Introduction
Introduction
What is so important about the second century?
Frankly, it was a messy century.
Walter H. Wagner1
With followers in the billions, Christianity is the world’s largest religion. Every Sunday, believers from all over the globe – from Roman Catholic to Pentecostal – gather together in some fashion to worship Jesus Christ. Spires of churches dominate the skylines of most major cities. Christians are represented in all levels of society, from the richest to the poorest. As an institution, the Christian Church wields substantial influence over major aspects of our modern culture. From ethics to the arts and even to politics, there hardly seems to be an area it has not touched. In short, Christianity is a global phenomenon.
But it was not always so. There was a time, nearly two thousand years ago, when Christianity was in its infancy. It possessed very little cultural influence, was weak and frail, and found itself fighting for its life. Theological formulations were imprecise and undeveloped, factions and ‘heresies’ were dominant, attacks from pagan philosophers were rampant, and the future was altogether uncertain. On top of all of this, Christianity was, for the first time, moving forward without the direct guidance of living apostles and still did not yet have a fully formed New Testament canon.
When was this time? It was the second century. This particular block of time is one of the most critical in the life of the Church – perhaps the moment when it was most vulnerable. It is what we might call the transitional century for the early Christian faith. The Church was out of the apostolic womb and now trying to take its first breath. Like a new-born animal on the Serengeti plains, Christians found themselves in a dangerous world. As Walter Wagner observed, ‘The second century was a time of sharp disappointments, gradual adjustments, bitter controversies, and grave hazards for Christian communities.’2
It is ironic, however, that within the study of early church history (first five centuries), the second century has arguably received the least attention from modern scholars. Christianity in the first century, of course, has been extensively studied, primarily through the lens of the New Testament writings themselves, our earliest Christian texts. And the third and fourth centuries (and beyond) have generated quite a bit of scholarly attention because, by that time, Christianity’s presence and influence was on the rise. The new religion was no longer new; it had a substantial leadership base (e.g., Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius), its doctrinal disagreements were being hammered out (e.g., the Council of Nicaea), and the boundaries of the New Testament canon had largely solidified. Such developments have given historians much to study and explore. But the second century, bracketed by these two well-known periods of church history, has been all too easily overlooked. As Everett Ferguson observed, ‘In spite of its importance, the second century is a period inadequately understood in its own right. It might even be said to have been a neglected period.’3
Currents in the study of the second century
Of course, there have been exceptions to this general pattern of neglect. But we can only note a few examples here. If we look to some older works, we might think of William Cunningham’s volume, The Churches of Asia: A methodological sketch of the second century (Macmillan, 1880) which covers a number of aspects of church life during this time, including ecclesiological structure, battles with heretical groups like Gnosticism, and even church discipline. But needless to say, it is considerably out of date. We might also note the second volume of Philip Carrington’s two-volume church history entitled The Second Christian Century (Cambridge, 1957), but this was simply part of a larger work and now too is out of date. In the early 1980s, a group of scholars came together to start a new journal, entitled The Second Century, which was devoted to studying precisely this area. This was certainly a step in the right direction, but the narrow focus of the second century could not be sustained and the title of the journal was eventually changed to the Journal of Early Christian Studies.
One of the most helpful overviews of the second century would certainly be K. W. Tröger’s Das Christentum im zweiten Jahrhundert (Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1988). Tröger covers many of the same subjects of the current volume – Christianity within the Roman Empire, Christian literary production, theological diversity and even early Christian worship. But, in addition to being nearly 30 years old, it remains inaccessible to many in the English-speaking world. Walter H. Wagner’s After the Apostles: Christianity in the second century (Fortress Press, 1994) covers many of the main figures and theological disputes during this critical period, but gives little attention to other important issues, such as the development of the canon and the transmission of the New Testament text.
Of course, there have been countless works that cover just one particular aspect of the second century. For example, Eric Osborn’s The Emergence of Christian Theology (Cambridge, 1993), focuses on the theological developments of early Christians largely through the lens of key second-century figures such as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. In a similar vein, Christianity in the Second Century: The case of Tatian (Routledge, 2003) by Emily J. Hunt offers much helpful material about Tatian, his theology and his place in early Christianity. Also looking at just a slice of this period is Paul and the Second Century, edited by Michael F. Bird and Joseph Dodson (T&T Clark, 2011), which examines the influence and use of Paul in the second century from a variety of perspectives. Examining just the text of the Gospels in this century is The Gospel Traditions of the Second Century: Origins, recension, text, and transmission, edited by W. L. Petersen (Notre Dame, 1989). More recently, Judith Lieu’s Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the second century (Cambridge, 2015) explores the person and theology of Marcion during this critical period through the lens of the heresiologists that critiqued him. However, all of these works (and more could be added), as helpful as they are, are fairly narrowly focused on just one aspect of the broader second-century phenomenon.
Larry Hurtado’s recent volume, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world (Baylor, 2016), should also be mentioned. While this volume does not intend to be, like the present volume, a broader introduction to the second century, it does cover some of the same ground. Hurtado focuses upon the characteristics which made Christianity unique or distinctive within its Greco-Roman context, and thus explores some of the same issues I cover below; e.g., early Christian worship, intellectual and political persecution, and the ‘bookish’ nature of the early Christian movement. Hurtado’s volume was published just as this volume was being completed (autumn, 2016), so I had little opportunity to utilize its excellent content. But even in my quick read through a pre-published version of the book, I was encouraged to see that our conclusions were remarkably similar. Of course, the volumes are also different in a number of ways. As will be seen below, this current volume also covers more sociological dimensions of early Christianity, specific elements of Christian worship (baptism, Lord’s Supper, house churches), the emergence of the episcopal church structure, the battles over heresy and orthodoxy, and the state of the NT canon and text in the second century.
Another encouraging sign of renewed interest in the second century is the (very) recently published volume, Christianity in the Second Century: Themes and developments, edited by James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu (Cambridge University Press, 2017). This volume contains a collection of papers given at a 2013 conference held at Cambridge University entitled, ‘The Christian Second Century’. Unfortunately, this volume was published just as the current book was headed to press and I was unable to engage with what looks to be a rich trove of essays. Of course, it is a very different volume from the current one, since it is a collection of academic papers from various authors on a wide range of technical subjects.
This all-too-brief survey can certainly not do justice to the vast number of scholarly works that have touched on the second century in some fashion. But it nonetheless provides the necessary backdrop to understand the purpose of this volume, namely to build upon these earlier studies and to take a further (and deeper) step into the second century of Christianity. While the aforementioned volumes have proved to be a great help in this regard, there is no updated, single-volume resource for students (or scholars) that addresses the broad range of issues faced by Christians in this century and this century only. This present volume is structured to accomplish precisely that goal. It is certainly not intended to be the final word on the subject – on the contrary, it is designed to generate many more words on this subject, as interest in the second century (hopefully) increases.
Key issues in second-century Christianity
With this very selective survey in mind, we now turn to the distinctive issues faced by second-century Christians that justify more scholarly attention on this oft-overlooked century. In prior generations of scholars, the second century has sometimes been viewed as a time period when Christianity was simply taking the next step in its inevitable march towards dominance and institutionalization as it easily swatted away heretical groups like the ‘Gnostics’ and rallied around a fixed ‘orthodoxy’. Such an approach, particularly in light of the work of Walter Bauer, has been rightly critiqued as overly simplistic and not accounting for the complexity and diversity of the second century.4 We must be careful not to study second-century Christianity as if its future were already predetermined. That said, we must also be careful of the opposite mistake. The diversity and complexity of this time period does not necessitate a view where the Christian movement is merely stuck in a morass of conflict and does not change or develop at all. It is not illegitimate to ask how (and why) early Christianity might have looked different at the end of the second century from how it did at the beginning of it.
In light of these considerations, it might be helpful to describe the second century as a period of transitions. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything in the second century was different from the first (or from the third). On the contrary, we shall see below that many first-century trends continue on into the second century and beyond. Nor does it mean that these transitions were neat and tidy, all aimed toward a predetermined end point. Nevertheless, we can say that Christians during this period stood at a crossroads: the changes and challenges they faced, and how they would respond to them, would (re)shape the Christian movement for years to come. Here we shall briefly outline some of these transitions which, of course, will be fleshed out further in the subsequent chapters in the book.
Sociological transition
As will be discussed in Chapter 1, the sociological make-up of Christianity in the second century is worthy of more scholarly attention. In particular, the second century marks a time when distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were more established and visible. Christianity was viewed less and less as a sect within Judaism and had begun to achieve its own distinctive identity within the Greco-Roman world. Consequently, the second-century Church proved to have a large (if not dominant) population of Gentiles that brought with it a number of intellectual and cultural challenges. This demographic shift allowed Christianity to reshape the standard definition of ‘religion’ in the Greco-Roman world. Whereas most religions were seen as tightly bound to a particular ethnic or national identity, Christianity was adopted by a variety of people groups, crossing the standard boundaries. In a rather unprecedented fashion, Christianity now allowed religion to be conceived as an entity independent of the ethnic-cultural components that were normally (and inevitably) attached to it. This chapter also explores the educational and economic status of early Christians, as well as the popularity of Christianity among women.
Cultural-political transition
The second century proved to be a time when Christianity found itself immersed deeply in a ‘pluralistic’ world – very different from both the Jewish world into which it was born and the later Christian Empire it would become under Constantine. Due to the fact that Christianity was now more visible as its own ‘religion’ (if that term is even applicable), it garnered additional attention from the governing authorities and intellectual leaders in the Greco-Roman world. Although Christians had already begun to suffer persecution from the Roman government in the first century (e.g., under Nero), the barrage of attacks in the second century would prove to be substantial. Chapter 2 explores how Christianity’s commitment to exclusive, monotheistic worship of Jesus was viewed as not only culturally peculiar and intellectually wanting, but also as politically subversive and a threat to the stability of the Roman state. Consequently, governing authorities began to arrest and (at times) even execute Christians – often at the behest of the Roman mob – and the intellectual elites began to attack Christianity’s philosophical credibility. This situation gave rise to the second-century apologists who pushed back on a number of fronts, defending and explaining the infant Christian faith to all who would listen. As a result, the second century would prove to be the ‘golden age’ of apologetics. Or as Eric Osborn put it, ‘Christian philosophy begins here in the second century.’5
It is worth noting that this particular feature of second-century Christianity makes it especially relevant for the modern reader of this volume. Given that we, too, live in a pluralistic society, we are asking questions that sound more like the questions asked by second-century Christians than by fourth- or fifth-century Christians. Such questions include ‘Is there a god?’, ‘How many gods are there?’, ‘How can we know this God?’, and ‘Are all religions the same?’ The second century was the time when Christians began to develop more well-rounded answers to these questions.
Ecclesiological transition
As the Church began to grow and expand, Christians faced an additional challenge of how it would operate and how its leadership would be structured. Before long, there would be multiple Christian congregations in individual cities, raising questions about how they would be governed and how they would relate to each other. Moreover, churches were facing doctrinal disagreements and divisions (more on this below) which required strong and steady leadership. Chapter 3 explores how these challenges led to a transition in ecclesiastical structure. While the evidence suggests the first-century Church was largely led by a plurality of elders/presbyters, by the end of the second century that structure had changed considerably. At some point during the second century, churches began to be ruled by a singular bishop (as opposed to a plurality of elders) – what some would call a ‘monoepiscopate’. This chapter also explores the particular elements of early Christian worship and how that made these new believers distinct from the broader religious context out of which they came. The overall transition in ecclesiology and worship allowed Everett Ferguson to observe, ‘The second century was the time when the form of ministry assumed the shape which was to become traditional in church history.’6
Doctrinal-theological transition
Perhaps the most dominant feature of second-century Christianity, and certainly one promoted by Walter Bauer and his followers, is its profound doctrinal and theological diversity. This century witnessed an explosion of what might be called ‘heresies’ (e.g., Marcionism, Gnosticism, Montanisms, the Ebionites) and ‘heretics’ (e.g., Basilides, Valentinus, Ptolemy, Heracleon, Theodotus). In battle with these groups and individuals were ‘orthodox’ writers such as Polycarp, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria. And these writers appealed to what is known as the ‘rule of faith’ – a widespread and well-established summary of the apostolic teaching that had been passed down to the churches. Thus, the second century was a battleground where different versions of Christianity were competing for the right to be regarded as the authentic (or original) version of the faith. It is for these reasons that Lieu argues that ‘the second century was a period of intersecting paths moving in different directions, with as yet no obvious main road or right direction’.7 Again, this is another way of saying second-century Christianity stood at a crossroads. In Chapters 4 and 5, we shall explore this issue of theological diversity and unity in early Christianity and its implications for understanding whether terms like ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’ are meaningful and relevant for this period.
Textual-canonical transition
Closely related to the emergence of debates over heresy and orthodoxy is the emergence of debates over text and canon. The second century was noteworthy for the enormous amount of literary production that came from the pens of Christian writers. The early Christian movement, contrary to popular notions that it was a purely ‘oral’ religion, proved to have a robust culture of textuality. Christians in the second century produced all sorts of literature, ranging from theological treatises to sermons and commentaries, martyrdom accounts and apologetic works designed to defend the faith. On top of this, and perhaps most notably, Christians in the second century began to produce apocryphal works in droves. These included apocryphal gospels, acts, epistles, and even apocalypses. In the midst of this prolific literary production, and perhaps paradoxically, Christians also began to settle very early on a ‘core’ collection of books that they regarded as Scripture. Although the boundaries of this collection would not be solidified until the fourth century, the essential bulk of it was in place by the middle of the second century. Consequently, the second century has proved to be one of the most critical periods for the emergence of the New Testament canon. As Gerd Lüdemann has observed, the second century ‘saw the emergence of the basic decision as to what was to form the holy scripture of catholic Christians, a decision which had far reaching consequences for the non-catholic groups’.8 In Chapters 6 and 7, we will explore more fully the issues of text, canon and literary production in the second century.
As we reflect upon these five areas of transition it should be noted that this is not an exhaustive list. So complex is the second century that many more issues and challenges could be explored. But since this volume is intended to be an introduction (more on this below) some limitations are inevitable. Even so, these five areas demonstrate that the second century stands as a crossroads in the development of the early Christian movement. Again, the words of Lüdemann provide a helpful summary of the overall importance of this century: ‘To put it pointedly, in the period from the first Christian generations to the end of the second century, more important decisions were made for the whole of Christianity than were made from the end of the second century to the present day.’9
The approach of this study
Now that we have a sense for what makes the second century distinctive, we turn our attention to the approach of this present study. Here are some features of this volume that are important for the reader to understand.
Introductory, not exhaustive
It is important to recognize from the start that this book is not intended to be a full-scale academic monograph on all aspects of second-century Christianity. Such a work would be significantly bigger than this one and loaded up with extensive footnotes. In contrast, I have limited the range of subjects here, and the depth at which they are discussed, in order that the volume may function more as an introduction. Thus, I have tried to keep the footnotes to a minimum (though the reader may disagree about what counts as a minimum!) and have not engaged with the more intricate scholarly debates going on behind the scenes. I realize, of course, that any given claim I make in this book is subject to debate (and has been debated) by some scholar somewhere. But I do not always interact with, or even acknowledge, all of these debates lest this volume become a clunky and tedious read (due to the inevitable stops and starts caused by such discussions).
Let me also add that the introductory nature of this volume has prevented me from pursuing a number of other highly pertinent (not to mention interesting) subjects related to the second century that I would have wished to address. One example includes early Christian ethics (or behaviour) that proved to have a substantial impact on the early Christian witness. I was thankful to see, however, that my friend Larry Hurtado took up just such a discussion in his new volume Destroyer of the Gods, so I refer the reader to that volume for more. As another example, I might have wished to examine second-century theology (particularly Christology) in greater depth, but again I could not justify the space to address individual theological loci in such detail.
Topically arranged
It is also important for the reader to understand the way this book has been structured. There are a number of options for how to arrange a book on church history: a scholar can cover material based on date,10 or even by surveying key figures (or their writings).11 However, this present volume has been arranged topically. This structure has been chosen because it allows the volume to more effectively highlight the main issues that made the second-century Christian experience noteworthy. Even so, this structure still allows the volume to cover key individuals and their writings – but this is done naturally as the volume progresses and as the topic at hand requires it.
Balance between primary and secondary sources
In introductory volumes that try to cover a lot of different topics in early Christianity (such as this one) it is not unusual for authors to lean more heavily on secondary sources. This allows an author to cover a lot of ground more quickly without being bogged down with references to primary sources. However, a concerted effort has been made in this volume to strike a better balance between primary and secondary sources. While secondary sources are still critical (as will be evident from the footnotes and the select bibliography), I have still sought to redirect the reader, as much as possible, to the historical sources that speak to the particular issue at hand. Although this can seem a bit cumbersome – as the footnotes are sometimes peppered with a variety of historical referents – it is done intentionally so that the reader can become exposed to the key texts that speak to this century (though for space reasons, I have not always been able to quote these texts at length). So, this volume is seeking to use both primary and secondary sources in as balanced a fashion as possible (though the reader will need to decide whether this goal has been met).
Limited to the second century
The final observation to make about this volume, though it seems obvious, is that it is limited to the second century. Consequently, the goal here has been to use second-century primary sources when trying to demonstrate the characteristics of this period. However a few caveats are in order: (a) sometimes later sources are used if they speak about the second century (e.g., Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History); (b) sometimes both earlier and later sources are used to provide the broader context for understanding what is happening in the second century and perhaps why it is happening (e.g., sometimes I trace second-century practices back to their roots in the first century); and (c) some sources fall on the borders of the second century, either at the end of the first century or beginning of the third, and these are sometimes used due to their close proximity (e.g., 1 Clement, Didache, Tertullian). But even with these caveats, some sources are simply not used. For example, as helpful as the Apostolic Traditions of Hippolytus would be in our discussion of ecclesiastical structure and early Christian worship (Chapter 3), this has been avoided because it is clearly dated to the third century and it is unclear how much of it reflects practices that go back to the second.
With the structure of this book now in mind, and with a clearer understanding of why this period is so critical for early Christianity, we are now ready to dive into the world of the second century. My hope is that this study will rejuvenate interest in the second century and spur even more studies in the years to come.