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Curiosity is the mother of knowledge.
Because of the friendly relations Rome had enjoyed with Judaea up till then, Jews gained all sorts of special privileges within the Empire. For instance, they were exempt from military service, and did not have to take part in any Pagan rituals, not even emperor-worship.
In its first years, this was a religious movement which blossomed exclusively within the confines of Judaism, and revolved around Jerusalem as its spiritual home. The original followers of Jesus were all Jews, and they had no intention of being anything other than faithful and pious Jews.
The term Christian was also first used in Antioch: “And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch” (Acts 11:26).
By the AD 60s the word was widely accepted by all believers in Jesus as a suitable name for themselves; 1 Peter 4:16 uses the term. Prior to this, Christians called themselves by labels such as “followers of the Way” (Acts 9:2, 22:4); their Jewish enemies called them “the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5).
The persecution was limited in scope to the city of Rome. It did not extend throughout the Empire. However, it claimed two great victims. The apostles Peter and Paul were probably both in Rome during Nero’s persecution, and it seems likely that they were both executed at this time. Tradition says that imperial soldiers beheaded Paul and crucified Peter upside-down.
According to Docetism, Jesus Christ was not a true human being. Christ only seemed to be a man; in fact, He was a purely heavenly being, who could not have had any real contact with the inferior world of flesh.
From Justin’s account, we learn that the main ingredients of Christian worship in the 2nd century were (i) the reading and expounding of Scripture, (ii) prayer, and (iii) the celebration of the Lord’s supper.
Those who partake, before reclining, first taste the sweetness of prayer to God.
Christians also rejected the widespread Roman custom of abortion (killing unwanted unborn children) and infanticide (killing unwanted newly born children).11 They opposed easy divorce, which was at that time the normal Roman practice. Tertullian remarked that Roman women “long for divorce as if it were the natural consequence of marriage”.
the vast majority of Christians would not permit a divorced person to remarry and many disapproved of widows and widowers remarrying.
Many Christian leaders opposed the idea of Christians being soldiers, not just because it involved Pagan worship, but also because they did not think Christians should ever kill a human being for any reason. However, many Christians did in fact serve in the Roman army; they managed to avoid committing idolatry, and could often live the life of a soldier without having to kill anyone, since in the Roman Empire the army acted as a police, prison and fire service, as well as a strictly military force. Christian soldiers spread the gospel as they did tours of duty in different parts of the Empire;
The first Christian to write in defence of war was Athanasius,14 the great 4th century bishop of Alexandria, who wrote that “it is lawful and praiseworthy to destroy an enemy” in a “just war” (usually a war of national self-defence against invasion).
The Roman world could tolerate such a view in the Jews, because Jews were simply following the traditional religion of their nation and ancestors, and did not go around trying to make everyone else into Jews.
Until the year 250, there were no persecutions of universal Empire-wide extent.
Pagans increasingly blamed and victimised Christians for any local calamity or disaster; in the words of Tertullian: “When the Tiber floods, or the Nile fails to flood, up goes the cry: Christians to the lion!”16 The idea was that the gods were angry because Christians were drawing people away from worshipping them.
So Pagans blamed all local catastrophes on the Church. It became a common saying, “No rain, because of the Christians.” Since Christians did not worship the gods, people even regarded them as atheists. “Away with the atheists!” was a popular anti-Christian cry.
The Church therefore treated the dead body of a martyr (or what was left of it) with special respect and tenderness.
This quotation shows us that the Smyrnean believers would hold a special religious service every year on the day Polycarp was put to death, to treasure in their hearts the memory of their great bishop and martyr. Christians all over the Roman Empire did the same for their own local martyrs.
The apologists is a name historians give to a number of Christian writers from the 2nd century who wrote in order to disprove the accusations that Pagans made against Christians, and to show the intellectuals of the Roman world that Christianity was worthy of their attention and their belief. The name “apologist” comes from the Greek apologia, meaning “a speech for the defence”.
The apologists aimed other apologies more at the intellectual culture of the day, trying to demonstrate that Christianity was the best and truest philosophy.
Justin said, Christ had been at work not only among the Jews, but in the Pagan world too, instructing the minds of those philosophers who wanted to live in harmony with Reason.
Justin believed that Christianity was the fulfilment of Greek philosophy. The philosophers had only seen parts of the jigsaw: Christianity gave the complete picture.
Probably no emperor ever read any of the apologies addressed to him. The chief effect of the apologies was on the Church itself: they helped to develop the Church’s theology, and to strengthen the confidence of believers in the truth and righteousness of the faith they confessed.
How will you be able to love enough the One who has first so loved you?
This is how I have dealt with people accused of being Christians. I asked them if they were Christians; if they confessed, I asked them a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment. If they continued to confess their faith, I ordered them to be put to death.
For Gnostics, humanity’s great problem was not sin; the problem was our ignorance of our true spiritual nature and destiny. Christ solved this problem by giving us back the lost knowledge of who and what we really are, and where we belong.
The very thought of sexual reproduction seems to have made Marcion feel sick.
Marcion became the supreme heretic in the eyes of the early Church. This was unfortunate in one sense, because in reacting against Marcion the Church may also have reacted against some true elements in his teaching, such as his emphasis on grace and faith. At any rate, his sect had a long life; it died out only in the 6th century.
I listened eagerly to these things at the time, by God’s mercy which was bestowed on me, and I made notes of them, not on paper, but in my heart, and constantly by the grace of God I meditate on them faithfully.
The word comes from the Greek katholikos, which means “universal” or “throughout the world”. By calling itself Catholic, the early Church was setting itself apart from Gnosticism. The different Gnostic sects had no unity
Visions, revelatory dreams, speaking in tongues, prophetic utterances of prediction and of divine comfort and rebuke, and other extraordinary religious experiences also abounded among the Montanists.
Montanism was the first manifestation of a particular form of Christianity which has appeared several times in the course of Church history; today it would be called “Pentecostal” or “charismatic”.
The evidence suggests that these gifts did continue in the Church, but that they were far less common in the 2nd century.
Some Montanists fell into the “Sabellian” heresy, which taught that Father, Son and Holy Spirit were not three distinct persons, but only one person acting in three different ways.
and through His obedience He cancelled our disobedience.
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5
He united humanity to God,
Our Lord Jesus Christ, out of His boundless love, became what we are, that He might make us what He Himself is.
Irenaeus. Against Heresied, Book 5. Beautiful quote.
so that they babbled madly, in a disorderly and wild way, like Montanus himself.
The false prophet speaks in a state of abnormal ecstasy, after which all restraint is entirely cast aside. As we have already said, he begins with a blank mind which he himself chooses, and ends up with a complete loss of mental self-control!
The Logos had always been at work among all peoples, leading them by different paths towards the knowledge of the one true Creator God.
and partly from his belief in the universal presence and activity of the Logos, which made him appreciate truth and goodness wherever he found them,
When he interpreted the Bible, he said it had three levels of meaning, which he called the body (the literal meaning), the soul (the moral or ethical meaning) and the spirit (the spiritual meaning). This scheme of interpretation sprang out of Origen’s threefold view of human nature as body, soul and spirit,
An allegory is a statement or a story in which the words have two levels of meaning: the obvious meaning, and another secret meaning.
Origen thought that hell was not a place of eternal punishment, but a place where a purifying fire cleansed souls from their sins.
According to Sabellians, God’s oneness – the fact that there is only one God – required Christians to believe that God was only one person. The Father and the Logos, they claimed, were really the same person; it was God the Father who became flesh as Jesus Christ.
Sabellianism is also called Modalism, because it sees the Son and the Spirit as merely “modes” or ways of the Father’s acting, rather than distinct persons.
The Logos was not a created being, but the uncreated offspring of the almighty Father.
This belief that there could be “degrees” of divinity came from Greek philosophy (from Middle Platonism8). Origen also applied this view to the Holy Spirit, who was a degree less divine than the Logos. For Origen, the Father possessed divinity in a full and absolute sense; the Logos, who is eternally begotten from the Father’s nature, possessed divinity in a slightly lesser, inferior sense.
God, Tertullian said, is one substance and three persons
