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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
What Is Christianity? provides a fascinating overview of the world's largest religion, weaving history, theology, spirituality, denominational divisions, and global growth into a single compelling story. Written in clear and captivating prose that requires no previous knowledge of Christianity, it describes the religion inspired by Jesus as a living faith that is still changing and developing today. Reader-friendly chapters introduce the major traditions of Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism), explaining their spiritual appeal and tracing their evolution over the centuries. Christianity's recent global expansion is highlighted, but Christianity has been a diverse and multicultural movement from the very beginning. Each chapter provides thought-provoking insights into the beliefs, values, practices, achievements, and failures of Christians as they tried to remain faithful to the message and meaning of Jesus in different times and places. * Condenses a vast amount of information into a coherent narrative * Explains how and why Christianity has become so incredibly diverse * Describes what almost all Christians have always held in common * Summarizes the current status of Christianity in each global region * Discusses the challenges that Christians worldwide are facing today What Is Christianity? is an ideal introduction to Christianity as a world religion for people who are unfamiliar with Christianity as well as for Christians who want to know more about their own faith and the faith practices of fellow believers from other Christian traditions. An engaging text for general readers, this short volume will also be a stimulating choice for book discussion groups and or for the classroom.
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What Is Christianity?
Douglas Jacobsen
This edition first published 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jacobsen, Douglas G. (Douglas Gordon), 1951- author. Title: What is Christianity? : a short introduction to Christianity and its major sub-traditions / Douglas Jacobsen. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021024449 (print) | LCCN 2021024450 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119746690 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119746706 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119746713 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Christian sects. | Christianity. | Church history. Classification: LCC BR157 .J33 2022 (print) | LCC BR157 (ebook) | DDC 280–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024449LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024450
Cover image: © Kevin Carden/123rf
Cover design by Wiley
Set in 9.5/12.5 pt and STIXTwoText by Integra Software Services, Pondicherry, India
For Hudson
Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction: What Is Christianity?
1 Christian Beginnings
The Jewish Roots of Christianity
Jesus and the Gospel
Christianity’s Original Diversity
Emergence of the Great Church
The Roman Imperial Church
Christian Diversity and Unity in the Year 500
The Great Division
The “Traditioning” of Christianity
2 Orthodoxy: Preserving Ancient Ways
Orthodox Spirituality
The Orthodox Understanding of Salvation
Orthodox History
Institutional and Social Structure of Orthodoxy
3 Catholicism:
The
Church
Catholic Spirituality
The Catholic Understanding of Salvation
Catholic History
Institutional and Social Structure of Catholicism
4 Protestantism: The Bible and the Individual
Protestant Spirituality
The Protestant Understanding of Salvation
Protestant History
Institutional and Social Structure of Protestantism
5 Pentecostalism: The Power of the Spirit
Pentecostal Spirituality
The Pentecostal Understanding of Salvation
Pentecostal History
Institutional and Social Structure of Pentecostalism
6 Becoming Global
Catholic Globalization
Protestant Globalization
The Bigger Picture: From Eurocentrism to World Christianity
7 The Contemporary Geography of Christianity
Mapping Christianity’s Regional Differences
The Middle East and North Africa
Eastern Europe
Western Europe
India and Central Asia
Sub-Saharan Africa
East Asia
Latin America
North America
Oceania
Christian Interactions Today
8 Common Threads and Shared Challenges
Common Threads in the Early Christian Movement
The Modern Search for Christian Unity
Christian Commonalities Today
Contemporary Challenges
Conclusion: What Is Christianity Today?
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
1.1 Figure of Jesus as a young shepherd...
1.2 Geographic locations of the three traditions...
1.3 Diagram of the Great Division summarizing Christological...
Chapter 2
2.1 Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral (Sibiu, Romania), interior of main dome
2.2 Floor plans of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and a...
2.3 Simplified map of Eastern Europe showing national boundaries...
2.4 Interior of small Orthodox church (Cyprus)
Chapter 3
3.1 Statues of the Infant of Prague (the young Jesus) for sale...
3.2 Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, a Baroque style...
Chapter 4
4.1 Interior of Hungarian Reformed Church in Sibiu, Romania...
4.2 Religious map of Catholic and Protestant Europe c. 1650....
Chapter 5
5.1 Aimee Semple McPherson (front row, second from left) in a...
5.2 Social structure of Pentecostalism.
Chapter 6
6.1 Graph showing changing percentage of all Christians who...
Chapter 7
7.1 Global geographic profiles of the world’s four...
7.2 Nine regions of the world, with percentage...
List of Tables
Chapter 2
2.1 Major Eastern Orthodox Churches with current...
Chapter 4
4.1 Five major Protestant families, representing...
Guide
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Figures
List of Tables
Begin Reading
Conclusion: What Is Christianity Today?
Index
End User License Agreement
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List of Figures
1.1 Figure of Jesus as a young shepherd (from the catacomb ofPriscilla, Rome, third century) and Jesus as a middle-agedjudge (from the Chora Church in Istanbul, originallyconstructed in the later fourth century)
1.2 Geographic locations of the three traditions created by the Great Division
1.3 Diagram of the Great Division summarizing Christological differences
2.1 Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral (Sibiu, Romania), interior of main dome
2.2 Floor plans of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and a typicalOrthodox church showing similarity of layout
2.3 Simplified map of Eastern Europe showing national boundariesin 1700 and 1900
2.4 Interior of small Orthodox church (Cyprus)
3.1 Statues of the Infant of Prague (the young Jesus) for sale at a shop near the Church of Our Lady Victorious in Prague (Czech Republic), where the original statue is on display
3.2 Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, a Baroque style Catholicchurch in Rome built in the early 1600s, showing apse at thefront of the sanctuary and details from the painted ceiling
4.1 Interior of Hungarian Reformed Church in Sibiu, Romania illustrating the centrality of the pulpit in Protestant church architecture
4.2 Religious map of Catholic and Protestant Europe c. 1650. (Regions colored white were predominantly Orthodox)
5.1 Aimee Semple McPherson (front row, second from left) in a performance at her church, Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles
5.2 Social structure of Pentecostalism
6.1 Graph showing changing percentage of all Christians who lived in Europe and who lived elsewhere during the period 1500 to the present
7.1 Global geographic profiles of the world’s four largest religions
7.2 Nine regions of the world, with percentage (in parenthesis) of world’s Christian population
List of Tables
2.1 Major Eastern Orthodox Churches with current ecclesiastical status and estimated membership
4.1 Five major Protestant families, representing two-thirds of all Protestants worldwide
Introduction What Is Christianity?
Christianity is the most popular and influential religion in human history. Launched by Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago, the Christian movement currently has more than two and a half billion members. Christians are now located in every country on earth, and they represent the majority of the population in Europe, Latin America, North America, Oceania, and southern Africa. But what exactly constitutes Christianity? What does this religion stand for? What makes Christianity Christian? Why have so many people embraced it?
More than one hundred years ago, a professor at a prestigious German university decided to provide answers to all these questions. He arrived at the university lecture hall a few minutes before six o’clock in the morning when it was still dark outside, and the walk across campus had invigorated him. When he stepped up to the podium, not a seat in the house was empty. Six hundred students (all of them male because women would not be admitted to the university until 1908) and a smattering of faculty colleagues had their eyes fixed on him as he began the day’s address. “What is Christianity?” he asked, and they were counting on him to supply an answer. The year was 1900. The place was the University of Berlin. The speaker was Adolph von Harnack, one of the most brilliant and well-known scholars in the world.
Professor Harnack did not disappoint. He gave them a simple and straightforward answer because, he told them, the gospel itself is simple. Christianity at its purest and best is the religion of Jesus, the message that Jesus himself proclaimed. It focuses on three things: the fatherhood of God, the infinite value of the human soul, and the commandment to love everyone. In a nutshell, that was it. That is the essence of Christianity. Christians had advocated many other beliefs and practices during the movement’s long history, but, according to Harnack, those other things were largely superfluous. The only thing that really matters is Jesus’s core teaching. This is the gospel – the message Christianity has to share with the world – and that gospel (or “good news”) is simple.
Something even more basic was at stake, however. For Harnack, the simple gospel of Jesus is not merely the essence of Christianity, it is the quintessence of religion itself. A humanistic scholar who affirmed the validity of science, Harnack served as the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm society which later became the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, one of the most prestigious centers for the study of human evolution in the world. Harnack was interested in human origins, and he believed that it is religion – the spiritual impulse that leads people to wonder about the mystery of life and how they are called to live – that makes Homo sapiens into something more than merely smart animals. For Harnack, a proper understanding of the gospel of Jesus was not merely the key to understanding Christianity, it was the key for understanding what makes any of us human. And that is why 600 students voluntarily crowded into a university lecture hall at six o’clock in the morning for fifteen weeks in a row: to hear someone explain who they were called to be as followers of Jesus and who they were as human beings.
The German state church was not impressed with Harnack’s views or erudition. Traditional German Christians thought his interpretation downplayed Christianity’s traditional emphasis on personal salvation and correct doctrine, and they initially tried to block his promotion to the University of Berlin when it was announced in 1888. Ultimately Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to intervene personally to make sure Harnack got the job. Despite the church’s worries, Harnack himself was deeply committed to Christianity, and his lectures were crafted to provide university students with a positive view of Christianity that was fully compatible with modern learning. He hoped that university students would be so inspired by the message of Jesus that they would leave the university intent on making the German nation a place where “justice is done, no longer by the aid of force, but by free obedience to the good…not by legal regulations but by the ministry of love.”1 He wanted his students, and everyone else who heard or read his lectures, to become better Jesus-following Christians and more intelligent, caring citizens. That is how he envisioned Christianity: as the highest expression of religion itself, a faith focused on goodness and love, and the solution to all of humanity’s problems.
Except it wasn’t. Just a few years after delivering his lectures, Harnack’s own actions undercut his claims. During the early months of World War I, he was one of ninety-three German intellectuals who composed a document entitled “To the Civilized World,” which justified atrocities committed by the German army during its infamous Rape of Belgium. In this statement he and his professorial peers argued that anyone “inciting Mongolians [i.e., Asians] and negroes against the white race, ha[d] no right whatsoever to call themselves upholders of civilization.”2 Harnack may have thought Christianity was the best and most perfect religion for all people, times, and places, but it did not prevent him from rationalizing wanton violence against civilians and championing the cause of German racial supremacy.
Christianity has not been a wellspring of universal goodness for humankind. Christians have contributed much that is good to the world, but they have also done significant harm. They have believed Jesus’s message of love for all people, but have often failed to act in loving, or even decent, ways. And Christianity cannot serve as the sole arbiter of human religiosity. Different religions provide humankind with different visions of the world as it is and could be, they offer different pathways to and definitions of salvation, and they advocate different ideals and values. Christianity is a powerful and inspiring religion, but it is not the simple religion that Harnack described.
In contrast to Harnack’s idealistic portrayal, this book offers a more empirical examination of what Christians have believed, how they have acted, how they have organized themselves, how they have spread their message around the world, and what challenges they are facing today. There is no intention to either criticize or praise the movement; the only goal is fair and accurate description. That said, this book is more than a mere recital of facts and numbers quantifying Christianity from the outside. It also looks at Christianity from the inside, trying to explain Christianity’s spiritual appeal and why so many people around the globe have embraced it.
One obvious fact about Christianity is that it is a far different movement today than it was a century ago when Harnack gave his university lectures. In 1900, two-thirds of the world’s Christians still lived in Europe. Today, only a quarter of the world’s Christians reside in Europe and about 10 percent live in North America. The rest, two-thirds of all the Christians in the world, live in the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). The internal composition of Christianity has also been transformed. In 1900, three major Christian traditions (Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism) dominated the Christian movement. Now there are four major traditions. The addition is Pentecostalism, and this new tradition, which currently attracts one out of every five Christians globally, has dramatically altered the Christian landscape.3 Simultaneously, the terrain of global politics has been fundamentally reordered. In 1900, half the world’s people were ruled by European colonial governments. Today those former colonies are independent nations, and the Christians who live in them are fully independent of Western Christian control. Christianity is no longer a European religion with a periphery everywhere else; Christianity has become a postcolonial, global faith with many different centers.
This book describes Christianity in eight chapters. Chapter 1 explains how the movement got started, and how within 500 years a small group of followers of Jesus grew into a religion that had a membership that spread across a massive region of the world, ranging from Ireland in the northwest to the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Chapter 1 also traces how Christianity changed from a loosely structured and fluid movement into a religion comprised of separately organized and distinct Christian traditions. Today, Christianity is housed in four major traditions – Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism – and these four traditions account for about 97 percent of all the Christians in the world. Chapters 2 through 5 explain each of these traditions in turn.
The remainder of the book deals with the characteristics of Christianity as a whole. Chapter 6 describes Christianity’s recent expansion around the world and the changing attitudes of Christians in both the Global North (Europe and North America) and the Global South (Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania). Chapter 7 describes the dramatically different experiences of Christians around the world today. Some Christians are persecuted; others are persecutors. Some Christians are wealthy; many are poor. In some regions Christianity is growing; elsewhere it is in decline. Despite all of these differences, most Christians continue to see themselves as members of one religion. Chapter 8 explores this sense of Christian connectedness, describing what most Christians hold in common while also reflecting on a variety of religious challenges that Christianity is currently facing as a global movement. The Conclusion returns to the main question of the book and argues that Christianity today is what it has been throughout its long history: a religion that is still in the process of forming and reforming itself in response to changing circumstances and in light of its memory of Jesus.
Notes
1
Adolph Harnack,
What Is Christianity?
translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 112. Harnack’s lectures were originally published in German in 1900 under the title
Das Wesen des Christentums
, which could literally be translated as “The Essence of Christianity.” They were published in English in 1902 using the present title.
2
Professors of Germany, “To the Civilized World,”
The North American Review
210:756 (August 1919), pp. 284–287,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25122278.pdf?acceptTC=true
(accessed September 8, 2020).
3
The demographic information included in this book represents the author’s best estimates based on a variety of sources. The most complete and reliable source of information is the World Christian Database (
https://www.worldchristiandatabase.org
) and it has been consulted frequently. The numbers used here are not, however, taken directly from the WCD. They have sometimes been adjusted based on other information (from, for example, the United Nations or different national census figures) and the reporting categories differ from those of the WCD. Numbers in this book have been consistently rounded off to reflect that they are indeed estimates and not actual headcounts of Christians in different traditions, nations, or regions of the world. The goal has been to include all people who self-identify as Christian wherever they may live and whatever they may believe.
1 Christian Beginnings
The religion called Christianity did not spring into existence with its identity already fully developed and finalized. At first, Christians did not even know what to call themselves. The New Testament book of Acts refers to them simply as “followers of the Way” and infers that the term “Christians” was first used by others, possibly as a derogatory means of distinguishing disciples of Christ from other kinds of Jews. What seems clear is that Jesus had a powerful impact on his closest friends and associates and that those allies were able to communicate their enthusiasm about Jesus to others. In a sense, Christianity began as something like a fan club for Jesus. This is not meant as criticism, but merely as description. A fan club is held together by its devotion to a person, not by the ideas or ideals that demarcate its identity. Earliest Christianity was indeed something like a fan club: it was a movement of devotion to Jesus long before it developed a clear and distinct sense of its own religious identity.
Religious identity is a group phenomenon. Everyone has their own spiritual sense of who they are, but religions are bigger than any one individual. A religion is a community that a person joins, or is born into, that connects participants with the divine (or more generally with “the transcendent”) and provides guidance for the journey of life. Religions are not meant to be easily modified to conform to one’s wishes; indeed, few people want their religion to be pliable and undemanding. Religions are instead expected to provide a standard to which individuals conform, an ideal worthy of utmost human effort. People change their lives to fit their religion, not the other way around.
Religious identity consists of the beliefs, actions, values, personality traits, affectivities, and organizational structures that a religious community champions and shares with others. This does not mean that every member of the group agrees about everything. No group of people is ever that uniform. What it does mean is that members of the group hold enough things more-or-less in common that they feel a sense of belonging together. They recognize each other as family. They understand how people in the group think and know how members of the group feel about themselves, about others, and about the things they hold sacred.
When Christianity first began, it had not yet figured out its own religious identity. Christians weren’t fully sure what they believed or didn’t believe as a group, and there were no fixed rules about who belonged or didn’t belong. There was as yet neither a New Testament nor a church hierarchy to supply answers. They had the Hebrew scriptures, but they were not quite sure how to interpret them; for that matter, they were not sure if Christianity was a new kind of Judaism or something else. As a group, Christians simply had not spent enough time together to develop a corporate personality, and they had no idea how to institutionally organize themselves or even if institutionalizing the movement was a proper goal. They all loved Jesus, but Christianity was not yet a religion. It was still just a loosely connected social movement of people on “the way.”
It would be wrong to see these early Christians as totally adrift. That is clearly not accurate. Everyone agreed that Jesus was their guide and teacher, and they were all quite certain that a new age of divine blessing was dawning, but the movement was surprisingly open-ended. Lots of rules, regulations, and practices would be implemented later, and once they were in place Christians often treated them as if they had always been essential elements of the movement, but most had not. When Christianity began, it was a movement in search mode. Christians possessed a handful of ideas and inclinations that they were spiritually willing to bet their lives on, but they had not yet deciphered what it all meant. Figuring that out would literally take centuries, and there would always be multiple answers rather than just one. Instead of ending up with just one uniform and ubiquitous Christian identity, Christianity ended up with a number of different but overlapping and interrelated identities. These varied packages of Christian beliefs and practices are called traditions, and this chapter recounts how the original fledgling Christian movement slowly evolved over five or six hundred years to become an organized religion housed in multiple different traditions.
The Jewish Roots of Christianity
Jesus was a Jew, and Judaism is the source of many of the ideas and commitments that still characterize Christianity today. While the precise origins of Judaism are largely lost in the mists of history, the Hebrew scriptures assert that the Jewish people were called into existence by God and given a special role in the human story. The Hebrew scriptures include a vivid account of exodus from Egypt and conquest of Palestine, but the archaeological records from this time period (thirteenth century bce) reflect a much slower and less dramatic progression of events that eventually gave birth to Israel and to Jewish religious consciousness. Whatever the process, it seems clear that by about 1000 bce an Israelite kingdom had been established in Palestine, with its religious life focused on rituals performed at the Temple in Jerusalem.
In 587 bce, Palestine was conquered by the powerful Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar II. Many Jews were exiled to Persia (now Iraq and Iran), and the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. Without a temple, Jews developed other mechanisms for preserving their faith, most notably the synagogue, a place where Jews could gather to pray and to discuss religious and moral matters. Jews started returning to Palestine around 540 BCE and promptly rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple, but synagogues remained in use as local meeting places for Jews wherever they lived. Several different dynasties conquered and ruled post-exile Palestine, but in the 140s bce a Jewish state was reestablished in the region. That kingdom was of relatively short duration; it was subsumed into the Roman Empire in 63 bce. From that juncture until 1948, Jews had no land they could call their own.
By the time of the Roman occupation, assorted groups of Jews had developed their own different ways of making sense of God, themselves, and their historical experience. Prominent Jewish sub-groups included the Pharisees, who stressed the law and personal piety; the Sadducees, who emphasized traditional temple worship; the Zealots, who were violently opposed to Roman rule; and the Qumran community that assumed the end of the world was near and that a final battle between good and evil was about to commence. The Samaritans, another quasi-Jewish group, claimed descent from two of Israel’s ancient tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh. In addition, an increasing number of Gentiles (non-Jews) were calling themselves God-fearers and adopting many of Judaism’s ideas and values without formally becoming Jews themselves.
This was the complex world of Jewish faith into which Jesus was born and which shaped the early Christian movement. Christianity retained many of the basic ideas and practices of Judaism. The synagogue morphed into the church, and the diversity of perspectives within Judaism prepared the way for the diversity of beliefs and practices that soon came to characterize the early Christian community. Imbedded in the matrix of first-century Judaism, Christianity emerged as a new and distinct religious movement led by a backcountry prophet named Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus and the Gospel
Jesus was an unlikely leader. Neither a priest nor a scholar, Jesus lived his first thirty years in relative obscurity as the son of Mary and her husband Joseph, a carpenter in the small town of Nazareth in the region known as Galilee. Then, for just a few years before he was killed, he took on the role of a wandering Jewish prophet and teacher, at first in the rural region where he had been raised and later for a very short time in Jerusalem.
His message was simple but profound. Jesus affirmed much of the Judaism of his day, including the Golden Rule (which Jews usually expressed in the negative as “do not do to others what you would not want done to you”), but Jesus frequently added his own twist to these teachings. Some of his additions – the folksy way he referred to God as “abba” (best translated as “daddy”), his willingness to bend the law to accommodate human frailty, his claim that he was able to forgive sins – were troubling to traditional Jews, and some Jewish leaders plainly disliked Jesus and his movement.
His message was also troubling to Rome. Jesus spoke of a coming “kingdom of God” and described his own actions as the dawning of that kingdom. He instructed his followers to give appropriate respect to Caesar (the Roman Emperor), but he also told them to give their complete obedience to God, a qualification that obviously limited any loyalty owed to Caesar. And, while he did not seek political power for himself, he refused to cower when Rome’s political appointees detained and interrogated him. His behavior seemed potentially subversive to an empire that demanded absolute obedience, and Rome responded vigorously. Using the gruesome spectacle of execution on a cross, the Empire eliminated Jesus and sent a public message to his followers that insolence in the face of imperial authority would not be tolerated.
Jerusalem’s residents, and many of Jesus’s own closest followers, thought that was the end of the matter. His male disciples were despondent and ready to abandon the cause. But some of his female friends began to claim they had seen Jesus alive, and soon his male disciples were making the same claim. They believed that somehow Jesus had been resurrected from the dead and had been given a new and glorious body. They also came to believe that this resurrected Jesus had given them a task to accomplish: they were to continue the work that Jesus had started, preaching the gospel message throughout the world, to every person, in every nation, in every tongue, and they were not to stop until they reached the ends of the earth.
The fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea says that the disciples of Jesus cast lots to determine where each of them should go. Thomas was supposedly assigned to Parthia (now Iran and Iraq), Andrew to Scythia (now Ukraine), and John to the province of Asia Minor (now Turkey). Peter, as the group’s leader, was given freedom to travel wherever he wanted.1 Eusebius did not always get his facts straight and this particular story may well be a pious fiction, but his basic point is accurate. Within a century of Jesus’s death, the Christian gospel had been exported far beyond the boundaries of Palestine, taking root as far west as Spain and as far east as India.
What exactly was this “gospel” or “good news” that the followers of Jesus sought to transmit around the world? Much of its content was derived from the teachings of Jesus himself: that God was humanity’s dear father, that people were required to love each other, that repentance was the pathway to true righteousness, that ultimately everyone would stand before God and be judged, and that somehow Jesus’s own suffering and death was part of God’s plan to redeem humankind and the world. But Jesus himself never wrote any of this down; a literary legacy was not left behind. Jesus was not a writer, nor was he a systematic thinker or an institution builder. He was a storyteller who reveled in the spoken word. Later on, some of his followers recorded their memories of Jesus, preserving his teachings and the stories he told in short books called “gospels” (four of which are included in the New Testament). These accounts of Jesus’s life and message do not, however, define the entirety of the gospel as Christianity proclaimed it.
The gospel of Jesus, what Jesus himself taught his followers, was quickly augmented within the Christian movement with a gospel about Jesus, a description of who Jesus was and why his life and teachings were so important. This gospel about Jesus proclaimed that he was more than merely human and more than merely one more prophet in a long line of Jewish prophets. He was the Messiah, a special and unique messenger from God, or perhaps he was even God incarnate. The Christian movement would later decisively emphasize the latter of these interpretations, but such a degree of clarity did not exist in the early decades. Everyone agreed, however, that Jesus was no mere mortal. He was the Christ (the anointed of God), and the gospel preached by his followers would ever after combine the message of Jesus of Nazareth with this additional message about Jesus the Christ.
Christianity’s Original Diversity
During the first two centuries of its existence, Christianity remained a small religious movement with no discernible center or governing structure. Groups of Christians in different locations held widely varying opinions about almost every aspect of the movement, including who Jesus was, what salvation entailed, how the movement was related to Judaism, when and how the world would end, which sources of authority should guide the movement, and how the movement should be organized. The Bible had not yet been compiled, and institutional church structures were weak or nonexistent. It was a movement led by charismatic, often self-appointed, individuals who sometimes had conflicting visions for the movement’s future. Even at the local level, Christians had their differences. In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he indicates that many Christians in that city looked to a person named Apollos as their main guide and teacher, others looked to Peter, some followed Paul himself, and a few apparently claimed direct access to Christ with no need for any human teacher. Unanimity was clearly not the norm.
A short book called the Didache (meaning “teaching”), written around the year 100, advised early Christians about how to conduct themselves in this diverse and fluid environment. One immediate concern was evaluating the many wandering Christian prophets and preachers who traveled from town to town, providing instruction and seeking support from local Christian communities. The Didache says these peripatetic prophets should initially be welcomed as fellow believers, but they should be designated as false teachers if they stayed too long (more than two nights), if they asked for money or food, or if they failed to follow their own guidance. The document’s advice on baptism is similarly practical and flexible. Instead of mandating one specific mode of baptism, the Didache says it is best to baptize individuals in a cold spring-fed stream, but if a stream is not available, then a cold lake or pool will do; if cold water cannot be found, then warm water is satisfactory; and if there is not enough water for full immersion, then pouring water over a person’s head will suffice. Early Christianity was adaptable, and Christians felt little need to endorse just a single way of doing anything.2
Multiple versions of Christianity flourished alongside each other. Some Christian groups continued to insist that followers of Jesus needed functionally to become Jews and to obey the entirety of Jewish law. Other Christians adopted a position at the opposite extreme and condemned Judaism as thoroughly mistaken and evil. A person named Marcion, who grew up on the southern coast of the Black Sea and later moved to Rome, was the most prominent champion of this antisemitic perspective; he was also the first person to publish a collection of specially selected sacred Christian texts that prefigured the New Testament. Marcion’s compilation included the Gospel of Luke, the book of Acts, and most of Paul’s letters, but he removed anything in those texts that reflected favorably on Jews. Marcion and his antisemitic proto-New Testament were eventually rejected by the church in Rome where he was a member, but a separate Marcionite church continued to exist for several centuries. Another Christian group called the New Prophecy believed that God was still speaking directly to humankind through prophets whose words were as authoritative as those of Jesus. The movement was nominally led by a man named Montanus, but its prophetic oracles were both women, Prisca and Maximilla. Another significant subgroup of early Christians were called Gnostics, who delighted in formulating complex metaphysical descriptions of the universe and all the spiritual beings, both good and evil, that inhabit it. Gnostics claimed that Jesus had provided them with secret knowledge about how to negotiate their way through a complex and spiritually crowded universe after death and eventually make their way to heaven. The perspectives of Gnostics, Marcionites, members of the New Prophecy, and many others were all part of the early Christian amalgamation, and there was no central authority to adjudicate their conflicting claims.
Emergence of the Great Church
During the late second and early third centuries, a group of Christian bishops from the major cities of the Roman Empire launched a concerted effort to bring more structure, order, and male control to the movement. The immediate goal was to establish their own authority to govern the movement, and their proposals were based on a new theory called “apostolic succession.” Apostolic succession operates along the same lines as a modern self-perpetuating board of trustees that chooses its own successors. For the early Christian movement, apostolic succession was established when Jesus selected his disciples and invested them with special authority to lead the movement in his post-ascension absence and when Christ’s apostles then chose their successors and gave them special authority to lead the church. Those leaders subsequently had chosen their successors, and so on right up to the present day.
Bishops who could trace their lineage of leadership succession back to Jesus viewed themselves as having special authority within the movement and as having a special responsibility for imposing order on a movement that many of them considered to be much too freewheeling. Slowly these bishops formed themselves into a network of orthodox (“right-believing”) Christian leaders who began establishing boundaries around their wing of the Christian movement, which they called the Great Church or simply the Church. Identifying heresy (wrong belief) became a focus of attention, and volumes with titles like Against All Heresies, written by Irenaeus who was bishop of the city of Lyon (France) from around 180 to 202, became standard texts for deciding who was in and who was outside the Great Church. Formal church membership now became a major concern, and Cyprian (208–258), the bishop of Carthage, bluntly declared that no one could “have God as Father who does not have the church as mother.”3 The bishops were never able to attract or corral everyone who called themselves followers of Jesus into the Great Church, but over time a majority of Christians became associated with their version of Christianity, and it developed into the mainstream of the movement.
