Book Review:
	The Earliest Christians by Kenneth Westby

The Earliest Christians? Just what were the earliest Christians like? What did they believe? What were their practices? Don't we all want to know answers to those questions?

Some may feel they already have answers to those questions. For them it is as simple as reading and believing the Bible. Just look in the New Testament and the answers are all there. But is it so plain? Today, those Christians who are orthodox, and they are the overwhelming majority, are comfortable believing their doctrines and practices are based in Scripture. Further, they can cite as proof to their claim almost 2000 years of affirming church history.

The orthodox (ortho = straight, correct, right; dox=belief, doctrine, opinion, view) have a point. Sunday keeping and belief in the Trinity, for instance, have a long history going back almost to the days of the Primitive Church. I say almost since even the orthodox will admit that Christian doctrine was not officially set, declared orthodox, until the seminal church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. Until then there were competing "Christianities," competing doctrines, and competing theologies.

The first through the fourth centuries were a time of great debate and contest within the Christian community. It was also a time of great persecution. Following the days of the apostles the church was attacked from within and from without. On the one hand a host of heresies were entering the church as it fought against a slide into apostasy. This contest brought divisions in doctrine and fellowship. From without, the pagan Roman empire was bent on containing the spread of the new faith, and at other times destroying it.

Not everything was settled at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, or Chalcedon in 451 AD, but for the official Christian church finally recognized by the Roman Empire, the key doctrines and practices were largely fixed: the triune Godhead, immortal soul, Sunday worship, an ever-burning hell, heaven the reward of the saved, non-Jewish religious holidays, etc. Virtually all the basic theological doctrines of the orthodox Catholic Church survived the Protestant Reformation and today are considered orthodox for both Catholic and Protestant Christianity.

But what about that period before things became "orthodox"—the straight or correct doctrine? The first two hundred years of Christianity are often called the "lost centuries" or the dark period of church history. One historian observed that the church that emerged after that dark period looked quite different from the one pictured in the NT that entered it.

The history of this period is scant for at least two reasons.
1) It was a time of great persecution upon the church; the details of its history were given little attention by the Roman historians of the time; the church was often "underground" and few of its records have survived.
2) The victors of the doctrinal debates of the early centuries became the custodians of "church history"; victors always write the history of the wars they win and those histories often slant the story, justify their side, ignore facts, and take liberties to mischaracterize their opponents.

The orthodox victors had little interest in preserving the teachings of yet earlier Christians/Christianities which were in disagreement with their doctrine. It would not be helpful to their claims of orthodoxy to admit that they had departed from earlier Christian traditions. In fact, there was an active effort to destroy competing Christian theologies, discredit their leaders, and often, to mischaracterize their teachings. But like a difficult murder mystery where the killer has tried his clever best to cover his tracks, good detective work can often find enough facts and clues to paint the true picture of what happened.

Modern scholars have attempted to do just such a reconstruction of those "lost centuries" between the Primitive Church of the apostles and the emergence of orthodox Christianity of the fourth century. One such scholar is Bart D. Ehrman, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is widely known and respected in scholarly circles as an authority on the Early Church. He has written many books on the subject and is frequently featured on A&E and the History Channel. I have read several of his books and had the pleasure of meeting him two years ago where he lectured at the Society of Biblical Literature's annual meetings held that year in Denver.

Ehrman's most recent book is Lost Christianities— The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003, $30). His focus is that mystery period of church history during which the cherished faith of the earliest Christians came to be abandoned, destroyed, and forgotten. What can be know of those times? One of Ehrman's purposes is to bring back in view for us moderns what was lost amid the sands of time.

The late Dr. Charles Dorothy, ACD's Director of Biblical Research and my associate for many years, was a specialist in the inter-testament period and the first century of the current era. Like Ehrman, he documented many "Judaism's" and many "Christianities" populating the religious world of the first century—not too unlike our religious scene today.

Dorothy broadly characterized the early church as branching into two wings toward the end of the first century, and it continued to diverge in the centuries following. He labeled them the Jewish wing and the Gentile wing. By the fourth century the Gentile wing had thoroughly eclipsed the remnants of Jewish Christianity and became recognized as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Dr. Dorothy also noted that there were many iterations of Christianity within those two wings already manifesting by 100 AD.

Epiphanius, the orthodox bishop on the island of Cyprus, writing in the fourth century, attacks eighty different non-orthodox Christian groups calling them heretical. He names and describes several of them.

Using the writings of Epiphanius and other early accounts, Ehrman documents many strains of early Christianities, but in this book he chooses two to illustrate the likely two ends of the spectrum: the Ebionites and the Marcionites. The Ebionites represented the extreme of the Jewish wing of the Christian movement, the Marcionites the extreme at the Gentile wing. Contrasting the two, Ehrman writes.

The Marcionites [followers of the second-century theologian and evangelist Marcion], on the other hand, had a highly attractive religion to many pagan converts, as it was avowedly Christian with nothing Jewish about it. In fact, everything Jewish was taken out of it. ...Not only were Jewish customs rejected, so, too, were the Jewish Scriptures and the Jewish God. From a historical perspective, it is intriguing that any such religion could claim direct historical continuity with Jesus.1

At the other extreme of those earliest "Christianities" is a group called the Ebionites. This was a group that existed in the 100s AD (2nd Century)— and perhaps for centuries following. What was written about them was largely penned by their opponents. The description of their doctrine is gleaned from attacks written against various Ebionite "heresies." The proto-orthodox heresiologist Tertullian attacked them, as did Origen and other "church fathers."

The "proto-orthodox" were, of course, church leaders in the early centuries whose theology would eventually prevail and become considered "orthodoxy" in later centuries. They were not known for their tolerance as their opponents could testify. The Ebionites were one of many early sects of Christianity that came under attack. What "heresies" did the Ebionite's hold? Ehrman describes them:

Proto-orthodox authors clearly agree that the Ebionites were and understood themselves to be Jewish followers of Jesus. They were not the only group of Jewish-Christians known to have existed at the time, but they were the group that generated some of the greatest opposition. The Ebionite Christians that we are best informed about believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures.

They also believed that to belong to the people of God, one needed to be Jewish. As a result, they insisted on observing the Sabbath, keeping kosher, and circumcising all males. That sounds very much like the position taken by the opponents of Paul in Galatia. It may be that the Ebionite Christians were their descendants, physical or spiritual. An early source, Irenaeus, also reports that the Ebionites continued to reverence Jerusalem, evidently by praying in its direction during their daily acts of worship. ...The Ebionites, however, maintained that their views were authorized by the original disciples, especially Peter and Jesus' own brother, James, head of the Jerusalem church after the resurrection.One other aspect of the Ebionites' Christianity that set it apart from that of most other Christian groups was their understanding of who Jesus was. The Ebionites did not subscribe to the notion of Jesus' preexistence or his virgin birth.

The Ebionites were Jews who insisted there was only one God. Marcionites were Gentiles who insisted that Jewish practices were fundamentally detrimental for a right standing with God. These two groups were clearly the far end representatives of what Dr. Dorothy characterized as the two wings of Christianity.

Within the two wings and between these two extremes there were many intermediate groups with more moderate positions. Ehrman speculates on what Christianity might have looked like had the Jewish wing prevailed.

If the Ebionites had established themselves as dominant, then things would be radically different for Christians today. Christianity would be not a religion what was separate from Judaism but a sect of Judaism, a sect that accepted Jewish laws, customs, and ways, a sect that practiced circumcision, observed Jewish holy days such as Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana and other festivals, a sect that kept kosher food laws and probably maintained a vegetarian diet. ...In any event, Ebionite Christianity was "left behind" at a fairly early moment in the history of the church.3

Another interesting observation Ehrman makes concerns why Christianity was able to take root in the pagan world of the Roman Empire. Before Christianity could succeed it first had to be palatable.

Unlike today, in the ancient Roman world there was wide-ranging suspicion of any philosophy or religion that smacked of novelty. In the fields of philosophy and religion, as opposed to the field of military technology, it was the old that was appreciated and respected, not the new. ...Nothing new could be true. If it were true, why was it not known long ago?

The Strategy that Christians devised to avoid this obstacle to conversion was to say that even though Jesus did live just decades or a century or so ago, the religion based on him is much, much older, for this religion is the fulfillment of all that God had been predicting in the oldest surviving books of civilization. ...Moses lived four centuries before Homer, eight centuries before Plato....Christianity is not a new thing.and as an ancient religion, it demands attention. ...Had Christians not been able to make a plausible case for the antiquity of their religion, it never would have succeeded in the empire.4

What finally emerged as orthodox Christianity was a blend of various forms of early Christianity. It borrowed from (or shared with) elements of both Ebionite and Marcionite Christianity.

Some of these "common grounds" or "borrowings," whichever they were, obviously stood in tension with one another and several unique aspects of proto-orthodoxy were the result. For example, while affirming the authority of the Jewish Scriptures (with the Ebionites but against the Marcionites), the proto-orthodox rejected historical Judaism (with the Marcionites against the Ebionites); while affirming the divinity of Jesus (with the Marcionites against the Ebionites), they also affirmed his humanity (with the Ebionites against the Marcionites).

...From a historical point of view, it appears that the Ebionites did indeed teach an understanding of the faith that would have been close to that of Jesus' original disciples—Aramaic-speaking Jews who remained faithful to the Jewish Law and who kept Jewish customs even after coming to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. But the Ebionites came to be declared heretical by the proto-orthodox.5

Ehrman's conclusion should resonate among many of us who can identify with particular teachings among these early Christianities—especially those within the Jewish wing of the early church.

An anti-Jewish bias would eventually become enshrined in the orthodoxy that became the Roman Catholic Church. Since the fourth century that particular Christianity dominated the history until the Protestant Reformation. But below the radar of mainstream church history, countless varieties of non-orthodox (heretical?) Christianity survived and at times thrived.
Just as in the first few centuries of early Christianity, today's world has "many Christianities." We should note, however, that the true body of Christ, the Church of God, is a spiritual body of believers who have received God's Holy Spirit. Their names are known to their God and membership in that True Church is totally independent from membership in any visible denomination or church. For that, I praise God!

If you love to study church history—or just like a good detective mystery—you will enjoy Ehrman's Lost Christianities.

End Notes:

Ehrman, Bart D, Lost Christianities, Oxford, 2003, p. 103.
Ibid, p 100-101 Ibid, p 110 Ibid, p 112 Ibid, p 253

Kenneth Westby is a director emeritus of the BSA and founder and director of the Association for Christian Development (ACD) and the Virtual Church. The ACD Web site can be found at www.godward.org.

TSS

March - April 2005 The Sabbath Sentinel