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CHRISTIANITY, OVERVIEW OF EARLY Overview of Early Christianity. A survey of the
practices and teachings associated with Christianity in the first and second centuries AD,
exploring how the movement founded by Jesus started as a sect of Judaism based on faith in him
as Israel’s messiah and unique Son of God and transitioned into a distinct religion.
Introduction
The diverse expressions of early Christianity were united by a common faith in Jesus and a
common core of apostolic teachings. Church leaders’ ongoing travel and correspondence
between communities prevented most churches from forming in isolation. While different early
Christian communities treated the Hebrew Bible in varying ways, they all accepted it as the
Word of God and interpreted it in light of the new revelation in Jesus Christ. From the first
century onward, shared practices such as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, Sunday worship
gatherings, and unique ethical characteristics functioned as unifying factors (Ferguson, Church
History, 43–44).
Features of Early Christianity
Definition and Initiation
Acceptance of Jesus as Messiah and Lord differentiated Christians from Jews and pagan
Romans. Followers of the Jesus movement were first called “Christians” in Antioch (Acts 11:26)
around AD 44. Entrance into the Christian church entailed commitment to Jesus as Lord and
Savior and baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christian baptism was
distinguished from Jewish ceremonial washings by its confession of Jesus as divine and the fact
that Christianity promised the gift of the Holy Spirit, which many Jews considered the sign of the
dawning of the eschatological era. Moreover, Christian baptism was seen as participation in the
death and resurrection of Jesus and as a sign of spiritual rebirth (Patzia, Emergence, 235–41).
Common Meals
Early Christians continued the practice of sharing common meals that they had begun during
Jesus’ ministry. Now, however, the breaking of bread and the drinking of the cup—accompanied
by a blessing or thanksgiving (εὐχαριστία, eucharistia) to God—functioned as a remembrance of
Jesus’ last supper, passion, and resurrection. Christians’ special meetings comprised prayer,
singing, reading from the Hebrew Bible, messages of exhortation and instruction, and
observance of the Lord’s Supper. While these meetings could take place as often as daily, they
seem to have occurred at a minimum on Sunday—the first day of the week (the Jewish term) or
the “Lord’s Day” (the Christian term)—in commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 20:7; 1
Cor 16:2).
Other Features
Much of Christian practice reflects Christianity’s Jewish roots. For example, Christians
integrated prayer to Jesus and Jesus’ teachings about prayer into traditional Jewish patterns. They
also interpreted Jewish moral teachings regarding family, occupation, and social structure under
Jesus’ rubric of loving God maximally and loving one’s neighbors as oneself. Furthermore, they
interpreted the Jewish law as finding its fulfillment in Jesus’ ministry. The Jerusalem Council
(AD 49) officially freed Gentiles from the ceremonial and ritual commands of the Mosaic Torah
as requirements for salvation (Gundry, Survey, 318) and required them instead to “abstain from
food sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual
immorality” (Acts 15:29). Christian communities stood out from the pagan world by their

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extreme generosity in caring for the poor—a Christian hallmark for the first four centuries of
church history (Cairns, Christianity, 84).
Early Christian Leadership
Peter, Paul, and James—the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church—were likely
martyred within five years of each other in the AD 60s. Josephus records that the Jewish
Sanhedrin stoned James to death in AD 62. Peter and Paul were likely executed in Rome under
Emperor Nero’s persecution of Christians in AD 64. The removal of these three dominant
personalities, along with Rome’s defeat of the Jews and destruction of Jerusalem in the Jewish-
Roman War (AD 66–70), brought about developments in the leadership of the church (Ferguson,
Church History, 46).
The original leadership structure, which included a group of elders or presbyters (responsible
for preaching, teaching, and other leadership functions) and a group of deacons (responsible for
the care of the poor), continued to be used. Over time, bishops were added to this structure to
supply the leadership formerly offered by the apostles. By the middle of the second century,
bishops of major Christian centers such as Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, and Ephesus were
recognized as superior to other bishops. The bishop of Rome would, over time, emerge with
greater influence than other bishops. Cairns lists several factors that bestowed this extra prestige
upon the bishop of Rome (Cairns, Christianity, 112–13):
• Peter, a central leader among Jesus’ apostles, was instrumental in founding the church at
Rome.
• The longest and possibly the most significant of Paul’s epistles was addressed to the Roman
church.
• Rome’s prestige as the capital of the Roman Empire led to a natural exaltation of the church
there.
• Rome had a reputation for unflinching orthodoxy in the face of heresy and schism.
Christianity in Its Ancient Context
Split from Judaism
The late first and early second centuries witnessed increased alienation of Christians from the
synagogues, and Gentile churches separated themselves from Judaism. Jerusalem ceased to
function as the geographical nucleus of the Christian movement for several reasons, including:
• the death of James the Just (AD 62)
• the destruction of the temple (AD 70)
• the Roman banishment of Jews from Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 135)
During the Jewish War (AD 66–70), Christians fled from Jerusalem to Pella across the Jordan
River. This desertion—which Jews considered a betrayal of their Jewish heritage—prompted
many synagogues to eliminate any Christian presence from their membership. Jewish Christians
thus found themselves excluded from synagogues yet still mistrusted by Gentile churches.
Ferguson remarks that this double rejection undercut the possibility for a Jewish-Christian
viewpoint that preserved lines of communication between Jews who did not embrace Jesus and
Gentiles who did (Ferguson, Church History, 47).
According to some early church fathers, three groups of Jews that survived the Jewish War
combined aspects of Jewish practice with Christian belief:

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 • the Ebionites
• the Elchasaites
• the Nazarenes
The Ebionites and the Elchasaites were both generally classified as heretical sects according to
the later evaluations of several early church fathers (on the Ebionites see Irenaeus, Haer. 1.26.2;
Haer. 1.26.2; Epiphaneus, Pan. 30.13.2–6; 30.14.3, 5; 30.16.4–5; 30.22.4; on the Elchasaites see
Hippolytus, Ref., 9.13–17; 10.29, Epiphanius, Haer, 19, 30; Origen ap Euseb HE, 6.38).
The Ebionites considered James the Just a hero and strongly opposed Paul, arguing that
Gentile Christians must submit to the ceremonial and ritual demands of the Torah to be saved.
Their emphasis on monotheism drove them to regard Jesus as merely human and to reject his
virginal conception; they regarded him as the new Moses and the Messiah by virtue of his
righteous life. Ebionites viewed Jesus’ mission as overturning the temple sacrificial system and
instituting a new way of forgiveness of sins by immersion in running water. The Ebionites
prohibited the eating of meat, likely emphasized poverty (the appellation “Ebionite” comes from
the Hebrew ‫אביון‬, 'bywn, “poor”), and practiced ritual immersions in addition to initiatory
baptism. They continued the Jewish practices of circumcision, Sabbath observance, and dietary
laws. Recognizing the Gospel of Matthew as Scripture, they also composed at least one
noncanonical gospel and perhaps acts (Walker, History, 40).
The Elchasaites featured their own holy book, allegedly revealed by Jesus to their prophet
Elchasai. This book discusses a second baptism in the name of the Most High God and his Son,
efficacious for forgiving adultery and healing wounds from the bites of mad dogs and other
diseases. They carried out theosophical speculations and practiced an inflexible asceticism
(Seeberg, Doctrines, 1:89).
The Nazarenes are sometimes identified with the Ebionites, but they appear to have held
more closely to orthodox Christian teachings, particularly in regard to the divinity of Jesus. Later
patristic sources suggest that the Nazarenes affirmed Jesus’ virgin birth and divinity and
accepted Paul’s writings as authoritative. Their only divergence from Gentile Christianity
appears to have been their continued practice of the Jewish law. Epiphanius, for example, does
not raise any specific erroneous beliefs held by the Nazarenes—although their inclusion in his
work targeting heresies implies that he did not regard them as acceptably orthodox (Epiphanius,
Panarion, Heresy 29; Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity, 37–46).
Relationship with Roman Religion
Early Christianity encountered rivalry from competing Roman systems of religion and
philosophy. The Romans were syncretistic in their religious outlook and tolerated any faith that
would not threaten the stability of the state or preclude its adherents from taking part in the state
system of worship. The state religion integrated emperor worship with the old worship patterns
of the Roman Republic and demanded the allegiance of everyone in the Roman Empire; Jews,
however, were legally exempt from state religious rites. The state system of worship was a
public and social affair of family and community, whose rites local political leaders
administered. Romans offered worship to the emperor as the living manifestation of the divine;
they also believed human well-being in agriculture, business, and war depended on the goodwill
of the Roman gods. Since Christians would not take part in the state system of worship, the
Roman Empire persecuted them (Walker, History, 50–52). Christianity also faced persecution
because of its exclusive claims to loyalty in Christ. Roman authorities viewed such loyalty as

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treasonous and saw Christians as attempting to institute a state within a state (Cairns,
Christianity, 87).
Several Christian practices appeared to substantiate the Roman leaders’ suspicions.
Christians consistently refused to offer incense on the altars devoted to the spirit of the emperor.
They also held the majority of their meetings at night and in secret. Misinterpretation of the
Lord’s Supper led to the rumors that Christians killed and ate infants in sacrifice to their God,
while the kiss of peace resulted in rumors of incest and other kinds of immoral behavior
(González, Story, 60). By contrast, Roman intellectuals embraced philosophical systems,
including Stoicism, Epicureanism, and neo-Pythagoreanism, that taught philosophical
contemplation as the way of salvation. Stoicism aimed to provide a philosophical foundation for
the Roman Empire, as its pantheistic view of god, its idea of natural ethical laws discoverable by
reason, and its assertion of the fatherhood of god and the fraternity of human beings gave support
to imperial claims (Gundry, Survey, 61–62).
The Roman masses were attracted to the mystery religions of Mithra, Cybele, Eleusis,
Dionysus, and Isis, all of which furnished an avenue to fellowship with the gods and claimed to
offer immortality. These religions often centered on myths of a goddess whose lover or child was
taken away from her and later restored. Gundry observes that these religions contained secret
initiatory rites and additional rites involving the sprinkling of blood, ceremonial washing,
sacramental meals, drunkenness, emotional frenzy, and elaborate pageantry through which
devotees allegedly gained union with the divine (Gundry, Survey, 58–59).
Some elements of mystery religions seem to reflect Christian beliefs and practices, but such a
viewpoint would misunderstand the basis of Christianity, which is Christ Himself. As mystery
religions were known for their assimilation, it is more likely that they were influenced by
Christian practice rather than the other way around. Mettinger notes that elements that appear
similar are actually not. He argues, for example, that myths of dying and rising gods do not
correspond to the Christian belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection, as the dying and rising gods
symbolized the vegetation cycle, in which crops die in the dry season and come back to life in
the rainy season. In addition, none of these gods was resurrected bodily from the dead but only
spiritually revived or came back to life in the underworld (Mettinger, Riddle, 4–7). The notion of
death by crucifixion and bodily resurrection were abhorrent to ancient pagans, who linked
crucifixion with insurrection against the Roman state. Ancient pagans also often viewed the body
as the prison of the soul that was to be destroyed at death, such that the soul could be
permanently liberated from the body to enjoy a purely ethereal existence.
Early Heresies Related to Christianity
Proto-Gnosticism and Gnosticism
The heresy of Gnosticism proved the greatest philosophical threat to early Christianity,
presenting itself as an alternate way of viewing God and the gospel. Christian tradition traces the
origin of Gnosticism to Simon Magus, whom Peter denounced (Acts 8:18–23). It has been
argued that the book of Colossians and John’s writings appear to be written against a nascent
form of proto-Gnosticism (Rudolph, Gnosis, 25–31). Maintaining a radical dualism in which all
things physical were evil and all things spiritual were good, Gnosticism emphasized secret
knowledge (γνω̃σις, gnō̃sis) as the key to salvation and held secret rites and ceremonies that
often appealed to the intelligentsia.
Gnostic writings that have come down to us from the mid-second century and onward
presented Jesus as a teacher of knowledge (gnosis) and special emissary from the supreme God.

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In these texts, Jesus either seemed to have only a physical body (Docetism) or was an earthly
man that the Christ, a higher spirit, associated with from his baptism to his crucifixion. There are
about 52 of these gospels—titled in order to associate them with well-known figures (a
phenomenon known as pseudepigrapha)—including (Brown, Introduction, 835–40):
• The Gospel of Thomas
• The Gospel of Judas
• The Gospel of Philip
• The Gospel of Mary
• The Secret Gospel of Mark
Gnosticism held that there is a supreme God who is utterly transcendent, having no relation to
physical things. This supreme God differentiated into aeons, or progressively lower divine
beings, which in turn differentiated until the emergence of an ultra-low, wicked god known as
the demiurge, who created the physical world. The gnostics identified this demiurge as the
Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, who they believed spawned humans by enslaving bits of pure soul
into evil material bodies. Only by apprehending knowledge (gnosis) could humans escape the
perpetual reincarnation of their souls into further bodies, leave the physical cosmos, and enter
heaven.
In response to gnostic teachings, the early church drew up a brief creed in order to test
orthodoxy; this creed also had the effect of unifying Christians in a core set of beliefs. The
Apostles’ Creed likely was the basis for this early creed or the creed itself.
Marcionism
While not technically a gnostic, Marcion (ca. 85–160) taught that the God of the Mosaic
covenant was an inferior deity, distinct from and opposed to the true God of Jesus and Paul.
Upon his expulsion from the mainstream church, Marcion founded his own church in AD 144 and
formulated his own canon of Scripture, which contained 10 letters of Paul and a truncated form
of the Gospel of Luke. By creating this canon, Marcion spurred Christianity to take up the
question of the canon and to assert continuity with its Jewish heritage (Pagels, Gnostic Gospels,
30–31). The church affirmed that its basis of authority was more than one apostle and one
gospel: There were epistles that were equally authoritative to those of Paul and gospels that were
equally authoritative to that of Luke. Further, it affirmed the authority of the Hebrew Bible and
equated the God of Israel with the God of Jesus Christ.
Responses to Heretical Movements
Church fathers such as Hegesippus (ca. AD 110–180), Irenaeus (ca. AD 135–203), Tertullian (ca.
AD 160–225), and Hippolytus (AD 170–235) issued polemics to refute Gnosticism. In his Against
Heresies (ca. AD 180), Irenaeus taught apostolic succession as a major line of attack against the
authenticity of the secret traditions that gnostics claimed to have received from the apostles.
Irenaeus insisted that the bishops of Christian churches could be traced back to men ultimately
appointed by the apostles, thus demonstrating that the bishops possessed the authentic traditions.
Irenaeus’ doctrine enhanced the office of the bishop as a center of unity for the faithful against
heresy (Pelikan, Emergence, 118–19).
Ultimately, the early church countered the issues of heresy and potential schism by
developing an authoritative canon for faith and practice, articulating an authoritative creed, and
insisting on Christians working within the bounds of the historical church. Jaroslav Pelikan states
that these factors served to unify the community of the faithful, such that by AD 170 Christians

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 were denominating themselves as the “catholic,” or universal, church (Pelikan, Emergence, 159–
60).
Bibliography
Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference
Library. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Cairns, Earle E. Christianity through the Centuries: A History of the Christian Church. 3rd rev.
ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1996.
Ferguson, Everett. From Christ to Pre-Reformation. Vol. 1 of Church History. Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Zondervan, 2005.
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Christianity. Rev. ed. San Francisco, Calif.: HarperOne, 2010.
Gundry, Robert H. A Survey of the New Testament. 5th ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan,
2012.
Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient
Near East. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001.
Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage, 1979.
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Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Vol. 1 of The Christian
Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1971.
Pritz, Ray. Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period Until Its
Disappearance in the Fourth Century. Leiden: Brill, 1988.
Rudolph, Kurt. Gnosis: The Nature & Structure of Gnosticism. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
Seeberg, Reinhold. Text-Book of the History of Doctrines. 2 vols. Rep. ed. Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf
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KIRK R. MACGREGOR

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