The Rise and Fall of Christendom 1A - Christianity Before Christendom Part 1

Christianity before Christendom

Jesus said “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). It was about 30 A.D. when Jesus said this, and within a generation his disciples had spread the gospel throughout the entire Roman Empire. By the end of the century, all the books of the New Testament had been written. Churches had been formed, church leadership established, vigorous doctrinal disputes were underway and heresies were growing like weeds. Yet Christendom was still a long way off.

     Although all books of the New Testament had been written by 100 A.D., the church before Christendom did not have a full canonical Bible at its fingers. Jewish believers used the Hebrew scriptures, which contain the same books as appear in a modern Protestant Bible. Gentile believers, who, by the turn of the century, greatly exceeded the numbers of their Jewish brothers, used the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, but including the apocryphal books that now appear in a modern Catholic Bible. All believers drew on a collection of gospels and apostolic letters to supplement the Old Testament, but there was not yet a full consensus on which books should be part of what we today call the New Testament – that would wait on Christendom. The lack of an official canon may have played a part in the development of additional heresies that developed prior to Christendom.

Early Christian Heresies

The church before Christendom by definition enjoyed no official sanction or government endorsement. Because no Christian doctrines had been codified as “official,” the environment was fertile for the growth of heresies within the faith.

     Christianity was born in a Jewish environment. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the 12 disciples and the first 10,000 or so Christians were all Jews. As the gospel began to spread to the gentiles, it gave rise to the first major heresy in the Christian faith – that of the Judaizers. This is the one heresy that appeared early enough to be fully described in the New Testament. The Judaizers taught that gentile Christians needed to be circumcised and obey the entire law of Moses – essentially this would mean that a gentile needed to become a Jew in order to become a Christian. The controversy was addressed in the first Jerusalem conference described in Acts 15. The church leadership – all of whom were Jewish – ruled that gentiles who came to Christ did not have to follow Jewish laws and customs, but did stipulate that gentile believers should avoid behavior that would harm fellowship with Jewish believers. Although the error of the Judaizers has long since been abandoned, the erroneous tendency for Christians to believe in a works-based relationship with God has continued to this day and will probably never go away.

     Gnosticism was a second heresy that was addressed in some of the New Testament letters, but it continued well into the 2^nd century A.D. and was responsible for numerous pseudo-Christian writings which are preserved to this day. Gnosticism (from the Greek gnosis, or “knowledge”) may have had pre-Christian roots, but it quickly made an appearance and grew within the church. It took a number of forms, but all generally regarded the material world as evil and the spiritual world as good. Therefore, Christ could not have become a physical man, and must instead have been a spiritual being only. One can see the New Testament writers refuting this with verses like 2 John 7 “For many deceivers have gone out, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.” Gnostics believed that salvation could be achieved through knowledge. The knowledge required was often held to be secretive information not known by the masses, much like modern conspiracy theories often work.  

     Marcion of Sinope (85-160) rejected the Old Testament and taught that the God who sent Jesus into the world was a different and higher God than the God of the Old Testament. Although Marcionism was rejected by all the early church fathers, similar rejection and/or criticism of the Old Testament sometimes still surfaces in Christian churches today.

     Arius (256-336) rejected the concept of the Trinity, teaching instead that Jesus was not fully divine in the same sense as God the Father. Arianism dug in enough to become the leading view in some early Christian lands. The Visigothic kingdom would be Arian in its theology. The famous Council of Niceaea was largely a reaction to the Arian heresy.