1. Judaic Christianity.
The disciples of Jesus, if they
appeared ready to confess their
despondency and even
weakness at the time of the Crucifixion, made a recov-
ery so rapid that it puzzles the
historians. It altered
the course of history; for though, as a result of it, they
did
not exactly announce a new religion to their fellow
countrymen, they
proclaimed an “event” which
brought the older faith
to its culmination, shattering
its traditional framework and calling for a
host of new
interpretations. It would seem that, during the lifetime
of Jesus, they may have followed Him without properly
understanding the
drift of His teaching; and it would
appear to have been the vividness of
their belief in
the Resurrection that transformed the situation for
them, enabling them to feel that now everything could
be fitted into place.
It had in fact convinced them that
Jesus was the fulfilment of the famous
prophecies on
which the Jews had been relying for a long time; and
that, if the truth had been so difficult to recognize,
it had been because
those prophecies—and particularly
the notions of the Messiah and
the divine Kingdom—
had been construed in too mundane a manner.
Once
this basic insight had been reached, a remarkable work
of
intellectual synthesis was quickly achieved, and
there followed an amazing
missionary endeavor, which
required considerable bravery at first and
cannot be
plausibly accounted for by reference to mundane
vested
interests. It is clear to the historian, and it was
amply admitted at the
time, that the dynamic behind
all this was the conviction that the beloved
Leader
has risen from the dead. There was a strong expectation
that He
would quickly return.
It has always been a matter of the greatest difficulty
for
Christianity—and perhaps for any similar form of
faith—to secure by peaceful means and sheer mission-
ary endeavor the wholesale conversion of a people
already dominated by an exclusive form of supernatural
religion. The Holy
Land was in this position, and
though Judaism was in a fluid and
interesting state,
the disciples produced only what appeared to be an
addition to the multitude of sects and parties there—
some of
these latter being impressive on the spiritual
and ethical side, and some
of them so similar in one
way or another that the tracing of influences
among
them is a delicate affair. The Church for a few decades
was
predominantly Judeo-Christian, its members still
attending the Temple and
conforming to the Law, but
meeting also in private houses or the Upper Room
for
instruction, prayer, and the breaking of bread. Until
the war
which led to the destruction of the city in
A.D. 70, it was the group in
Jerusalem (with James,
the brother of Jesus, at its head) which was the
leader.
It seems to have been quickly recognized that con-
verts from paganism were admissible; and pagans were
encountered
in great numbers when the gospel was
carried to the virtually Greek cities,
such as Caesarea,
on the Palestine coast. Communities were soon estab-
lished also in Damascus and the
Hellenistic city of
Antioch, beyond the frontier; and Antioch, where the
term
“Christian” came into use, became the center for
a
wider missionary campaign in the Greco-Roman
world. But also, at this early
stage in the story, Chris-
tian missions
(following previous ones on the part of
the Jews) spread eastwards to
Transjordan and into
Arabia, and they were pushed forwards to the
upper
Euphrates and the Tigris. Here, churches using the
Aramaic
tongue became important during the earliest
centuries. Some difficulty
arose over the question
whether the pagans should be made to conform to
the
Jewish law and this may have created additional diffi-
culty for Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, as
Jewish
nationalism became more intense, more exacting. But
the
extension into the Greco-Roman world, together
with the destruction of
Jerusalem, brought the Chris-
tian faith a
higher degree of autonomy, a further scope
for development; and it opened
to Christianity the
possibility of becoming a world-religion. The
early
need for exposition in the Greek language, the marriage
with
Greek ideas, and the contact with a highly devel-
oped culture were to prove important in this connec-
tion. “Historical
Christianity”—the religion as we have
actually known
it in its concrete development through
the centuries—comes in
some respects as a Greco-
Jewish synthesis,
owing part of its power to the combi-
nation
of two such highly different systems. It would
be interesting to know how
the religion would have
developed if, in its early generative period, it
had
combined with a different culture.
The historian is hampered because the Christians in
their very earliest
period produced so little in writing,
or at least preserved so little.
Their leaders knew what
was needed at the time, however, and the whole
future
question of authority in the Church would seem to have
been
decisively affected by the fact that (for the imme-
diate purpose) so much was realized to depend on the
evidence of
eyewitnesses, and the primacy was natu-
rally
given to these. Perhaps it is for similar reasons
that one glimpses the
importance of certain relatives
of Jesus in the earliest days at Jerusalem;
and, of course,
Saint Paul was accepted as an Apostle because his
particular vision of the risen Christ was regarded as
giving him first hand
knowledge. Once the eyewitnesses
had passed off the scene, it was natural
that a certain
primacy should be conceded to those who had been
closest to them—those to whom they had communi-
cated most; and the objective was the preservation
of
what had originally been delivered at first hand—what
in
the course of time could only appear in a less cogent
form as
“tradition.”
The attempt to secure uniformity in the Church
would seem to go back to the
jealousy with which the
Judeo-Christian leaders in Jerusalem regarded the
“Hellenizers”—some of these latter
being Jews who
had been affected by Hellenization or pagans who
(before becoming Christian) had been converts to
Judaism. When the
“Hellenizers” carried the gospel
to pagans in the
Greek coastal cities of Palestine or
in Syria, it would appear that the
Church at Jerusalem
would send a “Hebrew” to check on
the result of their
work. But, in spite of the care that was taken,
there
were aberrations even amongst the Christians in
Palestine; and
in Samaria, which had already been
heterodox in its Judaism, an irregular
form of Christi-
anity slid away and became
the origin of Gnosticism—
this after A.D. 70, when the failure
of Jahweh to grant
victory in an apocalyptic war helped to produce a
movement partly directed against the Old Testament
deity. Henceforward, the
rise of Christianity was par-
alleled by the
multiplication of Gnostic sects which,
in spite of their fantastic
character, proved imposing.
Now, more than ever, it was necessary to
safeguard
the original doctrines of the Church.
