Hill - Christianity: The First 400 Years

Christianity was founded by a group of fishermen and peasants from Galilee, a rural backwater in an unimportant region of the Roman empire. They were the followers of a relatively minor wandering prophet who had died as a condemned criminal. When their movement came to the attention of the Roman authorities, it was brutally suppressed. Yet little more than three centuries later, the Christian religion had become the faith of the empire itself. Christian bishops had combined Christian theology with classical philosophy to create an intellectual and spiritual synthesis that would endure for over a thousand years, while Christian emperors were busy dismantling the ancient religion of Rome itself and supplanting it with the official teachings of a triumphant church. How did this happen? How did this unregarded Jewish cult come to displace the traditional religion of the empire and go on to become the largest religion in the world?

In this book we trace the first four centuries of Christianity. These centuries were the most tumultuous and important in the religions history. They saw Christianity not only being founded but being refined and defined as it faced a series of potentially crippling challenges, both internal and external. These forced Christians to reflect on their faith and what it meant. By the end of this period, Christians possessed official declarations of doctrine and practice, holy writings, and ecclesiastical and monastic structures that were capable of enforcing orthodoxy. None of these things existed in the days of the first disciples of Jesus. So the first four centuries were truly a crucible for Christianity. It began rather rough and ill-defined, caught between a disapproving Jewish leadership and a hostile Roman state. It endured centuries of proscription, persecution, and massacres in both the Roman and the Persian empires. It emerged stronger than ever but had it been refined by the experience, or changed out of all recognition?

Throughout, our focus is on what the Christian religion really meant to its adherents. How did they live and what did they believe? Why did they believe these things? To understand these, we must place the early church in its social and cultural context, and see how the early Christians interacted with the world around them. For the crucible of the first four centuries did not simply refine and transform the Christian religion: it did the same thing to the pagan and Jewish religions, and to society as a whole.

This book is divided into three main sections. The first three chapters tell the story of the founding of Christianity and its first century, roughly the period in which the New Testament was written. Since this period is relatively well known and covered, these chapters are briefer. Chapters 47 then cover the next two centuries. In them we find out how Christianity developed and spread within Roman society and beyond during this period, and how it reacted to the increasingly violent persecutions against it. We also find out how Christians began to construct notions of orthodoxy and heresy, and how they distinguished between them. Finally, the last four chapters of the book cover the fourth Christian century. We see how Christianity was decriminalized, promoted, and finally made the official religion of Rome, and how the traditional Roman religion was increasingly marginalized and forbidden. But we also see how Christianity was riven by its greatest internal divisions yet, and how it forged a new understanding of its doctrinal and spiritual heritage.

Christianity was, and still is, unusual among the major religions in that its founder is also its message. Christians do not simply believe things that Jesus taught they believe things about Jesus. So who was Jesus? What do we know about him? How did his followers come to believe such remarkable things about him?

Judaism

Both Jesus himself and the first generation of Christians can be understood only in the context of the Jewish religion. Judaism in the first century was enormously complex and is still only imperfectly understood. A proper discussion of Judaism and the various parties and sects that composed it is beyond the scope of this book. Here we shall just indicate some of the most important and relevant elements.

All Jews believed that they belonged to a special people, descended from Abraham. All Jewish boys were circumcised on the eighth day after their birth as a sign of this covenant, and all Jews sought to keep the Law. This was part of a sacred covenant between God and his people. God, for his part, had promised to Israel the Jewish people that they would occupy the land of Palestine. Perhaps the greatest event in the sacred history of Israel was the exodus, described in the book of that name in the Old Testament, when God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land. He had given the Law to Moses and Israel had promised to keep it. The holiest festival in the Jewish religion was therefore Passover, when Jews ate a sacred meal in remembrance of the meal that their ancestors had shared on the eve of their departure from Egypt.

At the heart of the Jewish religion was the Temple, which had originally been built by King Solomon in Jerusalem centuries before and had been recently restored and rebuilt by Herod the Great. This immense building and its precincts surrounded an inner chamber, known as the Holy of Holies, which could be entered only by the high priest, once a year. The Pentateuch prescribed a complex system of sacrifices which were all offered here, and it employed around 20,000 priests and lower clergy, known as Levites. The number was so high because they all worked only part time at the Temple, spending most of their time in other jobs all over Palestine. This meant that although there was only one Temple, there were priests in every community.

Although the Temple was central to Judaism, most Jews did not live in Jerusalem and could not visit it often. The central focus of most Jewish communities was the synagogue. Synagogues at this time were places not of worship or sacrifice, but of prayer and study of the Scriptures. In most synagogues, a meeting would have involved readings from the Scriptures, as well as prayers, and the recitation of passages from the Scriptures. These Scriptures were also central to the Jewish faith, although it had not yet been officially decided which texts were scriptural and which were not; the notion of a canon of Scripture distinct from all other writings had not yet developed. The most important texts, however, were those contained in the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch, consisting of the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament. These books contained the story of the creation, Gods covenant with Abraham and the other ancestors of the Jews, the exodus from Egypt, and the Law which he gave to Moses. The attempt to follow this law in all aspects of life was one of the major elements of Judaism as a religion, and one of the major ways in which Jews as a people distinguished themselves from others. Because the Law was so central to Jewish life, interpreting it properly was a key concern of many Jews. There were many points where the Torah was not exactly clear, and these sparked debates among Jewish scholars about what exactly it meant. Scholars would issue pronouncements which would be treated by their followers as definitive, and which would become rather like legal precedents. These pronouncements were known as halakah , and they would eventually find their way into a vast corpus of literature known as the Mishnah, which was compiled over the following couple of centuries. However, different scholars often interpreted things differently.