Origins of Christianity Research Paper

1. The Jesus Movement

The movement that centered around Jesus of Nazareth in his own lifetime seems an unlikely candidate for the eventual transformation of Western society. It appears to have been one of many such movements in early first century Palestine led by a charismatic Jewish teacher appealing to a poor and mainly rural audience (Theissen 1978). Jesus’s message, which is only comprehensible within a framework of contemporary Jewish beliefs and expectations, centered round the proclamation of the imminent reign of God. From this expectation arose the urgent and sovereign demands to repent and believe in the gospel. All other concerns were secondary—including on occasion those of Jewish law and custom. Yet this message was presented as ‘good news’: what Jesus offered his followers was the most intimate relationship with a God not of wrath and judgment but of love and mercy—a ‘father’ who cares with loving tenderness for each one of his children. This God places no barriers on relationship with him—all are welcomed into his kingdom irrespective of their moral, social, or religious status.

2. The Pauline Revolution

Whilst Jesus’ mission was primarily to the Jews, the unrestricted address of his message gave it a universalist momentum which would make possible the later spread of Christianity beyond Israel. As a universal religion, Christianity provided an alternative to the national or civic religions, both Roman and Jewish, of the time. It appears to have been the apostle Paul, whose letters are preserved in the New Testament, who played the decisive role in drawing out these universalist implications and giving theological justification to a ‘mission to the gentiles.’

A Jew as well as a Roman citizen, Paul was converted by a vision of the risen Jesus. The faith whose spokesman he subsequently became was centered on this risen, cosmic Christ rather than on the historical Jesus of Nazareth. There were important sociological implications in this shift. As Troeltsch (1931) noted, Jesus’s original message was ‘individualistic’ in the sense that it was focused on intimate relation between the individual and God. Whilst its universalist and egalitarian message fostered a broad sense of community between all those called to love God and neighbor, it neither fostered new communities nor made any attempt to influence wider society. It remained a reforming faction within Judaism (Sanders 1985, Elliott 1995).

Paul’s reinterpretation of Christianity altered these dynamics of the early Jesus movement very significantly. As Schweitzer (1931) argued, Paul developed a ‘Christ-mysticism’ in which the believer is incorporated through faith into the ‘body of Christ.’ Though this mysticism also has an individualist emphasis, incorporation into the body of Christ is corporate— those who have faith are united not only with Christ but with one another. This corporate Christ-mysticism undergirded the development from the mid-first century of a church (ekklesia), which took the form of local communities linked together in a ‘catholic’ (universal) alliance by their common possession of the Spirit of Christ.

3. The Emergence Of Catholic Christianity

Until at least the second century these early Christian communities were charismatic communities (communities of the Spirit), in which social authority was not institutionalized, but conferred by the Spirit. There seems to have been no clear hierarchy of authority, with different functions (such as apostle, teacher, prophet, and miracle-worker) being regarded as mutually constitutive of the body of Christ. In a development that Troeltsch (1931) categorizes as the emergence of ‘catholic’ and ‘sacramental’ Christianity, however, the spirit gradually became institutionalized in the sacraments, particularly those of baptism and the eucharist. Here the presence of Spirit is, as it were, guaranteed. The sacraments are material signs of the freely given grace of God and the efficacious tokens of salvation.

The development of a sacramental Christianity allowed for the development of stable and enduring communities not based on the unpredictable outpourings of the spirit. It went hand in hand with the emergence of a clergy whose authority was bound up with their exclusive authorisation to handle and distribute the sacraments. Their status was not based on personal charisma, superior religious achievement, or inheritance. Rather, they were the authorised representatives of the wider Christian community. Early documents defending a sacramental priesthood reveal that this development was not uncontroversial. On the one hand it made possible catholicity and order. On the other it led to exclusions, most notably the exclusion of women from positions of authority in the church.

The development of catholic Christianity also involved the definition and maintenance of uniformity in belief and liturgical practice. This achievement was also a difficult and remarkable one given that ‘early Christianity’ was never as unified as that title implies. Despite the idealized backward glance of a later era (such as that of the fourth-century church historian, Eusebius), Christianity came into being as a diverse set of largely autonomous communities spread around the Mediterranean basin and in Syria and Asia Minor. Many were centered around a particular apostle and a particular gospel (whether in oral or written form), and developed distinctive forms of belief and practice. If we compare the four gospels contained in the New Testament (probably the products of such communities), we get some idea of the range of beliefs they held and of their very different understandings of Jesus.

In the face of this diversity, the establishment of an authorised scriptural, creedal, and rhetorical tradition was as important as that of a universal sacramental priesthood (Cameron 1991). By the second century we find early representatives of catholic Christianity listing the documents which should be treated by Christians as authoritative, and which would eventually come to form the New Testament. These were then bound up with the first authoritative Christian scripture, the Jewish Bible or ‘Old Testament’. The formation of this scriptural ‘canon’ went hand in hand with the development of a ‘canon of faith.’ Both were later debated and defined by the councils and creeds which would become such a distinctive feature of Christianity. Together authorized scripture and doctrine came to define the boundaries of ‘orthodoxy.’ Again, this process involved exclusions, including that of a large number of gospels, lives, and acts of Jesus, the apostles and saints which are now classified as ‘apocryphal,’ together with a large body of philosophical–theological literature influenced by Christian, Jewish, Platonic, and Persian sources, which is often classified together as ‘gnostic.’

Against the spiritualizing tendencies of the gnostics (a tendency which took further the Pauline spiritualization of Christ), the emerging catholic church developed an emphasis which may be characterised as ‘materialist.’ The authority of the clergy, e.g., was said to rest on an ‘apostolic succession’ which consisted of a historical and physical continuity established through the ‘laying on of hands’ by Christ and the apostles down to the present generation. Likewise, the church was the visible community of men and women gathered together to receive these sacraments rather than an invisible body of the elect, and the authorized means of salvation were the visible and tangible sacraments. In many cases too Christian hope continued to be focused on a physical resurrection, rather than on the release of an immaterial soul from the body. A more hostile attitude to the body and material life would, however, become a feature of some of the asceticism and monasticism that developed within Christian circles from the end of the third century onwards.

Despite this materialist emphasis, however, early Christianity was not involved in any direct attempt to reform the society within which it found itself. Jesus had directed his followers’ energies to ‘the one thing needful’—love of God and neighbor—rather than to social reform, and this emphasis continued in early catholic Christianity. To the extent that Jesus commanded his followers to love all, including the Roman soldier and the tax collector, it could even be argued that the Jesus movement had a broader social reach than the Pauline and post-Pauline communities whose energies were focused on love of ‘the brethren.’ Their duty was to ‘build up the body of Christ’ rather than to change ‘the world’—the latter being a category which derived from this mentality.

The result, as Troeltsch (1931) argued, was that the early Christian communities did not develop a ‘social teaching.’ The Christian response to social problems such as poverty was to advocate individual acts of charity rather than social reform. Ownership of property was neither abolished nor condemned, but possessions were to be used to help the Christian community. Similarly, in relation to class and social position, the early church initiated a revolution within its own walls—slave and free, male, and female were equal before Christ and in relation to salvation— which left wider patterns of social inequality (including slavery and the position of women) virtually untouched. The state, even when persecuting Christians, was regarded by most early Christians as the wielder of a proper and God-given authority that should call forth respect and obedience rather than attempts at reform.

4. Alliance Of Church And State

Despite its failure to develop a social teaching, it is clear that early Christianity had a significant impact on its wider social context. It appears to have initiated an inner revolution within the Roman Empire whose effect was felt in a number of ways—not least through the new educational and welfare opportunities it offered, and through the model of an inclusive society which it provided. Whilst it is impossible to reconstruct the nature and extent of the growth of Christianity in the first three centuries of its existence, it is estimated that by the beginning of the fourth century it may have accounted for up to 10 percent of the population of the Empire. Its success appears to have been due to its ability to form ‘a compact, even massive, constellation of commitments’ (Brown 1997). Morality, philosophy, and ritual, which formally had formed separate spheres of activity in the ‘pagan’ world, were brought together by the church, and fused into a universal religion.

It was these new characteristics and potencies which eventually enabled Christianity to serve as a unifying and legitimating force for an empire which had once persecuted it. Constantine formalized the process whereby church and state grew into alliance with one another after AD 312, and church leaders rapidly exploited the new opportunities that this opened. In this way a decisive alteration in Christianity’s relation to the social order took place, one which would have the most far-reaching consequences not only for the evolution of the church, but for the social and political ordering of Christianity’s territories in the East as well as in what—under Christian influence—would eventually become Western Europe.

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