Preface
Preface
This modern phenomenon we call Christianity is so enormous – in terms of age, scope and influence – that it is easy for us to think it has always been this way. Or that Christianity had to be this way. We can begin to think that the Christian movement had to prevail. It had to grow. It had to succeed. It was a foregone conclusion. Even more than this, we can begin to think that it had to be this version of Christianity that prevailed. How most Christians think now, what they read now, how they act now – this was the way, we might think, it was always going to be.
But such thinking is a luxury of those who live after the fact. It is only in hindsight that events take on an air of inevitability. For the earliest Christians, the future was not at all certain. It wasn’t yet clear whether this new movement was even going to survive. Nor was it clear which books it would read. And it certainly wasn’t clear what most Christians would believe. All of this would need to be worked out. And this volume will argue that many of these issues – some of the most critical for the survival of Christianity – were shaped by the events of the second century. In other words, it was the challenges, obstacles and transitions faced by Christians in the second century that, in many ways, would determine the future of the Church for the next two millennia. It was a century (though not the only one) when Christianity stood at a crossroads.
My interest in the second century, however, did not begin with this book. Indeed, many of my prior areas of research – NT canon, apocryphal gospels, transmission of the NT text, the battles over heresy and orthodoxy – all seemed to play out largely (or perhaps most critically) in the second century. And when I looked for a volume that would provide an overall introduction to this critical period, I found that there were very few options. What seemed (to me at least) to be a very important period had received proportionally much less attention than the other centuries of the early Christian movement. My hope is that the current volume will help, at least a little bit, to fill that gap. It is only intended as an introduction – and thus will provide only a general overview of what Christianity was like and what it faced during this century. But hopefully it will spur on more research in the years to come.
I should also note that this current research project increased my appreciation for the second century in an additional (and unexpected) way. My research about what second-century Christians were like, and the opposition they received, made me see that there is much more in common between the second-century Church and the twenty-first-century Church (at least in the Western world) than I originally thought. Of course such a statement is a truism of sorts – no doubt every generation of Christians can relate to the early Church in some fashion. Yet, it is hard to miss the fact that Christianity in the modern Western world has lost considerable cultural influence over the last generation and is now facing ever-increasing social and legal pressures. While certainly not comparable to the pressures faced by second-century Christians, the modern Church is being seen more and more as a threat to the social stability of modern society – similar to the way the second-century Church was viewed by the Roman elites. And, at least in this way, there is much that the modern Church can learn from our second-century counterparts. If nothing else, we need to learn (again) what it means to be the Church when we lack social or political standing. And that is something that, sadly, has been largely forgotten.
For a project like this one, I have many people to thank. I am grateful to Philip Law at SPCK for his faithful pursuit of me for this project, and for Dan Reid and his support at IVP Academic. I am thankful for the many who have read portions of this book and provided helpful feedback, including Chuck Hill, Larry Hurtado, Chris Keith, Craig Blomberg, Michael Bird and Andreas Köstenberger. This volume is better because of their input, though I remain responsible for its shortcomings. A word of thanks is also due to my TAs Aaron Ingle and Jason Piland who worked tirelessly on various details in the editing process. Of course, most of all I owe a debt of gratitude to my family. My wife Melissa has been so encouraging and sacrificial over the years as I have holed up in my study writing and doing research. She is truly a saint in every real sense of the word. And my children Emma, John and Kate are part of the reason I write all my books. May this volume (some day) encourage them as they reflect upon Christianity’s distinctive and fascinating beginning.