synagogues remained in use as local meeting places for Jews wherever they lived. Several different dynasties conquered and ruled post-exile Palestine, but in the 140s bce a Jewish state was reestablished in the region. That kingdom was of relatively short duration; it was subsumed into the Roman Empire in 63 bce. From that juncture until 1948, Jews had no land they could call their own.
By the time of the Roman occupation, assorted groups of Jews had developed their own different ways of making sense of God, themselves, and their historical experience. Prominent Jewish sub-groups included the Pharisees, who stressed the law and personal piety; the Sadducees, who emphasized traditional temple worship; the Zealots, who were violently opposed to Roman rule; and the Qumran community that assumed the end of the world was near and that a final battle between good and evil was about to commence. The Samaritans, another quasi-Jewish group, claimed descent from two of Israel’s ancient tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh. In addition, an increasing number of Gentiles (non-Jews) were calling themselves God-fearers and adopting many of Judaism’s ideas and values without formally becoming Jews themselves.
This was the complex world of Jewish faith into which Jesus was born and which shaped the early Christian movement. Christianity retained many of the basic ideas and practices of Judaism. The synagogue morphed into the church, and the diversity of perspectives within Judaism prepared the way for the diversity of beliefs and practices that soon came to characterize the early Christian community. Imbedded in the matrix of first-century Judaism, Christianity emerged as a new and distinct religious movement led by a backcountry prophet named Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus and the Gospel
Jesus was an unlikely leader. Neither a priest nor a scholar, Jesus lived his first thirty years in relative obscurity as the son of Mary and her husband Joseph, a carpenter in the small town of Nazareth in the region known as Galilee. Then, for just a few years before he was killed, he took on the role of a wandering Jewish prophet and teacher, at first in the rural region where he had been raised and later for a very short time in Jerusalem.
His message was simple but profound. Jesus affirmed much of the Judaism of his day, including the Golden Rule (which Jews usually expressed in the negative as “do not do to others what you would not want done to you”), but Jesus frequently added his own twist to these teachings. Some of his additions – the folksy way he referred to God as “abba” (best translated as “daddy”), his willingness to bend the law to accommodate human frailty, his claim that he was able to forgive sins – were troubling to traditional Jews, and some Jewish leaders plainly disliked Jesus and his movement.
His message was also troubling to Rome. Jesus spoke of a coming “kingdom of God” and described his own actions as the dawning of that kingdom. He instructed his followers to give appropriate respect to Caesar (the Roman Emperor), but he also told them to give their complete obedience to God, a qualification that obviously limited any loyalty owed to Caesar. And, while he did not seek political power for himself, he refused to cower when Rome’s political appointees detained and interrogated him. His behavior seemed potentially subversive to an empire that demanded absolute obedience, and Rome responded vigorously. Using the gruesome spectacle of execution on a cross, the Empire eliminated Jesus and sent a public message to his followers that insolence in the face of imperial authority would not be tolerated.
Jerusalem’s residents, and many of Jesus’s own closest followers, thought that was the end of the matter. His male disciples were despondent and ready to abandon the cause. But some of his female friends began to claim they had seen Jesus alive, and soon his male disciples were making the same claim. They believed that somehow Jesus had been resurrected from the dead and had been given a new and glorious body. They also came to believe that this resurrected Jesus had given them a task to accomplish: they were to continue the work that Jesus had started, preaching the gospel message throughout the world, to every person, in every nation, in every tongue, and they were not to stop until they reached the ends of the earth.
The fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea says that the disciples of Jesus cast lots to determine where each of them should go. Thomas was supposedly assigned to Parthia (now Iran and Iraq), Andrew to Scythia (now Ukraine), and John to the province of Asia Minor (now Turkey). Peter, as the group’s leader, was given freedom to travel wherever he wanted.1 Eusebius did not always get his facts straight and this particular story may well be a pious fiction, but his basic point is accurate. Within a century of Jesus’s death, the Christian gospel had been exported far beyond the boundaries of Palestine, taking root as far west as Spain and as far east as India.
What exactly was this “gospel” or “good news” that the followers of Jesus sought to transmit around the world? Much of its content was derived from the teachings of Jesus himself: that God was humanity’s dear father, that people were required to love each other, that repentance was the pathway to true righteousness, that ultimately everyone would stand before God and be judged, and that somehow Jesus’s own suffering and death was part of God’s plan to redeem humankind and the world. But Jesus himself never wrote any of this down; a literary legacy was not left behind. Jesus was not a writer, nor was he a systematic thinker or an institution builder. He was a storyteller who reveled in the spoken word. Later on, some of his followers recorded their memories of Jesus, preserving his teachings and the stories he told in short books called “gospels” (four of which are included in the New Testament). These accounts of Jesus’s life and message do not, however, define the entirety of the gospel as Christianity proclaimed it.
The gospel of Jesus, what Jesus himself taught his followers, was quickly augmented within the Christian movement with a gospel about Jesus, a description of who Jesus was and why his life and teachings were so important. This gospel about Jesus proclaimed that he was more than merely human and more than merely one more prophet in a long line of Jewish prophets. He was the Messiah, a special and unique messenger from God, or perhaps he was even God incarnate. The Christian movement would later decisively emphasize the latter of these interpretations, but such a degree of clarity did not exist in the early decades. Everyone agreed, however, that Jesus was no mere mortal. He was the Christ (the anointed of God), and the gospel preached by his followers would ever after combine the message of Jesus of Nazareth with this additional message about Jesus the Christ.
Christianity’s Original Diversity
During the first two centuries of its existence, Christianity remained a small religious movement with no discernible center or governing structure. Groups of Christians in different locations held widely varying opinions about almost every aspect of the movement, including who Jesus was, what salvation entailed, how the movement was related to Judaism, when and how the world would end, which sources of authority should guide the movement, and how the movement should be organized. The Bible had not yet been compiled, and institutional church structures were weak or nonexistent. It was a movement led by charismatic, often self-appointed, individuals who sometimes had conflicting visions for the movement’s future. Even at the local level, Christians had their differences. In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he indicates that many Christians in that city looked to a person named Apollos as their main guide and teacher, others looked to Peter, some followed Paul himself, and a few apparently claimed direct access to Christ with no need for any human teacher. Unanimity was clearly not the norm.
A short book called the Didache (meaning “teaching”), written around the year 100, advised early Christians about how to conduct themselves in this diverse and fluid environment. One immediate concern was evaluating the many wandering Christian prophets and preachers who traveled from town to town, providing instruction and seeking support from local Christian communities. The Didache says these peripatetic prophets should initially be welcomed as fellow believers, but they should be designated as false teachers if they stayed too long (more than two nights), if they asked for money or food, or if they failed to follow their own guidance. The document’s advice on baptism is similarly practical and flexible.
