Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

Many Christians today suffer from historical amnesia. The time between the apostles and their own day is one giant blank. That is hardly what God had in mind. The Old Testament is sprinkled with reminders of God’s interest in time. When he established the Passover for the children of Israel, he said, “Tell your son . . . it will be like a sign . . . that the Lord brought us out of Egypt” (Ex. 13:8, 16, NIV). And when he provided the manna in the wilderness, he commanded Moses to keep a jar of it “for the generations to come” (Ex. 16:33, NIV). As a consequence of our ignorance concerning Christian history, we find believers vulnerable to the appeals of cultists. Some distortion of Christianity is often taken for the real thing. At the same time other Christians reveal a shocking capacity for spiritual pride, hubris. Without an adequate base for comparisons they spring to the defense of their way as the best way, their party as the superior party. Finally, many Christians engage in some form of ministry without the advantage of a broader context for their labor. When they want to make the best use of their time or their efforts, they have no basis for sound judgment.

“Is the church a movement or an institution?” These pages will show that I think it is both. So I have talked about missionary expansion as well as papal politics. Professionals in the field may not be happy with my failure to set limits by a strict definition of the term church. But that fuzziness is due to the fact that I believe the people of God in history live in a tension between an ideal—the universal communion of saints—and the specific—the particular people in a definite time and place.

The church’s mission in time calls for institutions: special rules, special leaders, special places. But when institutions themselves obstruct the spread of the gospel rather than advancing it, then movements of renewal arise to return to the church’s basic mission in the world.

Christianity’s roots go back into Jewish history long before the birth of Jesus Christ. It was Jesus of Nazareth, however, who attacked established Judaism and brought a renewal movement into history’s light early in the first century.

CHRISTIANITY IS THE ONLY major religion to have as its central event the humiliation of

INRI: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).

Jesus was a Jew. He came from a Jewish family; he studied the Jewish scriptures; he observed the Jewish religion. Any serious study of his life makes this so clear that many people have asked if Jesus ever intended to create that company of followers we call the church. Albert Schweitzer,

the famous missionary to Africa, believed that Jesus was obsessed with a dream of the impending end of the world and died to make the dream come true. Rudolf Bultmann, an influential German theologian, taught that Jesus was a prophet who challenged people to make a radical decision for or against God. Other Christians have held that Jesus’ kingdom was a brotherhood of love and forgiveness. If he founded a society at all, they say, it was an invisible one, a moral or spiritual company—not an institution with rites and creeds.

Granted, that simple company lacked many of the laws, officials, ceremonies, and beliefs of later Christendom, but it was a society apart. Jesus made a persistent point about the special kind of life that separated the kingdom of God from rival authorities among men. Little by little his disciples came to see that following him meant saying no to the other voices calling for their loyalties. In one sense that was the birth of the Jesus movement. And in that sense, at least, Jesus “founded” the church.

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 the Jewish law and their extreme intolerance of people whom they considered ritually unclean. This piety and patriotism won respect among the people.

On the other hand, some Jews found Roman rule a distinct advantage. Among them were members of Jerusalem’s aristocracy. From this small group of wealthy, pedigreed families came the high priest and the lesser priests who controlled 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. At the time of Jesus, these men still controlled the high Jewish council, or Sanhedrin, but they had less influence among the common people.

Another party, the Zealots, were bent on armed resistance to all Romans in the fatherland. They looked back two centuries to the glorious days of the Maccabees when religious zeal combined with a ready sword to overthrow the pagan Greek overlords. Thus the hills of Galilee often concealed a number of guerrilla ban...

Finally came the Essenes, who had little or no interest in politics or in warfare. Instead, they withdrew in protest to the Judean wilderness, believing the temple of Judaism to be hopelessly compromised. There, in isolated monastic communities, they studied the Scriptures and prepared the...

Qumran

Many thought John was the promised Messiah, but he vehemently denied any such role. He explained his mission in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Matt. 3:3). He was, he claimed, only the forerunner of the Messiah. “I baptize you with water” he said, “but . . . he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Luke 3:16).

The temple authorities found their opportunity among Jesus’ closest followers. With the aid of Judas from Iscariot, one of the Twelve, they could arrest Jesus secretly without provoking a riot; so “they paid him thirty pieces of silver,” nearly four months’ wages for a skilled worker, providing he would lead them to

Jesus.

When the execution party reached a hill outside Jerusalem called Golgotha, the soldiers stripped the clothes from Jesus and divided the garments among themselves as the crosses were assembled. “Each prisoner was then placed on his cross. Jesus suffered in silence as the soldiers nailed his wrists to the crosspiece with large iron spikes and drove another spike through both ankles. As they lifted his cross upright, his weight was supported by a peg jutting out from the cross between his legs.” Then the soldiers fastened over the cross that sign describing his crime: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” “It was a slow and painful death.

Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things . . . ? (Isa. 66:1–2, NIV).

That mob scene, including the trial and death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, holds the answer to the question, how did Christianity emerge from its Jewish roots? How did a Jewish Messiah preaching a Jewish theme (the kingdom of God) to a Jewish following become the Savior of people everywhere? The answer lies in Stephen’s confrontation with the Jewish authorities. It centered upon the interpretation of the Old Testament. The encounter with Jesus prompted the early believers to examine the Old Testament anew. They discovered in the Old Testament documents a greater and comprehensive message for the entire world that Israel had failed to embrace. God had promised Abraham long ago that all the peoples of the world would find their blessing in him (Gen. 12:3). While Jesus appealed to the lost sheep of Israel, his scope was greater. The experts in the Jewish Scriptures, the Scribes and Pharisees, believed the Old Testament presented the law of God for his special people, the Jews. The law began with the Ten Commandments, but it also provided instruction for every area of life, worship, and piety. Stephen, however, disagreed—and said so. He insisted that the institutions of Jewish life, the law and the temple, were temporary. God intended them to point beyond themselves to the coming Messiah, who would fulfill all righteousness for all people. The Old Testament’s central purpose was to promise the Messiah. And he has come, said Stephen. Jesus is his name. We know this b...

Critics argue that the followers of Jesus were desperate to be with Jesus and were filled with a longing hope; dejected followers worked themselves into a series of hallucinations, some even group hallucinations. Critics reason that resurrection faith or hope of the believers produced the encounters or visions of the risen Jesus. But the first-century evidence points in the opposite direction. Despite all the remarkable things the followers of Jesus had witnessed him do, they concluded that Jesus was one more messiah whom the Romans executed. The disciples were defeated. Not even the empty tomb provoked them to conclude that Jesus was alive; the risen Jesus had to confront them to awaken resurrection faith. Encounters with the risen Jesus prompted resurrection faith, not vice versa.

Christians have disagreed about the nature of tongue speaking. Some say it is an ability to deliver a message in a language without ever having studied or learned the language. This ability is given by the Holy Spirit and provides God’s message in the listener’s language even though the speaker usually does not understand that language. Others say that tongue speaking is ecstatic speech. This series of sounds does not represent a spoken human language. If this is the nature of tongue speaking, then the book of Acts would not picture a language miracle (giving the speaker the ability to speak a foreign language) but a hearing miracle (granted to the listeners, enabling them to understand). Although ecstatic speech was being spoken, the listener heard or understood in his or her own language.

From the beginning, then, the apostles preached the resurrection of Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s purpose announced in the Old Testament. The Messiah, once crucified, was exalted above the universe. Apart from that miracle, said the apostles, there is no gospel, no salvation, and no church. But it is true. Therefore, “Repent,” Peter told the Pentecost pilgrims, “and be baptized in the name of Jesus and your sins will be forgiven and you too will receive the gift of the Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Many accepted Peter’s invitation. They were baptized and about three thousand were added to the Jesus movement that day. That is how the Christian church started. It was quite a beginning. Stephen knew the story well and Christians ever since have insisted that the death of Jesus on the cross, his resurrection from the grave, and the empowering mission of the Holy Spirit are the foundational realities of Christianity. The first forty years saw the infant church spread at a phenomenal rate. It sprang up in most of the major cities in the Roman Empire and was transformed from a tiny Jewish sect into a fellowship of many different peoples. Stephen, of course, never lived to see it. Yet he grasped first of all the special meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and outpouring of the Spirit for biblical history. He sensed deeply that Christianity could never be confined to the rigid boundaries of the Pharisees’ laws. Jesus himself had hinted that a breach would open. Once, when asked...

Since the whole company was devoutly Jewish, they remained loyal, for a time, to their Jewish law and continued to worship in synagogues and at the temple. In all outward respects their lifestyle resembled any other Jewish sect of the time. The disciples called their new movement “The Way,” emphasizing their belief that Jesus would lead his followers to the kingdom of God. Before long, however, the Jerusalem community came to speak of itself by an Old Testament term used to refer to the assembly of Israel. The Greek equivalent was ekklesia (or church in English) and meant a gathering of people, God’s people.

Despite their outward conformity to Jewish religion and their use of the Jewish Scriptures, the disciples sensed that the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost had made them something unique—a new wineskin?

At first the apostles welcomed to the church the Hellenists who believed in Jesus. The spirit of oneness was marred, however, by a growing rivalry between Palestinian and Hellenist members. Some of the Hellenist believers complained that their widows were overlooked in the church welfare program. In an attempt to remove these resentments, the apostles created a council of seven Hellenist disciples, among them Stephen and Philip, to oversee the distributions.

These men may have been the first to occupy an office called elsewhere deacon (in Greek, diakonoi), meaning servant or minister.

At Antioch, for the first time, Jesus’ followers were called Christians. Originally, opponents of the church used the term as a derogatory label for the “devotees of the Anointed One” (in Greek, Christianoi). But the believers soon adopted it gladly.

No man—other than Jesus, of course—has shaped Christianity more than Saul (or, as Christians came to say, Paul, a name more familiar to the ear of Greek-speaking people). No one did more for the faith, but no one seemed less likely.

He later explained that the law pronounces a curse on everyone who fails to keep it in its entirety, so all who hope to gain God’s favor by keeping the law are exposed to a curse. Fortunately, God provided a way of escape. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us,” by hanging on a cross (Gal. 3:10–14, NIV).

Stephen, then, was right. The law of God was given for a time to convince men of their inability to fulfill the will of God and to leave them with no option except to embrace the good news of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. That was strong medicine for Judaism. The authorities wanted no part of it. So the persecutor of Christians became the persecuted among Christians. He was, however, a leader uniquely qualified to bridge the gap between Jewish and Gentile Christianity. He was a man of three worlds: Jewish, Greek, and Roman.

The Palestinian Christians, steeped in traditional Judaism, said, “Tell them that unless they submit to the Jewish law, in addition to believing in Jesus, there is no hope for their faith.

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.

Many Christians thought Paul was impossibly optimistic. 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 by faith it does not really matter how they live. On the contrary, said Paul, if they really have accepted Christ by faith, they have accepted the way of Christ and the mind of Chr...

About AD 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.

Peter was arrested shortly after James’s death, but he escaped and embarked on an extensive missionary journey. He visited Antioch, Corinth, and other cities in Asia Minor. Toward the end of his life he traveled to Rome where he, along with Paul, was caught up in Nero’s persecution and martyred.

The leadership of the Jerusalem church rested first in the hands of James, “the brother of the Lord.” A devout, law-abiding Jew, he was revered by his followers, but in AD 62 he was murdered by command of the Jewish high priest. His death left the Jerusalem church leaderless and demoralized.

The tragic, bloody war that followed cost more lives than any previous conflict. The Jews held out against overwhelming odds for four years, but they could not withstand the power of Rome. In AD 70 Emperor Vespasian’s forces, led by Titus, broke through the walls of Jerusalem, looted and burned the temple, and carried off the spoils to Rome. The Holy City was totally destroyed. In the reprisals that followed, every synagogue in Palestine was burned to the ground. At the start of the revolt, the leaders of the Jerusalem church were advised in a vision to flee the city.

We call the years between AD 70 and AD 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.

Christianity, as we have seen, began as a tiny offshoot of Judaism. Three centuries later it became the favored and eventually the official religion of the entire Roman Empire. Despite widespread and determined efforts to eliminate the new faith, it survived and grew. By the reign of Constantine (312–337), the first Christian emperor, there were churches in every large town in the empire and in places as distant from each other as Britain, Carthage, and Persia. How did that happen? Where, specifically, did Christianity spread and why did it expand so rapidly?

We also know that the remote and rather rural province of Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor was for a time in the early second century a center of unusual growth. Pliny, the governor of the region, wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan in the year 112. In it he expressed his dismay over the rapid spread of the Christian faith. He spoke of “many in every period of life, on every level of society, of both sexes . . . in towns and villages and scattered throughout the countryside.” What was he to do with them? Pliny was afraid that the shrines of the pagan gods would soon be completely deserted. We may have here the first mass movement in Christian history.

Once planted by some unknown believers in the first century, the church grew rapidly. The highly respected German scholar Adolf Harnack calculated that by AD 250 no fewer than thirty thousand Christians lived in Rome! Most of these came from the poorer classes. We know this because for more than a century Christians in Rome spoke Greek, the language of slaves and poor men. True Romans of the upper classes used Latin.

We have no firm idea how Christianity first entered Britain. It may have been through some Roman soldier or merchant. All that we know for certain is that three bishops from Britain attended a church council at Arles in southern France in AD 314. Beyond this we have only imagination and hearsay.

African Christianity produced the first Latin-speaking churches in the world. This means they tended to be of the upper class. Not surprisingly problems of race and language arose in this area, for the Punic language, brought by the early Phoenician settlers, and the Berber language, spoken by the village and desert dwellers, could also be found in and around Carthage. In the great persecutions of the third century these cultural differences spelled trouble for the churches.

Moving east across North Africa we come to Cyrene, just west of Egypt. This territory is mentioned four times in the New Testament. 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). Cyrenians were also present on the Day of Pentecost when Peter delivered his rousing message to the throng in Jerusalem (Acts 2:10). Some of them later disputed with Stephen (Acts 6:9). And finally we learn that Cyrenians took part in that decisive step that carried the gospel beyond Israel to the gentile world (Acts

Throughout the first three centuries the majority of believers were simple, humble people: slaves, women, traders, and soldiers. Perhaps this is simply due to the fact that most in the population were in this class. At any rate, Celsus, the outspoken critic of Christianity, took note of it: “Far from us, say the Christians, be any man possessed of any culture or wisdom or judgment; their aim is to convince only worthless and contemptible people, idiots, slaves, poor women, and children . . . . These are the only ones whom they manage to turn into believers.” Celsus was right to observe many poor and disadvantaged embraced the message of Jesus’ victory. It is to the church’s credit that it did not neglect the poor and despised. But by the end of the second century the new faith was on its way to becoming the most forceful and compelling movement within the empire. Many people with the keenest minds of the day were becoming followers of Christ.

To answer critics like Celsus, a number of Christian writers arose to defend the Christian faith against the rumors and railings of the pagans. We call these men the apologists. Not because they were sorry for anything: the word comes from Greek and means defense, such as a lawyer gives at a trial.

As Professor Ward Gasque says, although most of the writings of these apologists were dedicated to the emperors, their real audience was the educated public of the day. If they could answer the accusations of the enemies of Christianity and point out the weaknesses of paganism, they hoped this would help to change public opinion about Christianity and lead to conversions. Men such as Aristides, Justin Martyr, his disciple Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, the unknown author of the Letter to Diognetus, and Melito, bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor, all directed their intellectual and spiritual gifts to this cause. “Toward the end of the second century,” says Gasque, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in Gaul, wrote five monumental books against the gnostic heresies of his area, together with a book entitled Proof of the Apostolic Preaching . . . . His theology was grounded in the Bible and the church’s doctrines and helped ...

Tertullian, the “father of Latin theology,” was born in Carthage around AD 150. After his conversion to Christianity, he began writing books to promote the Christian faith. The large number he wrote in Greek are now lost, but thirty-one surviving in Latin are highly significant. Tertullian’s Apology underlined the legal and moral absurdity of the persecution directed against Christians. Some of his other books offered encouragement to those facing martyrdom. He attacked the heretics, explained the Lord’s Prayer and the meaning of baptism, and helped develop the orthodox understanding of the Trinity. He was the first person to use the Latin word trinitas (trinity) . . . . His intellectual brilliance and literary versatility made him one of the most powerful writers of the time.

By the third century the Christian church was beginning to assume the proportions of an empire within the empire. The constant travel between different churches, the synods of bishops, the letters carried by messengers back and forth across the empire, and the loyalty that the Christians showed to their leaders and to one another impressed even the emperors.