This article is far longer than any other on this site. It also may appear to ramble … but I promise, all of the rambling has a point. So at the outset, I beg your indulgence, Dear Reader.
Christianity has been with us for just about two millennia now. It changed considerably through that time, having undergone many changes in philosophy, doctrine, practice and dogma. It has split into hundreds or thousands (depending on how one counts them) of different sects.
Because of that, its history could fill an encyclopedia shelf, several times over. However, of particular interest are the first two and a half centuries of Christianity. From the 30s CE to the 280s CE, the faith underwent colossal changes that — in some ways, and comparatively speaking — dwarf much later events, such as the Eastern Schism or even the Reformation.
This period is when Christianity became the vast, amorphous yet coordinated institution (or collective of them) that we now know. It’s also the time in which most of the concepts we most associate with the faith, such as the sacraments, were established (with a few exceptions). It’s worth understanding not only this period of the religion’s history, but why it’s so much more impactful than other, later, periods.
I must start explaining what happened in the period from the 30s CE to the 280s CE, by discussing events prior to the 30s CE and the initial source of the (now-many) Christian faiths.
The seed of Christianity lies in the reported career of Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant Jewish preacher of an apocalyptic form of Judaism, who spent most of his life and his ministry in Galilee, in his reported time a client-state of the Roman Empire. (Galilee was annexed by the Roman province of Judaea, it’s true, but that happened in 44 CE after Jesus’ reported lifetime.)
Galilee had been mostly absorbed by the kingdom of Judea around the turn of the last century BCE, but Rome stepped in and assumed control of the whole Levant in 63 BCE. By the start of the 1st century CE, the Romans were in the process of building new cities in Galilee, including Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee’s western shore (completed about 20 CE).
Each of these changes (Judea’s annexation, Rome stepping in, and the Romans’ construction efforts) was followed by a wave of Jewish settlers arriving from further south. In Jesus’ reported time, the new cities built by Rome were home mostly to Romans or others who arrived to trade with or work for them; but from the 40s CE onward, those would become primarily Jewish. In Jesus’ own time there were a number of Jewish communities in many parts of Galilee, as well as some primarily-Gentile communities. Also there werea smaller number of Samaritan communities. It’s hard to assign specific numbers to the population, but something like 10% of Galilee’s residents were Roman; the remainder were Jewish, Samaritan, and Gentile (although it’s likely the percentage of Samaritans was smaller than those of either Gentiles or Jews).
Of note, Galilee in Jesus’ reported time was ruled by Herod Antipas. It was also not under formal Roman occupation, unlike some other parts of the Levant. Antipas was a son and presumed heir of Herod the Great, however, when the latter died, the Romans didn’t trust Antipas with Judea. Instead they set him up to rule Galilee, separately. He ruled until 39 CE when he was set aside on the grounds that he’d conspired against Emperor Caligula, who’d died in 37 CE. (If you’re getting the idea that Antipas’s standing with the Romans was poor, you’d be correct.) Overall the Romans treated Galilee as “a Jewish region” even if, under Antipas, they’d set it up as its own client-state independent of Judea.
A couple centuries before then, Galilee was sparsely settled compared with regions around it. Prior to the kingdom of Judea annexing it around the year 100 BCE, it had very few communities. What people it had, were Gentiles (Aramaeans and Phoenicians, mostly, with some Syriacs) and a small number of Samaritans.
It’s important to understand that Samaritans weren’t Gentiles or pagans, per se. Their religion followed the tradition of Abraham and was related to that of the Jews. Jews at that time, and perhaps even now, might insist that the Samaritans’ faith had nothing whatever to do with theirs, but this is not the case. Samaritans had their own version of the Pentateuch or Torah, which they held as sacred along with some other writings of their own.
The Samaritans had a temple of their own, too, as well as a city nearby, on Mount Gerizim. It was destroyed by the Jews during the fighting that led up to Galilee’s annexation.
After this, as noted previously, a wave of Jewish settlers arrived. Once the Roman regime seized control and set themselves up mostly in what they now called their province of Judaea, another wave of Jewish settlers arrived in Galilee (one assumes, trying to evade the Romans). The construction of new Roman cities, from c. 20 BCE to 20 CE, attracted a smaller wave of Jewish settlers but also led to a smaller influx of Romans and other Gentiles, as well.
Within a span of about 5 generations, the region’s social makeup had changed quite a bit. Many of the settlements were relatively new, having been established after 100 BCE. Whereas it originally had mostly pagan worshippers alongside a Samaritan minority, it now had many followers of Judaism. A mix of languages was spoken there as well; while Aramaic dominated, there were some Greek speakers (which included a portion of the small number of Romans who’d come in) and a tiny number of Latin speakers. Hebrew was known to a minority of Jews, but even those who knew it didn’t speak it as an everyday tongue; it was mostly reserved for religious contexts. Their everyday language was Aramaic, although based on where they lived or their professions, a minority spoke Greek.
Despite the mixture of ethnicities, religions and languages spoken in Galilee, there wasn’t much hostility — at least, no more than was found in most other parts of the Levant at the time. This may have been a function of the reality that Galilee still was only sparsely settled, even if it had attracted new residents since c. 100 CE.
Alexander the Great conquered Persia in the 330s, and that included the Levant, which had been part of Persia’s Syrian satrapy (or province). With the region under his control and that of his successors, it opened up to the rest of the Hellenistic world. As a result, Jews began venturing to other parts of the eastern Mediterranean, and by the same token, Hellenistic people arrived in the Levant, including Galilee and Judaea (though initially not in many numbers).
Over the next few centuries, Gentiles’ awareness of Judaism increased. In many ways, Judaism was viewed as a kind of philosophical school, and its synagogues regarded as small academies. By the last century BCE, some Gentiles had attached themselves to synagogues and followed various Jewish practices, even if they didn’t fully convert to Judaism. Jews referred to them as “Godfearers” (among other names).
Given the admixture of Jews and Gentiles in Galilee, there must have been quite a few Godfearers there — although, as in so many other ways, we don’t have any exact numbers. Nor can it be stated how pervasive this practice was. It’s simply worth knowing this was a phenomenon within the eastern empire, and it was present, to one degree or another, in Galilee by the start of the 1st century CE.
In the same way that some Gentiles had an interest in Judaism, there were also Jews with an interest in Hellenistic culture and philosophy. Naturally, some overlap developed between the Jews’ religion and the rest of the Hellenistic world.
This overlap was stronger and more thorough in some areas than in others. It was more noticeable in places like Alexandria and parts of Anatolia, as well as Antioch, but it was found even in the heart of Judaism, Judea. In Alexandria, a group of hermitic Jews developed called the Therapeutae; they overtly combined Hellenistic philosophy with Judaic scripture. In essence they constituted their own Jewish sect. Philo of Alexandria, whose life overlapped with that of Jesus of Nazareth, is the best-known of these.
Note, the Therapeutae are far from the only Jews who mixed their religion with Hellenistic philosophy. Also, in some Jewish communities, the prevailing language became Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew. Jewish scripture was translated to Greek (the Septuagint) and a few Jewish sacred texts were composed in Greek (e.g. Sirach).
But with that said, there was a bit of tension about this within Jewish communities. Some were more parochial or traditional than others and didn’t appreciate this overlap. This was especially the case after the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV desecrated the Temple in 167 BCE. A surge in Jewish parochiality accompanied the rise of the new kingdom, but it hardly stamped out all Hellenistic influence on Judaism.
One more consideration is that the Jewish system of sacrifices centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. The religion’s priesthood resided and ruled from there, and sacrifices could only take place there.
This had been a problem for a long time, freezing out portions of Israel and Judea further than a day’s travel or so away from Jerusalem. But it became more of an issue with the Jewish diaspora, as Jews ended up in other lands and were even further away from the Temple. This had caused no small amount of anxiety during the Babylonian occupation when the Temple had been destroyed and the priesthood that had survived was in no position to conduct sacrifices. Restoring the Temple had alleviated this problem, but it had the attention of Jews like never before. Galilee, of course, wasn’t all that close to Jerusalem, meaning that Jews there were subject to this problem.
The uniqueness of the Temple and the mandated sacrifices that could only be done there became the focus of different approaches to Judaism that developed in the centuries leading up to Jesus’ time. The Pharisees, for example, attempted to deal with it by extending Jewish sacred practices to other aspects of life, thus reducing dependency on the sacrifices and the Temple. Their view was predicated on the idea that Jews had been directed to spread YHWH’s holiness to all peoples, for example in Exodus:
“Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Ex 19:5-6a)
Other factions of Judaism didn’t go along with this, particularly the Sadducees, which led to no small amount of strife within the Jews’ faith. However, dealing with the exclusivity of Temple sacrifices would, late in the 1st century, go from simply a problem to be solved, to something that almost totally broke the faith (with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE).
Religion was an integral part of life in the Greco-Roman world. As noted in another article on this site, everyone participated in one or more religious traditions. It was all but unavoidable.
One important thing to keep in mind about religion, leading up to the 1st century CE, is that it had much more to do with who one was, than anything else (including what one believed). There were regime-level civil religious practices, such as sacrifices to the Roman deities and occasionally the emperor, that everyone had to perform. Still other civic-religious practices might take place at a more local level; that’d be sacrifices or acknowledgements of local or provincial deities. Certain families and/or tribes had their own rites. So too did some professions. In addition to all of that, there were also the so-called “mystery religions,” each of which had its own standards of who was admitted (and initiated into it) and who couldn’t get in.
At the time they became part of the Roman state, Jews were generally exempt from having to participate in the Roman state religion, since they had their own national religion — and that was respected by Rome, to an extent. Hard feelings would develop later in the 1st century, culminating in the First Roman-Jewish War from 66 to 70 CE. After that, Jews were forced to pay a special tax in order to be allowed to observe their own faith.
This leads us to another matter that affected Galilee in the latter part of the 1st century. The First Roman-Jewish War itself was conducted partly in Galilee before being concentrated in and around Jerusalem. Many Galilean Jews were killed or taken prisoner and subsequently enslaved. Once the Romans took control of Galilee and the fighting moved south, refugees moved in (although it’s hard to know how many).
The outcome of this war was catastrophic for all Jews, given that it ended in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, but in many ways, Galilee had borne the brunt of it.
A corollary effect of the Roman-Jewish War, as well as the Kitos War (115-117 CE) and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132 to 135), is that Christians more generally felt a need to separate themselves from Judaism. Initially the Jesus movements had begun among Jews, but despite most of them being open to Gentiles, they tended to view themselves either as Jews themselves or as having taken Jews’ place in God’s eyes. What’s more, traditional pagans often confused Christians and Jews, frequently treating them as two sides of the same coin (and in some cases they were unaware of any differences between them).
As the Roman regime and society more generally became distrustful of Jews and resentful over the wars they’d triggered, Christians became concerned their association with Judaism was a liability. They worked to distance themselves from Judaism, when it was convenient for them to do so — but still referred to their own movement as “the New Israel,” having superseded YHWH’s selection of Hebrews (and subsequently, Jews) as “his people.”
Much has been said on this subject, over the past 2,000 years, so I won’t waste much time on this particular topic. I will repeat, however, that he mostly propounded an apocalyptic form of Judaism. He taught that “the Kingdom of Heaven” (or “of God”) would soon arrive and set everything right again.
Although the gospels make clear that Jesus preached mostly to Jews, we can’t know how many of the Godfearers were in his audiences. But given that he preached mostly in Galilee, it’s virtually impossible that he’d never preached to any of them. The extent that Godfearers paid much attention to apocalyptic Judaism, or even understood it, is hard to guess, but again, some of them had to have been exposed to it, at the very least.
After Jesus’ departure (according to the gospels, by ascension to heaven), his teachings remained behind, and were especially beloved by his own disciples, the Apostles. They continued preaching apocalypticism, but many of them also came to believe the relationship between Jews (and the rest of humanity) and YHWH had fundamentally changed.
This happened, of course, within the context of all the above-mentioned influences, and it must be kept in mind that it was in Galilee that Jesus had taught (spending only the last week of his ministry in Judaea and Jerusalem specifically). Memory of those teachings lived on within Galilee, at least initially, since it was only Galileans (including the Apostles) who knew what Jesus had said and done — again, aside from the last week of his ministry.
Presumably the end of his ministry was in 33 CE. This may or may not be accurate; Jesus’ ministry may have ended in the late 20s or perhaps as late as 36 or 37 CE.
There’s a historiographical vacuum of anywhere from 10 to 15 years between when Jesus preached and the oldest extant documents that concern him (the genuine Pauline epistles, some of which were written as early as the mid-40s CE). While later documents have something to say about what happened in this period, including Acts of the Apostles, it’s difficult to understand exactly what transpired during this time.
One presumes a number of things were going on: First, all of the Apostles and other disciples of Jesus (how many there may have been is unknown) traveled the Levant, or perhaps further away, conveying his teachings. Second, the masses to whom he spoke on occasion (such as during the Sermon on the Mount) may well have been thinking — and talking — about him, too.
Because this decade to decade and a half is a vacuum, it’s best not to speculate too much about it, beyond the above.
Once the gap in our knowledge is lifted, in the 40s CE by the earliest writings of Paul formerly Saul of Tarsus, we can see that things have changed from the apocalyptic Judaism originally taught by Jesus. He is, by Paul’s account, not a Jewish preacher declaring the impending “kingdom of God,” but a savior for all humanity, not just Jews.
Also, since Paul was from Cilicia, we know that knowledge of Jesus had not only reached southeastern Anatolia during the “vacuum” years, but had already gone further. In his writings we see the germ of the notion — more explicitly stated later (such as in the epistle to the Hebrews) — that Jesus’ death was a substitution for the Temple sacrifices of old intended to wipe away the sins of Jews.
This was a very neat solution to the problem of the exclusivity of Temple sacrifices, and it also opened things up more fully to Gentiles, including the Godfearers. Paul claims to have been a Pharisee himself; assuming that’s true, one can see his impulse to move beyond the Temple sacrifices.
But, this is just one slice of the much larger pie which is the collective of Jesus movements. As noted in my article about the fractured record of Christianity, other Jesus movements existed that either had nothing to do with the one Paul belonged to, or were aware of it but worked around it or ignored it. Other movements remained closer to the apocalyptic Judaism of Jesus; in fact, some remained overtly Jewish but believed in Jesus on top of that. Still others had yet other ideas that they later expressed.
What’s more, the very reason Paul was writing in the 40s and 50s CE was to deal with differences that were cropping up inside of the movement he belonged to. So even this one movement had to deal with variations rising up in its midst.
The most important point to keep in mind, though, is that even 10-15 years after the end of Jesus’ ministry, different ideas about him and what he’d taught, and what his ministry ultimately meant, had already emerged among all the groups that ostensibly followed him. We see this in the letters Paul wrote in the late 40s through early 50s CE. As I’ve stated multiple times on this site, at no point in the historical record is there any indication that there ever was a single, unified “Christianity” once the career of Jesus of Nazareth had ended.
When we get to the end of Paul’s epistles, we’re right at the halfway point of the 1st century. By this time not only do we have his correspondence, but it’s a virtual certainty that the “lost gospel Q,” a collection of Jesus’ sayings that would later be a source for Matthew and Luke, must have existed in some form. There might also have been a “Signs Gospel” that would subsequently lead to the gospel according to John, and also, perhaps, a Passion Narrative that the author of Mark worked from.
It’s during these last five decades of the 1st century that a lot of foundational material — canon and non-canonical alike — is set down. The four canonical gospels as well as a few non-canonical gospels were first written in this time. So was Revelation, and most of the rest of the New Testament (Acts of the Apostles may have been written in the first years of the 2nd century; the “pastoral” epistles to Titus and Timothy, and the letters attributed to John and Peter, almost certainly were written between 100 and 150 CE). Influential but non-canon documents like Didache, Barnabas, and 1 Clement may have been composed in this time, as well.
This is the period when the Apostles were replaced by the apostolic fathers, and early Christianity slowly but surely started envisioning itself as a “church.” The many different groups were not united in any way that we are able to discern, based on the documentary record, mainly because that record is thin and the documents that existed weren’t known to all the various groups. They operated, apparently, in ignorance of one another, bumping up against each other only randomly. Also, they weren’t numerous, making chance meetings much more unlikely.
What we can see, however, is an increasing awareness of a need for “authority.” As newer members enter the Jesus movements, more time has passed since Jesus’ own time and his own teachings. Newcomers depend on existing members to convey those teachings; but the numbers of members who can recall them — either directly, or 2nd or 3rd-hand — is falling rapidly through these decades.
The answer was to enlarge and entrench the somewhat informal system of Christian leadership that had existed up to then. By the end of the century — as revealed, for example, in 1 Clement — we see there’s a defined priesthood, and also as shown in 1 Clement, things have reached the point where that leadership itself is dealing with conflicts of its own.
The Roman-Jewish War I’ve already mentioned took place in 66-70 CE and it certainly had an effect on Christianity. It may have seemed to a few (at least, and at that time) that Vespasian’s forces wiping out Jerusalem and razing the Temple could have been the very apocalypse Jesus had predicted.
This view did not prevail, of course, but it was enough of a disaster that at least some early Christians felt the need to account for it, and even roll it into Jesus’ own apocalyptic teaching. For example, chapter 13 of Mark is an apocalypse-prediction passage in which Jesus states the Temple will be destroyed. (This is one of the reasons scholars date Mark to 70 CE or later. Given the well-thought-out nature of Mark 13, I suspect it took as long as 5 years after the Temple’s destruction for that gospel to be written.)
Even in this period, Galilee is the region in which memory of Jesus and his career would have been strongest and most pervasive. But it had been decimated during the War, and there’s no doubt some Galileans had fled to other areas. So too did Jews generally become refugees, and this would have included Jewish-Christian movements.
Ultimately this meant knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth spread even further, during the second generation after the end of his career. Think of it as something of a “second wave” of dispersal to other parts of the Greco-Roman world.
As noted, Jesus of Nazareth had spoke many times about the coming of “the Kingdom of God” and an apocalypse that would bring it about. Based on what Christians themselves have reported about what he said of it, it’s clear he anticipated it would happen within his own lifetime. The gospels quote him as stating that “there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom” (Mt 16:28; see also Lk 9:27 & Mk: 9:1).
This certainly had to weigh on those Jesus movements which continued to relay those particular teachings. By the early 2nd century, it’s impossible that anyone in the audiences Jesus spoke to could still be alive to “see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” Jesus’ apocalypticism had to take a back seat to other concerns.
There were also attempts to push the apocalypse forward into the distant future. For instance, the early 2nd century author of 2 Peter wrote, “But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day” (2 Pt 3:8). How this formula is consistent with Mt 16:28, Lk 9:27, Mk 9:1 and other gospel passages, is unknown; one assumes the author of this epistle — which absolutely couldn’t have been the Apostle Peter — wasn’t aware of them.
That fact also continues to be an issue; in the 2nd century we still have many Christian authors writing about their faith in ignorance of one another. This leads to disagreements such as the above, and makes clear how varied their beliefs were.
But, aside from the correspondences from this period describing various disagreements inside the movements, there isn’t a large amount of strife between them, no serious contests to speak of. And Christians begin speaking of themselves as a single body and of their religion as a single faith (even though it’s not unified in any way, especially given that so many of their communities aren’t even aware of most others).
By the year 100 CE, it’s been nearly 7 decades since the end of Jesus’ ministry; almost 3 generations have passed. The Apostles themselves are gone; the apostolic fathers and Apostles’ various protégés are either getting old, no longer active, or are also gone.
Given the still-small numbers of the various Jesus movements, plus the reality that some might be under threat, there was more than a little anxiety within them. Moreover, those movements had largely been self-governing. A few (such as Paul’s movement) had outposts in far-flung places, but generally, Christian congregations ran themselves, and often did so as they saw fit.
It’s in the early decades of the 2nd century that the Jesus movements appear to realize there are better and worse ways of doing things. Didache, along with some other early “church orders” documents, was an answer to this notion.
The epistle to Timothy was also composed in the early decades of the 2nd century (despite being attributed to Paul) and contains specific advice about who should be a bishop (επισκοπος, episkopos or “watcher, overseer”) and a deacon (διακονος, diakonos or “servant, minister”). There’s a third title, elder (πρεσβυτερους or presbuterous) but they aren’t spoken of in the same way within that document; there, elders are mentioned later and referred to as a group who should “considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching” (1 Tim 5:17). Note, it’s from this Greek word that we get the English word “priest” (essentially, it’s a contraction).
In the other “pastoral” epistle, Titus, elders and bishops are spoken of almost in the same breath (see Ti 1:5-6). It’s possible they’re considered the same thing, or perhaps the term “elder” is a more general one describing Christian leaders in the aggregate while “bishop” is more specific to an office.
At any rate, we see within the Jesus movements in the early 2nd century an effort to come up with standards and at least a loose structure within which all of the various congregations should operate. It’s at this point, one assumes, there’s a growing awareness of the different congregations and movements to which they belonged. There’s also discussion of various Christian writings (prior to this, Christian authors tended only to quote, refer to, or allude to Jewish scripture).
We also see in this period growth of movements that not only are aware of one another but are in overt disagreement. An example is the emergence of Gnostic Christianity. We see Christian authors beginning to pen commentaries intended to discredit their opponents — which include other Christian sects, in addition to Jews and pagans.
Based on what they wrote in this period, Christians appear to assume that all congregations now exist within this larger framework; bishops oversee elders/presbyters and deacons. All congregations are considered to be part of a region which has its bishop. It’s unclear how bishops are appointed, but even by now it appears that each different rank involved a separate ordination (that is, someone might be ordained a priest, then ordained again as bishop). This shows a good deal of formality, which was certainly not the case as little as 50 years prior.
The irony of Christians imagining themselves as part of a single, overarching institution is that, based on the documentary record — which as I’ve stated many times is highly fractured — the religion has never been a cohesive whole, and in all likelihood didn’t even originate in a single place. Its various movements and groupings have been coming into contact with each other by now, though, and it’s almost as though they’re in a state of denial about it; or, they simply are more aware of the points they have in common, than differences. It’s possible this imagined unitary Christendom was a reaction to the knowledge of other Christians out there who aren’t quite the same — a way of asserting that, despite variations, Christianity is ultimately a single, distinct entity.
Some congregations had kept funds for the care and upkeep of widows and orphans. This was a form of mutual care that had been a feature of many different groups in Greco-Roman society — religious and otherwise — so this was not really novel, nor was it unique to Christianity. Widows and orphans were particularly vulnerable in that era because most women, and orphans who were still very young, were unable to make a living and pay for their own affairs. There were various guilds and collegia devoted to mutual assistance.
This is something that some congregations did for themselves. But as Christians’ clerical hierarchy developed, widow and orphan funds were rolled up into it. Slowly, they ceased to be informally managed and were administered by clergy, but at the beginning, at the level of the congregation or sometimes a town or city.
It’s hard to say how much influence this granted clergy in the lives of lay Christians. Certainly widows and orphans, themselves, were in many ways at their mercy. It was a reason some widows joined Christianity, depending on what was available to them in their own locales. And it even attracted men who were heads of families; belonging to a congregation with such a fund was, effectively, a life-insurance policy promising to care for their wives and children, should anything happen to them. So it certainly was a recruiting tool.
A phenomenon discussed in some detail in Didache and mentioned in a few other documents are wandering Christian teachers. These preachers — some referred to as “prophets,” or “apostles,” — roamed among Christian communities and visited congregations.
The few mentions of these itinerants suggests this wasn’t a pervasive or common phenomenon, but it did occur in various places. Based on what Didache says about how congregations should handle them, which was to treat them with respect and deference, but don’t allow themselves to be taken advantage of by them, it’s possible that some of these itinerants were grifters with their hands out, using their status as Christian sages to mooch off of believers.
Even so, Jesus had himself been just such an itinerant preacher. John the Baptist had been one, too, as were (at one point or another in their careers) all of the Apostles. It was natural that this was something that would continue to happen within the faith. It’s possible that itinerants were the very reason the faith had expanded within the eastern Roman Empire within only a few years after the end of Jesus’ ministry.
Still, the emergence of a leadership hierarchy and the establishment of at least rough outlines of what clergy were expected to do, appears to have absorbed these itinerants. Perhaps this diminished their numbers by providing anyone looking to use the faith as a way to make one’s living offices to hold that might fulfill this desire.
The various Christian movements tended to have loose organizations. With a leadership tier increasingly governing more congregations, possibly crossing movements, and members of that leadership increasingly in touch with one another, differences of belief and practice became more noticeable. They’d desperately wanted to see their faith as a cohesive unit, and maybe had been willing to ignore variations, but this could only last just so long. Complaints about those differences become more pronounced, especially at the leadership level, and more bitter as the years passed.
What’s more, they’re being expressed in almost metaphysical terms. The Johannine epistles, which were written in the early decades of the 2nd century (definitely not by the Apostle John), speak of “antichrists” (αντιχριστος or antichristos in the singular) that are active in the world (and, by way of warning, could be active within the ranks of the faith).
Where once there’d been disputes among followers of Jesus (e.g. the Judaizers condemned by Paul in his epistle to the Galatians), the language has become more alarming, and overtly metaphysical and/or spiritual in nature.
It’s true the gospels mentioned Jesus casting out demons, and Revelation — with its talk of the Dragon (identified with Satan) and the Beast — was written most likely in the final years of the 1st century; but we see more references to the Forces of Darkness in the first half of the 2nd century within Christian writings (canonical and otherwise).
There’s genuine concern and anxiety over the faith itself. This is coupled with a tendency to speak of the religion as a single, organic whole: The Church. This is a translation into English of the Greek term εκκλησια (ekklēsia), meaning “assembly” (as in a civic assembly that decides matters). Christians viewed themselves not as members of a congregation, or of a bishop’s district, but as part of a single unit, the collective of all believers in Jesus of Nazareth.
Put simply, Christians began looking for unity in ways they hadn’t done, previously. Many of them had lived in ignorance of other Jesus movements, and later learned of others but may not have been overly concerned with them. The problem with this thinking is, Christianity hadn’t been united in any way. This belief in a vast, unitary Christian Ekklēsia was — for better or worse — almost delusional.
But as the 2nd century proceeds, even that imagined unified Ekklēsia is no longer enough for many of them. They’re looking for even more than that. This tendency led to cognizance that (for example) Gnostic Christian sages like Basilides and Valentinus were teaching what, in many ways, was a separate religion. They began to be regarded as outside of the Church, or as corrupting influences trying to undermine or destroy it from within.
The middle and later parts of the 2nd century feature the emergence of true “heresy-hunters.” Irenaeus is the most famous of the early heresy-hunters, but this is not a trend that was limited to him. It’s simply that he happens to have been the early heresy-hunter whose writings were most trafficked and quoted, and later preserved for us to read. In fact, it’s extremely unlikely that he was the first Christian ever to pen anything of this kind — although he certainly presented himself as a uniquely-authoritative proponent of “orthodoxy.”
At the same time, we see that the clerical hierarchy is becoming more entrenched, pervasive, and is no longer as amorphous as it had been. As noted previously, until the middle of the 2nd century, it’s hard to be sure what it meant for someone to be a deacon, or presbyter/priest, or bishop. Sometimes a person referred to as a “deacon” might be able to consecrate and give the eucharist (a job reserved for priests or higher in today’s Roman Catholic Church). In other places, though, a “deacon” may simply have been a reader during services or the person who collected worshippers’ donations (that’d be a layman’s position, today). By the same token, a “bishop” may simply have been a senior priest with no responsibility outside of one congregation; or he may have been in charge of a large number of congregations, perhaps overseeing all congregations within a province.
It’s in the middle decades of the 2nd century that the breakdown among these offices becomes more definite and applies more uniformly across regions — and even across sects. We also see the growth of terms such as “metropolitan” (referring to a senior bishop-among-bishops within a district or province) and “patriarch” (an even grander title for a respected or influential metropolitan, in a large city with a legendary history within the faith).
The concept of Christianity as a single, overarching organization or Ekklēsia, with a single, overarching layer of leadership, that was moving in a single direction — or rather, it should be, even if it wasn’t — became further entrenched, within a large number of the many Jesus movements.
This growing desire for Christianity to become a single, coherent whole was a natural effect of its progress, up to the final decades of the 2nd century. What separated Christianity from other religious traditions in the Greco-Roman world is that anyone could belong, if he/she wanted to. Unlike many other religions, it wasn’t a matter of who you were, where you lived, your ethnicity, profession, or anything else.
Recall that within its historiographical vacuum years, Christianity had already become home not just to Jews who followed the teachings of the Jewish preacher Jesus of Nazareth, but Gentiles who also wanted to follow his teachings and pursue his truths. In Jesus’ time it was a Jewish phenomenon, but after him, its doors were opened to pagans. It was also open to women and slaves and many sorts of people. This made it unlike most other religious traditions.
Even so, as noted, differences had already come to light inside of some of these movements. At the same time there was something of a force bringing the Jesus movements toward one another, within them there were elements splitting apart (or, trying to, anyway). The Christian faith was a vast collective of push-me-pull-you congregations, fellowships, and associations. All were trying as best they could to follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as they knew and understood them, and they typically did so however they saw fit.
This seething rumble would continue for the next several centuries. It’s an aspect of Christianity that would continue through its history, to one extent or another.
As heresy-hunters kept pumping out propaganda in favor of “one, and only one, indivisible and lockstep-united Christianity,” heresies continued to pop up throughout the Greco-Roman world. The faith was still young and people were still figuring it out. And it had never really been unified in any meaningful way. Rifts, schisms, etc. became more pronounced and in many cases more bitter in spite of efforts to force the faith into one massive straitjacket.
The hierarchy, having worked itself over the past 6 or 7 generations into an institution with a life of its own, was alarmed at schismatics and heretics that wouldn’t toe the line. Heresies such as that of the Montanists in particular were not welcomed by this hierarchy, since it taught that any follower of Jesus could become a “prophet.”
Even so, they had no authority outside of the churches they worked in or the congregations they ministered to. In many cases, too, it wasn’t always easy to know who the “heretics” were within the ranks of believers. We see examples of Montanists, Gnostics and others who remained part of congregations that don’t appear to be aware of everything they believed. The story told of Valentinus that he was almost made Pope (aka Bishop of Rome) isn’t as absurd as it might appear to be, these days, in hindsight.
It was heresy-hunters who first raised alarms among the wider Christian community about the growth of Gnosticism. Among the issues this brought to the fore, was what many “literalist” Christians considered the Gnostics’ elitism. Gnostic Christians sometimes looked down on the “literalists,” treating them dismissively and refusing to initiate them into their own sects/movements.
The “literalists” found this attitude grossly offensive. They were further offended because, by nature, most Gnostics didn’t run afoul of Roman authorities, being willing to participate in the various civic pagan rites that were sometimes required. The Gnostics’ appeared, to “literalists,” at times to have an almost lackadaisical approach to Christianity; that too was offensive to them.
It’s because of this that Gnostic sects tended to bear the brunt of heresy-hunters’ often-harsh propaganda. That’s not to say other heresies didn’t suffer their wrath; they most certainly did. So too did Jews, whose rejection of Jesus as the Messiah also was offensive to “literalists.” Both Gnostics and Jews flew in the face of their overall efforts to construct a large, united, “whole” Christianity which took the place of Judaism as they’d imagined.
Literacy and Christianity marched hand-in-hand, nearly from the beginning of the faith. While there’s no evidence Jesus himself ever wrote anything, nor is there any evidence his own disciples or Apostles did, it’s within the historiographical vacuum years (i.e. the early 30s to the middle 40s CE) that we see Christianity acquiring a dependency on writings. This is a result of its origins in Judaism, which also depended mightily on the written word (to the point were the scribes of Israel and Judea were effectively a level of clergy).
From that time on, virtually everything about the faith was based on something written. Weekly eucharistic services involved readings from texts — and acting out Jesus’ reported instruction to “do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19; see also 1 Cor 11:23-25). Other Christian rites also depended on writing.
This meant that any Christian who was literate, was important to his/her congregation and was necessary for its continuation. There are suggestions that the faith attracted literate followers for this precise reason: They knew they’d be needed and could be influential over others.
Even so, there’s little evidence of many highly-educated Christians, at least in the faith’s first century to century and a half. Mostly it was enough for someone to be able to read and write; they didn’t need to do it well. An extensive education in order to read out various texts during services (for instance) or copy those texts in order to preserve them. Many of the oldest manuscripts and fragments of Christian texts that we have, suggest not all of them were very educated; some of them contain mistakes (not only what one might call “typos” or mere misspellings, but outright errors, such as nonsense phrases).
But in the later part of the 2nd century, this changes. Better-educated people either join the faith or are born into it. The most famous of these early, accomplished scholars was Origen, but he was hardly alone. His predecessor (and, briefly, mentor) Clement of Alexandria had also been well-educated (though not nearly the prodigy that Origen turned out to be).
It’s the arrival of intensively-educated followers that cracks the door to a deeper examination of Christianity, its dogmas, doctrines, and overall philosophy. This would only accelerate over the next hundred years, and lead to the rise of serious problems such as Christological conflicts.
Still, within Origen’s own time, his efforts to reconcile Christianity with Hellenistic philosophical traditions were not an issue (it’s true he was denounced as a heretic but that was quite some time later, outside the era being discussed here). It was a time when there was increasing thought about what it meant to be a Christian and how best to follow, and honor and worship, Jesus of Nazareth.
As the 3rd century opened, Christianity had become something that neither Jesus nor his Apostles would likely have recognized. At no time had he, or they, ever conceived of themselves or their followers as having a “priesthood.” If anything, Jesus had condemned the Jewish priesthood of his own time, and nothing he said about the priesthood suggests he envisioned his own followers establishing one of their own.
But now, Christianity had a priesthood, a layered one with an increasingly strong hierarchy and the expectation that lower orders of clergy — and below them, the ranks of laymen — should be utterly obedient to those of higher rank.
By this time, the widow and orphan funds that had initially been collected and managed at the congregation level, had moved up the hierarchical chain to the bishops and patriarchs. In many districts, such as bustling, cosmopolitan Alexandria, these funds were substantial. That granted many bishops and patriarchs economic power, even in a world that didn’t officially tolerate their faith or approve of their offices. A few of them were willing to use these funds to essentially buy influence and also wield no small amount of control over the lower ranks of clergy and laymen below them.
Thus, in a small number of districts, the Christian hierarchy had managed to build a power infrastructure that in some ways extended outside Christianity itself.
Jesus had taught the coming of an apocalypse to be followed by the imposition of “the Kingdom of God” within the lifetimes of those he’d spoken to — but that hadn’t materialized, and while memory of those teachings was retained by Christians, that notion was no longer central to the faith.
Jesus had spoken, in person, to many people during the years of his ministry. But now, Christianity wasn’t about speeches as much as it was about the written word. Again, there’s no evidence Jesus or his Apostles were even literate. And while he quoted the Jewish scripture of his own time, there’s little in what he said that should have led to such dependence on writing.
And Jesus had spoken mostly to the Jews of Galilee (with an unknown number of Gentile “Godfearers” perhaps lurking among them). But now Christianity had become a religion for all nations. It may well have been those Galileans who’d set the ball of this faith rolling, since they were the ones mostly likely to have known about him and his teachings.
It’s the merger of Christian theology with Hellenistic philosophy, begun by the likes of Origen as well as others (including many of his students/followers), that forced Christian thinkers to consider their faith in ways their forebears hadn’t.
A major concern, as the decades of the 3rd century rolled by, was the nature of Jesus of Nazareth himself. Christianity now was focused on him as the holy sacrifice for the salvation of all, but it was clear this notion had rational ramifications that Christians began teasing out.
For instance, for Jesus’ sacrifice to have any meaning, it’d be necessary for him to have actually perished. But, if he’s also God, how was that possible? It’s inconceivable that God — especially the all-powerful god of the Jews — could have died.
But the implication clearly is, that Jesus of Nazareth had to have died. How was anyone to make sense of this? Some were troubled by this conundrum, but in a way they sort of barreled through it, not taking it very seriously. After all, God was God and could do what he wants; why think too hard about it?
Still, people did think about it, and some of them thought hard about it. By 260 CE, people like Paul of Samosata openly taught monarchian and adoptionist views. By 270, the Christian hierarchy in his region had enough of him and he was deposed as a bishop.
Paul was not the only one to offer such teachings. Actually, the germ of such notions had lurked within Christianity for a while, but simply hadn’t had much attention, mostly because it simply hadn’t been a concern. It was only once Christianity had become a “thinker’s religion” that it was discussed, more and more, and became a point of conflict.
Thus, by 280 CE we see that Christianity is not only an institution in its own right, the Ekklēsia that so many of its members had so desperately wanted, but it’s one that seriously policed itself — to the point of deposing and exiling people like Paul of Samosata over their religious ideas.
What this faith became has a lot to do with its Galilean origins. As noted already, during its undocumented years from the early 30s CE to the mid 40s, the faith became home to both Jews and Gentiles. They’d taken the idea of the “Godfearers” one step further, and found a way to integrate Gentiles into the movement based on the memory of a Jewish preacher’s teachings. Although all parts of the Levant were home to at least some Gentile pagans during the early 1st century CE, there were more of them in Galilee than in most other areas, including the Roman provinces of Judaea or Idumea to its southeast.
What’s more, Galilee in the early 1st century was still a relatively “young” region, having only a minimal population prior to 100 BCE. The final century BCE had featured a few minor waves of arrivals, of multiple sorts, making the region more of a “melting pot” than one would find elsewhere.
All told, it’s no wonder that a religious movement that intentionally was structured to be open to multiple sorts of people might have its origins in Galilee. It also made sense that it welcomed the lower classes, which also makes sense for Galilee given there was little in the way of any aristocracy there aside from the small number of Romans who arrived after 63 BCE, and the retainers of Herod Antipas who decamped there with him to rule the district for Rome. This separated the Jesus movements from other traditions such as the “mystery religions” which often attracted the upper classes and intelligentsia.
This degree of egalitarianism wasn’t found in a lot of religious traditions (other than civic religion or ethnic religions such as Judaism). Christianity certainly wasn’t unique in this respect, but it was an aspect of the faith that received a lot of overt attention.
At the same time as Christianity developed a strong sense that it’s “a religion for all,” it also developed a parallel sense that it’s “the religion for all.” That is, not only could all humanity join the faith, all humanity was required to join it, since it was the One True Religion and all others were false.
This spelled trouble for most followers of Jesus movements, early on. They considered it blasphemous to participate in any other religious rites. Most would not participate, for example, in the sacrifices and other rites of the Roman civic religion. They would not acknowledge deified emperors. Generally, just as most Jews did, they followed the first of YHWH’s laws handed down to Moses that they worship no other deities.
In the Roman system, it was acceptable for Jews not to have to do this. They had their own religion — effectively, a kind of “shadow” civic religion of their own — which in most cases they were allowed to follow. As noted, Christians were often treated as Jews and frequently were given the same allowance. On occasion, though, they ran afoul of the Roman legal system (as documented, for example, by Pliny the Younger while he was governor of Bithynia and Pontus).
In response, many Christian sects viewed themselves as standing in lonely opposition to the world around them — a holy community of innocents under siege, if you will — merely because they followed the One True Religion of the One True God. Still, other sects had less trouble in this regard, particularly the Gnostic sects, which did not object to the other religions or their deities, as well as Jewish Christians who were viewed as Jews and treated accordingly.
This was a self-feeding phenomenon; the more Christians felt like outsiders within their own world, the more acutely aware they were of what made them different. In many ways this became a pathology that didn’t serve them well, and in some individuals, led to self-destructive behaviors such as St Anthony and the father of Origen daring the authorities to prosecute them (a gamble that the former survived, but the latter didn’t).
That Christians had died because of their unfailing faith in the One True Religion of the One True God further added to this sentiment. We see for example in Ignatius of Antioch someone who relished dying for Jesus, as proof of his own sanctity and righteousness. All too many Christians viewed being killed for Jesus as the ultimate expression of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. That others had died for Jesus only furthered their conviction in the veracity of Jesus and his teachings.
Christian apologists often appealed to outsiders based on this. “Why, of course our religion must be the One True Religion of the One True God, because there’ve been people who believed in it so fervently that they willingly died for it! Why would anyone want to die for a lie?” As they saw it, martyrdoms were unassailable proof that Christianity couldn’t possibly be a lie.
Outsiders, of course, didn’t see it that way. They viewed this as an insane and suicidal philosophy. And truth be told, for some Christians, it was suicidal. Most understood the appeal to martyrs’ willingness to die for the faith was illogical. However, the idea that something must be true if people are willing to die for it, is emotionally powerful, and it held many Christians in its grip. Even Christians who couldn’t necessarily agree on the details of their religion — was Jesus actually God, or was he a human who’d been appointed Messiah? — could find something to agree on, in their feeling of persecution and their overwhelming sense of devout righteousness.
In 249 CE the Emperor Decius assumed power. Not long after that, he issued orders that everyone in the Empire make a sacrifice to the traditional Roman civic gods to provide for the well-being of both himself (as Emperor) and the Empire. As far as is known, only Jews were explicitly exempt from these orders.
This was only part of Decius’s effort to rehabilitate the traditional religious institutions of Rome, which he believed had degraded under his predecessors. This alarmed Christians and only further fed their sense that the world itself was thoroughly hostile to them. Some Christians did as ordered by the Emperor (in many cases it was enough for them simply to burn some incense in front of a statue or image of the Emperor). Some were executed, however, for refusing to go along.
Among the devout, who refused to obey, there was a sense that their faith was doomed. Still, the religion was spared catastrophe when Decius died in 251. His immediate successors (from 2 to 6 of them, depending on how they’re counted) showed no interest in continuing the order.
In 257, after he came to power, though, Emperor Valerian issued a similar order. However, it didn’t apply to everyone. Among Christians, it only applied to leadership (i.e. clergy). Memories of the Decian persecution were triggered, but this had a lower impact on the Jesus movements. This lesser persecution ended when Valerian was defeated and captured by the Persians.
His son and successor, Gallienus, not only didn’t pursue his father’s order, he explicitly decreed tolerance for Christianity. Disaster had been averted, Christians believed, and finally they might be respected for their faith instead of vilified because they wouldn’t go along with traditional pagan rites. This became an era of hope for them, in ways they hadn’t seen before.
We come now to the latter part of the 3rd century. A lot of Christians considered their religion the One True Faith of the One True God and the One And Only Religion that any human being should be permitted to follow. They’d assembled themselves into a large, somewhat amorphous, yet organized institution that managed to survive some occasional persecutions. They did this in spite of not quite agreeing on everything … to the point where some of their leaders (such as the aforementioned Paul of Samosata) were thrown out because of those disagreements.
Late 3rd century Christians had their eyes on a prize: A single overarching faith intended for all humanity, to which all humans ultimately belonged (even if the vast majority of them didn’t know it). It was this goal that had led to the creation of that institution as well as efforts to root out “heresy,” correcting it where possible and ejecting it when it wasn’t. They did not accept the longstanding principle of the Greco-Roman world that religion was one way for some sorts of people, and other ways for others, depending on who they were.
That was not what their God wanted. That wasn’t why he came to earth to teach. That wasn’t what humanity should settle for. And in Gallienus’s order of tolerance, they thought maybe, finally, they were “home safe.”
Christianity had reached a state of confidence, where it could withstand a major threat that could have wiped it out. And it faced just such a crisis in 303 CE when Emperor Diocletian and his co-rulers targeted the faith in a way that hadn’t previously been applied. Gallienius’s order of toleration, it turns out, had been short-lived. He’d been assassinated in 268 and his immediate successors didn’t enforce toleration for Christianity. The Roman state’s old animosity toward Christianity returned … with a vengeance.
But Christians themselves, their own individual movements, and the faith as a whole, withstood it in ways many did not expect. That Christianity did so, was largely a by-product of what it had made itself into, in the decades prior to Diocletian’s persecution.
After Diocletian’s persecution was over in 305 CE, when he left office, Christianity would subsequently make itself into something else entirely: A kind of shadow-state existing inside the Roman state. Only then, it needn’t remain in the shadows, as had been necessary before. It could step out into the light, make its presence known, and impress itself upon the Roman Empire.
Many writers have penned a lot of material over the past several centuries trying to explain why a fringe faith that started in the margins of an older minority faith (i.e. Judaism) and originated in a backwater district (i.e. Galilee), became one of the most enduring and powerful organizations in human history. Most of them have been Christians themselves, and — conveniently for them and their faith — decided the reason for Christianity’s success is very simple: It’ true! Christianity, they claim, is the One True Religion of the One True God. Why of course it would emerge triumphant! How could it not?
The truth of the matter is far more nuanced and complex than that. Christianity’s ascent resulted from a number of forces that acted on it during its earliest centuries and put it in a position were it could become ascendant almost without being aware of it.
It ascended because it had been constructed from the ground up to be an egalitarian faith to which all humanity ought to belong. Of course, not all Christians saw it this way; but because of the faith’s need to include everyone and be exclusive, those variations were relentlessly winnowed out over time.
It ascended in spite of the fact that it had an extremely informal start, that being the career and teachings of an itinerant apocalyptic Jewish preacher. He’d literally wandered from place to place, announcing the imminent arrival of “the Kingdom of God” in which the world would be set right, spiritually, physically, and in every other way. Malicious powers would be toppled, the meager and righteous would be put on pedestals, and the fundamentally-flawed physical world would be remade into a divine realm of perpetual bliss, for those who understood this truth.
It ascended in spite of the failure of Jesus’ apocalyptic predictions, which never materialized. The failure of that apocalypse to arrive, only forced the faith — a collection of movements all based ostensibly on that preacher’s teachings — in other, new directions. Its informality had to be disposed of because, without some effort to get those teachings to be aligned, it would all collapse into utter chaos.
It ascended in spite of its early membership being both powerless and poorly-educated. Over time, followers of the faith understood they couldn’t remain in the dark, intellectually, nor could they could remain on the sidelines of society and the state.
It ascended as a vast collective, “the Church,” in spite of the differences (some of them severe) among its far-flung members. It targeted anyone and everyone who wouldn’t “play ball” as it were with the overall effort to create a single sacred entity, One Holy Church to which all of humanity belonged. As noted, Gnostic Christians and Jews were the greatest offenders in this regard. That they refused to go along with this dream of a One Holy Church is the reason they were purposely frozen out. Gnosticism itself would vanish after several more centuries; while Jews would remain, they would suffer mightily at times for their supposed “insolence.”
Christianity ascended because it had all of those flaws — and more — but worked through them all, over a long period of time, and became much more than it had been at its origins.
But Christianity’s ascendance had a price: That being, it sacrificed pretty much everything it had started out to be. It ceased, for example, to be egalitarian: By the middle of the 3rd century it had a strong hierarchy with layers of membership, some of whom possessed a great deal of authority over the rest. It ceased to be a faith of the humble and simple-minded; its leading lights delved increasingly into philosophy and theology, and in the process found new things to argue about with one another.
It was a religion that started among the lowliest of people, but came to be followed by aristocrats, even princes and emperors. It was a faith that initially and ostensibly welcomed the involvement of women (for instance, Paul’s epistles name female leaders in his sect) but within just a couple generations had frozen them out of the leadership entirely (women couldn’t be ordained, except in some “heresies” such as Montanism).
It was a religion that had started appealing to the undesirables of society. According to the gospels, Jesus had associated with prostitutes, tax collectors, and others who were largely shunned. But it became a religion that determined there were some within their ranks who were too “undesirable” to remain within it (e.g. Paul of Samosata).
It was a faith that started out among those who wanted peace, and whose founder taught things such as “blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” and “whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Mt 5:9, 39b). But it became a faith whose followers strove mightily against one other — initially only in a spiritual or intellectual manner, but later using outright force.
Christianity became ascendant because it turned into something it had never started out to be. And that happened because its followers simply could not live up to the standards of the faith, as it had originally been propounded by Jesus of Nazareth. How many times has a Christian actually “turned his/her cheek” to an attacker? Or walked two miles when forced to walk one? Or handed over his/her shirt in addition to his/her cloak?
That’s something that just doesn’t happen in the real world. It didn’t happen in the classical world, either. And it doesn’t (and didn’t) happen, for a very simple reason: It’s impossible to do, especially in the Roman Empire — but also at almost at any other time.
Bible quotations are from New American Standard Bible, copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.
↵ Go back up to Early Christian History menu.