The Early Christian Quest

Christianity is where the major Western intellectual legacies--Greek, Roman and Jewish--come together.

Jesus Christ
Jesus of Nazareth (ca. 5 BC - 30 AD) and his Jewish Messianic movement made the tremendous contribution to our Western understanding of life by casting it not only in orderly but also in loving terms. Life as presented by Jesus was not only orderly, regular, just--but it was also a joyous, graceful event. Further, life had eternal qualities to it--if one would but trust the gracious architect of all life: God, the heavenly "Father."
Jesus himself seemed to have had a very brief tenure as teacher, prophet, "Anointed One" (Christ). In the very early stages of his popular ministry in Roman-dominated Galilee and Judea, Jesus was arrested as a religious/political troublemaker and put to death on a Roman cross. But then Jesus mysteriously began to appear to many of his followers in the days after his death. This unexplainable development had a tremendous impact on the moral nerve of his followers--transforming them into amazing bulwarks of faith in Jesus' Messianic ministry. Instead of the Jesus' movement dying away after his death, it seemed only to spread.

The Birth of the Christian "Way" (ca. 30 AD)
The cross, his followers now understood, was the ultimate divine sign of Jesus' own surrender of "self" in service to others--the heart of the Christian spirit. Ultimately the cross became the symbol for all Christians of the true Christian life.
Jesus' well-attested resurrection appearances were likewise understood as God's final testimony on behalf of Jesus--that those who followed in his footsteps would not die, but live eternally, even as Jesus now lived eternally with the Father.

To the Christian, all of this pointed to one fact: Jesus was indeed the long-awaited Anointed One: the Messiah (Jewish) or Christ (Greek). Jesus was the Dionysian Son of Man/Son of God who had returned from the dead to save all humanity. Jesus was the embodiment of the Platonists' and the Stoics' understanding of the perfect Form, Idea, Word or Logos--eternally with God from before the foundation of the world, and with God for all eternity. Jesus summed up all the religious hopes of his time--provided that one was willing to accept him in the role of Lord of life.

Rejection and Persecution
For a number of reasons, rabbinical Judaism decisively rejected the claims of the followers of Jesus that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. Also a number of other problems set the "Christians" apart from their Jewish co-religionists, and by 90 AD the two had split hopelessly into two separate--and hostile--religions.
The Romans were thus unwilling to give any official recognition to the status of Christians because now rejected by Judaism they had no claims to recognized tradition or antiquity as a religion within the Empire. They were merely an upstart movement--the kind the Rome, with its love of conservative order, actively discouraged. The Romans did so in their usual cruel way of dealing with "political" dissidents: torturing and putting to death in the grimmest fashion those that continued to insist on their undesireable religious views.

But persecution only seemed to make the faith more attractive. The heroics of the Christians facing death over the next centuries were an affront to an increasingly amoral Roman society. Attracted to the strength of character of these heros, converts to the faith grew in number. The new faith even began to draw adherents from the Roman aristocracy.

Standing at the heart of the Christian faith was the belief that Jesus of Nazareth (ca. 5 BC - 30 AD),
a charismatic Jewish teacher (rabbi) and healer operating chiefly in the Jewish province of Galilee, was indeed the long-awaited Messiah--the Son of David and of God. His followers believed strongly that he had been sent by God to usher in this glorious age of God's Divine Rule: the Day of the Lord when the Kingdom of Heaven established itself throughout the earth.
Indeed, Jesus himself had announced over and over again the coming of this eternal kingdom. But this eternal kingdom was not merely a place of pure order. It was even more importantly a place of pure love--a love which flowed from the essence of God to the heart of the believer. And it was a kingdom that touched the believer for all eternity.

His Message: The Providence of God--and the Derivative Righteousness of Man
The message of Jesus was basically for all people to trust in the goodness of God. It was the gracious work of God--not the industrious or even moral works of man--that brought truth, goodness and beauty to human life.
Jesus often sniped at the Pharisees' vision of human righteousness arising through strict observance of the Jewish purity laws. To Jesus, the purity that God sought from his people was an internal disposition--not an external moral discipline undertaken by the religiously rigorous. Indeed, Jesus saw such rigorism as producing a distancing of the human heart from the power of God's goodness--not a movement towards it. Jesus saw this rigorism not as a measure of our faith in God--but as a measure of our determination to grasp at righteousness through our own religious controls.

Jesus offered the world a quite different path to righteousness. If we would let go of our anxieties about life, our grasping natures concerning our own existence, we would discover the real power of life. Our pretentious to "control" over life were vain--"vanities of vanities" as ancient Jewish wisdom put it.

Jesus at times put this matter pretty bluntly. We could trust in our own devices--even our own "virtues" to get us through life. But this was not really going to get us into "eternity"--into God's Kingdom. Such worldly achievements would die with us at the end of our earthly life. Only surrender of these very self-serving instincts (including the desire to make ourselves moral "superiors") and a willingness to take up truly sacrificial living, living beyond ourselves, would bring us full blessing, joy, peace--and eternal life.

Clearly this message did not sit well with the "accomplished" and "virtuous" citizens of his times. Apparently he argued frequently with them. And it seems fairly clear that this was the group responsible for having him put to death as a dangerous trouble-maker.

Signs and Miracles
Jesus' teachings were purposely accompanied by healings of the sick, raisings of the dead, feeding of the multitudes from virtually no real resources, controlling even of nature and its processes. These were all given as "signs" of the power of God the Father to meet all contingencies in life--the kinds of contingencies that we mortals spent too much time worrying about!
Jesus also taught that we would be better served to spend more time in the care of others than in the care of "self." Focus on "self" was merely the mark of how strongly the sin of personal anxiety gripped our lives. Giving ourselves over to others, on the other hand, was the testimony of how much we had been set free to live by the pure grace of God and His divine provision.

The Eternal or Heavenly Kingdom
Finally, Jesus tied this freedom to live beyond oneself now with the freedom to live eternally as well. Such freedom in a person's life was the sign of the presence of the true Kingdom of God. It was a spiritual kingdom--one which transcended mortal existence--and which brought the soul into a highly transcendent and "eternal" existence. To achieve such eternal existence (everlasting fellowship with God) was to Jesus the goal of all life.
Death and Resurrection
Jesus was arrested as a troublemaker and put to death on a Roman cross (crucifixion)--a fate which awaited all religious insurrectionists. As Jesus's body was entombed and his grave put under Temple guard, his followers were thrown into confusion and despair.
But then reports of mysterious appearances of Jesus--the "Risen Lord"--began to come forth. Indeed, the apostle Paul records that the resurrected Lord appeared before at least 500 people, himself included. These sitings were understood as being God's ultimate testimony that indeed Jesus was the Son of God, sent to bring the rest of God's children to a similar life that would not end at the grave. Jesus was alive in heaven with the Father--for all eternity--as all believers also would be one day.

The Spirit's Testimony that Jesus Was Indeed the /MessiahChrist
Those who were willing to receive in faith this Gospel (Good News) message about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus were promised to find themselves living a new life of uncanny supernatural power. They would live under, by and through the power of God's own Holy Spirit.
In reflecting on the bizarre life, death and resurrection of Jesus, his followers began to remember special ways in which his Messiahship or "Anointing" seemed confirmed by events:

First there was the story of God's declaration from beyond the clouds that "this is my Son with whom I am well pleased"--as Jesus was being baptized by John the Baptizer in the Jordan River.
Then there was the testimony of Peter, James and John concerning the events that occurred on what later came to be known as the "Mount of Transfiguration" (Mount Tabor?) when mysteriously Elijah and Moses appeared and held conversation with Jesus--and the voice of God again came from beyond the clouds to declare, "this is my beloved Son; listen to him."
Finally, the remembrance of all his many healings (blind, crippled, deaf and dumb), his deliverance of people from demonic possession, his raising of individuals from the dead, and from his control over nature (winds, sea, fig tree). Each one of these stories stood as a witness to the incredible fact that he was indeed the Anointed One (the Messiah) of God.
In the end the irony of Jesus' death on a cross came to be understood by his followers as being the final testimony of how God wanted us to give up our lives for others--even our enemies. The despised cross became the very sign of Jesus' own divinity--and ultimately the symbol of the faith.
In this act of self-sacrifice Jesus embodied the loving essence of God. Jesus was the Son of God, the only begotten of the Father, but also the one who opened the way to others to become God's adopted sons and daughters. Ultimately the cross became the symbol for all Christians of the hope and the victory of the Christian life.

Jesus' well-attested resurrection appearances after his death were likewise understood not only as God's final testimony on behalf of Jesus but also that those who followed in his footsteps would not die, but live eternally, even as Jesus now lived eternally with the Father.

Jesus, the Atoning Christ
Thus to his followers Jesus was the very marvel of God. Jesus had come not as a mighty military conqueror--as all Israel had been expecting. Rather he had come as a renewer of life of the broken and afflicted (as Isaiah had frequently prophesied), as a redeemer of those held in captivity by sin, as one who opened for others the way to eternal life. Not the Messiah they had been expecting--but better, much better! Jesus was indeed the fulfilment of all that Judaism had long awaited: he was indeed the Anointed One: the Messiah (Jewish) or Christ (Greek). He was also the Lamb of Atonement whose blood was sacrificed for the sins of the world.

The story of Jesus the Christ did not long remain merely a Palestinian story. It soon began to be told around the Roman empire--carried by those who truly felt themselves, and the world, transformed by this strange event. Needless to say, in moving from its Palestinian-Jewish roots to the broader Hellenistic-Jewish setting, even the Gentile setting, the story (Gospel) got translated in such a way that it might be more readily understood within the larger Hellenistic

Paul (mid first century)
Certainly the greatest of these translators of the gospel into the language of the larger Greco-Roman culture was Paul (Jewish: Saul) of Tarsus. Paul's faith in Jesus was based upon his own very unique personal encounter with the Risen Lord--on the road to Damascus where he was originally headed in order to begin arresting and putting to death the followers of this new "Way" of Jesus Christ. His conversion was abrupt, painful, and thorough. From Christ-hater he became Christ-proclaimer, one of the most important agents in spreading the Christian Gospel to the broader Greco-Roman world.
Interestingly, in his collected letters to the various churches that he had either founded or greatly influenced, he mentions almost nothing about the actual life of Jesus. Rather, he reflects on Jesus as a covenant sign of God's doings on earth.

In Paul's early writings (the letters to the Thessalonians) he emphasizes the return of the Lord Jesus (the "Day of the Lord") as a great act of cosmic judgment on all creation.

But his later writings switch emphasis to the spiritual efficacy of faith in Christ as the Atoning Sacrifice for our sins, the power of God's Spirit given to those who live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the unique role of the new church, the "Body" of the "Living Christ" in an unfolding of Divine history.

Mark
Mark's Gospel (written perhaps around 70 AD for the church in Rome), a story of the life and death of Jesus the Christ, was more than just a simple biography of Jesus. It was actually a theological treatise which used the "story" to give an account of the powers and authority of the person of Jesus Christ. Mark's Gospel was used liturgically (read in worship) as a declaration of faith: faith in the One who was soon to return in Judgment--as the empty tomb implied.
This Gospel of Mark was possibly supplemented by another Secret Gospel of Mark, lost to us today, which was accessible only to the "initiates": those baptized and entitled to share the Eucharist meal of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

John (late first century)
John, who was one of the original 12 disciples of Jesus, was reportedly the only disciple not to suffer Roman execution for his faith (though he faced a life of continuing imprisonment) and lived to an old age--when he eventually put down his own reflections (the Gospel of John) on themeaning of the life and death of Jesus the Christ.
In these reflections he introduced the philosophy of Plato and the Stoics into Christian theology as he stressed over and over that Jesus was the Divine Logos--the perfect representation of the essence of God.

This Jesus was the true Logos--which was the very mind of God and thus with God from even the beginning of all things. This Logos was found fully within Jesus--so that the person of Jesus and the person of the Logos were indistinguishable. John did not explain how this came to be: he merely posited it as being so--by God's doing (unlike the miraculous birth accounts of Matthew and Luke which set out to explain the source of Jesus' divinity in his birth)

This use of the Logos concept was not exactly an unprecedented approach: Platonism was very popular as the standard of high-minded thinking among the more literate classes of the empire--and Judaism was doing the same translation of its religion in

The Jewish Rejection of Christianity
The first Christians thought of themselves as Jews--Messianic Jews who believed that in Jesus of Nazareth the ancient Jewish hope of a Messiah had been fulfilled.
Nonetheless, these Jewish Christians rejected (in line with the apparent teachings of Jesus and the apostles) the halakik midrash of the Pharisees--seen as legalistic burdens imposed on the faithful: the ritualistic washing of hands, burial restrictions, required fasts, etc.

But such disrespect for the Law was shocking to the rest of the Jewish community--which began to see the Christian group not just as another Jewish sect (of which there were many within Judaism)--but as a serious "heresy." (Thus Paul in his early life had been active in trying to stamp out this movement--by imprisonment and death if necessary)

Further the Pharisees were scandalized by the Christian doctrine of the incarnation (and potentially the Trinity) as well as the idea of the blood atonement in the person of Jesus Christ.

Finally, as the last straw, when in 66 AD the Roman emperor Hadrian inisisted that the Jews renounce their religious observances, Christian Jews did not hesitate doing so, for they had ceased to observe such religious practices themselves for some time. Much of the rest of Judaism, however, rose up in angry revolt against the Roman decrees.

In contrast, the Christians withdrew to the safe site of Pella (in modern-day Jordan) when Jerusalem in AD 70 was sacked by the Romans in retaliation for the Jewish rebellion. And in the intensity of the pain of seeing their beloved temple leveled to the ground, the "Orthodox" Jewish party felt all the more hatred for the Christians. To them, the behavior of the Christians during this crisis proved all the more convincingly that the Christians were Jewish "traitors."

So finally, in around 90 AD, a group of Jewish leaders convened their scattered people at Jabneh (or Jamnia), trying to form a new "Sanhedrin" (Council) in Palestine to replace the one that had once gathered in Jerusalem. Present were Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, Gamaliel (grandson of Hillel) and Simeon. Here it was decided that word was to go out to all the synagogues around the Empire that Christians were to be expelled from synagogue worship. They had no part of the "true" Jewish community.

The Formation of the Greco-Roman Church
Now expelled from synagogue worship, each local Christian community established its own structure for fellowship--though they all seemed to have had one or more overseers ("episcopos") or elders ("presbyters"), depending on whether the Greek or Jewish tradition was emphasized.
As defined in 1st Timothy (Chapter 3), an "episcopos" (from which we get the word "bishop") was one of the congregation, a person of excellent repute whom the congregation could rely on as a trustworthy overseer.

Some of the churches were recognized as "apostolic" churches--that is, founded by one or another of the original apostles--and thus their governing structure commanded regional respect (Jerusalem until 70, Rome, Antioch, Smyrna, Ephesus and others).

Roman Persecution
From its origins in Roman Palestine in around 30 AD, the "Way" of Jesus Christ spread quickly around the cities of the Roman empire among the humbler classes. In a way it touched the Dionysian hearts of the people: Jesus had proved himself Son of God by dying for us and then by being raised from the dead by God--though not for just a season but for all eternity. Fervent was the belief that those who honored Jesus as the "Lord" of their lives would be raised with him to glory--where they would live eternally with him--without further fear of pain or death.
But making Jesus "Lord" ran into a distinct problem in that the emperors were in no mood to be challenged for that same position as spiritual "Lord" by some cultic figure known as "Christ." Also the Roman army, which was the chief tool of the emperors, was heavily Mithraist (a religion from Persia) and held Christianity in contempt. And the Jewish community--which had legal status under Roman law--was quick to deny that Christianity was merely a Jewish subject. In short, Christianity was unwelcome in the Roman empire--except in the private hearts of the faithful who met secretly to celebrate the secret rite of the Lord's Supper, and to read and expound on the Scriptures (both Jewish Scripture and the new "apostolic" writings that were being passed around carefully).

In 64 AD, the persecutions became more systematic when Nero put Christians to death as scapegoats for the burning of Rome. From then on persecution was a constant fact of life for the Christian. But in 250-251 AD under the emperor Decius, in 259-260 under Valerian, and in 303-305 under Diocletian the persecutions were pursued relentlessly by the authorities. The horror of the persecution during each of these periods was relieved only with the death of each of the zealous emperors involved.

The Early Definers of the Faith
But the persecution only seemed to serve to purify the ranks of the Christian community, leaving it filled with people of the highest integrity and courage--and factor which only attracted the Romans all the more to the faith! Indeed, some of the finest Roman talent began to make its way into the ranks of this community, giving us such people of stature as Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria in the second century AD--and Tertullian, Origen and Cyprian in the third century.