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<b><font color="ff0000">In Search of The Early Christian Church</font></b> <BR> <BR><font color="0000ff">The following material comes from a book review of Bishop Wright's work: <i>The New Testament and the People of God</i>. I present it here for its simple analysis. I have organized the information into lists for further clarity:</font><blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1><b>quote:</b></font><p>Wright outlines a history of the early church – a ‘quest for the kerygmatic church’ analogous to the well-established programme of a ‘quest for the historical Jesus. He begins by plotting a spectrum of scholarly opinions regarding the constitution of early Christianity: <blockquote>at one end of the scale, there is the view that the early church quickly became a Hellenistic movement (also incorporating Gnosticism); <BR> <BR>at the other, the view that the church emerged as ‘a Jewish messianic sect, going out into the world with the news that the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had now revealed himself savingly for all the world in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus’ (344).</blockquote> Currently the debate is quite finely balanced. ‘Many scholars are now of the opinion that the main problem in describing the origin of Christianity is to account fully both<ul><li> for the thorough Jewishness of the movement <LI>and for the break with Judaism that had come about at least by the middle of the second century.’</li></ul>Wright sets out nine historical fixed points, in reverse chronological order, for an investigation of the development of the early church up to the middle of the second century:<blockquote>i) the martyrdom of Polycarp around AD 155/6; <BR> <BR>ii) Pliny’s letter to Trajan between AD 110 and 114 regarding the treatment of the illegal sect of Christians; <BR> <BR>iii) the letters of Ignatius written during his journey to Rome to face martyrdom under Trajan (AD 110-117); <BR> <BR>iv) the interrogation of certain blood-relatives of Jesus by Domitian around AD 90, recounted by Hegesippus and record in Eusebius’ History; <BR> <BR>v) the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70; <BR> <BR>vi) Nero’s scapegoating of Christians in Rome after the great fire in AD 64; <BR> <BR>vii) the stoning of ‘James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ’ in AD 62, recorded by Josephus; <BR> <BR>viii) the activity of Paul in the first half of the 50s; and <BR> <BR>ix) Suetonius’ evidence for the expulsion of the Jews from Rome because of ‘continuous disturbances a the instigation of Chrestus’ around AD 49.</blockquote>As with the history of first-century Judaism, Wright proposes to begin not with particular writings but with the elements that made up the early Christian worldview:<ul><li> praxis, <LI>symbols, <LI>questions and answers, <LI>and, most importantly, the characteristic stories told by early Christians (358).</li></ul>Under praxis he examines<ul><li> mission, <LI>sacrament (baptism and eucharist), <LI>worship with reference not only to God but also to Jesus, <LI>‘a strong and clear ethical code’, <LI>the non-performance of animal sacrifices, <LI>and a willingness to suffer martyrdom for the sake of Christ (359-365).</li></ul> The early Christians constructed their world view around rather subversive alternatives to the regular symbols of both Judaism and paganism: <ul><li>the highly offensive symbol of the cross, <LI>supplemented by the symbolic status of Christian martyrs; <LI>mission to the whole world in place of the Land and ethnic identity in the Israel’s symbolic universe; <LI>the person of Jesus instead of the temple – a transfer of symbolism that “was forcing them to articulate the meaning of the word ‘god’ itself in a new way”; <LI>creeds and baptismal confessions as the new ‘badges of community’ membership instead of circumcision, kosher laws, and sabbath (365-369). </li></ul>Early Christians also, naturally, had a different set of answers to the four worldview questions (369-370): <ul><li>Who are we? <LI>Where are we? <LI>What is wrong? <LI>What is the solution?</li></ul> <BR> <BR><a href="http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/198" target=_top>http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/198</a> <BR><!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
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