WHAT DID THE FIRST CHRISTIANS EVER DO FOR US?
1. Tongues of Fire
Today is Whitsunday – Pentecost – the day when, traditionally, Christians celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to the company of disciples, gathered in Jerusalem following the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Christ. The story is vividly told by Luke in his second book and sequel to his gospel, the Acts of the Apostles. The tongues of fire come to rest on the disciples’ heads. They speak to the crowds – Jews “from every nation” – who heard them “each…in his own native language”, and Peter preaches the gospel (Acts 2: 1ff.).
Quoting the prophecy of Joel he declares, “I will pour out upon everyone a portion of my spirit; and your sons and daughters shall prophesy”. He speaks of the coming “day of the Lord” when “everyone who invokes the name of the Lord will be saved”. “Men of Israel”, Peter continues, “I speak of Jesus of Nazareth, a man singled out by God” and who had been crucified “by heathen men”, but who God “raised to life again, setting him free from death.” Asking what they should do, the crowds are told, “repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus the Messiah for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”. And so, according to Luke’s account, it begins.
Converts are made, the first Christian community is formed on a communist basis, and the “whole body of believers was united in heart and soul”. They “met constantly to hear the apostles preach, and to share the common life, to break bread and to pray”. They also “kept up their daily attendance at the temple”, so indicating that at this early stage the community, who were not yet called ‘Christians’, still saw themselves and their mission as Jewish.
The way Luke tells it – writing many years after the event – the expansion of Christianity was rapid, although in fact, the description of those early years is sketchy. Some incidents, like the martyrdom of Stephen, Philip’s preaching in Samaria and his baptism of the Ethiopian “high official” are described but it isn’t really until the conversion of Saul on the Damascus road that the story is told in a more continuous fashion. How the new Way (as it was known) took hold in Judaea or spread to cities on the Mediterranean’s eastern coasts is not mentioned, although we know that by the time Paul was on his missionary journeys in the 40s and 50s of the first century, churches already existed in some of the places he visited, including Rome. There were churches in other places besides, such as the great Egyptian city of Alexandria. Who founded these we don’t know, but clearly Paul was far from being the first Christian missionary.
As Christianity spread from its Judaean homeland into the wider Hellenic world of the eastern Roman Empire, its Jewish identity was steadily eroded, often with considerable argument and unpleasantness along the way. Part of Paul’s mission was to bridge divisions within the growing Church and to bring a sense of unity, and we see a foretaste of this process in Luke’s account of the Jerusalem church soon after its foundation - although how soon after we don’t know.
Luke tells us of a dispute within the church between Hellenists and Hebrews. The Hellenists were, although Jewish, Greek-speaking and attuned to Greek culture, the Hebrews were more conservative and more closely tied to traditional ways. The dispute was about the “daily distribution” - presumably of food – but it indicates the existence of tensions that were to trouble the nascent Church for some time to come. In this instance, Luke tells us that the problem was resolved by the agreement to appoint “seven men of good reputation” – often referred to as ‘deacons’ – to oversee such matters. Among them were Stephen and Philip and all but one were, presumably, Jewish by birth. But the other one, whose name was Nicolas of Antioch, is described by Luke as “a former convert to Judaism”.
This is significant because it was among Gentile – that is non-Jewish – admirers of Judaism that Christianity was to make its principal advance outside of Judaea. Jewish monotheism and its clear moral teachings attracted many who found the decaying paganism of Greece and Rome inadequate. Some, like Nicolas, went the whole way and converted to Judaism, but this wasn’t easy. Not all Jews welcomed converts, and because conversion involved circumcision Gentiles often stopped short of it. Nevertheless, they attended synagogues across the Empire and were called “God-fearers”. When Christian teachers came along with a faith that retained what they saw as Judaism’s plus-points but didn’t require circumcision or the wholesale adoption of Jewish culture, many of these God-fearers were baptized into the new faith and formed congregations – ecclesia – or churches.
The idea of a faith community that embraced both Jew and Gentile was central to the preaching of Paul and his associates, giving us the legacy of a religion that is universal in its scope and tied to no particular race, nation, culture or ethnic group. Paul called this community the “Body of Christ”, meaning the physical dwelling-place of the Spirit that had filled Jesus. Within it, whatever differences may exist in the surrounding world, all are made one by the power of the Spirit. As he wrote, “There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3: 28).
The ancient world was unequal and socially divided and the Early Church couldn’t challenge this head-on but it could create an alternative world – the Kingdom of God – within itself. For slaves, women and anyone in subordinate or outcast social positions, this made Christianity very attractive, but remarkably it also attracted people from the more powerful and privileged echelons of the Empire. This both aided Christianity’s rise but also, in time, eroded its radicalism until, in the end, it was hijacked by the power structures to which it had once presented an alternative. It is, perhaps, that original radicalism to which we look when asking what the first Christians ever did for us.
2. Resurrection and Community
Besides its social radicalism, the success of the Early Church rested on its central affirmation of the Resurrection and on the nature of life within the Christian community. For people whose lives were often “nasty, brutish and short” the idea of being raised to new life in and with Christ was an attractive one, although what precisely Resurrection meant to the first Christians isn’t always clear.
In the passage where Paul writes most fully about Resurrection he clearly doesn’t see it in terms of our earthly bodies coming back to life, whether in this world or any other. He writes, “What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness it is raised in power; sown as an animal body it is raised as a spiritual body” (I Corinthians 15: 42-44). And just to ram home the point he writes “flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God” (I Corinthians 15: 50).
Paul saw the Church itself as the Risen Body of Christ, filled with his Spirit, and by the same token the Resurrection awaiting the Christian was seen as spiritual rather than physical. Does this sound a bit puzzling? Yes, it does – and Paul clearly thought so too – hence his comment, “I will unfold a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye” (I Corinthians 15: 51).
What we are to make of this is very much a matter of individual understanding, but whatever precisely Paul meant, his idea of Resurrection as a spiritual experience or reality makes more sense than the alternative. And so does his idea that the physical Resurrection of Christ has more to do with the Church as a communal Body imbued with the Spirit than it does with the body of Jesus coming back to life.
And it is in the life of the church community that we owe our greatest debt to the first Christians – those of the first century when such things as organisation, hierarchy, orthodoxy and the canon of scripture were still fluid. It is clear from the New Testament itself that there were differences and debates within the so-called ‘Apostolic’ Church of Paul, Peter and their associates. It is also clear that there were more serious differences with other versions of Christianity, such as that of the Ebionites – Jewish Christians who held closely to the faith’s Jewish roots – or the nascent Gnostic Christian sects, who were to both seriously rival and to influence what later came to be seen as the Christian mainstream. What mattered to Gnostics was finding a way of liberating the soul from the material prison of the body and returning it to its true home in God. And this secret way, they believed, had been imparted by Jesus to his disciples.
But how did the Apostolic Church of Paul and his associates see its community life? There are many passages in the New Testament that consider this but one of the best known is in Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 12 vv. 9 to 18. Beginning with its emphasis on love – a favourite theme of Paul’s – it proceeds to spell out what this means. And this makes as much sense now as it did when Paul wrote it, which is why it belongs in a consideration of what the first Christians did for us.
3. Equality in Christ
Among my favourite sections of Paul’s letters are the greetings he gives at the end. From these we get a sense of the very real friendship, comradeship and mutual respect that existed among the community of Christian teachers, fellow workers, missionaries and leaders to which he belonged. And notable among them are the women. Paul is often wrongly charged with misogyny, usually on the basis of a few verses to be found in I Corinthians 14 – verses which he probably didn’t write anyway. In the letters attributed to Paul no less than ten women are mentioned affectionately by name and are quite clearly regarded as equal in all respects to the men he also lists. Other New Testament letter-writers also make positive mentions of women without naming them, such as “The Lady chosen by God” (II John v. 13) and the intriguing “her who dwells in Babylon” (I Peter 5: 13). In societies where women were oppressed and disregarded, the honoured and equal place they occupied in the Body of Christ was a radically positive aspect of the Early Church, if sadly not of the later one.
Similarly with slavery. The Early Church was in no position to bring down an institution so integral to the social, economic and political structures of the ancient world, but it made it very clear that in the Body of Christ so-called slave and so-called master were equals. When Paul wrote a letter to the slave-owner Philemon to accompany the return of his friend, fellow worker - and a former slave - named Onesimus, he used words that, many centuries later would provide the slogan of the Abolitionist movement in Britain: “have him back for good, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave – as a dear brother, very dear indeed to me and how much dearer to you, both as man and as Christian” (Philemon vv. 15-16). Such profound humanity is an important part of what we owe to those first Christians as they took their new faith, their new Way, across the ancient world. And this is something which we can and, I believe, should still celebrate.