The Story of Christianity: Volume 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation

by Justo L. González

to tell the story of those to whom we are heirs is to write a long preface to our own life stories.

history is never simply the bare past as it actually happened; it is the past as read through the sources that have survived, as selected by countless generations of historians, and as interpreted from our own present and from the future for which we hope.

History is crucial for understanding not only the life of Jesus, but also the entire biblical message.

the presence of God among us did not end with the ascension of Jesus.

Luke’s second book does not seem to have a conclusion.

the story he was telling shall not come to an end before the end of all history.

It is a history of the deeds of the Spirit in and through the men and women who have gone before them in the faith.

while this narrative is the history of the deeds of the Spirit, it is the history of those deeds through sinners such as we are.

it has been through those sinners and that church—and only through them—that the biblical message has come to us.

They have also left the illuminating record of their striving to be faithful witnesses under the most diverse of circumstances.

we are heirs to this host of diverse and even contradictory witnesses.

Without understanding that past, we are unable to understand ourselves,

The notion that we read the New Testament exactly as the early Christians did, without any weight of tradition coloring our interpretation, is an illusion. It is also a dangerous illusion, for it tends to absolutize our interpretation, confusing it with the Word of God.

Not only is our view of the present colored by our history, but our view of history is also colored by the present and by the future we envision.

both by our action and by our inaction, we are making history.

it demands that we do history in order to be able to make it more faithfully.

the past will illumine the present.

History is not the pure past; history is a past interpreted from the present of the historian.

the church was never disconnected from the world around it.

Palestine, the land in which Christianity first appeared, has long been a land of strife and suffering.

He did not wish simply to conquer the world, but to unite and enrich it by spreading the insights of Greek civilization.

they saw in it a threat to Israel’s faith in the One God.

the Romans justified their imperial conquests by means of an ideology.

In general, Roman policies toward the religion and customs of conquered people were rather tolerant.

They were the party of the populace, who did not enjoy the material benefits of Roman rule and Hellenistic civilization.

Those more conservative Jews were the Sadducees. By and large, they belonged to the Jewish aristocracy, and they were conservative in both politics and religion. In matters of religion, their interest centered on the Temple, which they held with the support of the Romans, who in turn found the political conservatism of the Sadducees much to their liking. The Sadducees rejected many of the doctrines of the Pharisees as unwarranted innovations.

A great deal of the friction between Christians and Pharisees was due to the similarity of their views, rather than to their difference.

this diversity of tendencies, sects, and parties should not obscure two fundamental tenets of all Jews: ethical monotheism and eschatological hope.

all looked to a future when God’s promises would be fulfilled.

Not being able to attend worship regularly in the Temple, they developed the synagogue, where the Law and the traditions of Israel were studied, and where the dispersed Jews experienced community and strengthened their resolve to live as the faithful people of God even in dispersion.

By the time of Jesus, there were sizable Jewish communities in every major city in the Roman Empire.

Diaspora Judaism is of crucial importance for the history of Christianity, for it was one of the main avenues through which the new faith expanded throughout the Roman Empire.

the Septuagint was of enormous importance to the early church.

Due to the Diaspora, Judaism was forced to come to terms with Hellenism in a manner that could be avoided in Palestine itself.

Philo tried to prove that the God of scripture is the same as the One of the philosophers, and that the moral teachings of the Hebrews are basically the same as those of the best among the Greek philosophers.

the general policy of the empire was to encourage as much uniformity as possible without doing unnecessary violence to the uses of each area.

The political unity wrought by the Roman Empire allowed the early Christians to travel without having to fear bandits or local wars.

Since trade flourished, travel was constant; thus Christianity often reached a new region, not through the work of missionaries or preachers, but rather through traveling traders, slaves, and others.

In order to achieve greater unity, imperial policy sought religious uniformity by following two routes: syncretism (the indiscriminate mixing of elements from various religions) and emperor worship.

These traditions and beliefs mingled in the plazas and markets of the cities, to the point that their original form was barely recognizable. Syncretism became the fashion of the time.

one did not belong to a mystery religion by birth, but rather by initiation.

Since the deities of the mysteries were not exclusivistic, like the God of Jews and Christians, many people who were initiated into various of these cults borrowed elements from one to the other.

When Christians refused to burn incense before the emperor’s image, they did so as a witness to their faith; but the authorities condemned them as disloyal and seditious people.

To communicate their faith in the midst of Hellenistic culture, Christians found two philosophical traditions particularly attractive and helpful: Platonism and Stoicism.

Although at first these philosophical traditions were used for interpreting the faith to outsiders, soon they began influencing the manner in which Christians understood their own faith—which would eventually result in bitter theological debates.

all Stoics believed that the purpose of philosophy was to understand the law of nature, and to obey and adjust to it.

The church, which many Christians called a “new race” because it drew its members from all races, was living proof of the universal unity of humankind.

The earliest Christian community is often idealized.

It was rather a conflict between two groups of Jews: those who kept the customs and language of their ancestors, and those who were more open to Hellenistic influences.

the naming of the seven appears as an attempt to give greater voice in the affairs of the church to the Hellenistic party,