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All he could learn was that Christians gathered before dawn to sing to Christ “as to a god,” and to join in an oath not to commit theft, adultery, or any such sins. They also used to gather for a common meal, but had discontinued this practice when the authorities had outlawed secret meetings.
Christians were an ignorant lot whose doctrines, although preached under a cloak of wisdom, were foolish and even self-contradictory.
He proposed a plan to bring all his subjects together under the worship of Sol invictus (the “Unconquered Sun”)—and to subsume under that worship all the various religions and philosophies then current. All gods were to be accepted, as long as one acknowledged the Sun that reigned above all.
“Now my sufferings are only mine. But when I face the beasts there will be another who will live in me, and will suffer for me since I shall be suffering for him.”
Perpetua asked to be able to retie her hair, for loose hair was a sign of mourning, and this was a joyful day for her.
Following the imperial decree, everyone had to offer sacrifice to the gods and to burn incense before a statue of Decius. Those who complied would be given a certificate or libellum attesting to that fact.
Some ran to obey the imperial command. Some bought false certificates declaring that they had sacrificed before the gods, when in fact they had not. Others stood firm for a while, but when brought before the imperial authorities offered the required sacrifice to the gods. And there was a significant number who resolved to stand firm and refuse to obey the edict.
Those who had confessed the faith in such circumstances were then called “confessors,” and were highly respected by other Christians.
As in so many other cases, the issue was whether purity or forgiving love should be the characteristic note of the church.
The significance of these episodes is that they show how, due to its concern for its own purity, and to its understanding of sin as a debt owed to God, the Western church was repeatedly embroiled in debates regarding how that purity should be sustained while still having the church be a community of love.
It was out of that concern that the entire penitential system developed.
Foremost among these writings are some of the Apocryphal Gospels and some of the Acts of various apostles and of the Virgin. This includes the Acts of Peter, the Epistle of Jesus to King Abgar, the correspondence between Mary and Ignatius of Antioch, the Gospel of Bartholomew, and many others. The miraculous plays a central role in these writings, even to the point of the ridiculous.
Thus, for instance, in one of the Apocryphal Gospels, young Jesus amuses himself by breaking the water jars of his playmates and throwing the pieces into a well. When the other boys burst into tears, saying that their parents will punish them for having broken the jars, Jesus orders the water to return the broken jars and these come up unscathed. Or, when Jesus wishes to be atop a tree, he does not climb like other boys. He simply orders the tree to bend down to him, sits on it, and tells the tree to return to its original position.18
We are told in the book of Acts that from the very beginning the early church had the custom of gathering on the first day of the week for the breaking of bread—the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. The reason for gathering on the first day of the week was that this was the day of the resurrection of the Lord. Therefore, the main purpose of this service of worship was not to call the faithful to repentance, or to make them aware of the magnitude of their sins, but rather to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and the promises of which that resurrection was the seal.
A new reality had dawned, and Christians gathered to celebrate that dawning and to become participants in it.
Only after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century—and in many cases much later—did it become common practice in many Protestant churches to focus their worship on preaching rather than on communion.
The most remarkable characteristic of those early communion services was that they were celebrations. The tone was one of joy and gratitude, rather than sorrow and repentance.
We hold this general gathering on Sunday, because it is the first day, in which God, transforming darkness and matter, created the world, and also the day in which Jesus Christ, our Savior, rose from the dead.19
In order to preserve and symbolize the bond of unity, the custom arose in some places to send a piece of bread from the communion service in the bishop’s church—the fragmentum—to be added to the bread to be used in other churches in the same city.
some thought it should be set in accordance with the Jewish Passover, while others believed that it should always be celebrated on a Sunday.
For him, the Christian God was a very powerful being who would support him as long as he favored the faithful.
The earlier notion, that in the resurrection of Christ the new age has dawned, and that by baptism and the Eucharist Christians become participants in it, was now abandoned, and Christian hope was now limited to the individual’s life after death.
While those who followed the monastic way of life expressed their dissatisfaction with the new order by withdrawing to the desert, others simply declared that the church at large had been corrupted, and that they were the true church.
Thus, some bishops and other leaders were given the offensive title of traditores—that is, those who had handed over or betrayed, a title often applied to Judas.
According to the Donatists, one of the three bishops who had consecrated Caecilian was a traditor—that is, had delivered scriptures to the authorities—and therefore the consecration itself was not valid.
Thus, besides the factual question of whether or not this particular bishop—and others in communion with Caecilian—had yielded, there was the additional issue of whether an ordination or consecration performed by an unworthy bishop was valid.
It seemed necessary to resist that process, and to remind the newly converted powerful that when they were still worshiping pagan gods, the supposedly “ignorant” Numidians, Mauritanians, and others knew the truth.
It was partly in response to the Donatists that Augustine and others developed their doctrine of the church, their view of the validity of sacraments, and the Just War Theory.
Thus, as is often the case, those whom the rest of the church eventually rejected as heretics and schismatics left their mark in the theology that was developed in order to refute them.
Due to the influence of Origen and his disciples, these views had become widespread in the Eastern wing of the church—that is, that portion of the church that spoke Greek rather than Latin.
The phrase that eventually became the Arian motto, “there was when He was not,” aptly focuses on the point at issue.
Arius claimed that, strictly speaking, the Word was not God, but the first of all creatures.
Arius, on the one hand, argued that what Alexander proposed was a denial of Christian monotheism—for, according to the bishop of Alexandria, there were two who were divine, and thus there were two gods. Alexander retorted that Arius’s position denied the divinity of the Word, and therefore also the divinity of Jesus.
In order to see that event in the perspective of those who were there, it is necessary to remember that several of those attending the great assembly had recently been imprisoned, tortured, or exiled, and that some bore on their bodies the physical marks of their faithfulness.
The bishop of the Imperial City [Rome] could not attend due to his advanced age; but he was represented by his presbyters.
Since Arius was not a bishop, he was not allowed to sit in the council, and it was Eusebius of Nicomedia who spoke for him and for the position that he represented.
Most of the bishops from the Latin-speaking West had only a secondary interest in the debate, which appeared to them as a controversy among Eastern followers of Origen. For them, it was sufficient to declare that in God there were, as Tertullian had said long before, “three persons and one substance.”
The assertion that the Word or Son was no more than a creature, no matter how high a creature, provoked angry reactions from many of the bishops: “You lie!” “Blasphemy!” “Heresy!” Eusebius was shouted down, and we are told that the pages of his written speech were snatched from his hand, torn to shreds, and trampled underfoot.
(The Apostles’ Creed, being Roman in origin, is known and used only in churches of Western origin—which include the Roman Catholic Church and those stemming from the Protestant Reformation.
Furthermore, in the last paragraph, those are condemned who declare that the Son “came from that which is not”—that is, out of nothing, like the rest of creation.
But Constantine added his own sentence to that of the bishops: He banished the deposed bishops from their cities.
Let it suffice to say that Eusebius of Nicomedia and his followers managed to have Athanasius exiled by order of Constantine. By then, most of the Nicene leaders were also banished. When Constantine finally asked for baptism, on his deathbed, he received that sacrament from Eusebius of Nicomedia.
His concern was rather with the core Christian tenet that Jesus is the Savior of humankind, the restorer of that which had fallen.
Along these lines, Athanasius argued that the corruption of humanity as the result of sin was such that a new creation was required, a radical reformation and restoration of what had been destroyed by sin.
The work of salvation is no lesser than the work of creation. Therefore, the one responsible for our re-creation can be no lesser than the one responsible for our creation.
Therefore, some preferred not to say “of the same substance,” but rather “of a similar substance.” The two Greek words were homoousios (of the same substance) and homoiousios (of a similar substance). The Council of Nicea had declared the Son to be homoousios with the Father. But now many were saying that they would rather affirm that the Son was homoiousios with the Father.
In Augustine’s words, before the fall we were free both to sin and not to sin. But between the fall and redemption the only freedom left to us is the freedom to sin. When we are redeemed, the grace of God works in us, leading our will from the miserable state in which it found itself to a new state in which freedom is restored, so that we are now free both to sin and not to sin. Finally, in the heavenly home we shall still be free, but only free not to sin. Again, this does not mean that all freedom is destroyed. On the contrary, in heaven we shall continue to have free choices. But none of
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Back to the moment of conversion, how can we make the decision to accept grace? According to Augustine, only by the power of grace itself, for before that moment we are not free not to sin, and therefore we are not free to decide to accept grace. The initiative in conversion is not human, but divine. Furthermore, grace is irresistible, and God gives it to those who have been predestined
Thus, the practice arose of translating the sacred text into Aramaic, at first orally, and then in written form—in documents known as Targums. This practice, which paralleled the rise of Christianity, provided early Aramaic-speaking Christians with ready-made versions of at least part of the Hebrew scripture, much as the Septuagint provided Greek-speaking Christians with a similar instrument.
At some point around the second century, a Syriac translation of both the Old and New Testaments appeared, and came to be known as the Peshitta—(peshitta means “simple”), which thus reminds us of Vulgate, which has a similar meaning.
