Jesus didn’t say too much about church, he mentioned “the kingdom” a lot but it’s a bit fuzzy what he meant by that: was he talking about the church or heaven, the future or some kind of platonic ideal church? After Easter, the Christians started to appear with liturgical practices of the eucharist and baptism based on Jesus’ teachings but still with a connection to Judaism.

As with so many things in theology, no-one really thought about church until conflicts about its identity arose. The first step was separating from Judaism: As Christianity grew and became a strong force, it was inevitable that it would threaten established Judaism and be pushed away and forced to stand on its own.

As the church grew and dispersed, various conflicts on how it should work arose and the apostles dealt with these on an ad-hoc basis. We see in Paul’s letters arguments on whether you need to be circumcised or whether it’s ok to eat meat from pagan rituals. We also start to see a hierarchy evolve with Paul’s advice on selecting leaders using the analogy of a family that needs a strong father. Paul also describes the church in relation to Jesus as a bride and groom.

Further conflicts for the church sprang up around gnosticism: was there a secret knowledge required for salvation? Irenaeus came onto the scene and argued for a view of the church in terms a bit like a franchise: it’s the same no matter where you find it in the world, no-one has some special extra deal, we all have the tradition handed down to us from the teachings of the apostles.

Then came the persecutions which in themselves would have caused feelings of solidarity for Christians but when these times ended there were questions about how to deal with Christians who hadn’t remained pure. Part of the what the Romans did to break the Christians was require them to sacrifice and pray to the Roman gods. This had to be witnessed and documented. After the persecution, how could these Christians be allowed back into the church? What about the bishops who had succumbed?

Cyprian’s response to the questions was to further emphasise the place of bishops in the church. As the bishops had been established by the apostles and then these positions handed on, he argued that they had the power to forgive.

In the time of Augustine, again the question of purity in the church had come up with the Donatists refusing to accept a bishop because he had allowed the Romans to get a copy of his scriptures. The Donatists saw the church as being tainted by this Bishop and so set up their own Bishop which caused confusion. Augustine resolved this issue by appealing again to the Christian “franchise” and again pushing the idea of apostolic succession as being the underlying support structure of the church.

By the time Roman acceptance of Christianity came, it was pretty easy to superimpose the structure of Bishops priests and deacons onto the Roman imperial model with the Bishop in Rome naturally acquiring central power further reinforced by appealing to Jesus’ words to Peter in Matthew’s Gospel: “On this rock I shall build my church”.

Full reference of the Sanks reading: Sanks, T.H. ‘From Kingdom of God to City of God: Jesus to Augustine’ in Salt, Leaven, and Light: The Community Called Church. Crossroad: New York, 1997, pp. 39-64

T. Howland Sanks’ page at Jesuit School of Theology

In a climate where it was becoming more and more life threatening to be a Christian, it was no wonder that people didn’t want to be mistaken for one. One or the chapters I read covered some cases of mistaken identity where Jews were confused with Christians and how this may have motivated a stronger split between Judaism and Christianity.

Also as laws against Christianity spread across the Roman Empire, there was confusion about how to punish this crime: execution? Make them sacrifice to the Roman gods and recant their faith? Jail? Or just a simple flogging. Various letters between head office and the outposts were looked at in this chapter.

Finally, a chapter looked at a place of sanctuary for Christians which was ironically in the emperor’s staff. Apparently Christians were often well educated so were useful as public servants and the world of the emperors palace was fairly isolated from the public so could afford to bend the rules a bit. The only downside was an occasional purge of Christians from the staff.

So here ends my blogging on McKechnie’s book. I’ll post again on my future plans for this blog.

It is also believed that both Peter and Paul were executed in Rome during this time but again there are no actual records, just mentions in other documents written years later that may or may not be reliable.

I was going to write something obvious about Christians persecuting minority groups in modern times but I don’t think it compares at all to mentality or the brutality of the Roman Christian persecution. Maybe the crusades stack up.

I suppose you can draw some parallels between 9/11 and the burning of Rome with a similar flow on effect for an ethnic / religious group who were previously viewed with suspicion.

The strange thing is that Christianity continued to grow even when Christians were being persecuted, they took their religion underground and used secret codes to communicate. I wonder if the War on Terror has had a similar effect of counter-productively antagonising groups that might turn to terrorism whilst making the groups harder to track by driving them further into secrecy? It’s interesting to read the way Christians were demonised to justify their persecution. How much do we demonise those who we disapprove of today?

The next chapter looks at the secret life of Christianity during the Roman persecution.

Anyway, on with the actual theology. The second chapter looks at what we know about the first fifty years of Christianity. We get most of our information from Acts and Paul’s letters that refer to events in this period. As far as historian’s can tell, Peter was the leader of the Church during this period and it was based in Jerusalem. These years represented a change in Christianity from being mostly rural to being city based and with Jerusalem having a large population of pilgrims from other countries, Christianity began to spread far and wide straight away. We don’t know exactly how it spread to all of the countries but sometimes we get mention of Paul or another apostle going to meet an existing established community in one or another country. The urbanisation of Christianity brought it into conflict with the established jewish leaders and persecution from these groups started up pretty quickly. John’s gospel describes “the Jews” anachronistically as persecuting Christians which was probably the case at the time the gospel was written rather than when Jesus was alive (since Jesus was a Jew and there were no groups that identified as Christians distinct from Jews until after his death). But this persecution seemed to be aimed at the followers of Christianity rather than the leaders probably because the leaders were held in high esteem. The effect of this seems to be that Christians were also forced to scatter throughout Judea and into other countries and Christianity soon became a religion of gentiles – the Jewish word for people who were not of Jewish heritage.

In terms of demographics, it seems that the converts to Christianity generally mirrored the social strata of society, it was not just made up of the “poor and outcast” which was traditionally thought but also had key members with wealth and social status (McKechnie spends a bit of time looking at arguments for and against this analysis of the demographics too). It is hard to estimate how many Christians there were at the end of fifty years. One historian looks at the growth rates of cults today to estimate that there must have been thousands, but others think there must have been many more than that when they look at literacy and the fact that Christians had written the Gospels: for these books to have been written there must have been a lot of literate Christians to make it worth the effort and when you look at literacy rates (noting that Christians would have had higher literacy rates because of the higher number of Jews amongst them) you tend to end up with a figure in the tens of thousands.

So at the end of fifty years, we have Christianity spreading far and wide amongst rich and poor despite and partly because of persecution by the Jews. McKechnie ends the chapter by observing that at that phenomenal growth rate, the Christians were probably only a few years off meeting their goal of bringing Christianity to the whole world but of course, the Roman empire put a stop to that and the next chapter deals with how Christianity became outlawed under Nero.

The most interesting thing for me in this chapter was the discussion of Christianity becoming an urban religion and how that changed the nature of it. The interaction between urban and rural thought is fascinating even if you think of how it works today with more educated and liberal thinkers generally in the cities. There is a mutual suspicion that results from these differing intellectual values yet the message of Christianity seemed to impress both groups equally. Also, the urban base meant that high profile people were converted which would have boosted the religion’s credibility and acceptability as well as provided some monetary resources to help establish the new community. I’m not sure of how correct I am in saying that today’s Christianity is much more popular amongst the rural (or at least the uneducated) than in the cities. Where Christianity spread exponentially in the first century through the cities, it struggles to be taken seriously today. Then again, packaged in the right way, it could be poised to re-ignite a society that is now bringing up groups of people who have virtually no exposure to it. I have heard of and read a few books over the last decade or so that express excitement about young people’s spirituality being set to take off in new ways but I see little evidence of it. Still you never know how things will unfold and maybe history can repeat.

This chapter deals with what McKechnie calls the source debate: how do we know which ancient texts are authoritative and how much can we trust them? In general, the texts written closest to the events are considered to most likely be accurate so there is a lot of debate about dating the texts. There is also the extracanonist debate which looks into whether books outside of the accepted canon aka The New Testament should have more authority than they are traditionally given.

The extracanonists as McKechnie calls them generally argue that the books of the New Testament only tell the story that the winners of ancient debates wanted us to know. We know that later on (like in the third and fourth century) there was a campaign against gnosticism which also sought to destroy all gnostic texts. The extracanonists say that the scraps of texts that have been rediscovered over the years represent a large body of Christians who may have been as numerous and influential in the early church as the group that became accepted by Rome.

The intracanonists argue that there is no evidence that these groups were of great influence in the early church. McKechnie puts himself in between these groups arguing that you can view the early church as being a shaggy bush: it had a general shape as described by the New Testament books but around the edges there were branches sticking out that were pruned as the church became more established (for better or for worse).

I suspect McKechnie is leaving something important out of the debate here. What is to be gained by considering these extracanonical books to have authority? Clearly the extracanonists feel these books have important content that is at odds with the agenda of the intracanonists. What are they really arguing over and does it have relevance to the arguments we are having today about the church?

Early church history has an important place in the ongoing process of church reform. When I studied our introductory theology subject, we were told that the Protestants broadly rejected Tradition (with a capital ‘T’ to denote the authority of the traditional teachings of the church as Revelation (with a capital ‘R’ to denote knowledge of God revealed to us)). But I’m guessing it was more complicated than that, I think the Protestants were very much interested in Tradition and apostolic succession (the idea that the apostles have handed the mantle of leadership from one generation to the next) but they believed the church had become corrupt so they wanted to get back to the authentic way of being church and to them, scripture was the link back to the first christians.

Since the Reformation, the western world has of course had the Age of Reason, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, whatever you want to call it and during that period, analytical and evidence based history has developed and more recently, post-modern critiques of the analytical and evidence based histories have been produced, all of which have affected our understanding of the first christians and thus all of which have affected the way we think about church reform.

There continues to be a thread of thought in church reform that seeks to draw upon the early church as a source of the authentic christian expression of church but this way of thinking faces difficulty when it bogs down into historical critiques and alternative readings of the history upon which it is trying to lay a foundation.

With this in mind, I can see that the study of early church history is likely to be loaded with agendas and clashing interpretations of the facts and disputes over the authenticity of historical sources. A far cry from my initial feelings that it would be dry, static and mostly irrelevant – at least I hope so.