Jesus’ closest disciples remained in Jerusalem and struggled to keep their community intact. An early leader was the former fisherman Peter, who, according to Matthew’s account, had been picked out by Jesus as the first leader of his movement. By AD 40, however, the dominant figure in the community appears to have been Jesus’ brother James. The preoccupation of the small community at this time was to wait together until the coming of God, predicted by Jesus, took place. Its converts were mainly among Greek-speaking Jews, and soon small congregations appeared outside Jerusalem in the Jewish communities of large cities such as Damascus and Antioch. The synagogues in these large cosmopolitan cities traditionally attracted gentiles (non-Jews) to their services and it must have been through these ‘godfear-ers’, as they were known, that the story of Jesus first leaked out into the gentile world.
At first it had little impact. The Jerusalem leaders, Peter and James, wedded to their Jewish background, insisted that Jesus was only for those who were circumcised and who obeyed Jewish dietary laws. Uncircumcised gentiles could not be admitted to the sect. It took one of the most remarkable figures of early Christianity to break this taboo. Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia and a Roman citizen who had come to Jerusalem to train as a rabbi. (The most likely reason for Paul’s Roman citizenship in this period and this region was that he was descended from a freed slave (as argued by Jerome Murphy O’Connor in his biographies of Paul).) At first he had shared the Pharisees’ distrust of Jesus and joined in persecution of Christians but then, on the road north from Jerusalem to Damascus, he had a vision of Jesus and became a believer.
It was some time, at least three years, before Paul made contact with the Christian community in Jerusalem. He was probably much younger than its leaders (he may have been born as late as AD 10) and, unlike them, had never known Jesus. In his letters to the early Christian communities he makes almost no reference to Jesus as a historical person. (While there is no full consensus among scholars, the genuine letters of Paul are assumed to be those to the Romans, the two letters to the Corinthians,
Galatians, the First Letter to the Thessalonians, Philippians, and the short letter to Philemon. The other New Testament letters attributed to Paul are probably written later in the century.) However, Paul had few doubts as to who Jesus was and what his message meant. He was the Christ who had come to redeem those, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female alike, who showed faith in him. Those who put their trust in Jesus would be saved. Paul’s emphasis is thus on faith rather than rigid adherence to Jewish law. Many of Paul’s letters (those to the Corinthians in particular) are concerned with the problems that arise when believers are freed from the rigid constraints of a moral code and have to define a new code of behaviour that is compatible with their faith in Jesus.
Paul insisted that uncircumcised gentiles could become Christians and he argued his case against the restrictive attitudes of the Jerusalem community with vigour. He only got his way when he agreed that his gentile churches would collect money for the church in Jerusalem. There followed broad agreement that the Jerusalem leaders would continue to preach to Jews while Paul would be leader of the mission to the gentiles. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two missions was a tense one. Paul later told the Galatian Christians of a public row he had had with Peter in Antioch. Peter had been prepared at first to eat with gentiles but when joined by fellow Jewish Christians from Jerusalem withdrew from doing so. His behaviour infuriated Paul who felt that Peter had no right to make gentiles follow Jewish ways.
The activities of Paul and the early Christian community are described in the Acts of the Apostles, composed probably after ad 85 by Luke as a sequel to his Gospel. An educated Greek, Luke was writing within the historical traditions established by Thucydides and he may have been present at some of the events he records. He probably had no written sources and it is believed that the speeches he places in the mouths of his main characters are, like those of Thucydides, shaped to the personality of the speaker and the occasion on which he was speaking. This leads to some scholars viewing the historical accuracy of Acts with caution (‘vivid but unreliable’ in the words of the scholar Philip Rousseau). Luke has a wider message. He attempts to place the Christian story within the context of world history and, more than any other Gospel writer, he shows a detailed knowledge of the Roman world. His account of Paul’s shipwreck on the way to Rome, for instance, is a valuable piece of historical evidence in its own right. It was to be 250 years before another such detailed work of church history (that by Eusebius) was to be composed.
Paul is the central character in Acts and it was his energy and beliefs that transformed the young Christian communities. He travelled on his missionary journeys through Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, Greece, and even as far west as Rome at the end of his life (where, by tradition, he was martyred) inspiring the first Christians and struggling tirelessly to achieve some coherence and unity in their beliefs. Even so one must not overestimate the impact of Paul. The Christian communities in Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome were all founded without reference to him, while there is no evidence of the survival of the Christian communities in the cities of Galatia, the recipients of one of Paul’s most impassioned letters. Yet the fact that several letters in the New Testament that are dated later in the first century, well after Paul’s death (Ephesians, Colossians, and Thessalonians and the ‘pastoral letters’), were attributed to him shows his lasting influence. His championship by Augustine in the Roman Catholic tradition and Martin Luther in the Protestant has ensured his dominant role in the Christian tradition to this day.
Theologically Paul laid a new emphasis on the crucial role of ‘faith’, specifically condemning the pagan philosophers for their ‘empty logic’ and thus arguably setting in place a conflict between Christianity and the Greek tradition of rational thinking. His abhorrence of sexuality (especially homosexuality) was much more pronounced than that of Jesus (who laid a greater emphasis on the sanctity of the marriage bond rather than any distaste for sexuality as such). While Jesus appears to have been relaxed about his exercise of authority, Paul was much less secure, partly because often he had no direct contact with the scattered recipients of his letters and constantly feared that in his absence they were losing their way. His stress on the importance of Christian authority was to become influential in the fourth century when the church needed to consolidate its own position.
Equally influential for the Christian tradition was Paul’s depiction of the human personality as at war with itself. ‘I have been sold as a slave to sin. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and find myself doing the very things I hate. . . I know of nothing good living in me,’ as he told the Romans. As seen earlier (p. 285), this sense of internal struggle was also intrinsic to Plato’s concept of the soul and by the fourth century Plato and Paul’s depictions of inner conflict had coalesced to provide a specifically Christian pathology of sin, ‘original sin’, as Augustine, drawing on Paul’s letters, was to define it (see below, pp. 624-5).
By the second century the gentile communities represented mainstream Christianity. The Christian communities in Jerusalem appear to have been eclipsed after the destruction of the Temple in ad 70. The separation of Christianity from Judaism was a tortuous process and the boundaries between the two faiths were always fluid. Christians believed, like Jews, that there was only one God, who deserved exclusive worship, and that those who believed were a people set apart. It is hard to imagine the later success of Christianity without this cohesion and sense of exclusiveness. The elders of a Jewish synagogue may have provided a model for the priesthood, and the Jewish condemnation of idols was transferred into the Christian tradition, again by Paul. There was also a shared ethical tradition. Jews valued chastity and the stability of family life. They visited the sick, and supported the poor. Sometimes, as with the Qumran community, they held property in common. This was echoed by early Christian behaviour. ‘We Christians hold everything in common except our wives,’ said the second-century Tertullian.
While some Christians, such as Marcion who arrived in Rome from the Black Sea area in c.140, argued that the Hebrew scriptures should be rejected as incompatible with faith in Jesus, they were retained and valued for what were seen as references—in Isaiah, for instance—to the coming of Jesus. The Old Testament, as it became known, remained an integral part of the body of Christian scripture, even if the God of the Old Testament, with his exclusive relationship with one people and a heavy emphasis on the destruction of his enemies, sits ill at ease with the more gentle and approachable God preached by Jesus.
The adoption of the Hebrew scriptures and their story of the relationship between God and humanity that stretched back to the creation gave Christianity a narrated past it would otherwise have lacked. There is a fascinating document, probably from the 150s, the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, in which one Justin, who had emigrated to Rome from a Roman colony in Samaria and who had come to Christianity after making a path through Greek philosophy, debates with Trypho over these issues. Trypho refuses to acknowledge that the coming of Christ can be predicted in the scriptures and accuses the Christians of manipulating the original texts. Justin responds that the Jews had indeed once enjoyed God’s favour but these gifts had now been transferred to the Christians. Justin does not try to dominate or denigrate his opponent but there was a more hostile approach to Judaism, recorded perhaps first in Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians but developed in the so-called Epistle of Barnabas of c.130, which claims that the Jews had separated themselves from God and so deserved to be deprived of their scriptures. In the last third of the second century Melito, the bishop of Sardis, excoriated the Jews for killing God himself through their involvement in the crucifixion of Jesus. So was founded the tradition of Adversus Judaeos, a body of polemic aimed at the Jews that was to remain part of Christian ideology for many centuries.
World History
