This current set will
deal with the early church, the first few hundred years up to the time of the
Emperor Constantine. At that point, the church received legal status and went
on to become the official faith of the Roman Empire. This first issue in the
cycle takes a broad look at life, worship, and ministry in the early church. We
hope this will whet your appetite to feast more on this critical period.
HAVE YOU EVER noticed that the Bible gives us no
clue as to 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 actually a derisive graffiti on the wall of a house on the
Palatine Hill in Rome. It pictured the body of a man being crucified but with
the head of an ass. The inscription reads: “Alexamenos worships his god.”
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.
Jewish Roots
Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
Much of the earliest proclamation of the Gospel took place in the synagogues.
The Christians did not side with the Jews in their revolt
Debate but not 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. They did.
And they did not find this surprising. They felt they were dealing with matters
of ultimate truth and error— matters to be taken with the utmost seriousness
even when it meant dissension.
When a “church” wasn’t a
building
These early believers did not have church buildings
to meet in. They met mostly in homes. The first church buildings did not start
to appear until the early 200s.
Persecution
The early Christians were the targets of repeated
persecutions— some of unspeakable cruelty. For example, the emperor Nero
destroyed 10 of the 14 city wards at Rome in 64 A.D., a fire that Nero
apparently 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.”
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 the Certificate!
There were two all-out empire-wide persecutions
intended to utterly destroy the church. The first, under the emperor Decius,
began in December, 249. Everyone in the empire had to get a certificate from a
government officer verifying that he or she had offered a sacrifice to the
gods—an act that most Christians in good conscience could not do.
The second, called “The Great Persecution,” began
on February 23, 303, under Emperor Diocletian. Galerius, the empire’s secondin-
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 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 penetration
of the faith across the empire was so pervasive that the church could not be
intimidated nor 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.”
Baptism
The Christian writer Hippolytus, writing about 200
A.D., describes baptism at Rome. Candidates took off their clothing, were
baptized three times after renouncing Satan and affirming the basic teachings
of the faith, and put on new clothes. 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 “catachumen.” This lasted
as long as three years, involving close scrutiny of the catachumen’s behavior.
The church would only admit those who proved to be sincere in seeking a totally
new life within the Christian community.
Stats
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.
Slave Makes Good!
Christians drew members into their fellowship from
every rank and race, an affront to proper, class-conscious Romans. A former
slave who had worked the mines actually became the bishop of Rome—Callistus in
217.
“Send me your letters and
gifts”
Misusing the Gospel for financial gain is by no
means the invention of 20th-century religious hucksters. One of the earliest
Christian documents after the New Testament, “The Didache,” a kind of manual on
church practice, warns about traveling 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. The showman instincts of Peregrinus reached their climax when he died by
publicly cremating himself at the close of the Olympic games in 165.
N.B.: 1. This is only my notes on my study on Church
History in Christians Leaders Institute (CLI), a free
Bible study course. Please join the Course to study a highly esteemed lessons
on theology.
