It would be wrong to see these early Christians as totally adrift. That is clearly not accurate. Everyone agreed that Jesus was their guide and teacher, and they were all quite certain that a new age of divine blessing was dawning, but the movement was surprisingly open-ended. Lots of rules, regulations, and practices would be implemented later, and once they were in place Christians often treated them as if they had always been essential elements of the movement, but most had not. When Christianity began, it was a movement in search mode. Christians possessed a handful of ideas and inclinations that they were spiritually willing to bet their lives on, but they had not yet deciphered what it all meant. Figuring that out would literally take centuries, and there would always be multiple answers rather than just one. Instead of ending up with just one uniform and ubiquitous Christian identity, Christianity ended up with a number of different but overlapping and interrelated identities. These varied packages of Christian beliefs and practices are called traditions, and this chapter recounts how the original fledgling Christian movement slowly evolved over five or six hundred years to become an organized religion housed in multiple different traditions.
The Jewish Roots of Christianity
Jesus was a Jew, and Judaism is the source of many of the ideas and commitments that still characterize Christianity today. While the precise origins of Judaism are largely lost in the mists of history, the Hebrew scriptures assert that the Jewish people were called into existence by God and given a special role in the human story. The Hebrew scriptures include a vivid account of exodus from Egypt and conquest of Palestine, but the archaeological records from this time period (thirteenth century bce ) reflect a much slower and less dramatic progression of events that eventually gave birth to Israel and to Jewish religious consciousness. Whatever the process, it seems clear that by about 1000 bce an Israelite kingdom had been established in Palestine, with its religious life focused on rituals performed at the Temple in Jerusalem.
In 587 bce, Palestine was conquered by the powerful Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar II. Many Jews were exiled to Persia (now Iraq and Iran), and the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. Without a temple, Jews developed other mechanisms for preserving their faith, most notably the synagogue, a place where Jews could gather to pray and to discuss religious and moral matters. Jews started returning to Palestine around 540 BCE and promptly rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple, but synagogues remained in use as local meeting places for Jews wherever they lived. Several different dynasties conquered and ruled post-exile Palestine, but in the 140s bce a Jewish state was reestablished in the region. That kingdom was of relatively short duration; it was subsumed into the Roman Empire in 63 bce. From that juncture until 1948, Jews had no land they could call their own.
By the time of the Roman occupation, assorted groups of Jews had developed their own different ways of making sense of God, themselves, and their historical experience. Prominent Jewish sub-groups included the Pharisees, who stressed the law and personal piety; the Sadducees, who emphasized traditional temple worship; the Zealots, who were violently opposed to Roman rule; and the Qumran community that assumed the end of the world was near and that a final battle between good and evil was about to commence. The Samaritans, another quasi-Jewish group, claimed descent from two of Israel’s ancient tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh. In addition, an increasing number of Gentiles (non-Jews) were calling themselves God-fearers and adopting many of Judaism’s ideas and values without formally becoming Jews themselves.
This was the complex world of Jewish faith into which Jesus was born and which shaped the early Christian movement. Christianity retained many of the basic ideas and practices of Judaism. The synagogue morphed into the church, and the diversity of perspectives within Judaism prepared the way for the diversity of beliefs and practices that soon came to characterize the early Christian community. Imbedded in the matrix of first-century Judaism, Christianity emerged as a new and distinct religious movement led by a backcountry prophet named Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus and the Gospel
Jesus was an unlikely leader. Neither a priest nor a scholar, Jesus lived his first thirty years in relative obscurity as the son of Mary and her husband Joseph, a carpenter in the small town of Nazareth in the region known as Galilee. Then, for just a few years before he was killed, he took on the role of a wandering Jewish prophet and teacher, at first in the rural region where he had been raised and later for a very short time in Jerusalem.
His message was simple but profound. Jesus affirmed much of the Judaism of his day, including the Golden Rule (which Jews usually expressed in the negative as “do not do to others what you would not want done to you”), but Jesus frequently added his own twist to these teachings. Some of his additions – the folksy way he referred to God as “abba” (best translated as “daddy”), his willingness to bend the law to accommodate human frailty, his claim that he was able to forgive sins – were troubling to traditional Jews, and some Jewish leaders plainly disliked Jesus and his movement.
His message was also troubling to Rome. Jesus spoke of a coming “kingdom of God” and described his own actions as the dawning of that kingdom. He instructed his followers to give appropriate respect to Caesar (the Roman Emperor), but he also told them to give their complete obedience to God, a qualification that obviously limited any loyalty owed to Caesar. And, while he did not seek political power for himself, he refused to cower when Rome’s political appointees detained and interrogated him. His behavior seemed potentially subversive to an empire that demanded absolute obedience, and Rome responded vigorously. Using the gruesome spectacle of execution on a cross, the Empire eliminated Jesus and sent a public message to his followers that insolence in the face of imperial authority would not be tolerated.
Jerusalem’s residents, and many of Jesus’s own closest followers, thought that was the end of the matter. His male disciples were despondent and ready to abandon the cause. But some of his female friends began to claim they had seen Jesus alive, and soon his male disciples were making the same claim. They believed that somehow Jesus had been resurrected from the dead and had been given a new and glorious body. They also came to believe that this resurrected Jesus had given them a task to accomplish: they were to continue the work that Jesus had started, preaching the gospel message throughout the world, to every person, in every nation, in every tongue, and they were not to stop until they reached the ends of the earth.
The fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea says that the disciples of Jesus cast lots to determine where each of them should go. Thomas was supposedly assigned to Parthia (now Iran and Iraq), Andrew to Scythia (now Ukraine), and John to the province of Asia Minor (now Turkey). Peter, as the group’s leader, was given freedom to travel wherever he wanted.1 Eusebius did not always get his facts straight and this particular story may well be a pious fiction, but his basic point is accurate. Within a century of Jesus’s death, the Christian gospel had been exported far beyond the boundaries of Palestine, taking root as far west as Spain and as far east as India.
What exactly was this “gospel” or “good news” that the followers of Jesus sought to transmit around the world? Much of its content was derived from the teachings of Jesus himself: that God was humanity’s dear father, that people were required to love each other, that repentance was the pathway to true righteousness, that ultimately everyone would stand before God and be judged, and that somehow Jesus’s own suffering and death was part of God’s plan to redeem humankind and the world. But Jesus himself never wrote any of this down; a literary