The early Christian communities are poorly recorded. They met in private houses or halls joined to these houses (see the classic Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians, New Haven and London, 1983). However, as the historian Ramsay MacMul-len has shown in his study The Second Church (Atlanta, 2009), there was also considerable activity around the tombs of martyrs. Funerary rites, including commemorative feasts, had always taken place there and the pagan rituals could be adapted to the veneration of Christian saints and martyrs. So, MacMullen argues, a more popular church emerges, flourishing outside the walls of cities and perhaps drawing in the rural masses who were neglected by the more established urban Christian communities. These forgotten congregations, who may, MacMullen suggests, have made up as much as 95 per cent of the Christian population, will probably be given greater prominence as the excavations of early Christian burial sites continue.
Whether the focus of worship was the tomb or the house church, Christianity spread. Later Christian writers argued that God had created the Roman empire, with its wide-flung trading routes, specifically so that Christianity might spread more easily. The openness of the empire certainly helps explain the geographical range of the early communities. A surviving correspondence between the emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger, the governor of Bithynia and Pontus (in what is now north-western Turkey), on how to deal with Christians makes it clear that Christian communities had already travelled that far by the early second century. There were many Christian communities in Asia Minor, Syria, and along the north African coast in Egypt and Libya. A number of distinct congregations had also been founded in Rome by Greek-speaking immigrant Christians from different parts of the empire—Greek remained the language of the liturgy in Rome until as late as 380. (The idea that there had been a single Christian church in Rome under one bishop, a ‘pope, from the earliest times was a development of the late second century—see Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, Minneapolis, 2003.) There is no evidence of a Latin-speaking Christian church until about 180 in Carthage where Tertullian, a robust and outspoken figure, provided the first Christian texts in Latin, and so earns the accolade as the earliest Latin theologian. In short, the early church was essentially Greek.
The geographical spread of the early church communities meant that uniformity of worship could not be expected. There was some acknowledgement that Rome, as the result of a tradition, recorded certainly from 150 ad, and possibly earlier, that the apostle Peter had been martyred there, and buried outside the walls on the Vatican hill, should be given some supremacy, but this could never be enforced. It is clear that the essential elements of Christian belief were still fluid and that different communities highlighted different sacred texts, favouring perhaps just one of the Gospels, for instance. Yet the idea of a single empire-wide church does appear in the work of Irenaeus, the Greek bishop of Lyon. His Adversus Haereses, ‘Against the Heretics, of about 180, is now seen as one of the founding documents of Christian orthodoxy.
Irenaeus sets out the narrative of Christian history from the time of Adam, with the arrival of Christ marking a New Covenant. The teachings of Christ are enshrined in the four, and, Irenaeus stresses, only four, Gospels. (As there were many early texts circulating this was an important moment in the formation of an authoritative New Testament, a canon.) The message of Christ must be preserved through the generations until the Last Judgement and Irenaeus argued that this was done through the apostles, the bishops they had consecrated, and so from bishop to bishop through time. This was the principle of ‘apostolic succession’, the bishops preserving the core of Christian doctrine. However, there would always be heretics who attempted to throw Irenaeus’ church off its predestined path and they must be resisted. (The Greek word haeresis originally meant ‘choice’ but in this Christian context came to mean ‘wrong choice’.) The church, in short, has ‘one soul and one and the same heart, she proclaims and teaches and hands on those things with one voice, as if possessed of a single mouth. (Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition, i (of five): The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100-600, Chicago and London, 1973, provides a stimulating survey.)
Irenaeus’ conception of a church represented an ideal that was not to be realized for 200 years. Meanwhile the Christian communities were marginal groups. They rejected the pagan gods and ceremonies of the state (which invariably involved sacrifices to the gods) and so played no part in the public life of the community. They
Carried out their worship out of sight, ‘gabbling in dark corners’ as one critic put it, and insisted on a strict programme of instruction, normally lasting three years, before catechumens could be baptized and participate fully in the Eucharist that remained at the core of worship. Inevitably stories proliferated of Christians eating human flesh or indulging in free sex, but the limited evidence suggests high moral standards, especially in sexual behaviour, a rejection of the Roman custom of exposing unwanted babies, and an organized system of care for members of the community especially widows. In Rome 1,500 poor were being fed by the church by the middle of the third century while fifty years later the community at Antioch was providing food for 3,000 destitute people. An ascetic streak in early Christianity appears to have attracted virgins and widows in particular.
Christians took care over their burials, favouring the Jewish custom of preserving the body rather than burning it. Around Rome the soft tufa rock allowed galleries to be cut into it with recesses for bodies carved out of their sides. One early Christian burial site by the Appian Way bore the name ‘by the hollow’ and the Greek for this gives the word ‘catacomb’ The word was used to describe the hundreds of galleries constructed around Rome as the Christian community in the city grew in the second and third centuries. The catacombs are moving places to visit and they are also treasuries of very early Christian art. There are scenes from both the Old and New Testament. Jonah being saved from the whale and Daniel from the lions’ den are common Old Testament themes that emphasize the power of God to save those in peril. Jonah is always shown emerging from the whale after three days without any blemish, just as Christ rises as the perfect body after three days in the tomb. Particularly interesting are the representations of Jesus. Here pagan art provides the models for Jesus as Good Shepherd or the Sun of Righteousness, in one instance being carried up to heaven in the chariot of the sun. In some cases he is portrayed as if he were the pagan hero Orpheus who had the ability to calm beasts through the playing of a lyre. The suggestion is that Jesus will also bring peace to those around him. (See Robin Jensen, Understanding Christian Art, London and New York, 2000, for a probing introduction.)
An opponent of Christianity, Celsus, whose attack, written about 180, was influenced as much by his sense of social superiority as by distrust of Christianity per se, recorded woolworkers, cobblers, and laundry-workers among the congregations, going on to argue that Christianity was only suitable for the most ignorant, slaves, women, and little children. Recent scholarship suggests that individuals of wealthier backgrounds were, in fact, members of the church from its earliest days, some providing their houses as meeting places. With time there is more evidence of converts of higher social status. In the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century narrative that describes the infancy of the Virgin Mary, her father Joachim is described as ‘exceedingly rich’, a fascinating example of how Mary becomes socially ‘upgraded’ early in the Christian tradition. (The Protoevangelium became very popular in the Middle Ages and is often represented in fresco cycles.)
It is important, however, not to overestimate the success of early Christianity. Perhaps 2 per cent of the empire were Christians by ad 250 with virtually no
Christian presence in the west of the empire or along its northern frontiers. The boundaries between what was Christian and what was pagan were not clearly drawn nor was conversion necessarily permanent. The Greek theologian Origen (see further below) told of bishops in Egypt who exploited their status in their own interests, and Tertullian seems to have withdrawn from the institutional church of Carthage altogether. Inevitably many Christian communities failed and their members lapsed. A major issue in the third and early fourth centuries was how to deal with those who abandoned the churches when persecution threatened.
World History
