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Within ten days of Jesus’ return to the Father,1 His disciples (a Greek term for those who had “submitted” to His teachings)2—despite having encountered Him several times after His death—were huddled in an upper room in Jerusalem, frightened and confused. But Jesus had promised that He would send the Spirit upon them, and on that day, they experienced an unseen power in the midst of a great wind, with tongues of fire hovering over each of their heads. Their fear vanished, and they were suddenly filled with zeal and courage.
The Birth of the Church
The First Pentecost
It was the day of a major Jewish feast—Pentecost (“fifty days” after the Passover Sabbath)—and the city was crowded with visitors, devout Jews from all over the Near East, North Africa, and other regions. Led by Peter, the Eleven whom Jesus had specially chosen as His Apostles (those who were “sent”), stood up in public and began to preach. Simple and unlearned men, they knew no language except their sacred Hebrew and their vernacular Aramaic. But the crowd marveled that everyone seemed to hear the message in his own tongue. Skeptics claimed that the preachers were merely drunk, but three thousand people, according to the Acts of the Apostles, received the message and were baptized (“bathed”).
The Church of the Apostles
During His time on earth, Jesus spoke of His “Church” (ecclesia—“assembly” or “gathering”). He did not prescribe a detailed structure but gathered His disciples into a unified community with Peter and the other Apostles in positions of authority. The events of Pentecost showed that this Church would not remain merely a congregation of like-minded people but would be held together by divine power.3 On Pentecost, the Spirit molded a collection of deeply flawed men into a force that would transform the world.
Christianity and Judaism
Jewish Legacy
Christianity emerged from the culture of the Jews, a culture different from all others in being based on a covenant between God and His people according to which God is active in history, transforming the world and associating man with the divine mission. Judaism, alone among the great spiritual movements of history, did not build on a great civilization. The Jews were a nomadic warrior people, their God the god of battles, and contact with more advanced civilizations tended to weaken and contaminate them.
God’s people were poor while His enemies were kings, and the prophets resolved this baffling and frustrating paradox by revealing that those enemies were in reality God’s chosen instruments of punishment—the Jews’ defeats were signs of the truth of their religion. The prophets foretold the destruction of Israel, which happened not because God was weak but because the people were sinful. The promise made to Israel was liberation not from political bondage but from sin itself, from a power greater than man.
Thus, out of suffering, Judaism as a world religion was born. All of history was moving toward the reign of justice, the ultimate coming of the power and glory of God, and Israel’s misfortunes strengthened this belief, allowing national hopes to be transferred to the supernatural plane.
Christ: The Fulfillment of Jewish Hopes
The more the great pagan empires spread, the more the Jews clung to their own faith, their very political weakness forcing them to conceive of the Kingdom in spiritual terms, based on the Word of the God of righteousness and truth. In contrast to all other ancient religions, history had ultimate meaning for the Jews, moving toward the end of time. The Kingdom would be restored when the Jews finally received the Messiah, the Promised One, the Anointed One, the Christ.
The Jews did not, however, all agree in their understanding of the Messiah—or other aspects of their faith. Rome was a more formidable enemy than any other, and the Roman occupation of Palestine again raised hopes among some Jews that the Messiah would be a political savior. The Sadducees, who did not believe in personal resurrection, cooperated with the Romans; the Zealots actively opposed the conquerors; the Pharisees believed in resurrection and in strict ritual observance; while the Essenes of Qumran, who possessed a military character, expected two messiahs—one military, one priestly.4 Jesus summoned the Twelve from the midst of these factions, including even Simon the Zealot, and their divergent, even contradictory, views of Judaism often hampered the Apostles from truly understanding what Jesus was saying.
Jesus the Christ
Jesus and Judaism
Jesus was profoundly Jewish, but He did not merely seek to make people better Jews. His relations with the Pharisees were especially crucial, because of the subtle, easily misunderstood ways in which He both affirmed the Jewish faith and enjoined His followers to go beyond it—the central issue of “the Law” that would eventually be resolved by St. Paul.
The Good News
The first three Gospels (evangelion—“good news”) are primarily “synoptics” of Jesus’ life, in that each follows a similar narrative outline. The Gospels give historical accounts of the life of Jesus, including His ancestry and the circumstances of His birth, in order to disclose the reality of the Incarnation—that Jesus the Christ is none other than the eternal God, who took flesh and entered human history. Like Judaism, but unlike most other religions, Christianity is not mythical, in that it is based on events that took place not in a timeless realm but within human history itself. Thus the writers of the Gospels situate the life of Jesus very precisely in a particular time and place—by listing those who held public office at the time; by recording that “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar [which began in A.D. 14], . . . the word of God came to John, . . . in the wilderness” (Lk 3:1,2); and by carefully noting the location of each of Jesus’ sermons or miracles. But the Evangelists did not think it necessary to provide a comprehensive account of Jesus’ life (notably, they omitted almost everything between His birth and the beginning of His public ministry) but recorded only those facts that had significance for His mission in the world. But at the same time, the biblical narratives were considered to be historical, not merely symbolic or literary. The historical and theological purposes of the Gospels complemented one another.
The Gospel of John, the last of the four to be written, is both a narrative and an extended theological meditation on the meaning of Jesus’ life, particularly on the nature of divine love. It is also in John’s Gospel that Jesus’ identity—as the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, the Word that was God—is fully disclosed, something that perhaps did not become clear to His followers until they had meditated on His life and teachings for some years.
The Promised One
At first, Jesus was probably regarded by His disciples as the greatest of the prophets, but gradually they began to recognize Him as the promised Messiah who preached the coming of the Kingdom. His life and teachings unfolded on several levels simultaneously, none of which could be taken in isolation. Most accessible to human understanding in every age has been His role as a moral teacher who preached the highest and most sublime ideal of self-sacrificing love. But such a view cannot explain why He was treated so ferociously by the authorities.
Jesus was an ascetic who, with an occasional respite, such as the marriage feast at Cana, enjoined His disciples to live lives of prayer and fasting, of the renunciation of worldly goods, of intense self-discipline. He cast out devils and faced down the Evil One, curing both spiritual and physical illness. Above all, He warned His hearers to repent their sins and accept forgiveness from His loving Father, in order to escape eternal fire and to receive eternal life. His numerous miracles confirmed His credibility, and some of His sayings (“Before Abraham was, I am”), along with His transfiguration before three of His Apostles, provided intimations of His divinity.
Up to a point, Jesus acted in the traditional role of a prophet, commanding people to observe the Law—the traditional practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—but castigating them for their hypocritical legalism, their failure to comprehend the spiritual and moral nature of religion. But, as the more astute among the Jews recognized, in many of His sermons and parables, Jesus implicitly claimed for Himself the obedience that a good Jew was supposed to give to the Law. He claimed lordship over the Sabbath and the Temple, and the Jewish authorities eventually understood the claims He was making, as when He drove the money changers out of the Temple and announced that He could destroy that sacred place and rebuild it within three days. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem precipitated His arrest, as the Jewish leaders at last saw Him as a blasphemer, one who made Himself “equal to God”.
Christ the King
The Roman occupation of Palestine followed the pattern generally prevalent throughout the Empire. A rather small coterie of officials and soldiers looked after imperial interests and kept order, but as far as possible the institutions of self-government remained in place. The religious leaders had broad discretion in dealing with internal Jewish problems, so that Jesus was arrested by the soldiers of the high priest; then, while the priests tried to enlist the cooperation of the cautious and somewhat skeptical Roman officials, there followed a kind of bureaucratic dance in which Jesus was sent back and forth between the puppet king Herod Antipas (d. 39) and the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate (d. ca. 36).
The Romans did not see Jesus as a political threat, except insofar as He stirred up discord among the Jews. The Jewish leaders urged His prosecution primarily for offenses that were religious in nature but which necessarily seemed to involve a political agenda—the coming of “the Kingdom”, however that was understood. Significantly, when Jesus was given the opportunity by Pilate to deny that He was a king, He merely parried the question (“You say so”) and, whatever doubts he may have had, Pilate finally concluded that it was prudent to cooperate with the high priest, who warned him that Jesus was a subversive who might inspire a rebellion. Thus Pilate condemned Jesus to death by crucifixion, a form of punishment reserved for the worst criminals.
Victory over Death
On the morning of the third day after Jesus’ death, some of His disciples found His tomb empty and an angel announcing that He had risen. In that event, the ultimate mystery of the Christian faith was finally revealed—that, by Jesus’ sacrifice, life overcame death, good overcame evil, victory overcame defeat, and hope overcame despair, all in a complete and final way. By His conquest of death, Jesus redeemed not only mankind but the entire universe, which since Adam’s time had been groaning under the burden of sin.
Part of the genius of Christianity was that it did not shrink from the horrible way in which Jesus’ public life ended but actually placed it at the very center of the faith. The symbol of the cross did not become ubiquitous for several centuries, but St. Paul already boasted that, even though the cross was an obstacle to nonbelievers, “We preach Christ, and Him crucified.”
Early Christian Doctrine
Angels and Devils
As Jews, the early Christians believed in angels (“messengers”), who heralded Jesus’ birth, Resurrection, and Ascension; ministered to Him while He was on earth; and sing the praises of God through all eternity. From Scripture, three angels are known by name—Michael (“like God”), Gabriel (“the struggle of God”), and Raphael (“God heals”). Protecting angels—assigned to each nation and even to each individual—would herald the Second Coming, lead the saints into Paradise, and cast the damned into Hell, which, Jesus warned, was “prepared for the devil and his angels”.
Satan (“the adversary”) appeared in the Old Testament, as someone permitted by God to accuse men of sin and to test their fidelity, even to the point of tempting Jesus just before He began His public ministry.
Christians thought Satan was the serpent who tempted Eve, and they also thought that the Old Testament name Lucifer (“light bearer”) referred to him. (Somewhat unaccountably, Lucifer remained an honorable Christian name for two centuries.) From the Book of Revelation, Satan was recognized as a fallen angel who had originally been given responsibility for the earth but who rebelled out of resentment of the incarnate Christ, who he foresaw would supplant him.
There are legions of devils under Satan’s command (many of whom Jesus cast out), and in a sense, the world does belong to Satan. Both angels and devils struggle for the souls of men, but men remain free and ultimately cannot be coerced. In the end, Satan will be vanquished by God, the Creator and ruler of all. Quite early, the Christian rite of baptism included the exorcism of evil spirits.
The Kingdom
The God of the Jews was the Lord of history, governing human events through His providence, a belief that was greatly expanded by Christianity, which taught that the ultimate meaning of history is the unfolding of the Kingdom and that, since nothing is independent of God’s rule, good must ultimately triumph over evil, Jesus’ own apparent defeat being the culmination of this—His persecutors unwittingly served the Father’s purposes.
The Jews rebelled against Rome three times in the first and second centuries after Christ, but Christianity preached the coming of a nonpolitical Kingdom, one that is in some ways already present, based no longer on ancestry but on purity of heart, although open even to sinners. The ways of the Kingdom are in many respects the reverse of those of human society—triumph emerges only from defeat, suffering is the necessary prerequisite to glory, he who would save his life must lose it, the humble will be exalted, to give is better than to receive.
Christianity appealed to the prophetic and apocalyptic elements in Judaism rather than to its rituals and proclaimed even more emphatically the presence of God in history, looking forward to the end of time. Before returning to His Father, Jesus promised that He would come again, at which time He would pronounce final and definitive judgment on mankind, separating sheep from goats, casting the unrepentant into everlasting fire, and inviting the faithful into His Kingdom.
Savior and Redeemer
The Letters of Paul are the oldest records of Jesus’ life and work, and they present a developed theology of Jesus as nothing less than a divine being whose life and death transformed the universe. Jesus offered Himself to the Father on behalf of the sins of mankind, and He is the only means by which men can be saved.
Continuity with Judaism
The Christians saw fundamental continuity between their own faith and that of the Jews, because Jesus revealed the one true God—the God of the Jews—to the entire world. Beginning on Pentecost, the followers of Jesus proclaimed that He alone fulfilled the promises of the Jewish prophets. Thus the sacred books of the two religions fit together harmoniously. Christians insisted that the Old Testament could be ultimately understood only in the light of the New, although most Jews did not recognize that unity.
Paul and the Law
Observance of the Law of Moses was the essence of Judaism, but Paul made a radical break with that tradition, dismissing “the Law” as a barrier that Christ had broken down, thereby giving man a new spiritual freedom. Paul’s polemic was not anarchical antinomianism (“against the law”). Rather he was one of the most astute of psychologists, as in his exasperated cry, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:15). He made a subtle and profound analysis of human nature as enslaved to the inherited sin of Adam, a slavery which the Law exposes but which in itself it is powerless to overcome. Christ conferred freedom, but it is a paradoxical freedom—not self-will but the conquest of self-will, which is the very instrument of bondage.
The New Adam
Jesus was the New Adam who destroyed the sinful inheritance of the Old. When they accepted baptism, therefore, Christians did not merely join a community but through that mystical action were “baptized into Christ’s death” and thereby enabled to participate in His Resurrection, overcoming the slavery of sin. Men had to crucify their own natures and die to sin in order to become the adopted children of God.
The Mystical Body
Paul expounded the ultimate understanding of the Church—that she is nothing less than Christ’s own Body, of which all believers are members, organically linked to one another and to Christ as their Head.
Paul boldly asserted that, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14), and from the beginning, Jesus’ followers believed that His tomb was empty and that He had risen bodily. As with everything else having to do with Him, it was crucial to Jesus’ followers that His Resurrection was an actual historical event, one that was dated to the day and almost to the hour. The Apostles made many converts, claiming to be actual witnesses to the Resurrection and sealing their testimony by working miracles, especially of healing, solely in the name, and by the power, of Jesus, a power so impressive that one Simon the Magician tried to buy it from them.
Christian Life
The Eucharist
The Christians met regularly on their new Sabbath—the first day of the week, the day of the Resurrection—for prayers and “the breaking of the bread”, which soon came to be called the Eucharist (“thanksgiving”). In the Eucharist, the worshippers offered themselves to God and participated in the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God, sharing in both His death and His Resurrection, their earthly gifts transformed into heavenly ones.
There was no open invitation to partake of the Eucharist. In fact, Paul issued the awful warning that those who received the Body of Christ unworthily received it “unto their damnation” (1 Cor 11:29). It was not primarily a community meal. Christians did celebrate an agape (“love feast”)—but Paul rebuked the Corinthians for conflating the two and turning the Eucharist into an occasion of worldly merriment, asking sarcastically if they did not have homes where they could enjoy human fellowship, and asking rhetorically, “The bread that we eat, is it not the body of the Lord?” (1 Cor 10:16). Gradually, the agape was separated from the Eucharist, then abandoned.
The worshippers did not gather around a table facing one another but, as later artists portrayed accurately, followed the ancient banquet custom of all sitting (or reclining) on the same side of the table. As the agape meal was separated from the Eucharist, worshippers stood throughout the latter, sometimes raising their arms to Heaven in supplication.
The eucharistic sacrifice was seen as the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrifices of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek, and Christians continued using a number of Jewish customs in their worship: Scripture readings, recitation of the Psalms (now understood to refer primarily to Christ), intercessory prayers, congregational responses (especially Amen—“so be it”), prayers at regular hours during the day. Quite early, they adopted the Jewish custom of fasting, observing Wednesdays and Fridays for that purpose.
Almost all the words of the Eucharist were directed to God, with the worshippers never addressing one another and the celebrant addressing them only rarely. His occasional “The Lord be with you” was in a sense his brief acknowledgment of their presence amidst his continuing speaking to God on their behalf, and their reply—“And with your spirit”—a recognition of the celebrant’s special mediating role.
The Sacraments
The embryo of the Catholic sacramental system was present from the beginning. Jesus decreed the necessity to be born again of water and the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. On the night before His death, He commanded that the Eucharist be celebrated as He Himself was doing, and the repentance of sins was central to His message (and He gave His apostles power to forgive sins in John 20:23). Peter and John journeyed to Samaria to lay hands on newly baptized converts, in order that the Spirit would come upon them, and the Letter of James5 urged the flock to summon their leaders to the bedsides of the sick to pray over them and anoint them with oil. Deacons were ordained by the Apostles also by the laying on of hands.
Although immersion was the usual mode of baptism, in imitation of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River, the practice of simply pouring water on the convert’s head also appeared quite early. Baptism was always administered in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, not merely as a symbolic action but as an event that causes the recipient to be “signed with the sign of faith”, a kind of spiritual seal impressed on the soul.
Deposit of Faith
In the years before the Gospels were written, during the generation following the Resurrection (until roughly the year 60), the word Scripture meant what Christians would later call the Old Testament—there was no authoritative book from which they could learn about their own faith. The Gospel message was kept alive by traditions, most of them probably oral, within the living community of the Church. Paul rebuked the Galatians for departing from those traditions (the “deposit of faith”) and following false teachings and warned them not to give up those traditions even if told to do so by “an angel from heaven”.
The Spirit
After Pentecost, Jesus’ followers retained the dominant sense of being guided by the Spirit. Paul warned that no one could make the basic affirmation of faith—“Jesus is Lord”—except through the power of the Spirit, which is manifested in various ways, as when Paul and his traveling companion Timothy were told by the Spirit not to preach in Asia (roughly modern Turkey). The Apostles relied on this continuing inspiration, and Paul identified a range of gifts granted by the Spirit to individuals: to teach, to heal, to work miracles, to prophesy, to discern spirits, to speak in tongues.
The infant Church could therefore be considered charismatic (from the word for “gift”), in that it was guided by direct divine inspiration, manifested through inspired individuals. But that was not enough. Kerygma (“kernel”) is the heart of the faith as found in Scripture, but it is impossible to separate such a kernel from the ways in which the Church understands it.
It was sinful to reject the inspiration of the Spirit, but, while extolling the charisms, Paul ceaselessly warned against leaders (including, potentially, himself) who made their own teachings the substance of the faith. Particularly in the dispute over the Law, his powerful personality and his absolute conviction of being right were not in themselves sufficient. Formal deliberation by the Apostles as a group was required, with Peter acting as their head, the responsibility that had been entrusted to him by Jesus.
One Gospel
After the New Testament had been written, Christians read it as a coherent whole, not as representing divergent viewpoints. They had a strong sense of belonging to a unified Church, not to particular local communities each with its own theology. In the second century, adherence to false teachings came to be called heresy, a Greek word meaning “choice”, because heretics were not unbelievers but professed Christians who emphasized some teachings at the expense of others.
Ecclesial Offices
From the beginning, the Church had both an invisible and a visible character, spirit and flesh, inner life and external discipline, simultaneously both an institution and a spiritual community. The ecclesial offices were not administrative only but possessed spiritual power and authority, with office-holders not simply chosen by the community, for the sake of good order, but by the action of the Spirit, in order to represent Christ.
The Twelve
Jesus personally called the Twelve, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel, and He later designated seventy-two disciples, thereby establishing inner and outer circles among His immediate followers, with the Twelve possessing ultimate authority.
Despite its name, the Acts of the Apostles recounts the activities of only a few of the Twelve, probably because the rest had departed on long missionary journeys from which they never returned. Some of that group presided over a local church (James at Jerusalem, Peter for a time at Antioch). Paul was called an apostle because he had encountered the risen Christ in person and, apart from the Twelve, he alone had apostolic authority, making periodic visits to the communities over which he exercised authority and attempting to guide those communities through letters.
Pauline Offices
Paul identified apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers as those who had been given special authority in the Church, although it is not clear precisely how those offices related to one another or whether they were entirely separate.
Bishops
In his First Letter to Timothy, Paul referred to the office of bishop (episcopos: “overseer”) and laid down the requirements for that office, showing that, as new communities of believers were formed, they were under the direct supervision of an Apostle or of someone who succeeded to apostolic authority. Perhaps as a counterweight to the authority of the spiritual charisms, in describing the bishop, Paul emphasized the virtues and practical prudence of the head of a household. St. Clement, bishop of Rome (ca. 91-100), said that the Apostles appointed bishops in the communities which they oversaw.
Priests
Full consciousness of a distinctively Christian priesthood probably did not emerge until the Church had broken decisively with Judaism, since until then many Christians regarded the Jewish priests as still having authority and continued going to the Temple for sacrifice.
Acts identified presbyteroi as local church officials, an office that already existed among Greek-speaking Jews and that meant “elders”. At first, the bishop alone probably presided at the Eucharist, and it is not clear if the presbyters were ordained for any sacramental role. But as the Church grew, the term was used for lower clergy who were authorized by the bishop to preside at the Eucharist, and the word thereby came to mean “priest” in the Catholic sense.
Deacons
At one point, the Apostles chose seven deacons (“servants”), thereby establishing a new office, an action that, along with the various decisions about the binding nature of the Law, illustrated the authority structure of the early Church—on matters of importance the Apostles deliberated, then announced their decision to the rest of the disciples.
Women
Several women were the first to discover that Jesus’ tomb was empty, and Paul had two female associates—Phoebe and Prisca—about whom little is known. But Paul also enjoined women to “keep silence in the churches” (1 Cor 14:34), and no woman held formal office, although some—Mary above all—undoubtedly had the kind of unofficial, charismatic authority that has been exercised in every age by holy individuals.
Widows had a special status and special duties in the Church, especially in ministering to other women. They were discouraged from remarrying (sometimes forbidden to, as Paul forbade bishops to do), so as to witness to the Kingdom, where, as Jesus said, “They [men] neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mt 22:30). Virgins—unmarried women—also became a recognized category of Christians, and there was an official order of deaconesses, although it did not involve formal ordination and disappeared quite early.
The Moral Life
Marriage and Celibacy
When Paul warned that “the desires of flesh are against the Spirit” (Gal 5:17), he did not equate sin only with physical acts but used the word flesh to refer to man’s entire lower nature, particularly his self-will. But sexual lust is one of the strongest and most immediate expressions of self-will, which makes its conquest a necessary step toward a truly spiritual life. Thus he listed adulterers, fornicators, and sodomites as among those who could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Peter was married (Jesus cured his mother-in-law), as probably were the other Apostles and, indeed, most people in the early Church. But nothing is known of the Apostles’ married lives—the writers of the Gospel apparently saw no particular relevance in it. Significantly, no one claimed that Jesus was married, and the weight of the New Testament is against it.
Paul was celibate for the sake of the Kingdom, something he extolled as a higher state for those who could follow it, a teaching that does not seem to have been controversial among his married contemporaries. He enjoined bishops to be the husbands of only one wife, an injunction that was obviously not directed at the sin of bigamy but was rather to urge that they remain unmarried if widowed.
Paradoxically, with celibacy as the ideal, marriage was also exalted. Contrary to most prevailing ancient customs (but not those of the Jews), only in marriage could there be legitimate sexual activity. Paul’s theology of marriage was far more exalted than anything known to the pagan world—an intimate union of man and wife like that of Christ and His Church.
Paul’s famous injunctions “Wives, be subject to your husbands” and “Husbands, love your wives” (Eph 5:22, 25) were understood in that context, which was a major moral advance over the prevalent Roman custom of the “double standard” of sexual behavior for men and women and the virtually absolute authority that Roman husbands and fathers had over their families.
Marriage was also honored in the high value the Church placed on children, against a pagan society in which unwanted babies were put out to die of exposure. The begetting of children was always considered the principal purpose of Christian marriage, so that abortion and contraception were condemned from the earliest times.
Thus celibacy was extolled not because marriage is evil but because it is highly meritorious to give up something good for a still higher good. (Among the Jews, celibacy and other kinds of asceticism were mainly practiced by the somewhat marginal sect of the Essenes.)
Property
Little is known about the finances of the early Church. Paul plied the trade of a tent-maker but reminded his hearers that, if he chose to ask for it, he was entitled to their material support, in order to enable him to devote himself entirely to the work of the Gospel. It is likely that other early leaders were supported in their work by the community.
The Sermon on the Mount was the heart of Jesus’ social teaching, but He laid down no plan for a just social order and thereby deprived all social orders of divine authority, something that, paradoxically, made social change possible. His preaching was directed primarily at persons. Living as Jesus urged would necessarily bring about profound changes in the world, since it demanded a radical inversion of ordinary human relationships (e.g., “Love your enemies”). The heart of the Gospel was the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven, so that no earthly evil could be ultimate and Christians were urged to endure gladly every kind of suffering for the sake of Christ.
Acts records that the early Christians shared their goods but, although Jesus repeatedly warned against an attachment to possessions, the Church did not condemn private property as such. A married couple, Ananias and Sapphira, were struck dead after selling some land and giving only part of the proceeds to the Church, while claiming that it was the full amount. But their sin was lying, not clinging to what was rightfully theirs. Paul ruled that, if people would not work, they also should not eat.
Private property would not exist in the Kingdom. While a few people would renounce it completely as a living reminder of the nature of that Kingdom, wealth was given to some in order that they could aid those in need. Property was intimately linked with stewardship; it could not be used merely for personal satisfaction.
Charity
The establishment of the diaconate, following complaints of inequities in the distribution of food to the needy, was justified by the Apostles on the grounds that “it is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables” (Acts 6:2), a pointed reminder of the Church’s true purpose. The hungry in body were to be fed, but spiritual hunger was far worse, requiring that the Church’s spiritual mission always take precedence over her humanitarian service.
Paul identified the three basic virtues as faith, hope, and love and pronounced that “the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13), which “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Col 3:14). Jesus’ threefold injunction to pray, fast, and give alms (Latin for “mercy”) was considered the practical basis of the Christian life, and some Church leaders urged giving alms even to nonbelievers.
Although some early Christians rejoiced that such love was characteristic of their community (“By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” [Jn 13:35]), from the beginning there were also divisions. The deaths of Ananias and Sapphira—believed to be the direct work of the Spirit—shows that discipline could be stern indeed. Paul sometimes rebuked his hearers for their quarrelsomeness, and the establishment of the diaconate resulted from the first ethnic squabble in the history of the Church, when hellenized (Greek-speaking) Christians complained that their widows were not being treated equally in the distribution of food.
Spiritual Equality
The early Christians had no developed system of “social ethics” as such and were not reformers or revolutionaries in the modern sense. They did not advocate the overthrow of the existing social order, nor even its radical transformation in political terms.
Christianity proclaimed a radical idea of equality but in an essentially negative way—all men are equal in sin and in need of redemption; none can be saved by their own merits, least of all by their social standing. The Church accepted social hierarchy as justified in worldly terms but reminded people that it had no significance in the Kingdom.
Slavery
In his First Letter to Timothy, Paul included slave-traders among those who could not enter the Kingdom. But, famously, he also urged, “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters” (Eph 6:5). Slavery was considered a result of Adam’s fall and as such was not condemned. Slaves had to be respected as human beings and as adopted children of God, but it was not considered imperative that their transitory earthly status be changed. The Shepherd, perhaps the earliest Christian documents after the Bible itself, was purportedly written by an ex-slave, and some ex-slaves even became bishops, including Pope St. Calixtus I (217-222).
Paul set forth a concept of slavery far higher than any prior to that time, an ideal in which slaves are spiritually equal to their masters, since all Christians are slaves of Christ. In the context of the Kingdom, slavery has no significance (“There is . . . neither slave nor free . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus” [Gal 3:28]). Paul wrote a letter to a Christian slave-owner, Philemon, urging him to receive back a runaway slave, Onesimus, who was also a Christian, urging Philemon to treat Onesimus as he would treat Paul himself and wishing that he could keep Onesimus with him as a helper in his labors.
The State
Jesus’ only directly political teaching was His famous injunction, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Lk 20:25), which meant that His followers should pay their taxes, since the coin in question was already Caesar’s property—it had his image on it. Some Jews criticized Jesus for associating with tax collectors, who were considered agents of an oppressive government. Jesus forbade His followers to resist His unjust arrest, and when summoned before Pilate He did not deny the procurator’s authority. Paul told his hearers to be obedient to the state, and in even the most severe persecutions, the early Christians never denied the state’s temporal authority.
Radical Conversion
Because Jesus condemned the values on which “the world” is based, His followers were revolutionaries in a far deeper sense than the merely political, preaching a fundamental change in human nature itself, the inward adoption of a way of life that would radically transform the world. This way of life was possible not by human effort alone, but by the grace Christ won for man and offered through His Church, which He commanded His Apostles to spread throughout the world.
Peace
The early Church was not pacifist but pacific, meaning that she incessantly preached the imperative of living peacefully but did not condemn war in principle. The courage and dedication of soldiers were extolled as virtues all believers should cultivate. Christians served in the Roman army, a practice that was sometimes criticized not because war was sinful in itself but because the army constituted a spiritual environment that was dangerous to the whole Christian way of life.
The Spread of the Gospel
The Fulfillment of the Promise
The apostolic message was at first primarily directed to the Jews, announcing that the old faith was not abolished but actually fulfilled in Jesus and marshaling the sayings of the prophets in order to show that their words foretold the coming of Jesus. The synagogues were places for teaching as well as worship, and the first Christians went there to find receptive audiences, inviting Jews not to deny their faith but to fulfill it. Christians claimed that they understood the Scripture better than the Jews did, because the prophets foretold the Christ.
Persecution
But this inevitably provoked strong reaction from the religious authorities. Several of the Apostles were at various times arrested and kept in prison, and James was put to death by Herod Antipas, possibly as a gesture of piety toward the Jewish religion of which Herod was a notoriously poor representative. One of the early converts, a young man named Stephen, preached with such vehemence, denouncing the “hardheartedness” of his hearers, that he became the first Christian martyr, stoned to death in the manner prescribed for blasphemers.
Conversion of Saul
Among those who joined in this stoning was Saul, a Pharisee who had studied under a leading rabbi and who took his faith with intense seriousness. But after being thrown to the ground on the road to Damascus (Syria) and hearing a voice ask, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4) he became the model of all converts. Saul came from a hellenized Jewish background at Tarsus in Syria, and “Paul” was the hellenized form of his name, by which he now became known. Suddenly, he was a fervent and passionate exponent of the religion he had once hated. He considered himself the least of the Apostles, because he had persecuted the Church. Paradoxically, it was precisely his intense Jewish piety that led Paul to see Israel as unfaithful to God’s promises, so that he proclaimed that in the new dispensation there would be neither Jew nor Greek, an announcement for which some of the original Twelve were not prepared.
“All Nations”
Paul saw that the Christian faith is cosmopolitan by its very nature, not only because Jesus commanded His followers to “make disciples of all nations” but because His Resurrection promises the transformation of the whole world. That expectation was progressively modified as it became clear that His Second Coming (parousia) would not occur soon, thereby making the whole world a field for continued efforts to spread of the Gospel.
With Paul in the lead, the Church moved out into the larger hellenistic world. In the ensuing centuries, none of her leaders were of Jewish background, and many of the early theologians wrote treatises to show that the Gospel had supplanted the Jewish faith.
The word Gentiles meant simply “the nations”—all those who did not belong to the chosen people—and even those who insisted that Christians had to observe the Jewish Law never excluded Gentiles from the Church. Jesus praised the faith of a Roman centurion, and Acts records both the admission of several Gentiles to baptism and the existence of Christian communities at Antioch and Damascus, although they were probably composed mainly of converted Jews.
Jewish Diaspora
Christianity penetrated the wider world primarily through the Jews of the Diaspora (“dispersion”), who had settled all over the Empire. Probably for a time, most of the early converts were hellenized Jews rather than Gentiles as such, as was Paul’s missionary companion Timothy, the son of a Greek father and a Jewish mother who had accepted the Gospel. The hellenization of the Diaspora Jews opened for the Apostles a door into the Gentile world.
Paul the Missionary
Paul made three missionary journeys around the eastern Mediterranean, thereby greatly expanding the geographical scope of the Church, his letters serving as a way of remaining in communication with the local communities and of reminding them of his teachings.
The Law
The first great crisis in the history of the Church erupted when Paul began to teach that the Law was no longer binding, specifically that male Christians had no need to be circumcised and that no Christian had to observe the Jewish dietary regulations. The issue was resolved only with difficulty. James, the head of the church at Jerusalem, for a time upheld the old ways, while Peter, the chief of the Apostles, had a vision in which he was instructed that no foods are to be considered unclean, since all have been created by God. (Christianity is unusual among great religions in not forbidding any particular food to its adherents.)
Although the exact sequence of events is unclear, Peter seems to have first affirmed the binding nature of the Law, until persuaded otherwise by Paul. Acts records a relatively easy resolution of the issue, in which some of the requirements of the Law were abrogated and others retained, but in his Letter to the Galatians Paul reported a somewhat tenser meeting in which “I opposed him [Peter] to his face” (Gal 2:11). In various of his Letters, Paul warned against “false teachers” who were imposing circumcision but also urged converts to be patient with the “weaker brethren” who might be scandalized by those who were emancipated from the Law. This dispute gives insight into the nature of authority in the early Church, with Peter’s authority needed to confirm Paul’s authority, but the two ultimately considered complementary. (Historically, the Church has often venerated Peter and Paul together.)
The Greek New Testament
Christians seem to have relied mainly on the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint (so-called because it was believed to have been compiled by seventy rabbis), and after the first century, few Christian writers seem even to have understood Hebrew. Significantly, the New Testament was composed in Greek, which made it accessible to the largest number of people throughout the Empire.
Jewish Christians
As various of the Apostles left on their missionary journeys, the church in Palestine itself probably continued for the most part to observe Jewish Law, although there was also a good deal of anti-Christian polemic from Jewish sources. Some communities of “Jewish Christians” survived in the Holy Land for several centuries but were increasingly isolated from the larger Church and fell into heresy, rejecting Paul’s authority, venerating gospels that were not accepted elsewhere, propounding an elaborate mythology of angels and demons, and possessing a strong sense that the last days were near. Some Jewish Christians were called Ebionites (from a Hebrew word for “poor”) and others Nazarenes. Their exact theology is uncertain, but they sometimes referred to Jesus as an angel or a prophet. At the other extreme, a heretical sect founded by a man named Marcion (d. ca. 150) demanded a complete break with Judaism, rejecting the Old Testament as pertaining to another God.
The destruction of the Temple by the Romans after the Jewish rebellion of the year 70—a desecration completed by later building a temple to Jupiter on the site—confirmed for most Christians that God’s action in history was now taking place on a much wider stage. For some, this destruction was a necessary act of divine providence, since Christ Himself is the new Temple. Thus worshippers no longer faced Jerusalem when they prayed but turned toward the East, to greet the rising sun, the symbol of the risen Christ.
The Gospel to the Gentiles
Although the total number of Christians remained fairly small, the movement spread even beyond the farthest eastern boundaries of the Empire. Early traditions traced the founding of various far-flung local churches to the evangelical efforts of particular Apostles—James the Greater in Spain, for example, the disciple St. Joseph of Arimathea in Britain, St. Bartholomew in Persia, St. Jude Thaddeus in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), St. Thomas in India, St. Mark in Egypt.
The Greeks
Paul sought to spread the Good News in more than just a geographical sense, bringing it into unfamiliar cultures. He first took Christianity to Europe through Macedonia, immediately to the north of Greece, his first missionary stop being Philippi, the place where the assassins of Julius Caesar had been vanquished a century before.
Bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles was in some ways far more difficult than bringing it to the Jews, because the missionaries had no obvious point of contact with polytheists. Paul’s claim at Ephesus that the pagan gods were frauds provoked the wrath of craftsmen who made their living by fashioning silver images of the goddess Artemis (Diana). The silversmiths started a riot in which crowds shouted for hours, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians”, and threatened violence against the Christians, until a town official stopped them. In Athens, Paul noticed an altar dedicated to the “Unknown God” (the Athenians’ way of hedging their religious bets) and tried to gain the pagans’ attention by proclaiming that he had come to speak to them precisely of this unknown deity, who in reality is the only God. But his message about Christ crucified puzzled and repelled his hearers (a “folly to Gentiles” [1 Cor 1:23]), so that his initial success was meager.
But paradoxically, as the Gospel spread, its fate became increasingly entwined, in a variety of ways, with the fate of the very Empire whose minions had crucified the Christ.