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1. Introduction

We know far less about the history of the church from AD 30–135 than we do about second-temple Judaism. This stark fact is not, I think, faced as often as it should be. There is no equivalent of Josephus for the early church. There are very few archaeological finds which come to our aid. The sources we do have are tiny in comparison with the Jewish material: the Greek New Testament is dwarfed on a shelf beside the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Mishnah and Scrolls, and even when we add the so-called Apostolic Fathers the bulk is not that much greater. Even if we were to assign the highest historical value to Acts, the bright light it would shed on a few areas would only emphasize the total darkness elsewhere. Eusebius, who wrote the best-known early history of the church in the early 300s, stands to the first generation much as the Talmud stands to pre-70 Judaism, full of interest, full of problems.¹

Yet it was in the first generation or so that the crucial moves were made which determined the direction that Christianity would take from then on. This, obviously, is why so many have laboured so long to produce what the vagaries of time have denied us, namely, a history of the development of the Christian movement between Jesus and Justin Martyr, or between Paul and Polycarp. Much of this attempt, unlike the attempts to write the history of Judaism, is sheer if unacknowledged speculation. It is remythologization, the invention of stories about the past which will sustain a certain view of the present. There is, in fact, a great need in our generation for a full-length book that will do for the Quest for the Kerygmatic Church what Albert Schweitzer did for the nineteenth-century Quest for the Historical Jesus, describing what has been written, exposing its character as fantasy, and setting out a provocative new thesis. The project would have a direct analogy to Schweitzer’s: just as the ‘study’ of Jesus was one of the most distinctive features of New Testament scholarship in the nineteenth century, so the ‘study’ of the early church has been one of its most distinctive features in the twentieth.

The reason for this concentration on what is largely thin air can itself be traced back to Schweitzer. Once he had thrown out the old liberal portraits of Jesus, and hung up instead his strange (Nietzschean?) sketch of an apocalyptic hero, where could one turn if one wished to read the New Testament as in any way normative for contemporary Christianity? Only, it seemed, to the earliest church. So Bultmann focused his attention on the primitive kerygmatic community, seeking there the vibrant faith that would serve as model and inspiration for modern Christians. The great majority of subsequent scholarship, one way or another, has followed his agenda, though not always his results. This is ironic; as we shall see, it is actually possible to know a good deal more about Jesus than about most of the early church.

If it is hard to be committed to the study of next to nothing, it is easier if those who are engaged in it can agree on some conventions, some ‘fixed’ points around which research can concentrate, like moons circling a wandering planet. The first, and best-known, of these fixed and yet unfixed points was found in the struggle between Judaism and Hellenism. This was projected on to the early church, producing what have been called ‘Jewish Christianity’ and ‘Hellenistic Christianity’.² Not much thought was given to the facts that the distinction between the two cultural blocks was difficult to press in the first century anyway; that Judaism and Hellenism, in so far as one can separate them, were themselves sufficiently pluriform to make the labels fairly useless; that almost all first-generation Christianity was in some sense ‘Jewish’; and that the one Christian writer whom we know beyond any doubt to have been active within twenty years of the crucifixion of Jesus was given to saying things like ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek … for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.³ A basic categorization that ignores such warning signs is unlikely to provide continuing possibilities for fruitful research. The planet will turn out to have been a black hole all along.

A similar problem is encountered (though one would not necessarily have guessed it from the confident tone of some scholars) if we try to acquire a second fixed point by studying early Christian expectation. A good deal has been made, this century, of the idea that the earliest and most Jewish Christians confidently expected the imminent end of the space-time universe, and that the development of Christianity was marked by the fading of this expectation.⁴ Another version of the same modern story is that some branches of early Christianity were not interested in this expectation, and that the gospel of Mark, or perhaps some other document, reintroduced the idea of an imminent end to the world into a tradition that had either not known it or at least not made it central.⁵ But in either case, and also with the many possible variations on this theme, there are two large problems to be addressed. First, the great bulk of the evidence used in making such reconstructions of the hypothetical entity ‘apocalyptic Christianity’ consists, as we shall see, of reworkings of passages such as Daniel 7, and depends for its supposed force on a reading of that text, and others like it, which we have shown in Part III to be false. Second, it is quite clear that the expectation of a coming great reversal, with Jesus returning as judge, continued unabated in the second century and beyond, with no apparent embarrassment or signs of hasty rewriting of predictions. All sorts of charges were being rebutted by apologists, but there is no sense that Christianity had changed its character, or been put in jeopardy, by the failure of Jesus to return within a generation of Easter. A full reappraisal of the nature and place of eschatology within early Christianity seems called for.

A third attempt at finding a fixed point has been made by those who argue for an early date for the Gnostic traditions contained in the Nag Hammadi finds.⁶ Like everything else in early Christianity, this thesis is indeed possible, and if true would give a definite shape to our perception of the whole. But, as with all possible historical theses, the crucial question is: is it likely or even probable? We shall see, in chapter 14, good reason to question whether Gnosticism in any form existed as a major segment of Christianity until at least the early second century.

For those interested in such things, we may at this stage draw up a small map of the scholars who have taken various different approaches. To begin with, we have the line begun by F. C. Baur. His distinction between Jewish Christianity and Hellenistic Christianity, and his (Hegelian) suggestion that the tension between the two was resolved in ‘early catholicism’, has been maintained, in different ways, by Adolf Harnack, Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Käsemann, Hans Conzelmann, and, most recently, Helmut Koester.⁷ Within this, the idea that Christianity’s move away from Judaism to Hellenism (including the incorporation of Gnosticism) was a positive and necessary move, made already by Paul and to be recovered by those who would claim his support, is inherent in the entire programme of Bultmann, followed with variations by Conzelmann, Käsemann (who managed to incorporate a fair bit of Schweitzer into his synthesis as well), and Koester (who proposes a fascinating but highly tendentious geographical scheme), and drawn on recently by Mack and Crossan. These writers, taken broadly together, see the essence of early Christianity as only marginally or tangentially Jewish. The main lines run, rather, through the Hellenistic world, the world of Cynic teaching, of early Gnosticism, of the wisdom-traditions shared by many peoples. The Jewish expectation of the kingdom has provided some of the language of early Christianity, but its substance is of a different order altogether.

This whole scheme of thought, with its neat ethnic divisions and its tidy chronology, has a pleasing simplicity. It has recently become apparent, however, that these are achieved at the cost of the data. It cannot accommodate phenomena which are increasingly making themselves felt, such as Jewish Gnosticism, Gentile apocalypticism, or signs of ‘early catholicism’ (such as an insistence on the passing on of tradition) which occur in the very earliest stratum.⁸ It is for that reason that Schweitzer protested against the whole thesis at the turn of the century, a protest that was partially heard by Käsemann (who, however, incorporated Schweitzer’s insistence upon the Jewish apocalyptic background into his own essentially post-Baur-and-Bultmann scheme), and that eventually bore fruit in the sea-change of history-of-religion study that took place in the 1940s.⁹

This change takes us to the other end of the spectrum, to writers who understand early Christianity as simply a Jewish sect, not too unlike the many other Jewish sects of the period. This new point of view owes something to the discovery of the Scrolls in 1947/8, but more to the change in general attitudes towards Judaism in the period following the Second World War.¹⁰ Suddenly Jewish material was good, pure, early, ‘biblical’, and Hellenistic material was corrupt, distorted, later and non-‘biblical’. These evaluative sub-texts precipitated a widespread new reading of the period. Phenomena that had been confidently labelled ‘Hellenistic’ were, quite suddenly, relabelled ‘rabbinic’. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha were re-edited and reread, and were discovered to contain thousands of previously unnoticed clues to the real nature of early Christianity. Adolf Schlatter in the pre-war period, W. D. Davies and J. Jeremias in the post-war period, and more recently scholars like M. Hengel and C. Rowland, have made out a strong case for seeing early Christianity as a Jewish messianic sect, going out into the world with the news that the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had now revealed himself savingly for all the world in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus.¹¹ This movement of thought has dominated a good deal of research in the last forty years. Until the recent American work of Koester, Crossan and others it could have been said that the balance had shifted decisively in its favour, and away from the Hellenistic, Cynic and/or Gnostic theories. Now, however, the field looks more open again, and the time is ripe for a reappraisal. Many scholars are now of the opinion that the main problem in describing the origin of Christianity is to account fully both for the thorough Jewishness of the new movement and for the break with Judaism that had come about at least by the middle of the second century.¹²

In between the two extreme positions, some scholars have remained content to plot the sociological and cultural location of various groups. The works of W. A. Meeks, G. Theissen and A. J. Malherbe on the early Pauline churches, and of Theissen on the early Jesus-movement, have produced sharper and more nuanced readings than can arise from broad generalizations; so have the works of M. Hengel, B. F. Meyer and C. C. Hill on the early Jerusalem community.¹³ But it remains the case that the revolutions which have taken place recently in the study of Judaism, of Jesus and of Paul have not yet completely filtered through to the study of the early Christian movements which stood in a complex relation to Judaism, which told the story of Jesus, and which seem to have had a love-hate relationship with Paul. There is therefore every reason to suppose that a new study of the evidence, using the methods articulated in Part II, and bearing in mind the reading of Judaism in Part III, may shed fresh light on the whole area.

3. Fixed Points: History and Geography

Where, then, are the fixed points around which we must work? And, granted them, how can we best go about charting and understanding the course of early Christianity?

The outer chronological limits for this investigation may be set by two events which form an interesting counterpoint. At the beginning there is of course the crucifixion of Jesus, which is probably to be dated in AD 30.¹⁹ At the end, about 125 years later, there is the burning of a bishop in the beautiful seaport of Smyrna, in Asia Minor.

The crucifixion sets not only the chronological and (in the full sense) historical starting-point for the movement: it also actually sets the tone for most of the major fixed points. But the earliest years of the resultant movement, as we have seen, present notorious problems for anyone trying to find solid historical ground. We will therefore do well to leave them on one side for the moment, and work backwards towards them cautiously, beginning at the end. There are nine pieces of evidence to be considered, not counting Jesus’ crucifixion itself.

Somewhat after the end of the first hundred years of Christianity, there took place an event so striking that it is worth quoting the earliest account of it:

There was a great uproar of those who heard that Polycarp had been arrested. Therefore when he was brought forward the Pro-Consul asked him if he were Polycarp, and when he admitted it he tried to persuade him to deny [his Christian faith], saying: ‘Respect your age,’ and so forth, as they are accustomed to say: ‘Swear by the genius of Caesar, repent, say: “Away with the Atheists” ’; but Polycarp, with a stern countenance looked on all the crowd of lawless heathen in the arena, and waving his hand at them, he groaned and looked up to heaven and said: ‘Away with the Atheists.’ But when the Pro-Consul pressed him and said: ‘Take the oath and I let you go, revile Christ,’ Polycarp said: ‘For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?’²⁰

The martyrdom of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna (modern Izmir), took place in about AD 155/6.²¹ Several points of interest for us stand out from this account of it, which, even though no doubt reflecting a somewhat later hagiographical piety, clearly witnesses to certain key features of early Christianity.

First, it is clear that the trial and execution of Christians has already become a matter of regular form. There are certain established procedures, certain standard things that Christians could do to escape the punishment, and certain fixed assumptions about what Christianity was. We can trace the earlier stages in this process in the letter of Pliny to Trajan (see below); by the middle of the second century these things had become the norm. In particular, it is assumed that Christians are members of a subversive sect. They do not believe in the normal pagan gods, and so have incurred the charge of atheism that was sometimes levelled at the Jews.²² In particular, they do not owe allegiance to Caesar, and refuse to swear by his ‘genius’.²³ Christ is seen as a rival monarch, a king to whom is due an allegiance which allows no room for the dictatorship of the emperor. Already it is clear that the Christianity to which Polycarp (and/or his biographer) had given allegiance was rooted in Judaism. The idea of Christ as a supreme king, which defines Christianity conclusively over against paganism, would scarcely have begun, in the face of inevitable hostility, unless it were based on some kind of messianic belief. Equally, Christianity is defined over against Judaism itself by the allegiance to this particular king, as is clear from the sequel, in which the Jews of Smyrna join the pagans in calling for Polycarp’s death.²⁴ His confession of Christ, and his refusal either to deny him, or to take an oath of loyalty to Caesar, or to offer the token sacrifice which would imply that he was prepared to fit his Christianity in to the dominant belief-system ²⁵—all these things show that the major cultural symbols and praxis of paganism on the one hand, and of Judaism on the other, have been exchanged for a new set.

What is more, Polycarp refers, in his most famous phrase, to his eighty-six years of allegiance to Christ. Assuming with most commentators that this is accurate, and that it means he was born into a Christian family and baptized as an infant, this puts the date of his birth, into an already Christian family in Asia Minor, at AD 69/70. We must therefore hypothesize that there was an established, though probably small, Christian church, holding allegiance to the royal figure of Jesus, and denying the pagan gods, in Smyrna within forty years of the crucifixion. This is not particularly controversial. But it provides us with a remarkably solid fixed point. The Gentile mission of the church, seen as the summoning of non-Jews to a risky allegiance to a Jewish-style Messiah, was apparently already established in Asia Minor before the fall of Jerusalem; was recognized by the authorities as a dangerous and subversive superstition by the time Pliny was governor in Bithynia (around 110); and was dealt with as a matter of routine by the middle of the second century. Whatever other trajectories may be drawn through the first hundred years of Christianity, this one must be regarded as settled.

The mention of Pliny must now be filled in, to provide us with a second highly valuable fixed point at the start of the second century. Pliny the Younger (whose uncle, the naturalist Pliny the Elder, had died while observing the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 ²⁶) was governor of Bithynia, in northern Asia Minor, for some years between about 106 and 114. He found himself faced with a problem. Various people were brought before him charged with being Christians, and he did not know how to deal with them. He recounts to Trajan, the then emperor, the action he was taking:²⁷

I considered that I should dismiss any who denied that they were or ever had been Christians when they had repeated after me a formula of invocation to the gods and had made offerings of wine and incense to your statue … and furthermore had reviled the name of Christ.

The Christians examined by Pliny reveal their characteristic practice as follows:

They had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately amongst themselves in honour of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath, not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery, to commit no breach of trust and not to deny a deposit when called upon to restore it. After this ceremony it had been their custom to disperse and reassemble later to take food of an ordinary, harmless kind; but they had in fact given up this practice since my edict, issued on your [i.e. Trajan’s] instructions, which banned all political societies. This made me decide that it was all the more necessary to extract the truth by torture from two slave-women, whom they call deaconesses. I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.

This cult was, however, spreading rapidly:

A great many individuals of every age and class, both men and women, are being brought to trial, and this is likely to continue. It is not only the towns, but villages and rural districts too which are infected through contact with this wretched cult.

As a result, according to Pliny, pagan practice, too, has taken on a new lease of life; he seems to suggest that this is the result of people being awakened to religious possibilities through Christianity, and then reverting to a hitherto dormant paganism, but it might equally be that latent paganism was stirred to life in opposition to a Christianity that was rejecting its tenets:

There is no doubt that people have begun to throng the temples which had been almost entirely deserted for a long time; the sacred rites which had been allowed to lapse are being performed again, and flesh of sacrificial victims is on sale everywhere, though up till recently scarcely anyone could be found to buy it.

Almost every phrase of this remarkable letter, and indeed of Trajan’s reply to it,²⁸ sheds such light on early Christianity and on pagan perceptions of it that it is tempting to spend longer examining it than is here possible. For our present purposes we note the following. First, it is clear that Christianity was already widespread in Asia Minor, beyond the area evangelized by Paul in the early days,²⁹ and that, although Pliny can assume that serious Christians must be punished, probably with death, there was no established procedure, no civil servants’ rule of thumb, for how to go about it. This indicates that previous persecutions by Roman authorities had probably been sporadic and occasional rather than systematic. Pliny, with his filing-cabinet mind, would have been embarrassed to write to Trajan about something he should have learned before leaving Rome for his new post. He was forced, rather, to investigate a new possibility, and to take more official notice of the new cult, because, it seems, the local residents were themselves bringing charges.

Second, the litmus test for conviction as a Christian was, as in Polycarp’s case, ritual actions and declarations which, small in themselves, carried enormous socio-cultural significance. These only make sense on the assumption that Christians of all sorts in the area, who would mostly not have been trained theologians, regarded it as fundamental that their allegiance to Christ cut across any allegiance to Caesar.

Third, they were therefore classified as a political society,³⁰ and as such came under a ban on corporate ritual meals. That is, they were seen not just as a religious grouping, but one whose religion made them a subversive presence within the wider Roman society. Though probably suspected of cannibalism or the like (note Pliny’s surprised stress on their ‘ordinary, harmless’ kind of food), they were self-consciously law-abiding and upright citizens, except for their supreme devotion to Christ.

At this point we may recall Josephus. He was after all a near-contemporary of Pliny, living in Rome when Pliny was there before being posted to Bithynia, and was writing not many years before this letter. Anyone reading Pliny’s narrative with half an ear open for echoes of Josephus may hear at least a faint resonance:

They … met … to bind themselves by oath … to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery … I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.

This school agrees in all other respects with the opinions of the Pharisees, except that they have a passion for liberty that is almost unconquerable, since they are convinced that God alone is their leader and master.³¹

Devoted pursuit of personal holiness, and the extravagant refusal to recognize any other master: these were the hallmarks of the Jewish resistance movement. There have, of course, been certain vital changes. But from a Roman point of view it would be the similarities between Judaism and Christianity that would stand out. The Christians in Bithynia in 110, and in Smyrna in 155, shared some salient characteristics with the Jews of the pre-70 era. In particular, their worldview looks suspiciously as though it included a Jewish-style adherence to the kingship of god.

The third fixed point, though he has not always been regarded as such, is Ignatius of Antioch. It is historically certain that Ignatius travelled from Antioch to Rome to face martyrdom in the latter years of the reign of Trajan, and that the seven letters now normally ascribed to him were written during this journey.³² Ignatius offers a wealth of material about the Christianity of his day, which we shall examine in more detail elsewhere. For our present purposes what matters is the event and (as Ignatius himself saw) its significance:the bishop of the greatest city in Roman Syria going to Rome to be torn apart by wild beasts. He exhorts the Roman church not to plead on his behalf, since if his martyrdom proceeds uninterrupted it will have great power as an announcement of the gospel:

For neither shall I ever have such an opportunity of attaining to God, nor can you, if you be but silent [i.e. and do not speak up on my behalf], have any better deed ascribed to you. For if you are silent concerning me, I am a word [or perhaps the word] of God; but if you love my flesh [i.e. if you act to prevent my martyrdom], I shall again be only a cry. Grant me nothing more than that I be poured out to God, while an altar is still ready, that forming yourselves into a chorus of love, you may sing to the Father in Christ Jesus, that God has vouchsafed that the bishop of Syria shall be found at the setting of the sun, having fetched him from the sun’s rising. It is good to set the world towards God, that I may rise to him.³³

Apart from his concerns about his own martyrdom, Ignatius was anxious chiefly for the unity of each local church within itself, which, he believed, was to be attained through the churches uniting around their bishops. It is clear that he saw the church, not least the one he had left in Antioch, suffering from potential and actual schism, caused partly by those who were mixing Christianity up with Judaism and partly by those who were preaching docetism, the idea that Jesus had only seemed to be, without really being, truly human.³⁴ This fight on two fronts locates him accurately and credibly as a theologian deeply aware that Christianity is born of Judaism, and hence cannot become a variety of paganism, but also that, being born through the death of the Jewish Messiah, it cannot collapse back into being merely a variety of Judaism itself. The extent to which Ignatius represents a thoroughly Hellenized Christianity can be debated. Some have suggested, for instance, that there are to be found in his letters traces of Gnostic ideas, though it is far more likely that he is actually combating Gnosticism.³⁵

Another fixed point, working back from Polycarp, Pliny and Ignatius, is the incident recounted by the second-century church historian Hegesippus, preserved in Eusebius’ History.³⁶ This incident took place under the emperor Domitian, who succeeded Titus, and reigned from 81 to 96. Certain men were brought before Domitian accused of being blood-relatives of Jesus himself, being descended from the Judas who was ‘said to have been [Jesus’] brother according to the flesh’. They were clearly under the suspicion of being members of a royal house, a potentially subversive dynasty. When, however, they demonstrated that they were merely poor labourers, Domitian questioned them ‘about the Messiah and his kingdom, its nature, origin and time of appearance’. This, we may be sure, was not an abstract theological debate. Like Herod in Matthew 2:1–18 (Hegesippus makes this parallel), Domitian was clearly worried about potential threats to his own position. The answer, though, was clear: the men explained that this kingdom was ‘neither of the world nor earthly, but heavenly and angelic, and it would be at the end of the age’, when Christ would return as judge.³⁷ Domitian thereupon ceased his persecution of the church, though the men in question were held in honour in the Christian community.

This story, for all that it may well contain legendary features,³⁸ coheres well with the picture of the early church we are developing. A movement with all the overtones of Jewish Messianism on the one hand, but without the nationalist and military overtones on the other; a movement looking back to Jesus as Messiah in a sense which could easily be misunderstood in a human dynastic sense; a movement which flouted the Roman emperor’s claim to be the ultimate object of allegiance. However we draw the main lines of early Christian development, they must include these in some central way. The four pieces of evidence we have examined so far (Polycarp, Pliny, Ignatius and Hegesippus) cohere in a remarkable way. Even long after the destruction of Jerusalem, Christianity seems to have retained, in some manifestations at least, a recognizably Jewish form, with redefinitions which pulled it, not in the direction of paganism or syncretism, but in a new direction of its own. We will not discover a satisfactory hypothesis about the early church until we have found an explanation for this basic phenomenon.

Continuing to work backwards, and ignoring evidence that might at this stage lead into endless discussion, we may note the fall of Jerusalem in 70 as a major event not only for Judaism but also for early Christianity. We shall explore this more fully later on. But it is clear from many passages, not least in the synoptic gospels and Acts, that the early Christians both cherished a strong critique of the Jerusalem Temple (Mark 13; Acts 7) and continued to worship there (Luke 24; Acts 1, 3). This means that they would be bound to see its destruction as simultaneously a vindication of their critique and a major sociopolitical tragedy. The first of these is expressed most clearly in the Letter of Barnabas (16.1–5); the second is evident from the account in Eusebius of the flight of Christians from Jerusalem to Pella, across the Jordan, in obedience (he says) to an oracle.³⁹

We next meet the famous, or rather infamous, passage in Tacitus, in which Nero attempts to shift on to the Christians in Rome the blame for the great fire of AD 64:

To suppress this rumour [of arson], Nero fabricated scapegoats—and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judaea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.

First, Nero had self-acknowledged Christians arrested. Then, on their information, large numbers of others were condemned—not so much for incendiarism as for their anti-social tendencies [odio humani generis, because of their hatred of the human race]. Their deaths were made farcical. Dressed in wild animals’ skins, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight … Despite their guilt as Christians, and the ruthless punishment it deserved, the victims were pitied. For it was felt that they were being sacrificed to one man’s brutality rather than to the national interest.⁴⁰

This, once more, is a remarkably interesting passage, not least for what Tacitus tells us by the way. It is clear both that he, and presumably others, held the lowest possible opinion of the Christians (perhaps the charge of cannibalism or clandestine vice had already been laid against them because of their secret meetings), and that no systematic pagan persecution of Christians had been envisaged before this point.⁴¹ The Christians may have been regarded as anti-social; refusal to take part in regular cultic activities, and the giving of personal loyalty to the movement and its leader rather than to old ties of kin and friendship, would have been quite enough to gain them that reputation. But Nero’s attack on them was not, according to Tacitus, part of a sustained or orchestrated campaign. We see here the roots of the second-century attitude, but not yet its full fruit.

This brings us back to the first of the Jewish sources which provides a fixed point in early Christianity. In AD 62 the procurator Festus died in office, and Nero appointed Luccius Albinus to succeed him. During the interregnum, the newly appointed high priest Ananus seized his opportunity to do away with one of the early Christian leaders. Josephus tells the story like this:

Ananus thought that he had a favourable opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinus was still on the way. And so he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. Those of the inhabitants of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the law were offended at this. They therefore secretly sent to King Agrippa urging him, for Ananus had not even been correct in his first step [i.e. convening the Sanhedrin], to order him to desist from any further such actions. Certain of them even went to meet Albinus, who was on his way from Alexandria, and informed him that Ananus had no authority to convene the Sanhedrin without his consent. Convinced by these words, Albinus angrily wrote to Ananus threatening to take vengeance upon him. King Agrippa, because of Ananus’ action, deposed him from the high priesthood which he had held for three months and replaced him with Jesus the son of Damnaeus.⁴²

This story is quoted by Eusebius, following his retelling of Hegesippus’ longer account, which, though confused, clearly refers to the same incident.⁴³ Among the many fascinating aspects of the Josephus passage is the clear implication that the Pharisees were incensed at a blatant Sadducean action against one so devout as James ‘the Just’, i.e. ‘the tzaddik’, the Righteous One. Equally, important, however, is the clear implication that Josephus knows of Jesus, and of his being referred to as ‘the Christ’; if Tacitus and Suetonius knew of this title, there is every reason to suppose that Josephus would have as well. The passage shows no signs of being a Christian interpolation, as is often suggested about the more famous one describing Jesus himself.⁴⁴ It is clear evidence of a well-known Christian community, with an even more well-known leader, still in Jerusalem as war drew closer; and of hostility to this community and its leader on the part of some Jews, but not all. James’ staunch Jewish piety seems to have enabled him to avoid the kind of Jewish persecution which Paul encountered.

Still working back, we must here include something about Paul. Though attempts to date the details of his career are notoriously complex, it is agreed more or less on all sides that he was active, not least in Ephesus and Corinth, in the first half of the 50s. It is usually reckoned that he arrived in Corinth for the first time in 49, about eighteen months before Gallio’s arrival as proconsul of Achaia, an event usually dated (because of a famous inscription) to 51.⁴⁵ Paul appeared before Gallio, who acquitted him of charges brought by the local Jewish community.⁴⁶ There is a good deal more to be said than this, but Paul provides at this stage another fixed point which must be taken very seriously.⁴⁷

We come finally to the evidence of Suetonius, who was born around 69 and wrote in the time of Hadrian (117–38). Racy and unreliable though he often is, the following extracts are normally regarded as referring to actual events. In his Life of Claudius (25.4) he describes Claudius’ policies towards foreign nationals in Rome. When he comes to the Jews he has this to say:

Because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus [impulsore Chresto], he expelled them from the City.

It has often been pointed out that the difference in pronunciation between Chrestus and Christus would be minimal in this period,⁴⁸ and there is no good reason to doubt that what we have here is a garbled report of disturbances within the large Jewish community in Rome, brought about by the presence within that community of some who claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. This expulsion from Rome is also mentioned in the New Testament, in Acts 18:2.⁴⁹ The reference in Acts suggests (though this is controversial) that the episode took place in about 49 AD, since some of those expelled found their way to Corinth in time to meet Paul when he arrived there around that time (see above).

We now have an initial series of fixed historical points, largely owed to non-Christian report, all involving non-Christian action:

30	Jesus’ crucifixion
49	Claudius’ expulsion of Jews from Rome because of Christian disturbances
49–51	Paul in Corinth; some time later, in Ephesus
62	Killing of James in Jerusalem
64	Nero’s persecution after the fire of Rome
70	Fall of Jerusalem
c.90	Domitian’s investigation of Jesus’ relatives
c.110–14	Pliny’s persecutions in Bithynia
c.110–17	Ignatius’ letters and martyrdom
155/6	Martyrdom of Polycarp

These events form a chain stretching across a century in which, time after time, the Roman authorities found the Christians (as they found the Jews) a social and political threat or nuisance, and took action against them. The Christians, meanwhile, do not seem to have taken refuge in the defence that they were merely a private club for the advancement of personal piety. They continued to proclaim their allegiance to a Christ who was a ‘king’ in a sense which precluded allegiance to Caesar, even if his kingdom was not to be conceived on the model of Caesar’s. This strange belief, so Jewish and yet so non-Jewish (since it led the Christians to defend no city, adhere to no Mosaic code, circumcise no male children) was, as we shall see, a central characteristic of the whole movement, and as such a vital key to its character.

It is frequently assumed that there ought to be another fixed point in such a list, namely, a serious persecution of Christians by Domitian. This is often cited as the natural home for early Christian literature which seems to reflect a period of persecution (e.g. 1 Peter). In fact there is very little evidence for such a thing. Suetonius’ descriptions of Domitian’s cruelty are clear enough, but that cruelty was directed against all sorts of people, not only Christians. Eusebius’ account of persecution under Domitian is generalized (except for the story of John on Patmos).⁵⁰ His account of Domitian’s investigation of the supposed Christian ‘royal family’ does not suggest a large-scale, sustained or fierce putting down of the movement; and in any case, had such occurred, Pliny might not have needed to ask Trajan what to do about this strange cult.⁵¹ Though it may well be the case that Christians died for their faith under Domitian, we have only the slenderest evidence for saying so, and nothing very sure can be built on this foundation.

Turning from history to geography, we have already said enough to show what sort of geographical spread took place within the first century of Christian activity. Jerusalem and surrounding Judaea; Samaria; Antioch, Damascus and surrounding Syria; Asia Minor (Smyrna and Bithynia); the cities of Greece; Rome; all these are clearly indicated in the texts we have examined, and in the New Testament, as major centres of Christianity. This much is uncontroversial. Beyond this, however, it is very difficult to go with any certainty. Paul’s letters give us a very clear impression of the churches in Asia Minor and Greece in the 50s; Ignatius’, of the same churches in the early years of the second century. Of Rome we gain more knowledge from the second-century writings of Justin and others; of Jerusalem, we glean tantalizing hints in the pages of Acts, and in Josephus’ reference to the martyrdom of James the Just. It appears that for some at least of the very early Christians Jerusalem held a place of high theological honour, though once the city had fallen we do not find Christians bemoaning its loss in the same way as their Jewish contemporaries were to do.⁵² Of Syria (Antioch excepted) and Egypt it is impossible to say anything for sure; but something must be said, because of the evident presence and power of Christianity in both places by the later second century. It is, frankly, simply not possible to sustain the sweeping claims of Koester, that Syria was ‘the country of origin of Christian Gnosticism’, or that a good many of the Gnostic writings found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt are of very early origin.⁵³ The documents upon which such claims are based simply do not admit of such geographical or chronological precision, and must join other early writings in the queue of candidates waiting for admission into the more solidly established historical framework. Clearly Syria and Egypt were among the important early centres of Christianity, but it is extremely difficult to say about them, any more than about most other places, exactly what their brand of Christianity was like. Of Antioch itself too much, perhaps, has been made of its possible link with the gospel of Matthew. It is perfectly possible that Matthew was written there, but this remains speculative. To regard the link as sufficiently definite to enable us to reconstruct the nature of early Antiochene Christianity by reading between the lines of Matthew’s gospel is a prime example of scholarship going further than the evidence will allow.⁵⁴