As the second major epic in the history of the Church began, the Period of the Great Separation CE 135�381, Church governance had shifted from the somewhat centralized authority of the apostles and their immediate successors to the local overseers, that is, to bishops. This resulted in a fragmenting of Christendom into hundreds of independent groups, arguing over matters of doctrine and governance, while claiming to be the possessors of the "authentic tradition" of the church.

As more and more Greeks and Latins became believers, Christianity became Greco-Roman slowly diffusing into thousands of cells or house-churches. The reality of the matter was that both branches of Christendom, the Judeo-Christian of Jewish ethnicity and ideology and the Greco-Roman of pagan stock and philosophy, comprised many factions and sects. The almost complete lack in the second and third centuries of any centralized organization was due, in part, to the thinking of the apostles and their immediate successors that the Holy Spirit would continue to lead the community. This led to a leadership vacuum spawning a Christendom riddled with heresy.

From her analysis of the Nag Hammadi documents Elaine Pagels concluded that:

...diverse forms of Christianity flourished in the early years of the Christian movement. Hundreds of rival teaches all claimed to teach the �true doctrine of Christ� and denounced one another as frauds. Christians in churches scattered from Asia Minor to Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome split into factions, arguing over church leadership. All claimed to represent �the authentic tradition� (Pagels 1979:7.)

Various local groups had their own leaders and allegiances. In most localities the groups were house-churches meeting in the homes of elders (local church elders) or leading members. In some regions there were larger, more centrally-located congregations, of various Christian sects, guided by regular overseers or pastors. There were often several factions, with separate leadership, in a single city. Justo Gonz�lez attributes the rise of the orthodox bishops in part as a reaction to this state of chaotic diversity. He writes:

...the emphasis on the authority of bishops and on apostolic succession was a part of the response of the church to the challenge of heresies in the late second and early third centuries. As the church became increasingly Gentile, the danger of heresies was greater, and this in turn led to a greater stress on episcopal authority" (Gonz�lez 1984:97.)

As Gentiles, particularly in the West, began to significantly outnumber Judeo-Christians, the culture of Christendom changed. While Judeo-Christians continued to celebrate the Christian Passover on Nisan 14, the weekly Sabbath, and the annual Sabbaths, Greco-Roman Christians embraced Easter Sunday in lieu of the Nisan 14th Christian Passover, Sunday Lord�s-day as a day of worship with an abandonment of the Sabbath as a day of rest, and disuse of the annual Sabbaths and festivals such as the Days of Unleavened Bread and the Feast of Tabernacles.^F1 This shift in praxis likely arose quite early considering the diversity of ancient Christianity.

The New Testament evidences different forms of Christianity at variance with the orthodoxy of the apostles. Attesting to this evolving change in praxis are second century works such as:

• the The Didache (see Didache 14.1; Didache 1970:178),

• the Epistle of Barnabus (see The Epistle of Barnabus 15; Roberts and Donaldson 1987:146�147),

• Ignatius of Antioch�s Letter to the Magnesians (see The Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians 9; Richardson 1970:96 but note that the text at 9 is doubtful^F2; Roberts and Donaldson 1987:62� 63), and 

• Justin Martyr�s First Apology (see First Apology 67; Justin Martyr 1970:287�288; Roberts and Donaldson 1987:185�186) and his Dialogue with Trypho (Dialogue 10.1; Roberts and Donaldson 1987:165�166). 

Nevertheless, Bardesanes of Edessa (ca. CE 164�222), in his early third century Dialogue on Destiny, declared that his disciples observed Sunday and did not keep the Sabbath nor circumcise as did "the Christians of Judea" (Bardesanes of Edessa, Dialogue on Destiny 46; Bagatti 1971a:10; Graffin 1894:605).

Judeo-Christianity, retaining its Jewish doctrinal character, continued to provide cultural continuity for Jews in the Diaspora, but Greco-Roman Christianity, distancing itself from Judeo-Christianity, saw the more significant growth. The Greco-Roman movement had ready access to large Gentile populations in the East and West from which to recruit. The successful maintenance of their growth rate until the time of Constantine involved religious syncretism, that is the blending of pagan beliefs and practices with those of Christianity. The more ceremonial, and the less legalistic, Greco-Roman Christianity became the more appealing and inviting it was to pagans in both the East and West. Nevertheless, there were even more compelling reasons for both Diasporan Jews and pagan Gentiles to become Christians. In his provocative account of the rise of Christianity, from a sociological perspective, Rodney Stark (Stark 1996:213-214) suggested that the rise of Christianity was due ultimately to:

1. its offering its converts a coherent culture entirely stripped of ethnicity;

2. its providing Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora opportunity to be free from an ethnic identity with which they had become uncomfortable;

3. its prompting liberating social relations between the sexes and within the family;

4. its great modulation of class differences;

5. its bringing a new conception of humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death; and

6. its giving its converts nothing less than their humanity.

As a result Jews and Gentiles continued to convert to Christianity well into the fourth century. There came to be, of course, Judeo-Christians in the Diaspora all over the Roman empire and to its east as well (Bagatti 1971a:26-29). However, Judeo-Christians increasingly isolated or separated themselves, sometimes referred to as the habdalah (separation), from the emerging Greco-Roman orthodox whom they increasingly saw as apostate and heretical. Bellarmino Bagatti, rationalizing that these distinctions did not reach the true essentials of Christianity, in a somewhat reconciliatory tone, described the irreconcilable differences differentiating the two groups.

There were also Greek assemblies in the Latin West and, in Roman colonies, Latin assemblies in the Hellenistic East. It is naive and erroneous to believe that any group was limited or confined to a defined region. Roman cities, such as Antioch of Syria, were not integrated but rather divided into quarters or distinctive ethnic precincts (Stark 1996:15). This ethnic diversity fostered the development of different Christianities along cultural lines in the same city. "In some bigger localities, where Christians were many," as Bagatti put it, "it was possible to have various churches according to particular religious doctrines" (Bagatti 1971a:34).

The independent character of Christian fellowships in the second and third centuries permitted quite different forms of Christianity to coexist in the same cities, provinces, and regions with each fellowship having its own allegiances, character, and leadership. According to Paul Johnson:

From the start, then, there were numerous varieties of Christianity which had little in common, though they centered round belief in the resurrection. They were marked by two things: individual oral traditions, which eventually found written expression as �gospels�; and, linked to this, claims to an apostolic succession. Each church had its own �Jesus story�; and each had been founded by one of the original band and who had handed over the torch to a designated successor and so on. The most important element in all these early Churches was the genealogical tree of truth. (Johnson 1976:44-45.)

The gentilization of the Church of God in the Diaspora, the independence, or autonomy, of the bishops, and the cultural divisions existing in Christendom led to the many theological controversies that followed. The gradual assimilation of various opposing Christian groups into orthodox Christianity blurs its historical development and allows claims of apostolic succession through the appropriation of the history of groups it absorbed. Moreover, surviving literary works such as, but not limited to, those of Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus, primarily reflect Gentile Greco-Roman orthodoxy not the Church of God of the circumcision. In his The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture Bart D. Ehrman summarized this reality.

These forebears came to be quoted as authoritative sources for deciding theological issues, and were presented as true heirs of the apostolic tradition, as reliable tradents who passed along the doctrines of the faith from apostolic to Nicene times. Chief among these were such figures as Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and even Clement of Alexandria and Origin�the writers whose works were preserved by the victorious party and who continue to influence students concerning "the" nature of Christianity after the New Testament period. (Ehrman 1993:12.)

The surviving literature of the time, hardily a representative sample, tends to distort the realities of early Christianity. It represents, almost exclusively, a Gentile movement viewing itself as orthodox and all other forms of Christianity as heterodox.

__________

^F1When Christians of later generations �read� these later phenomena into the New Testament they create, and usually perpetuate, a distortion of the record and its chronological framework. Unfortunately the distortion is disastrous to a factual understanding of the period.

^F2Orthodox scribes sometimes modified texts, including the Scriptures, to make them �more patently �orthodox� and less susceptible to �abuse� by the opponents of orthodoxy� (Ehrman 1993:4).

Page last edited: 01/26/06 07:12 PM

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