitated, the Gospel writers also emphasized the content of his preaching – especially the theme of the Kingdom of God which was expressed most strikingly perhaps in the parables. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God indicated not a place (not even a heavenly place) but rather God’s rule. His teachings about the Kingdom of God not only showed the goodness, justice and loving kindness of divine kingship but also demonstrated its stark contrast with the current condition of the world. Jesus thought that something was going to happen soon which would bring about God’s kingdom – that is, his preaching was marked by a strong focus on eschatology, or teachings about the ‘end’ (eschaton, in Greek). Furthermore, he thought that he was participating in that event in some way.¹⁸ There is much debate about what exactly Jesus himself thought about his involvement (for example, whether it would necessarily involve his death, or whether he anticipated his resurrection). In any case, the authors of the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers were writing from the perspective of their belief in Christ’s resurrection. Therefore, they depicted Jesus’ death and resurrection as the events which brought about the kingdom which he preached – or, more accurately, which initiated the events which would eventually bring it about in all its fullness. Some of the earliest Christian writers – notably Paul, especially in his earliest writings – shared Jesus’ eschatological outlook: that is, they looked forward to the imminent arrival of the end of the world (the eschaton). They developed this by connecting it to an expectation of Jesus’ imminent return to earth from heaven:

For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever. (I Thessalonians 4.14–18)

This hope is expressed in perhaps its most vivid form in the Book of Revelation. It is also found, for example, in other works like the Didache:

Be watchful over your life; never let your lamps go out or your loins be ungirt, but keep yourselves always in readiness, for you can never be sure of the hour when our Lord may be coming.¹⁹

Other writers interpreted the coming of the kingdom more in terms of the new spiritual life which they felt they enjoyed since Jesus’ death and resurrection.²⁰ This was often connected with a strong belief that Jesus’ resurrection was a guarantee of their own. In this period, the exact nature of that resurrection after death was not specified. Most important was the belief that one’s present life was not all that there was; that the new spiritual life which had been granted in baptism would be perfected after death and that the journey of coming to know God the Father through Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit would end in a homecoming in which the believer would see God ‘face to face’.²¹

Virtually all the early Christian texts explicitly mentioned Christ’s death and resurrection, but they did so with widely varying degrees of detail.²² Clearly, the Gospels offered the fullest narrative accounts and they interpret the significance of Jesus’ death in various ways. For example, they depicted Christ as speaking from the Cross the words of the Psalmist and saw the crucifixion as the fulfilment of various prophecies or symbolic passages in the Hebrew Bible:

At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15.34, quoting Psalms 22.1 in Aramaic; cf. Matthew 27.46)

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last. (Luke 23.46, quoting Psalm 31.5)

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.’ (John 19.28, quoting Psalm 69.21)

Another method is to explain the significance of Jesus’ death through concepts with resonances in Jewish theology, such as sacrifice or the defeat of death (see below).

Much debate about the theology of the writings of this period has focused on the so-called ‘titles’ of Christ – expressions such as ‘Messiah’, ‘Son of Man’, ‘Son of God’ and so on, which can tell us something about who the authors thought Jesus was and in what his importance lay. Although there are drawbacks to an exclusive focus on these words, they do provide a useful way into early conceptions about Jesus. In particular, they highlight the interplay of Jewish and other cultural backgrounds and they draw attention to the fact that the questions which modern theologians and historians most want to ask about Jesus (for example, was he God?, did he think he was God?) are not necessarily the questions which preoccupied the earliest Christians.²³

It seems probable that Jesus referred to himself as the ‘Son of Man’, but what he meant by this is rather more unclear. It seems to have been connected with Jesus’ recognition that his preaching would lead to his rejection, but it was also possibly linked to his hope that he would eventually be vindicated by God.²⁴ It was therefore an eschatological concept, which might explain why the title only appears in the Gospel traditions, which also emphasize Jesus’ preaching about the Kingdom of God. Similarly, the title ‘Lord’ does not tell us very much. It was probably used by some first-century Greek-speaking Jews as an alternative to the divine name in Hebrew, YHWH, which they were forbidden to pronounce. It was also used by Greek pagans to refer to certain deities. However, its use for Jesus did not necessarily imply that the writer thought Jesus was God (or a god), for it could also be used as a polite form of address, particularly for a man to whom one owed obedience. So, like Mary’s term for the risen Jesus, ‘Rabbouni’, the term ‘Lord’ tells us about the respect in which Jesus was held but not very much about what early Christians thought his life, death and resurrection achieved for humankind, and nothing about how they conceptualized his actual nature (was he human or divine?).²⁵

More helpful is the term ‘Messiah’, for which the Greek term Christos is a translation. This is the most common title applied to Jesus by Paul, for example, and it clearly stems from a Jewish tradition. In Hebrew a mashiah, a messiah, was someone who had been anointed. Traditionally, anointing was the mark of kings, priests and prophets. Imagery relating to all these categories was used by New Testament writers to explain who Jesus was (not always, however, in connection with the actual term ‘messiah’). In forms of Judaism with a particular eschatological expectation, ‘messiah’ was often used to refer to a hoped-for king who would come to rule Israel as a successor to King David. Did Jesus therefore think that he was this messiah? Possibly. At any rate, very early on his followers assigned to him this role, almost certainly with eschatological hopes in mind. However, this conclusion must be qualified in several important ways. First, the Gospel writers (and possibly Jesus himself) sought systematically to undermine several assumptions about such a messiah: Jesus was portrayed as rejecting all normal forms of earthly political power, as contrasting the Kingdom of God with human kingship, as subverting the imagery of human kingship. Secondly, not all Jews had Messianic expectations – so any sense that Jesus as messiah (even a reinterpreted messiah) was the ‘obvious’ fulfilment of a uniform Jewish expectation must be rejected. (When later Christians attacked Jews for not spotting that Jesus was the messiah, they were falsely assuming that all first-century Judaism was awaiting such a person.) Finally, although the title Christos was used very early for Christ, it rapidly lost the association with specifically Jewish eschatological expectation and became a kind of further proper name, almost as if to specify which Jesus was being spoken about. In his writings Paul never, for example, tries to argue that Jesus was ‘the Messiah’.²⁶

It might be thought that the term ‘Son of God’ would present a cut-and-dried case that Jesus was thought to be divine, but even here the evidence is rather ambiguous: in itself the term did not imply divinity, although it usually denoted someone who was an agent of God. It may well have been connected by early Christians to Jesus’ resurrection – the idea being that Jesus was ‘made’ Son of God at that point; it almost certainly reflected the fact that Jesus addressed God as ‘Abba, Father’ and invited other Christians to do so too.²⁷ Thus early Christians seemed to have believed that through Jesus they too could be counted as ‘sons of God’.²⁸ In Paul, this idea is extended with another metaphor: Christ is the true Son of the Father, but through him all who believe in him are made sons by adoption:

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8.14–17)

This was a particularly powerful image in a society in which it was common for men without sons to adopt a boy or young man to be their legitimate heir: it expresses a sense of being uniquely chosen that is missing from the English concept. It also creates a deliberate paradox with another central theme in Paul’s theology: the universal nature of God’s offer of sonship. That idea was strongly connected with the parallel which Paul drew between Jesus and Adam. For Paul, Jesus and Adam were in different ways representative of all human nature. Just as Adam represented the failings of human nature, so Jesus Christ represented the possibility that all could return to a proper relationship with God again: ‘for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ’.²⁹

A further range of language used by the New Testament writers for Jesus harks back to the ‘Wisdom’ traditions of the Hebrew Bible. In these, God’s ‘Wisdom’ and God’s ‘Word’ are described in ways that almost suggest that they are independent beings alongside the one God. Wisdom in particular is vividly personified in Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon. What these terms meant exactly to the Jewish writers is not clear – they may just have been powerfully imaginative ways of depicting God’s wise ordering of the world (both through creation and his providential action thereafter) and his ability to act powerfully in the world whilst remaining transcendent (a development of Genesis 1’s idea that God could create merely by speaking). Yet the ambiguous position which the authors gave to Wisdom and the Word – as being supremely expressive of God’s nature yet not identical to God – was undoubtedly exploited by Christian writers who wanted to say something similar of Jesus. What was different was the way in which the New Testament use of this language saw God’s Wisdom and Word as definitively embodied in one particular human being. The most famous passage to do this was, of course, the opening of John’s Gospel, which deliberately harked back to Genesis 1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ This passage, together with the Colossians’ ‘hymn’ ³⁰ and the opening of the Book of Hebrews, expressed the belief that not only did Jesus reveal or embody the wisdom and power of God, but that he was so close to God that he was involved even in God’s creative activity:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created. (Colossians 1.15–16)

In these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, through whom he created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. (Hebrews 1.2–3)

Such language naturally suggested that in some sense the Word which was in Jesus existed before Jesus’ birth, indeed before the beginning of the world. John’s Gospel expressed this belief vividly in narrative form, beginning with the idea that the Word who was ‘with God … came to dwell among us’ and constantly reinforcing the idea that Jesus would ascend to heaven where he was before.³¹ Similar passages pointing to the idea of a pre-existent Son can be found in the non-canonical writings of the period: they suggested, for example, that Christ was the inspiration of the Prophets and was sent from or by God.³² Ignatius wrote of ‘Jesus Christ who before the ages was with the Father and who was manifested at the end’.³³ It is clear that this kind of language exalted Jesus more than the other titles we have considered; it seems to have made more definite claims about Jesus’ divinity. Nevertheless, even here one should be cautious. The authors were developing the concepts of Wisdom and Word in order to apply them to a specific historical person, Jesus. Nevertheless the language remained ambiguous: faith in the one God was still central and the precise nature of the relationship between the Son, Jesus, to his Father was not defined. Of course, later Church Fathers used these texts to prove their own interpretations of this relationship, as we shall see; but this does not justify reading back into the New Testament a fully developed Christology.

As well as studying the titles of Jesus, it is useful to look at what the earliest Christians thought Jesus would or could do for them, rather than what he was. Their ideas were focused around several closely interconnected themes: Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection and ascension into heaven, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Although there is no formal theology of the atonement either in the New Testament or in the Apostolic Fathers, there are clear indications that the writers thought that Christ’s death and resurrection effected salvation, even if they were unsure how. This is most evident in Paul, whose writings emphasize the saving power of the Cross. Paul sometimes explained salvation in terms of sacrifice: the holy one, Jesus, was offered on behalf of sinful humanity and this opened up forgiveness, and a new life for those who believe in him. He also suggested that the believer could participate in Jesus’ death and resurrected life through baptism, which was interpreted specifically as the death to sin (or an old way of life) and initiating new life.³⁴

How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6.2–5)

These two ideas – sacrifice and participation – did not fit together in a neat or systematic way in Paul’s theology. Paul (like other Christian writers in the first and later centuries) employed a range of figurative language to get as close as he could to expressing what he thought was ultimately an inexpressible mystery.

In the Apostolic Fathers the belief in Jesus’ death as a holy sacrifice was often expressed in the idea that Christ’s flesh and blood effected salvation: for example, the Epistle of Barnabas asserted that Christians were ‘sanctified by the remission of sins, that is, by his sprinkled blood’.³⁵ By extension, Christ’s flesh and blood were something believers must believe in, even venerate, in order for that salvation to become effective in them:

Let us fix our gaze on the Blood of Christ, and let us know that it is precious to his Father, because it was poured out for our salvation, and brought the grace of repentance to all the world. (1 Clement 7.4)³⁶

Thus Christ’s flesh and/or blood became in itself symbolic of the new life of salvation or some specific quality associated with it and Ignatius even went so far as to salute his addressees ‘in the blood of Jesus Christ, which is eternal and lasting joy’.³⁷ This language clearly also alluded to the Eucharist – a theme to which we will return below. The idea of Jesus’ ascension into heaven, which was alluded to throughout John’s Gospel and narrated in an apparently more straightforward fashion in Luke and Acts, was accompanied by belief that Jesus’ power would remain with his followers in the form of the Holy Spirit:

‘But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. (Acts 1.8–9)³⁸

The theme of the pouring out of God’s Spirit is an important one in Peter’s preaching (as it is described in Acts) and Paul’s letters.³⁹ Both in his sacrificial death and in his gift of the Spirit, Jesus Christ was seen as a mediator. The language of mediation was particularly strong in the Letter to the Hebrews, where it accompanied the idea of Jesus Christ as a unique and final High Priest, mediating between God and humankind.⁴⁰ The little we know about early Christian liturgies and rituals also reveals the hope that even when ascended to heaven Jesus Christ would remain a mediator between the community and the Father. A typical prayer which implies that the Christian can call on God because of the work he has done through Jesus Christ appears in 1 Clement:

We will entreat the Creator of all things with heartfelt prayer and supplication that the full sum of his elect … may ever be preserved intact through his beloved Son Jesus Christ, by whom he has called us out of darkness to light, and from ignorance to the clear knowledge of the glory of his name.⁴¹

The idea of prayer to God through the mediation of Christ is also evident in early Christian eucharistic prayers. As the quotation from Acts at the beginning of this chapter makes clear, early Christian communities met to break bread together. These community meals were accompanied by mealtime prayers, as would have been traditional Jewish practice. Such prayers were adapted by Christians in ways that expressed their specific beliefs and hopes in Christ:

We give you thanks, our Father, for the holy vine of David, your child, which you made known to us through Jesus your child.

To you be the glory forever.

We give you thanks, our Father, for the life and knowledge that you made known to us through Jesus your child.

To you be the glory forever.

As this fragment of bread was dispersed upon the mountains and was gathered to become one, so may your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.⁴²

In this liturgy from the Didache, the worship of the community was conceived of as a sacrifice in which the whole community participated. This concept of sacrifice was often, although not always, connected with the interpretation of Christ’s death as sacrifice. The words from the Didache above also expressed a strong hope for the eschatological salvation of the whole Church – a hope that is set in the context of a vivid expectation of the imminent and traumatic end of the world.⁴³ Eucharistic themes in John’s Gospel – such as the identification of Christ with the bread of life – also suggested a close association of the Eucharist with Christ’s resurrection and the promise of new life.⁴⁴ The idea seems to be that in sharing the bread, which was symbolically identified with Jesus Christ, the community felt that they were sharing in (or would share in) Jesus’ resurrection. (This idea is similar to the second strand in Pauline theology identified above, but with a focus more on the Eucharist than baptism as the means of participation in Christ’s saving work.)

While some early eucharistic traditions stressed Jesus’ resurrection, others put more emphasis on Jesus’ crucifixion and on the breaking of bread as a memorial of his death. These traditions are reflected in the synoptic Gospels and I Corinthians. In these texts, the meal-time prayer which had already become traditional in some Christian communities was taken to echo the very words which Jesus spoke at the last meal before his death.

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (I Corinthians 11.23–6) ⁴⁵

Such a formulation puts a strong emphasis on commemoration – in particular, remembering God’s saving actions. Such commemoration was an important aspect of the prayers at Passover meals which Jesus’ words were meant to evoke (regardless of whether the Last Supper was the Passover meal or not).⁴⁶ The ideas of commemoration and participation were not clearly distinguished in these early prayers; in both it can be argued that there was a sense that through the shared meal Christ was somehow being made present.⁴⁷ The story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24.13–35) is a dramatic evocation of the combined elements of memory, sharing bread and Christ’s presence. The fact that Christ is only ‘somehow’ present is conveyed by the disciples’ initial lack of recognition and Christ’s vanishing. The story also points to the interesting combination of a meal with the exposition of the Hebrew Scriptures. The difference between the Didache tradition and the synoptic tradition suggests that different communities developed their own ritual meal-time prayers in the early decades of Christianity. What united all such early prayers, however, was the connection with an actual meal,⁴⁸ their role in uniting the community and the implicit sense of unity with other communities taking part in the same kind of meal elsewhere.

Baptism performed the same role of symbolizing the unity of the community and giving the baptized person a strong sense of belonging. Early Christian baptism carried with it a clear idea of initiation: the believer through baptism was identifying himself or herself with a specific group. It may be that baptism became for Christians the once-and-for-all rite of initiation for converts that circumcision was for Jews⁴⁹ – with the obvious difference that baptism applied to women as well as men. Just as some pagans became ‘Godfearers’ – attending synagogue and worshipping the one God of Abraham, but not receiving circumcision – it is likely that some people were associated with the earliest Christian communities without being baptized. (This situation was later formalized into the concept of the catechumenate, according to which believers signalled their intention to be baptized and received Christian teaching with that aim in mind.) It seems that baptism was necessary for full participation in the special community meals.⁵⁰

Besides the idea of initiation, early Christians associated baptism with purification and the forgiveness of sins. Christian baptism seems to have been similar in some respects to Jewish purificatory washings, particularly those of converts. However, the association of baptism with repentance and forgiveness and the application of it to everyone, Jews as well as proselytes, was apparently new.⁵¹ The connection of baptism with a call to repentance is evident in the Gospel accounts of both John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ preaching. The connection of baptism with forgiveness led to it being understood as salvific: ‘Your life has been saved by water’.⁵² Another aspect of the understanding of baptism was its interpretation as dying to sin and rising with Christ (discussed in relation to Paul’s theology above).

Since baptisms were closely associated with the community meals which the earliest Christians took in each others’ houses, baptisms probably took place in private baths or in local springs or rivers (after which the community would move inside).⁵³ A three-fold formula for baptism – ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ – seems to have become established very early, but baptism ‘in the name of Jesus’ was probably also very common.⁵⁴ Paul seems to have associated baptism with the declaration that ‘Jesus is Lord!’ ⁵⁵ The use of the metaphor of being clothed ‘with Christ’, or ‘with a new self’, suggests that the candidates removed some or all of their clothes in order to be baptized and perhaps put on new garments afterwards.⁵⁶ Frequent references to anointing and being ‘sealed’ indicate that the candidates were anointed with oil at some point.⁵⁷ For obvious reasons, the only explicit mentions of baptism in the very early Church refer to the baptism of adult candidates: it is possible that when whole households were converted to Christianity infants were baptized as well, but this is very uncertain. (Clarity over the issue has not been helped by the fact that those who supported infant baptism and those who rejected it have both sought to validate their views by reference to the New Testament.) ⁵⁸

Both the eucharistic prayers and the rite of baptism adapted certain aspects of Jewish tradition to a new Christian context. The same applied to the other aspects of community worship. Early Christians probably met to sing psalms, and possibly other, newly composed, hymns. They also set aside one day a week as a particular day for worship. Originally this was the Jewish Sabbath on the seventh day of the week, but as time progressed it became for increasing numbers of Christians the first day of the week, the Sunday on which they believed the resurrection had taken place. The veneration of this day of the week also connected with a traditionally held Jewish association of the ‘eighth day’ with eschatological perfection.⁵⁹ Arguments over whether one should venerate the seventh-day Sabbath or the first-/eighth-day ‘Lord’s day’ were one source of tension in early Christian communities.⁶⁰ The setting aside of the Sunday following the Passover as a special celebration of the resurrection was not established until the second century. The first Jewish Christians presumably celebrated Passover in the traditional manner. It is unclear what communities of Gentile converts did. The first evidence of a specifically new and Christian celebration of the Passover is found in the Letter of the Apostles (c.150CE); for several decades after that Christians argued about whether the celebration of the resurrection should be on the 14th day of the Jewish month Nisan (whatever the day of the week) or on the Sunday following. Underlying these arguments were not only regional variations in practice but fraught questions about how close to traditional Jewish practice Christian communities should remain.

Leadership in early Christian communities was provided by those who preached the new message about Jesus Christ, who led the rites of baptism and the Eucharist, who owned the houses in which the early Christian groups met or who had a moral authority owing to their own way of life. (These roles were not necessarily filled by the same people: Paul, for example, seems only rarely to have baptized.⁶¹) We can assume that most of those who wrote the earliest Christian texts – especially the letters – were leaders of their own communities. Some of the early Christian writings appear to be from the leader of one group giving advice to other leaders.⁶² Early Christians often viewed their leaders as heirs of the tasks given by Jesus to the Apostles, either literally, because they had been taught or appointed by Apostles, or in a figurative sense:

Now the Gospel was given to the Apostles for us by the Lord Jesus Christ; and Jesus the Christ was sent from God. That is to say, Christ received his commission from God, and the Apostles theirs from Christ. … So thereafter, when the Apostles had been given their instructions, and all their doubts had been set at rest by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, they set out in the full assurance of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the coming of God’s kingdom. And as they went through the territories and townships preaching, they appointed their first converts – after testing them by the Spirit – to be bishops and deacons for the believers of the future.⁶³

Not content with tracing bishops back to the Apostles and thus to Christ, the author even claims the institution was foretold in the Book of Isaiah! ⁶⁴ Later churches in the great cities of the Empire often claimed to have been founded by an Apostle, and churchmen tried to trace back a succession of Church leaders to one of the Apostles (see, for example, the lists in the fourth-century Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History).

In the first decades of the Christian movement, various terms began to be applied to the leaders, especially diakonos (minister, ‘one who serves’), presbyter (elder) and episkopos (literally, ‘overseer’, but usually translated as ‘bishop’). These words were originally probably very fluid or even interchangeable, especially the terms presbyter and episkopos. Paul refers to himself as the minister (diakonos) of Christ. As communities developed a more formal structure they probably usually had one main leader, assisted by deacons (diakonoi) who seem often to have helped with practical matters like communications with other churches and the distribution of assistance to the needy. Philippians, 1 Clement and the Didache mention ‘bishops’ and ‘deacons’; Polycarp has ‘presbyters’ and ‘deacons’; but bishops and presbyters seem to play the same role in all these texts and the role of deacons is not clear.⁶⁵ Although there is mention of all three terms in the pastoral epistles, one should be very cautious about assuming that there was a fully formed ‘three-fold ministry’ so early: in I Timothy, for example, the terms presbyter and episkopos could be read as synonyms.⁶⁶ Only by the beginning of the second century can one see, in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch for example, an argument for a quite firmly hierarchical system in which bishops oversaw the work of presbyters who were assisted by deacons. Only bishops, or someone appointed by them, could celebrate the Eucharist. Even then, we cannot be sure that this practice was common outside Asia Minor (or even inside Asia Minor – Ignatius is arguing for it, not assuming it was everywhere in place).

There is uncertainty about the precise roles of women in early Christian communities. It is fairly clear that women were very important in the development of early Christianity, for example in giving financial assistance, providing a house for groups to meet and worship in and being hospitable to travelling preachers. Clearly certain women were important converts in that they brought their whole household with them. Paul mentions several such women in his letters. But whether women had a more formal position in their communities is much more controversial (and, like the issue of infant baptism, is especially so because modern debates about women’s ministry have reached back to prove their cases from the ancient texts).⁶⁷ Phoebe is described as a diakonos and Paul’s prostatis (‘patron’) in Romans 16.1–2. Although diakonos has often been translated ‘deaconess’, there is no verbal distinction made between Phoebe and male deacons: the existence of a specific office of deaconess, as opposed to deacon, was not known until much later and its application to Romans is anachronistic. Having said that, it is not clear what her role was, beyond the fact that she was a financial supporter of the community and that she was travelling on the community’s behalf, perhaps by carrying Paul’s letter. I Timothy – a later text – gives advice for ministers in the Christian community:

Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way – for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? … Deacons likewise must be serious, not double-tongued, not indulging in much wine, not greedy for money; they must hold fast to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. And let them first be tested; then, if they prove themselves blameless, let them serve as deacons. Women likewise must be serious, not slanderers, but temperate, faithful in all things. Let deacons be married only once, and let them manage their children and their households well; for those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and great boldness in the faith that is in Christ Jesus. (I Timothy 3.2–5, 8–13)

Given the structure of this passage, it seems very likely that the ‘women’ referred to are women deacons, although it is possible that they are the wives of deacons. (The fact that I Timothy 2.11–15 rejected the teaching authority of women reflects the fact that ‘deacon’ does not appear to be used at this date for someone with a teaching function.)

If this evidence hints at a change in the role of women as deacons, is the same true of them as presbyters or episkopoi? A case has been made that Evodia and Syntyche in Philippians 4.2 are leaders of local house churches, i.e. episkopoi, rather than deacons, in the terminology of that letter.⁶⁸ Paul’s letter to the Romans suggests that some husbands and wives were joint leaders of house churches: Prisca and her husband Aquila (Romans 16.3), and Andronicus and Junia, who are apparently assumed to be Apostles (Romans 16.7).⁶⁹ It would be very surprising indeed if no early Christian woman led a baptism ceremony or a eucharistic meal, given that Christianity was in general welcoming to women and that some later groups (albeit marginal ones) used women in these roles.⁷⁰ The question is how common such women were. The lack of positive evidence and the relative scarcity of arguments against women leading baptisms or Eucharists suggests that such women were very few and/or very early. We know for certain that some women sought to speak authoritatively in their communities, for they are criticized in the pastoral epistles. Whatever the precise role of women in the earliest days of the Church, as the Church became increasingly institution-alized it reflected the social attitudes of the time towards women’s leadership, whether that leadership was thought of as being primary intellectual, spiritual or political. The difference between texts like the undisputed Pauline epistles and the pastoral epistles, and again between late first-century works and those written at the beginning of the second century, reflects the increasingly formal organization of the Church communities. As they became more institutionalized it seems that the role of women became more restricted.

Another way in which Christian communities were associated by common practice was in their ethics. We saw above the importance given to charity towards the needy and this seems to have been a very common concern (even if it did not often lead to the actual possession of all things in common, as the writer of Acts claimed for the first Jerusalem community):

The strong are not to ignore the weak, and the weak are to respect the strong. Rich men should provide for the poor and the poor should thank God for giving them somebody to supply their wants.⁷¹

Clement even encouraged his readers by reminding them that earlier members of the congregation even sold themselves into slavery to provide for other Christians who were destitute.⁷² Believers were instructed to care for widows and orphans, and indeed widows were held in especial esteem, eventually gaining in some communities a formal liturgical role and a position among the clergy.⁷³

There were strict sexual mores in the early Christian groups: marriage was seen as the only correct or holy context for sexual activity. This would not have set Christians apart from contemporary Jewish or Roman moralists; what was more unusual was a strong current in early Christian ethics which advocated the rejection of marriage and seemed to see holiness in chastity. This is evident, for example, in some of Paul’s writings. Much of this current seems to have been connected with the expectation of an imminent end to the world – although it was to resurface again in later Christianity in very different circumstances. It should be noted that although Paul is cautious about marriage he did not condemn it outright and seems to have had a more moderate position than some of the Corinthians to whom he was writing.

Food is a sensitive issue in all cultures, but in first-century Judaism food laws were a particularly potent religious and ethnic marker. Fairly early on, Christians seem to have welcomed into their common meals Gentiles with different food customs: the basis of the move is depicted in narrative fashion in Acts 10.9–16 (Peter’s vision of the sheet carrying different types of food).⁷⁴ Once this bridge had been crossed, Christians had to deal with the issue of whether they could eat food which came from the carcasses of animals sacrificed in pagan temples.⁷⁵

Far more controversial, however, was the issue of circumcision. This was the marker above all markers of Jewishness, and the decision of some Christians to welcome Gentiles without demanding that the men be circumcised clearly caused great tension. It may have been one of the factors which eventually caused Christian communities to develop from being groups within Judaism to being groups which defined themselves in contrast to Judaism. That is, it was not the inclusion of Gentiles in itself that separated the Christians from Judaism, but the way in which Christians welcomed Gentiles as Christians without requiring them also to be circumcised.

Early Christian communities, then, can be seen as sharing a set of common practices. Few of these practices were absolutely unique to Christianity – they were to greater or lesser extents adaptations of rituals and moral codes found in Judaism or the wider Mediterranean context. But it was the particular way in which these rituals and moral codes were adapted by Christians that united the communities. Even then, one must allow for a certain amount of variation from community to community, some more closely influenced by Judaism than others, some taking a stricter stance on marriage than others, different communities varying in the words used for the eucharistic meals and baptism ceremonies.

Modern scholars have sought to explain the nature of these Christian groups by associating them with other groupings in late antique society, such as religious cults, philosophical schools, synagogue communities and city guilds or fraternities (collegia). There are some striking similarities with all these types: for example, the performing of various rituals which bound the community together; the important role of charismatic teachers and their succession of pupils; shared practices and texts; community meals and a shared responsibility for poor members. Nevertheless, none of these categories quite matches how the Christian groups viewed themselves. In the early Christian writings, a mixture of themes was used flexibly and imaginatively to explain what the new communities were. For example, Christians described themselves as a kind of extended family or household (Roman households included servants and slaves) united under God or Christ as the paterfamilias.⁷⁶ These households of God were envisaged as – ideally – being united in their members’ love and respect for one another. Such attitudes transcended the ties of blood, obligation or convenience which held normal human households together. One also finds in the New Testament a striking theme of bodily unity, which reinforced the language of unity in love: this is most famously expressed perhaps in I Corinthians 12–13.⁷⁷

Another way of extending the family motif in a more universal direction was to refer to Christian groups collectively as Israel (or the new Israel). This term was – and is – deeply problematic in that it could be taken to claim that God had transferred his promises from the old, literal, ethnic Israel to a new, figurative or spiritual Israel. However, in some earliest Christian writings it was used merely to express the idea that God had extended his promises beyond the ethnic family of Israel to include the Gentiles too, without the implication that God had rejected the original people of the covenant. It was especially the theologians of the next generations who used the concept of the new Israel to argue that God had rejected the Jews.

One idea that the concept of Israel conveyed effectively – particularly in an era when Jews were already spread in a diaspora beyond Palestine – was that one could simultaneously be part of a small local community (a tribe, a family, a synagogue) and part of a wider nation. It was this concept which seems also to have been expressed by the Greek term ekklesia. Now most usually translated ‘church’, the term originally meant ‘meeting’ or ‘council’ and was used of secular or religious meetings. Although use of the term varied from writer to writer in this period it is notable that it could bear both a universal meaning – the whole Christian community – and a more particular one – an individual congregation. Paul tended to use it in the latter sense, but in later letters in the Pauline tradition, ‘church’ was used in the universalistic sense and expressed with the imagery of the body of Christ.⁷⁸ Furthermore, ‘the church’ could refer both to the present particular historical situation of Christian groups and to the Christian community’s ideal existence. Some authors wrote, for example, of a pre-existent or fore-ordained ‘church’ ⁷⁹ and others anticipated the eschatological perfection of the Church with images such as the heavenly feast and the new Jerusalem.⁸⁰

The use of terms like ‘Israel’ and ‘the church’ both to denote specific, divided, historical realities and to refer to ideal, unified, communities raises two fundamental questions about the development of the Christian Church in this period: first, to what extent were Christians ‘one’ with the Judaism from which they had emerged and, secondly, to what extent were they ‘one’ with each other?

Until fairly recently, it was conventional for Church historians to write of the ‘parting of the ways’: an irrevocable splitting away of Christians from Jewish congregations. This was assumed by many scholars to have happened at some point around the destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Romans in 70CE (although the timing of the split was much disputed). However, the current consensus is that the reality was much more complex and that the dividing lines between Christianity and Judaism were very fluid for many years – not least because both Christianity and Judaism were themselves not rigidly unified phenomena (many scholars prefer to refer to early ‘Christianities’ and early ‘Judaisms’). There were Jewish households who accepted Jesus Christ and who were baptized, and who continued to worship in their synagogue, to celebrate the seventh-day Sabbath and to keep the Passover. There were Gentile Godfearers who belonged both to the synagogue and to a house church. There were some converts from paganism who had much less familiarity with Jewish customs and whose communities probably exhibited more of a ‘break’ with Judaism, but who, for example, accepted the Hebrew Scriptures. Eventually, some Christian communities rejected even these.⁸¹ Some important historical judgements have challenged the earlier view. For example, scholars point out that the diaspora of Jews from Palestine began before the fall of the Temple in 70CE, and that, therefore, many Christian churches outside Palestine grew out of Jewish communities. Furthermore, the evidence surrounding the supposed ban of Christians from synagogues issued by Jewish leaders meeting at Jamnia is much more difficult to interpret than was once thought: there appears not to have been a clear policy of expelling Christians, although there were undoubtedly tensions. The friction in this period between Christians and the vast majority of Jews who did not accept Christ should not be underestimated. While some communities coexisted well, others undoubtedly had painful and bitter arguments and these are reflected in the pages of the New Testament and other early Christian texts.⁸² In this period, one can say that Christianity and Judaism were increasingly distinct and were certainly endeavouring to define themselves against each other, even if there was no clear split. But, yet again, one must also note that the situation differed from Christian community to Christian community.

Were early Christian groups one with each other? This chapter has painted a picture of what might be called ‘contained diversity’.⁸³ What one finds in the evidence of the earliest Christian writings is not one clearly defined institution with a fully defined creed or a clear set of community rules, but rather a constellation of groups which are associated with one another by a series of close family resemblances in what they believed, which texts they used, how they worshipped and how they organized their community life. They were also linked by a network of personal associations, which are witnessed to by the large number of early Christian texts which are letters. What is remarkable about these early Christian communities is that they were simultaneously preoccupied with their own disagreements and hopeful that somehow these troubles would be overcome in God’s plan for the followers of Jesus Christ. This explains why some can read the history of the beginnings of the Church and see discord and schism right from the start, while others can read it and find an ideal primeval unity: both are there, although if one looks carefully, it may be that the earliest Christians were fully aware that one existed in reality while the other persisted as their eschatological hope.