The First Church is a model for us

Our Christian origins remind us of the need for courageous faith

The Bible has shown no interest in giving us a description of what Jesus looked like.   All our paintings of Jesus are merely the artist's idea of how he might have looked. The first representation of Christ on record is an irreverent piece of graffiti on the wall of a house on Palatine Hill in Rome. It is known as the “Alexamenos graffito,” and depicts a man worshipping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. The inscription reads: "Alexamenos worships his god."

1st and 2nd century - Jews and Gentiles

At first, Christianity was considered part of the Jewish religion, until events separated the two faiths.

Christians and Jews; an unhappy story of separation.

Jesus was a Jew, as were most of those who first followed him.  The first Christian congregations were Jewish believers who were convinced that Jesus represented the fulfilment of the promises of the prophets. As they started to organise themselves as disciples of Jesus, they carried on meeting in the Temple, and did not appear to feel the need to go somewhere else (see, for example, Acts 2:46). They were still at home thinking of themselves like others who worshipped in the Temple.

The Judaism of this period was not monolithic; there were many strands, and competing schools of thought, and those who followed Jesus, for the first generation of Christians, were seen, and content to be seen as but another strand within the complexity of Judaism. They were not replacing Judaism.

However, although the different strands could co-exist for some time, even with some disagreements and tensions, things finally fell apart in AD 70, when Jerusalem was conquered and destroyed. Even before this, there had been times when the tensions between the older and the newer community had flared up – there are records of riots in Rome which appear to have been between Christians and Jews in AD 50, which resulted in expulsions from the city.

These expulsions were not all bad news.  As they moved out of the city and into distant cities and even countries, they took with them the Good News of Jesus our Saviour and our Messiah.  Today, one of the Churches established by some of those scattered groups and still thriving in the world today is the Coptic Church whose roots are in Egypt. 

 In AD 66, a rebellion of Jews against Rome started in Judea, and continued for the next four years, until AD 70 when the armies of Rome eventually conquered and destroyed Jerusalem. The Jews were again expelled from the city. For the Roman authorities, those who followed Jesus were simply one of the parts of the Jewish nation that they had defeated. They did not make a distinction and expelled both Jews and Christians. Most of those who followed Jesus had already left the city.

For the Jews, being expelled involved not just the loss of the city, but also the loss of the Temple, which was the centre of the community’s practice of religion. Although the synagogues were already in existence and were places where people gathered to study the Scriptures and to pray, the Temple was the heart of the faith – and its loss meant that there needed to be a new way to organise the religious life of the community, but one without sacrifices. This was worked out over the next years – a gathering of Rabbis at a place called Jamnia was largely responsible for setting the framework that was to shape the continued life for Jews now that the Temple was no more.

Among the decisions made because of this framework was a tightening up of the definition of what constituted Jewish faith - and that involved the exclusion of those who followed Jesus. This was not entirely inevitable, but nor was the pressure towards it easy to resist. Even before this, the movement around Jesus was already developing a life independent of its Jewish origins.

Peter, and then even more definitely Paul, had insisted that the good news of Jesus while it was for Jews, was not only for them, and so what is called “the mission to the Gentiles” (non-Jews) gradually developed. We can see the beginnings of it in Peter’s vision that is recorded in the New Testament book of Acts, chapter 10, and we can hear Paul arguing for it in the Council of Jerusalem reported in Acts 15.

That Council discussed whether those who had not started out keeping Jewish Law needed to keep it if they were going to be followers of Jesus. This may not seem to be a big problem today, but for the Jews of the time, it made it impossible for them to be both Jews and Gentiles.  The decision was that these Gentile believers did not need to be circumcised or to keep the Jewish food laws. This caused difficulties for those who remained loyal Jews – and even more for those Jews who were not convinced that Jesus fulfilled the prophets’ promises.  It was clear that the two were separate entities, even though they shared the same spiritual history and would remain separated.

 The various Laws that marked Jews off from non-Jews – notably circumcision, keeping the Sabbath and the food laws - were an important mark of identity when they were trying to survive within the Roman Empire and stay loyal to their faith and their God. It was their unique customs and religious practices that separated them from the people around them. They feared that the blurring of boundaries in this new sect, which did not demand that Gentile converts adopt these laws, was that they would further undermine an already precarious existence. One could not be both a Jew and a Christian.  There was no middle position as outsiders noted.

As the synagogues became the centre of Jewish life, and as Jews had to make homes far from their holy ground, the synagogues became much less hospitable to followers of Jesus.  Changes were made in the shape of the prayers and the kinds of blessings and curses that people might use which made it impossible for anybody who trusted in Jesus or who believed that he was the fulfilment of the prophets’ promises to stay as part of a synagogue congregation. With the Eucharist establishing itself at the centre of Christian life and worship, the Christians adapted traditional Jewish prayers to their own new and thoroughly Christ-centred prayers.

On the Christian side, as more and more people who were not Jewish became followers of Jesus, there grew a suspicion of, and a rejection of Jewish teaching and in particular law. It came to be seen as legalism, which was contrasted with the free grace offered by Jesus.

Sadly, and most assuredly contrary to the will of God, the misunderstanding of each side of the other led to a growing alienation, and a destructive caricaturing of each by the other, abuse that sadly continued for centuries. However, even if it had to happen, several sad things result from it.

As Christianity moved further and further away from its Jewish roots, it drew nearer to Greek philosophy and forms of thinking about the world. Christian thinking must engage with a broad variety of cultures and thought forms as people from all sorts of communities become followers of Jesus. However, this has sometimes meant that some of the emphases found in Judaism that were taken for granted by Jesus and by those who shared his culture can get distorted or forgotten.

In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God is known through his divine activity – it is stories, not philosophical discussions. When this background is forgotten more and more emphasis has been placed on understanding God through concepts and theories and God has become understood as an idea to be discussed, not a loving and active Creator known in a relationship.

The Christian faith has never completely forgotten the importance of stories and events. Nevertheless, the impact of an overemphasis on abstract concepts has not been helpful and can easily lead people in this post-Enlightenment world to see the Ancients as being more primitive.

There were also positive results. Christians began to work out their own form of life, including developing a specifically Christian body of Scripture, and Christian forms of worship and of structuring the community. When followers of Jesus were no longer seen by others as a part of Judaism, they began to work at exploring their own ways to announce and defend their faith. The Church took on a life of its own.  It became actively and intentionally missionary.

Take up your cross and follow me  - really?

There can be no doubt that the early Christian community, up until the time of Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, struggled under irregular but unending persecutions.   If there was ever a time in the Church’s history that the invitation of Jesus to “take up your cross and follow me” was realised, it was during those first two centuries.

One key element of these persecutions was misunderstandings.  What the pagan population did not understand was filled with malicious reports of gross misconduct and rebellion against Rome.  Their regular predawn worship was mysterious and what the wider community did not know they made up.  What they could not work out they feared, and the responses were often violent. 

Not surprisingly, this contempt for Christians, and their strange God was fertile ground for attacks on their integrity and morality.  Their ways of worship and doctrine elicited colourful stories of immorality.  All they had to rely on to inform their views were their own religious experiences and a culture that was itself polluted by gross immoralities.   Why would this new one be any different? Christians were accused of "Thyestean banquets [cannibalism] and Oedipean incest, and things we ought never to speak or think about or even believe that such things ever happened among human beings" (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, V.1.14).

Marcus Cornelius Fronto, an orator and rhetorician who was the tutor of Marcus Aurelius and later his correspondent, condemned the Christians in a lost speech, fragments of which are preserved by Minucius Felix in the Octavius, a dialogue between the pagan Caecilius and the Christian Octavius that sought to refute such charges.

"They are initiated by the slaughter and the blood of an infant, and in shameless darkness, they are all mixed up in an uncertain medley" (IX), another that "the charge of our entertainments being polluted with incest" (XXXI).

Justin, who was martyred during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (the record of the trial, based on an official court report, still survives), also mentions "those fabulous and shameful deeds—the upsetting of the lamp, and promiscuous intercourse, and eating human flesh" (First Apology, I.26), calumnies that inspired fear and hostility.

Marcus Cornelius Fronto (100 – 170) asserted that "the religion of the Christians is foolish, inasmuch as they worship a crucified man, and even the instrument itself of his punishment. They are said to worship the head of an ass, and even the nature of their father" (IX).

Tacitus recounts how the Jews, expelled from Egypt, wandered in the desert, exhausted and dying of thirst, when, following a herd of wild asses, they were led to water. So, in the temple at Jerusalem, "they consecrated an image of the animal which had delivered them" (The Histories, V.3). The earliest representation of the Crucifixion is the Alexamenos graffito, scratched on plaster about AD 200 and found in what was possibly a school to train servants in the imperial household.

Even though Pompey, upon entering the temple, found its sanctuary to be empty (V.9), it must have been from this story, supposes Tertullian, that the notion derived that Christians were "devoted to the worship of the same image" and that "our god is an ass's head" (Apology, XVI). Josephus, too, is obliged to refute the same charge in Against Apion (II.8ff).

Tertullian refers again to this notion that "our god is actually the head of an ass" in: To the Nations, where he accuses pagans of being no better. "You in fact worship the ass in its entirety, not just the head. And then you throw in Epona, the patron saint of donkeys and all the beasts of burden, cattle, and wild animals. You even worship their stables. Perhaps this is your charge against us that in the midst of all these indiscriminate animal lovers, we save our devotion for asses alone" (XI)!

He also defends Christians against the charge of a Roman Jew who "would carry around a picture directed against us with the heading 'Onocoetes,' meaning Donkey Priest. It was a picture of a man wearing a toga and the ears of the donkey with a book in hand and one leg ending in a hoof" (XIV).

We can observe in the caricature how the cross is low to the ground and in the shape of a T (a tau cross after the Greek letter, rather than the Latin cross that traditionally is depicted).  Indeed, Tertullian remarks "Now the Greek letter tau and our own letter T is the very form of the cross, which He predicted would be the sign on our foreheads in the true Catholic Jerusalem" (Against Marcion, V.22; cf. Ezekiel 9:4, "set a mark upon the foreheads of the men"). There is a bar to support the feet and the hands are tied to the cross beam, which would have prolonged the agony of crucifixion.

At the time, death on the cross was an ignominious and shameful death which is why St Paul could write of it that, "unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness" (I Corinthians 1:23).Hardly surprising then that  the Crucifixion was rarely depicted in Christian art before the sixth century AD.

There were different forms of execution on a cross. "I see before me crosses not all alike but differently made by different peoples: some hang a man head downwards [as Peter was said to have died, Acts of Peter, XXXVII],

...........some force a stick upwards through his groin, some stretch out his arms on a forked gibbet" (Seneca, To Marcia on Consolation, XX.3). This forked gibbet was the patibulum, in which the neck was placed between two pieces of wood which then were fastened together. Because it killed by strangulation, the gibbet was considered a lesser form of punishment than the cross, for it "immediately kills those who are hanged on it, but the cross torments those nailed to it for a long time" (Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, V.27.34).

The Early Christian Church

From the time of Nero (64 A.D.) until the conversion of Emperor Constantine and the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.), whereby Christianity was made legal, the Christian faith was officially regarded as a religio prava, an evil or depraved religion.

When a "Church" wasn't a building

These early believers did not have church buildings to meet in. They met mostly in homes, and the first church buildings did not begin to appear until the early 200s.

Debate and Differences but no Denominations

The early church did not have denominations as we think of them today but that does not mean they had no serious disagreements within the ranks. We know from Paul and the Acts of the Apostles that significant divisions did exist.  Given how they were dealing with matters of ultimate truth and error, life, death and living beyond the grave, these matters to be taken with the utmost seriousness even when it meant dissension.  Differences, however, did not equate with divisions. It was only centuries later when these differences led to the divisions we find today between East and West.

Torn by dogs, nailed to crosses...

The early Christians were the targets of repeated persecutions - some of unspeakable cruelty. For example, the emperor Nero blamed the Christians for the great fire that destroyed 10 of the 14 city wards at Rome in 64 A.D., a fire that Nero had ordered himself. The historian Tacitus, not a Christian, said that Nero had the believers "torn by dogs, nailed to crosses, . . . even used as human torches to illumine his gardens at night."  Of course, they were scapegoats for Nereo’s own wickedness and easy targets for the Roman authorities.   

But Christians were not under persecution everywhere and all the time. The persecutions were sporadic, with peaceful intervals in between. They varied in their intensity and were mostly localized.

Just Get your Certificate!

There were two all-out empire-wide persecutions intended to wipe out the church. The first, under the emperor Decius, began in December 249. Everyone in the empire had to obtain a certificate from a government officer verifying that he or she had offered a sacrifice to the gods - an act that Christians in good conscience could not perform.

The second, called "The Great Persecution," began on February 23, 303, under Emperor Diocletian. Galerius, the empire's second-in-command, was behind this persecution policy and continued it after Diocletian's death.

For eight long years, official decrees ordered Christians out of public office, scriptures were confiscated, church buildings destroyed, leaders arrested, and pagan sacrifices required. All the reliable methods of torture were mercilessly employed - wild beasts, burning, stabbing, crucifixion, the rack. But they were all to no avail.

The spread of the faith across the empire was so pervasive that the church could not be intimidated or destroyed. In 311, the same Galerius, shortly before his death, weak and diseased, issued an "edict of toleration." This included the statement that it was the duty of Christians "to pray to their god for our good estate."

Christian Baptism

The Christian writer Hippolytus, writing about 200 A.D., describes baptism in Rome. Candidates took off their clothing and were baptized three times in the sacred waters after renouncing Satan and affirming the basic teachings of the faith.  They then put on new clothes symbolic of the new life they had put on in Christ.  Then they joined the rest of the church in the Lord's Supper.

Baptism was not entered into lightly. First, one went through an extensive period of preparation as a "catechumen." This lasted as long as three years, involving close scrutiny of the catechumen's behaviour. The church would only admit those who proved to be sincere in seeking a totally new life within the Christian community.

Slave makes good!

Christians drew members into their fellowship from every rank and race, a welcome that was an affront to proper, class-conscious Romans. One former slave who had worked the mines became the bishop of Rome -- Callistus in 217.  While it was an affront to the class-conscious Romans, this lack of concern about wealth, position in society, colour of skin or any other earthly way of measuring people, was a great attraction to many. 

"Send me your letters and gifts"

 One of the earliest Christian documents after the New Testament, The Didache, which was a kind of manual on church practice, warns about travelling preachers who come and ask for money. The satirist Lucian in the second century, ridiculed Christians for being so easily taken in by charlatans, often giving them money. Lucian recorded the notorious case of the philosopher Peregrinus, who attracted a devoted following among Christians (and a lot of money) before he was found out.

How Was the Early Church Perceived?

Researcher David Barrett reports that by the year 300, or nine generations after Christ, the world was 10.4% Christian with 66.4% of believers Non-whites. The scriptures had been translated into ten languages. More than 410,000, representing one in every 200 believers from the time of Christ, had given their lives as martyrs for the faith.

The 1st Century Church lived their very attractive Christian lives walking in the Spirit. Those early believers faced the hostile world, walking in the power of the Holy Spirit. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ filled them with a hope that the worst calamity or darkness could not be defeated.

·       When Pliny was governor of Bithynia 110 and 112 AD) he wrote a most interesting letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan, asking why Christians were being exterminated, and added:

“I have been trying to get all the information I could regarding them. I have even hired spies to profess to be Christians and become baptized in order that they might get into the Christian services without suspicion.

“Contrary to what I had supposed, I find that the Christians meet at dead of night or at early morn, that they sing a hymn to Christ as God, that they read from their own sacred writings and partake of a very simple meal consisting of bread and wine and water (the water added to the wine to dilute it in order that there might be enough for all).

“This is all that I can find out, except that they exhort each other to be subject to the government and to pray for all men.”

·       Writing in about AD 125 Aristedes a Christian philosopher looked at the believers of his day and said:

“They walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them, and they love one another. They despise not the widow and grieve not the orphan. He that hath distributeth liberally to him that hath not. If they see a stranger they bring him under their roof, and rejoice over him, as it were their own brother: for they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit and in God; but when one of their poor passes away from the world, and any of them see him, then he provides for his burial according to his ability; and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs, and if it is possible he may be delivered, they deliver him. And if there is a man among them that is poor and needy, and they have not among them an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days that they may supply the needy with their necessary food.”

Conclusion:

The Church of the first two centuries was so effective in its evangelism and grew so quickly because of its difference to the world around it.  It offered an alternative to the oppressive and morally bankrupt society that had grown out of centuries of debauchery, elitism, corrupt and abusive exercise of power and a complete disregard for the rights of others.  Some of these are summarised below. 

The early church was multi-racial and experienced a unity across ethnic boundaries that was startling.

See the description of the leadership of the Antioch church as just one example (Acts 13). Throughout the book of Acts, we see a remarkable unity between people of different races. Ephesians 2 is testimony to the importance of racial reconciliation as a fruit of the gospel among Christians.

The early church was a community of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Christians were often marginalised and criticized, but they were also actively persecuted, imprisoned, attacked, and killed. Nevertheless, Christians taught forgiveness and withheld retaliation against opponents. This was unheard of in a shame-and-honour culture in which vengeance was expected. Christians didn’t ridicule or taunt their opponents, let alone repay them with violence.

The early church was famous for its hospitality to the poor.

While it was expected to care for the poor of one’s family or tribe, Christians’ “promiscuous” help given to all poor—even of other races and religions, as taught in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) was unparalleled. During the urban plagues, Christians characteristically refused to flee the cities but stayed and cared for the sick and dying of all groups, often at the cost of their own lives.  This witness and sacrifice were one of the most effective tools of evangelism and remain the most effective form today.

It was a community committed to the sanctity of life.

The Christian stress on the sanctity of life was not just about abortion, something that was rare and dangerous. Abortion was dangerous and relatively rare.  A more common practice was called “infant exposure.” Unwanted infants were thrown onto garbage heaps, to either die or be taken by traders into slavery and prostitution. Christians saved the infants and took them in.

Christianity was a sexual counterculture.

Roman culture insisted that married women of social status abstain from sex outside of marriage, but it was expected that men (even married men) would have sex with people lower on the status ladder—slaves, prostitutes, and children. This was not only allowed; it was regarded as unavoidable. It was part of daily life across the Empire.  This was in part because sex in that culture was always considered an expression of one’s social status. Sex was mainly seen as a mere physical appetite that was irresistible.

Christians’ sexual norms were different, of course. The church forbade any sex outside of heterosexual marriage. But the older, seemingly more “liberated” pagan sexual practices eventually gave way to stricter Christian norms, since the “deeper logic” of Christian sexuality was so different. It saw sex not just as an appetite but as a way to give oneself wholly to another and, in so doing, imitate and connect to the God who gave himself in Christ.

It also was more egalitarian, treating all people as equal and rejecting the double standards of gender and social status. Finally, Christianity saw sexual self-control as an exercise of human freedom, a testimony that we aren’t mere pawns of our desires or fate.

It was because the early church did not fit in with its surrounding culture, but rather challenged it in love, that Christianity eventually had such an effect on the world.  Like leaven and salt, the Gospel worked away from within the Roman communities, releasing the Spirit of Christ to transform even the greatest empire on earth through the words and witness of every Christian.  It is in these early centuries that we can find a broad missionary model fit for the Church of every age. 

Bishop Michael Hough                                                                                      March 2025