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Pontius Pilate, Jesus’ Roman judge, apparently intended it as a final thrust of malice aimed at the Jews, but like the cross itself Jesus’ followers found a special meaning in the message.
Did Jesus have anything to do with the formation of the Christian church? And if he did, how did he shape its special character?
Little by little his disciples came to see that following him meant saying “no” to the other voices calling for their loyalties.
the children of Abraham despised their overlords; they simply disagreed about how to resist them.
One group, the Pharisees, emphasized those Jewish traditions and practices that set them apart from pagan culture. Their name means “separated ones” and they prided themselves on their strict observance of every detail of Jewish law and their extreme intolerance of people whom they considered ritually unclean.
From this small group of wealthy, pedigreed families came the high priest and the lesser priests of the temple. Many of them enjoyed the sophisticated manners and fashions of Greco-Roman culture. Some even took Greek names. Their interests were represented by the conservative political group known as the Sadducees.
the Zealots, were bent on armed resistance to all Romans in the fatherland.
the Essenes, who had little or no
interest in politics or in warfare. Instead, they withdrew to the Judean wilderness. There, in isolated monastic communities, they studied the Scriptures and prepared themselves for the Lord’s kingdom.
found in John’s message the truth of God, so “to fulfill all righteousness” he submitted to John’s baptism and soon afterward began his own mission, proclaiming: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15).
The two can be reconciled if we recognize that the phrase stands for the sovereignty of a personal and gracious God, not a geographical or local realm.
Jesus hinted that the rule of God was already present in saving power in his own person. And he offered proof of the point.
it was not a hollow boast.
Pharisees excelled in those “works of righteousness”—fasting and tithing—that
Out of his hundreds of followers Jesus called a handful to travel with him full-time. They came to be called “apostles,” meaning “sent ones.”
Crowds were too likely to misunderstand them.
A man like Jesus presented a real danger to the Sadducees, because they held their privileged position with the support of the Roman authorities. Anyone who aroused talk of a messiah undermined the people’s allegiance to the established political order and endangered the relationship the Sadducees had with the Romans. Such a man, they concluded, had to be silenced before he sparked an uprising, which the Romans would crush with characteristic brutality. If that happened, the Sadducees stood to lose their privileges.
so “they paid him thirty pieces of silver,” nearly four months’ wages for a skilled worker,
His words were an echo of the prophet Jeremiah who had promised a day when the covenant on tablets of stone would be replaced by a covenant written on the hearts of men: “This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people . . . for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” ( Jer. 31:33–34).
THE SANHEDRIN had an uprising on their hands and they knew it. They had barely escaped a riot by bringing Stephen, the agitator, before them. But what to do with him—that was the question.
Time and again the council had commanded them to stop their incessant jabbering about Jesus, but each time the Nazarenes grew bolder, even accusing the council of killing the Messiah.
Paul, however, found this impossible. His own experience pointed another way. If a person could gain the righteousness of God by obeying the law, said Paul, I would have been the greatest in the kingdom. But righteousness by personal effort can only lead to failure. Man can be accepted as righteous only through God’s undeserved mercy. That is grace. And grace always arises from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
They were deeply troubled by the decline in Christian morality they felt sure would come in the gentile churches.
If you teach justification by faith alone, they argued, people will imagine that once they have accepted Christ
Matt Chandler sermon
The man who really loves God can do as he chooses, for if he really loves God he will choose to do the will of God.
It has endured in Christianity to our own day.
This superficial similarity to Christian belief was useful to Paul in explaining the message of Jesus to pagans.
But after the Emperor Nero’s persecution of Christians (A.D. 64) we never hear from Paul again.
A.D. 41, James, the son of Zebedee, long one of Jesus’ closest followers, was murdered by the order of Herod Agrippa I, king of Palestine from 41 to 44.
Pious Jews considered the Christian flight an act of treason, and it sealed the fate of the church in the Jewish world. With the decision to bar Christian Jews from synagogue services some years later, the break was complete. Any Jew who wished to remain faithful to his religion could not also be a Christian. The new faith had become and would remain a gentile movement.
That is what this period gave us, “catholic” Christianity. It was more than an organization. It was a spiritual vision, a conviction that all Christians should be in one body.
We call the years between A.D. 70 and A.D. 312 the Age of Catholic Christianity because this thought dominates Christian history between the death of the apostles and the rise of the Christian emperors.
Despite widespread and determined efforts to eliminate the new faith, it survived and grew.
Some Gentiles submitted to the rite of circumcision, and thereby became a part of the Jewish people. However, the majority of these interested Gentiles remained in the category of “God-fearers,” interested spectators of the synagogue service.
When Christian preachers made it plain to these folk that, without submitting to the rite of circumcision—which both Greeks and Romans considered degrading and repulsive—they could receive all that Judaism offered and more, it was not difficult for them to take one further step and accept Jesus as the Christ.
After the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the center of the Christian movement moved north and eventually west. The second home of the church was Antioch of Syria. Under a succession of notable bishops, the church in this third largest city of the empire took root and exerted widespread influence throughout Syria. By the end of the fourth century Antioch was a city of half a million people and half of these were Christians.
There is good reason to suppose that from Edessa some unknown Christian continued east until he came to India. So-called Thomas Christians in India today believe that the Christian was the apostle Thomas.
The mainstream of early Christian missionary work, however, did not move east of Antioch but west. The apostle Paul had set a course for Italy and Spain, and his work proved to be the path of the future.
The general picture suggests that backward areas, inhabited by people who preferred to keep their barbarian speech, were usually more resistant to the encroachments of the gospel.
That is not to say, as the Roman Catholic church has claimed, that God gave it authority over all other churches.
But once a church took root in the capital it naturally assumed leadership in Christian affairs, even as large churches in metropolitan areas do in our own time.
In the southern area of what is now called France (then Gaul) we know a church existed in Lyons in the middle of the second century,
By the end of the third century we also hear of churches and bishops in Spain. But the evidence suggests that the western regions of the empire trailed the eastern in the strength of the Christian witness.
All that we know for certain is that three bishops from Britain attended a church council at Arles in southern France in A.D. 314. Beyond this we have only imagination and hearsay.
North African Christianity produced the first Latin-speaking churches in the world. This means they tended to be of the upper class.
Simon of Cyrene carried the cross of Jesus on the way to Golgotha (Mark 15:21). It is almost certain that Simon became a believer since we later meet his son Rufus in the circle of Christians (Rom.
16:13).
Led by the well-known philosopher Philo, a contemporary of the apostle Paul, Jews in Alexandria tried to interpret Judaism in terms of Greek philosophy.
Early Christians in Alexandria liked to claim John Mark as the founder of their church. How it was established we do not know but during the third and fourth centuries
few churches exerted more influence.
