Lecture two, there went forth a stream, the growth of the Christian Church.
Last time I taught the class, um, Brian Howard produced his, uh, timeline in the form of a calendar, very nice calendar that, uh, has the quotation from the OS of Solomon, from which the title of this lecture, uh, is taken.
And, um, each mark has, uh, dates and dates in church history and the contemporary current calendar for 1998.
So I've enjoyed using that timeline, uh, this year.
And, uh, Rob Futo also inspired by that, uh, same quotation there went forth, uh, stream, uh, produced a little, uh, booklet, uh, for witnessing very fine, uh, book in which he set for the principles of Christian faith for people that, uh, are being introduced, uh, to it.
So a couple of ideas of some things that you can do in connection with church history.
The title there went Forth, A stream comes from the church in the East, the ode of Solomon Hyuk, we think produced in the church in Syria, perhaps in the second century.
Although the date is by no means, uh, clear, the prayer will come from one of the church leaders in the west, from the city of Rome, Clement of Rome, pastor in the Church of Rome who died about the year 100 ad.
And I used this prayer from Clement because it contains so many of the elements that made it possible for the early church to grow.
There went forth a stream, and as we prayed with this ancient church, father Clement of Rome, we catch a glimpse of some of the features and strengths of early Christianity that made it possible for that stream to reach both to the east and to the west.
Let us pray.
Grant unto us, Lord, that we may set our hope on thy name and open the eyes of our hearts that we may know thee, we beseech thee Lord and master to be our help.
And sucker save those among us who are in tribulation.
Have mercy on the lowly.
Lift up the fallen show thyself to those in need.
Heal the six, turn again, the wanderers of thy people.
Feed the hungry ransom our prisoners.
Raise up the we, comfort the faint heart.
Let all nations know that thou our God alone and that Jesus Christ is thy son, and that we are thy people and the sheep of thy pasture.
We praise thee who aren't able to do these in better things than these through Jesus Christ, the high priest and guardian of our souls, through whom be glory in majesty to thee, both now and throughout all generations, forever and ever.
Amen.
Some years ago, my son Alan, was studying in graduate school at Indiana University and he was taking a class in early Christian history from a professor who really was not a professing Christian by any means.
And as this professor described the, the triumph of Christianity, he expressed a, a great deal of amazement that Christianity, small sect part of Judaism originating in a out of the way Roman province, a not very important place, and without great power among the early followers of Christianity, amazement that of all the possibilities for the triumph of any one religion in the Roman world, that Christianity was the one that did triumph.
How could that be?
He said it really had nothing going for it.
Well, my lecture today is an attempt to answer Professor Lanigan and to understand something of why Christianity not only grew, but eventually triar.
So we look at the spread of Christianity, we can see it in different ways.
First of all, we can look at the spread of Christianity as a cultural movement, cultural spread as we go through this course and the next semester's course in reformation and modern church history.
We'll be looking at the six cultural transitions took place in the spread spread of Christianity as identified by Professor Andrew Walls, who teaches the history of missions at the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Walls talks about six frontiers, cultural frontiers across which Christianity moved at very critical times in its history.
And he says that as Christianity moved from one cultural milieu to the next, it did it just in the nick of time.
Without that cultural movement, humanly speaking, it would've died.
And we come to the first of those cultural movements, the movement from Judaism to the Gentile world.
The earliest Christians, of course, were Jews.
And it is one of the marvels of history that Christianity entered a second phase at all because of the resistance on the part of Jewish Christians, including some of the apostles at first, to see Christianity move beyond the bounds of Judaism into the Gentile world.
But in the Book of Acts, we have Antioch, we have the Jerusalem Council, and above all, we have the missionary work of the Apostle Paul.
And we see Christianity moving then from its Jewish roots into the next phase of its history into the Gentile whirl.
And as Professor Walls points out just in the nick of time, because the Jewish state disappeared in the wars of 80, 70 and 81 35.
But by the time the Jewish state disappeared in those wars with the Romans, Christianity was firmly planted in its second cultural context, the culture of the Greco-Roman world.
So that is one way to look at the spread of Christianity from a Jewish sect to a religious faith embraced by Gentiles far and white as well as by Jews.
Second way to look at the spread of Christianity is to see it as a social movement.
When Paul wrote to the church at Current, he said, not many of you were wise by human standards.
Not many were influential, not many were of noble birth.
And that continued to be true, not only for the church at current, but for the church throughout the Roman world.
The early church was largely made up of common people.
People sometimes call the people of the lower classes.
Actually the opponents of Christianity were not slow to pick up on this and to use it as an instrument against the Christians.
CELs us was one of the early opponents of Christianity answered by origin.
We will study this later, but uh, ssas said this, the Christian message is like this, let no one educated, no one wise and no one sensible come near by the fact that Christians admit that these people are worthy of their God.
They show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish dishonorable and stupid and only slaves, women, and little children.
Uh, was part of Cel attack on the Christian faith.
Well, in a sense it was true.
And Christians, uh, did not, uh, deny this charge.
A Christian apologist minutia Felix said that many of us are called poor is not our disgrace, but our glory.
There were many poor people who were members of early church.
Uh, women were accepted as full members of the church and probably in the early church.
As throughout most of church history, women have made up a larger percentage of the members of the Christian Church than men.
And even more remarkable slaves were accepted as full members of the church and participated equally in the worship of the community.
In fact, we think that a slave whose name was Callistus became bishop of the Church of Rome in the early third century.
Perhaps the most important post in the Christian Church at that time, so many of the people who embraced Christ and joined the Christian Church were poor people.
But there were some as also true in current who were from the higher classes by Nero's time, that would be ad sixties.
Christianity was beginning to infiltrate the families, the noble families of Rome.
In fact, all writing from prison in Rome in Philippians at all the saints sin, greetings, greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar's also.
So even at that early date, there were some Christians who were high placed in government.
There's evidence that in dome's time that would be in the nineties, the Empress Emory's cousin and wife were Christians.
We're not absolutely sure about all the details here, but apparently these two people were bish or put to death.
And their two young sons totally disappeared from history.
They had been designated as Ian's heirs.
And it could well be that the presumptive heirs of the throne of Roman emperor before the end of the first century were Christians.
German historian, hark puts it this way.
What a change.
30 years after the fearful persecutions of Nero, the heirs to the throne were brought up in a Christian House.
In the syllabus there is the writing by Clement of Alexandria in the late second century, what kind of rich person can be saved.
And the very fact that this church father would preach a sermon on this topic shows that people with wealth were beginning to become part of the Christian Church.
And this was now a question to be answered.
As you read that you'll find some very interesting material from this early church father, not a very clear idea yet of salvation through faith alone to Jesus Christ.
But Clement's answer to the question is a moderate one.
The person who does not set his heart on wealth and put it first like the rich young ruler did, person who does not do that certainly can be saved and be part of the Christian Church.
And so Christianity moves culturally out of Judaism into the Greco-Roman world.
It moves throughout the social levels of the Roman empire, although the large majority of Christians remain people described as people of the lower classes, common people.
And then we need to look at the geographical movement.
And of course, to do that, you need to look at a map of the Roman world.
We'll look at the movement first to the west and then to the east.
In the Book of Acts, we see the beginning of the movement of Christianity to the west up into Asia Minor.
And from there over into Greece and from there to Italy, to Rome, and perhaps even in the epistles hints of the spread of Christianity to Spain by the end of the first century, the areas in red have become Christian centers.
You can see that Asia Minor is the most, uh, Christianized, uh, area of the Roman Empire, this area here.
That's the real Bible belt of, uh, the first century, strangely enough because there are very, very few Christians there today.
But by the end of the first century, Asia Min was the center of Christianity.
And there were other places too that, um, had also become in part Christian.
The yellow areas on the map indicate the spread of Christianity by the year 180 5.
And uh, by then we can see that uh, Christianity has not only spread more widely in this area, but all the way over into Gaul.
There was a persecution here in Leo and the year 1 77 in which a Christian Bishop was put to death.
And there's a Christian center up in Germania around Cologne and Ria.
There are Christian churches in different parts of Spain and also Christians in different locations in North Africa.
North Africa is part of the Roman Empire.
The red line indicates the extent of, uh, the Roman Empire and North Africa from Egypt all the way over through Edia and Mauritania were included in Roman Empire.
The tradition is that Mark first established the Christian Church in Alexandria.
It's hard to know how to treat some of these early church traditions about the establishment of Christianity in various places because almost every church, every church wanted to claim a big name.
Even Scotland gets into the act and claims, uh, Andrew the Apostle, who also screened by Russia, that that's the case.
Uh, Andrew traveled widely and evangelized, um, in many different places and in different languages.
So we have to treat, I think those traditions with some caution.
Mark Shaw in his history of the Kingdom of God in Africa, says, until more evidence is produced, we should neither rule out St.
Mark's role in Egyptian Christianity nor endorse the tradition.
As it stands.
Uh, later, uh, Christianity will move further south into Africa, outside the bounds of the Roman Empire into newbie and into Ethiopia.
And, uh, we will look at that movement, uh, as we come, uh, to the later history.
So Christianity begins to make its way, uh, into the West and spreads, uh, widely.
By the end of the second century, it's sometimes forgotten that Christianity moved also to the East.
In fact, I have a book in my library by JC Juan, history of the Early Christian Church to the Year AD 500.
It's a very fine book, but, uh, professor Juan says this, the birthplace of the church stood on the boundary between the east and the west.
It is significant that this infant religion, as soon as it was strong enough to leave the cradle, marched straight to the west, but it did go straight to the west.
And the Book of Acts tells us the be of the beginning of that story of the spread of Christianity through the West, but it also went to the East with, uh, Sam Moffitt's history of Christianity in Asia.
We really don't have an excuse now for not knowing something about the remarkable spread of Christianity to the East.
The first New Testament translation was in Syriac in the East.
The first Christian Hyn book, the OS of Solomon, which I referred to earlier, was produced in Syria.
The first known church building, building, especially constructed or Christian Church we know anything about is in the east in Odessa or Dura Europas.
Both have claims on that.
And just in the last, uh, issue of Christianity today, I read, um, the work of a team of archeologists from North Carolina State University and Jordan, who think they have discovered an even earlier Christian Church at Koba, but that's in the east as well.
So the first known church building is in the East and perhaps the first Christian King and Christian state in Armenia or Eastern Turkey a hundred years before Constantine.
Well, I say all of that to stress the importance of not leaving out the history of the spread of Christianity to the East.
I'd like to, uh, focus on two aspects of that Eastern spread.
Uh, one is represented by the two red lines here and another by the two blue lines farther north.
The red lines represent the spread of Christianity to India.
The tradition is that the Apostle Thomas went to India.
Most of these traditions about where the apostles went and what happened to them are probably legendary.
But there is more reason to believe that the tradition that Thomas went to India is a true tradition.
Christians in India, the Mar Toma Christians who still look back to Thomas as the founder of their church.
Samuel Moffitt in his book, evaluates this tradition by saying most opinions range from possible to probable with a discernible trend toward the latter.
Dr.
Moffitt is very cautious scholar.
So if he says it's probable, then we can take his word for it, that Thomas probably reached India.
And then we know that, uh, there is another tradition in the late second century, about 120 years after the date for the martyrdom of Thomas in India.
A second missionary journey or missionary left the Roman world this time from Alexandria in Egypt.
The head of the church there, the head of the Catechetical school, president of the seminary, we would say, left this important center in the Roman world.
His name was Panina, in order to preach Christ to the Brahmans and philosophers in India.
Those are the words of Saint Jerome in the fifth century.
The visit of Panina to India, Dr.
Moffitt says, is not to be dismissed.
Likely there are indirect presumptive indications from the period of his mission that tend to support the later references to his journey.
And not only does Christianity spread very early to, uh, India, but it also spreads in this area into Syria, from Syria to Odessa.
And the little kingdom of Ene in Eastern Turkey or Armenia just across the Euphrates that we think became the first Christian state with a Christian King a hundred years before Constantine, the first Christian emperor in the Roman world.
And from Odessa onto Arbella, just across the ts near ancient Nineveh, this area produced a very famous eastern theologian whose name was Tatian, cheaply known for the D Teran.
That is the life of Christ that he compiled from the four gospels and amazingly from Avela, uh, into Persia and all the way into Afghanistan.
By the end of the second century, there were churches as far east as Persia and Bre or northern Afghanistan, from Syria to Mesopotamia, to Persia, to Afghanistan, and down into India.
Before the end of the second century, the faith, the Christian faith, was unquestionably spreading across the great continent of Asia as vigorously as it moved westward into Europe.
Now, I want to come to another question, and that is, why did Christianity spread?
Professor Flanagan said it had nothing going for it, and he could not understand how this feeble religion with its nondescript followers could make such an impact on the world.
Well, the first answer to the question, why did Christianity spread?
Certainly has to be the power of the gospel.
It's not an answer that every historian would see it first, but certainly a Christian historian sees that there is something supernatural about the spread of the Christian bait, the world into which Christianity came of east and West was a world full of religions.
Sometimes people have made the point that Christianity came into a vacuum and people were looking for something to believe, and so they latched on to Christianity because it wasn't anything else.
Well, that's very far from the truth.
The Roman world particularly was filled with warring sex and rival face.
There were the traditional pagan religions, not in the heyday of paganism, the Greco-Roman gods, but not yet gone from the empire.
In fact, still on a popular level, very strong.
We can read the book of Acts and find Paul encountering the pagan religions at Lira, the worship of Zeus, and in Athens in the worship of God's in goddesses, including an unknown God and Ephesus in the worship of Artemis or Diana as she was called by the Romans.
So the traditional pagan religions were still alive.
There were also the mystery religions, great variety of Eastern religions promising a sense of belonging and personal salvation, which did not come from the traditional gods of Greece and Rome.
You really had no personal relationship with these gods.
You just tried to stay on their good side.
But the mystery religions promised a great deal more salvation and fellowship with the God or the goddess.
And there were many of these from Persia came the worship of Mires from Egypt, the worship of Isis from Asia Maya, the worship of Bel and numerous mystery religions.
When Pompeii was discovered two centuries ago, the ruins of Pompeii, one of the first structures uncovered in that Roman city was an opulent temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis.
In addition to the mystery religions, the philosophies provided a kind of religious allegiance for some people, stoicism, charism and other philosophies, and moved away from theory to practical religious commitment by the end of the second century and promise through rational processes, the discovery of a good life and even hope beyond death.
And then as part of the religious mix of the Roman Empire, there was the imperial cult, the worship of the emperor, beginning with the death of jus Caesar in 44 bc.
There was a tendency to deify the Roman emperor after he had died.
But by the time we come to Augustus, the living emperor was beginning to be viewed as a God to be worship and Romans practice the worship of the emperor.
It was really a very small thing that was required simply bowing before the image of the emperor, or taking a little piece of little pinch of incense and burning it in a flame before some symbol of the emperor.
And that was viewed as a unifying patriotic act to hold the empire together.
A Rome promoted a kind of amalgamation of all these religions.
You could believe in all of them if you wanted to.
The only thing that was absolutely required was the worship of the emperor.
Edward Gibbon, in his famous decline in fall of the Roman Empire, offered a cynical view of Rome's attitude toward all these religions.
This is what he said.
The various modes of worship, which prevail in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true by the philosophers, as equally false by the magistrates as equally useful and thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.
But then Christianity comes into this and stirs up all kinds of trouble.
You can see it beginning in the New Testament, and we see it continuing in the history of this time in the Roman Empire because Christianity and Judaism were the only two exclusive religions of the tie.
You could not add anything else to Christianity or to Judaism.
And this became a source of persecution, not because Christians were Christians, but because Christians were Christians.
Only the the magistrates often charge Christians this way.
You do not worship the gods.
You do not sacrifice to the empress.
All they had to do was sacrifice to the empress and worship the gods and all would be well.
But not only was the exclusiveness of Christianity a source of persecution, it was a source of great strength.
And I think this is one of the reasons Christianity did spread.
One historian has put it this way.
There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from.
You could pile one religious insurance on another and yet not feel safe.
Christianity made a clean sweep.
You can see the appeal of that.
Arnold, Toby, and many others have said that in the modern world for Christianity to survive, it must give up its claims to exclusiveness and make common cause with other religions.
But the reason it survived and grew and even flourished in the early church was that it did not do that.
If it had done that, it would've long since disappeared from history.
Not only do we have uh, the power of the gospel, but we have the witness of Christians.
Christianity was victorious because the early Christians outlived outthought and outed the world around them.
The role of the apostles, I've already said is somewhat uncertain, although poll almost certainly made it or it's highly probable that he made it to India.
And we know that Peter died in Rome, and we know that John went to Ephesus and was in prison for a time on the island of Patmos.
But the legends about the other apostles are probably just that whatever the apostles did in the spread of the gospel, and the Lord gave the great commission to them, but he also gave it to everyone.
And we know that the ordinary Christians were missionaries in the early period.
The second calling of every Christian was to be a missionary.
The gospel was carried by merchants along the trade routes and by soldiers from post to post.
As these Christians went throughout the empire and also into the east, one loving heart setting another on fire.
These Christians were able to witness by word, but they also witnessed by deed.
Talia put it this way, in memorable words, it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand on us, to tell you is saying, this is what the pagans say about us.
It's not what Christians are saying about each other, but the watching world says this about the Christian Church.
They say, see how they love one another, how they are ready even to die for one another.
And that love that Christians had for each other overflowed the community of faith and reached out to people in the world so that the church Father Ignatius could talk about a love for widows and for orphans, for the oppressed, for those in prison, for the hungry, for the thirsty, for the abandoned babies that were left to die.
Christians had a reputation.
People loved each other and even loved those that persecuted them.
The Scottish historian James Ores said, the new spirit of self-denying love, which Christianity breathed into the world, awoke wonder from its very strangeness.
This was strange, and people began to wonder about it and to be brought into the faith because they were so impressed by the conduct of these Christians.
And Christians witnessed as we'll see next time in the lecture on persecution by their deaths.
Again, talien put it in famous words, blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
Of course, not everybody was converted who saw the martyrs put to death.
But we have many stories, true stories of jailers and magistrates and people in the stands watching the courageous death of Christians who abandoned their pagan faith and joined the Christian Church sometimes to be martyred themselves right on the spot.
Somebody has said that martyrdom was the Christians opportunity, the opportunity of the early church for mass evangelism.
They could not hold great rallies and public uh, preaching services, but as thousands watched Christians died, that was their opportunity for mass evangelism.
Therefore, since we're surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and run the race set before us with perseverance.