2,000 Years of Christ's Power Vol. 1: The Age of the Early Church Fathers

by Nick R. Needham

525. Using the historical evidence

The most common initiation rite was the taurobolium. The person being initiated into the cult climbed down into a pit and a wooden grating was placed across the top. Those above the pit then sacrificed a bull over the grating, cutting off the animal’s genitals and placing them in a special vessel. The bull’s blood poured down through the grating over the person in the pit, who turned his face upwards so that he could open his mouth and drink the blood, as it came streaming down over his head, shoulders and body. He had to make sure that the bull’s blood soaked every part

of him. The claim of the mystery cult was that this “blood-baptism” bestowed a new birth and the gift of immortality on the believer. All the cults promised eternal life after death to their followers; indeed, this was their greatest appeal – traditional Paganism and emperor-worship offered no such consolations in the face of death.

Middle Platonism had a profound belief in God as the Supreme Being, and taught that the eternal “ideas” in God’s mind were the source of everything in the universe. Reality could be found only in the eternal realm of these divine ideas.

In the world of space and time, Platonists said, everything is constantly changing; nothing stays exactly as it is, but is always in the process of

becoming something else. Rather than simply being, everything in this world is becoming. By contrast, the eternal world of God’s ideas is unchanging; it possesses true and permanent being. An individual human person might change in many ways; but the idea (or perfect form) of “humanity” in God’s mind is fixed and eternal – and, therefore, more real than any individual man or woman on earth. The true destiny of human beings, Platonists taught, was to be found by rising above th...

The human soul, according to Platonists, was itself eternal in its essence (that is, the soul had existed from all eternity, and was by nature immortal and incapable of being destroyed), and therefore the soul had more in common with God than with the world. By contemplating G...

between the changing realm of time and the eternal unchanging God. This made it difficult for some Christian thinkers to understand how an unchanging God could have entered the world of time by becoming a man in Jesus Christ; to solve the problem, they were tempted to say that Christ was something less than absolutely divine. It was not until the Arian controversy of the 4th century that the Church finally purged this “temptation” out of its theology.4 (ii) Platonism’s teaching on the superiority of the soul and the spiritual life over the body and physical life held powerful attractions for many Christians. It produced a tendency in some of them to interpret the spiritual life as a war between body and soul. Taken to its logical conclusion, this resulted in the belief-system known as Gnosticism.5

Pharisees believed that Israel’s conquest by the Roman Empire was a punishment by God for Jewish disobedience.

The Zealots (“zealous ones”) were a party of terrorists or freedom-fighters, perhaps founded by Judas the Galilean, who wanted to liberate Judaea from Roman rule by the use of violence. They thought it was sinful to pay taxes to the Roman emperor, because God alone was the true King of Israel. Zealots often acted as assassins, killing those whom they regarded as national enemies. One of Jesus’s twelve apostles, Simon the Canaanite, was (or had been) a Zealot (Luke 6:15).

They practised celibacy, refused to swear oaths, underwent frequent ritual washings, and devoted much time to studying the Old Testament prophets. They expected God to intervene in world history through one or more Messiah figures. Some Essenes were also Zealots. The name Essenes may come from an Aramaic word meaning “healers”.

Jewish dietary laws made it almost impossible for Jews and Gentiles to eat together. This made Jews very unpopular with Gentiles, because they seemed anti-social.

The greatest of these was Philo, who in his writings endeavoured to reinterpret the Jewish faith in the light of Greek philosophy. This attempt led Philo to combine the Old Testament idea of “God’s Word” with the Greek philosophical concept of Reason (both “Word” and “Reason” are logos in Greek). For many Greek philosophers, Reason was divine, yet distinct from God, and was God’s agent in creating the universe.

They do not actually wish to do away with marriage as the method of increasing the human race, but they fear the sexual immorality of women, being convinced that no woman ever remains faithful to one man.

The Jewish War had a number of far-reaching consequences: The fall of Jerusalem meant that both Judaism and the Jesus movement lost their spiritual home. Jerusalem, once the “mother church” of apostolic Christianity, ceased to have any importance in the life of the early Church for the next 300 years. This geographical separation of the Jesus movement from its Palestinian roots quickened the Church’s drift away from a Jewish to a Gentile membership. The refusal of Jewish Palestinian Christians to help their fellow Jews in the revolt against Rome meant that they were regarded as traitors in Jewish eyes. This helped to widen the gap between the Christian faith and the Jewish people. The crushing of the Jewish Revolt by Rome meant that the Pharisees became the controlling force within Judaism. The failure of the great Zealot rebellion destroyed the influence of the Zealots as a national party. The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple removed the power-base of the priestly, aristocratic Sadducees. The War also wiped out the Essenes, because they too had joined in the revolt against Rome; their community at Qumran (the one we know most about) was destroyed by the Romans in AD 68. So only the Pharisees were left to offer spiritual leadership to the Jewish people and guide their future; and the Pharisees had always been the most determined Jewish enemies of Jesus and His followers. Gathering together after the War in the city of Jamnia (or in Hebrew, Jabneh) on the...

He argued that serious post-baptismal sin could be forgiven only once.

The deacons were responsible for visiting the sick and distributing food, clothing, and other necessities of life to the poorer members of the congregation. They also assisted the bishop in the service of worship, especially the Lord’s supper, where they distributed the bread and wine. Church teaching In the age of the apostolic fathers, the Church had an extremely narrow, conservative, traditional attitude towards doctrine.

The Docetic concept of Christ grew out of the Greek philosophical idea that flesh and physical matter hindered and corrupted the spirit, so that God, the supreme spiritual being, could not have direct involvement in the physical world.

The second form of heretical teaching developed among what was left of the Jewish Christian community, and was called Ebionism. Ebionites were traditional Jewish Christians who looked back to the earliest days of the Jerusalem church, and continued to practise the Old Testament law, e.g. circumcision. They regarded Jesus, not as God in the flesh, but simply as the supreme prophet, the one man who had perfectly obeyed God’s law. He became the Son of God by adoption at His baptism, and would return one day as the heavenly Son of Man to reign over the nations of the earth from Jerusalem. Ebionites rejected the writings of the apostle Paul; to them, Paul was a traitor to the Jewish faith and a heretic. (Ebionism comes from the Hebrew ebionim, “the poor ones”, perhaps referring to their practice of voluntary poverty.)

We hold our common assembly on Sunday because it is the first day, on which God put to flight darkness and chaos and made the world; and on the same day, Jesus Christ our Saviour rose from the dead.

The first part, known as “the service of the Word” (singing, reading and sermon), was open to baptised believers, those who were receiving instruction in the Christian faith, and probably also to those who were simply curious about Christianity. The second part, the prayers and the eucharist (the Lord’s supper), was only for those who had been baptised; the rest had to leave.

The Christian view was that the only causes which could justify a divorce were adultery and the desertion of a believer by an unbelieving partner.

Even then, the vast majority of Christians would not permit a divorced person to remarry and many disapproved of widows and widowers remarrying.

This is a weird statement for a Christian apologist.

And when He comes again in glory, will He not totally destroy all who hate Him, and all who have wrongly deserted Him, but give rest to His own people and grant them all the things they have been longing for?

Huldah

Women were not allowed to be bishops or presbyters in the early Church, but they were equally eligible with men to be chosen as deacons.

In a letter written by a loving Pagan Roman husband to his pregnant wife, the husband says: “If you give birth to a boy, let it live. If it is a girl, throw it away.” Unwanted babies were simply thrown on the nearest rubbish-heap and left there to die.

Contrary to what many people think, the early Church did not oppose slavery, which was not abolished when the Empire became Christian in the 4th century. However, Christian teaching and practice did improve the conditions in which slaves lived. For example, the sanctity of marriage between slaves was recognised by the Church (not by the Empire), and church funds were often used to buy the freedom of slaves from cruel masters.

The Romans called France Gaul. It became known as France after the Germanic tribe of the Franks settled there in the 5th century (see Chapter 11). However, I will refer to it as France throughout this volume to make it easier to identify with the modern land of France.

Later theologians did not find this philosophical understanding of the Logos satisfactory. It admitted the eternity of the Logos, but made Him inferior to God the Father. The Father was too exalted and glorious to have direct dealings with creation, but apparently the Logos was not.

The dangerous and divisive thing about the Gnostics was their claim that they, not the Church, were the true Christians.

In the New Testament we find the apostles Paul and John condemning certain Gnostic ideas (e.g. in Col. 2 and throughout 1 John).

They all claimed that they possessed a special knowledge or gnosis2 (Greek for “knowledge”) of spiritual truth which was not available to the ordinary Christian.

Jesus had privately taught this secret knowledge to His apostles, they said, and it had been passed on and handed down to the Gnostics.

According to Gnostics, the whole physical world of space, time and matter was evil – all Gnostics were Docetic.

3 The material world, Gnostics taught, had not been created by the supreme God, but by an inferior and foolish being called the Demiurge (Greek for “architect”). They identified the Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament, and therefore regarded the Old Testament as an evil and unspiritual book. The supreme God and the physical universe were completely alien to each other. The human body was part of this evil material world; salvation meant escaping from the body, and from the world of space and time in which the body holds us prisoner (there was no place for a physical resurrection in the Gnostic scheme). Gnostics had a totally negative attitude to all physical activities, particularly sex which they abstained from. The only thing of any value was the soul, which was a divine spark from the spiritual world, trapped inside the body by the wicked Demiurge.

If Gnostics rejected the Old Testament and Judaism, they had a more positive attitude to Christianity. They made use of some New Testament books, especially John’s Gospel, alongside their own Scriptures. Christianity, they said, teaches how the supreme God sent Christ into the world to save a special group of elect souls from the tyranny of the Demiurge and from the misery of existing in the world of space, time and matter. Christ was not God in person, but one of an exalted rank of spiritual beings called aeons; Christ was the greatest of these beings. Since physical matter was evil, Christ the Redeemer could have had no contact with it. Some Gnostics taught that the Christ descended on the man Jesus at His baptism, possessed Him, spoke through Him, and left Him at His crucifixion; others taught that Jesus was not a human being at all – He only seemed to have a body of flesh, but in reality He was a purely spiritual, heavenly being. Gnostics interpreted Christ as the “Heavenly Revealer” who had come down from the spirit-world to give the elect the ...

Marcionites were a worldwide group; by the time of Marcion’s death in about AD 160, they had spread all over the Empire as a sort of alternative Church, with their own bishops and presbyters.

Orthodox Christians and Marcionites could find themselves in the same prison cell, awaiting death for their faith, but the orthodox disowned the Marcionites, calling them “Satan’s martyrs”.

Marcion was Docetic; he taught that the world of space, time and matter was evil, and he was very hostile to sex and marriage.

Irenaeus interpreted Christ as the Second Adam, who by His perfect obedience had reversed and cancelled the disobedience of the first Adam.

In the East, the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, written in AD 367, contained an authoritative list of New Testament books, corresponding to the New Testament we know today.9 In the West, a Church council at Carthage in AD 397 agreed on the same list of authentic New Testament books. This list was called the “canon” of the New Testament, from the Greek word for “rule” or “standard”.10

It called itself the Catholic Church – as in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the holy Catholic church.” It is essential not to confuse Catholic with Roman Catholic. We give the title “Roman Catholic” to that branch of the Western Church which, in the 16th century, rejected the Protestant Reformation. It was only at that point in history that what we today think of as “Roman Catholicism” really came into being, as Rome defined its theology and practice much more clearly in opposition to Protestant views.11 In contrast to this later term Roman Catholic, the early Church in both East and West called itself simply Catholic.

So the early Christians called themselves Catholics to express the unity of their common faith, and to distinguish themselves from Gnostics and other deviant groups.

The crisis of identity created by the Gnostics about who were the true Christians was made even sharper by the rise of another movement called Montanism. Montanus, a young convert to Christianity, came on the scene in the region of Asia Minor known as Phrygia in about AD 170, when he started to prophesy. He was joined by two prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla. They claimed that the Holy Spirit (or the “Paraclete”, as they preferred to call Him) was speaking in a new way to the Church directly through them, and that this was the fulfilment of Christ’s promise in John 14:16, “I will pray to the Father, and He will give you another Helper [in Greek, Paracletos], that He may remain with you for ever,” and John 16:12-13, “I have many more things to say to you, but now you cannot bear them. However, when the Spirit of Truth has come, He will guide you into all truth.” The Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, had now come to the Church in Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilla (they claimed), and was now leading believers into the promised fulness of truth. Montanists referred to their movement as “the New Prophecy”. In fact, the Montanist prophets offered no new doctrinal revelations. Their main message was the nearness of the second coming of Christ; as Maximilla prophesied, “After me, there will be no more prophecy, but the End.” In the light of this imminent return of the Lord, Montanists taught a severe moral code: among the distinctive teachings of the New Prophecy were an absolut...

Montanism seems to have come as a fresh outburst of the supernatural; it would probably not have created the sensation it obviously did create, if these spiritual phenomena had been part of “the normal Christian life” among believers.

Even at that late date, many miraculous powers of the divine Spirit worked through the evangelists of the Church, so that – the first time they heard the Gospel – entire communities embraced with wholehearted enthusiasm the worship of the Creator of the universe.

Many of the Montanist prophecies did not come true. For example, we remember that Maximilla prophesied, “After me, there will be no more prophecy, but the End.” Maximilla died in about AD 179 and the End did not come. Such things weakened the credibility of all Montanist prophets and their utterances.

The Montanists condemned other Christians as “unspiritual” if they would not embrace the New Prophecy, calling Catholics “prophet-killers” for their refusal to accept Montanist prophets as genuine. Montanists habitually referred to themselves as “the spiritual people”, and to Catholics as “the carnal people”. So it was very difficult for Catholic Christians to get on with Montanists.