Introduction to the History of Christianity

this is your first lecture on the religion of Christianity after the Jewish people had a century of relative Freedom that being from around 165 BCE uh to 63 BCE or BC we then find that the Roman Emperor Pompei comes into Jerusalem and takes over the city and so once again we find the Jewish people being under foreign control Imperial control uh there are four sociopolitical parties that you need to be aware of among the Jewish people pertaining to their response to this Roman occupation and uh this is very important for understanding the background at the time when Jesus of Nazareth would have been born uh he was born sometime between the year 6 and four BCE or BC uh first of all we have two very conservative groups that hold the majority of the power you see them pictured here in their religious Court called the Sanhedrin they called the Sadducees and the Pharisees uh very similar to our Republicans and Democrats that uh comprise Congress today the Sanhedrin had these two uh religious political parties that held all of the Power the Sadducees felt that the most important thing was that the people had the temple and as long as the Jewish people had the temple the Sadducees were so wealthy they were willing to pay whatever taxes Rome would demand because it really wouldn't hurt them in the pocketbook like it would the much poorer Jewish people so the Sadducees again felt as long as they had the temple uh then therefore they had God's presence with them and everything was just fine the Pharisees were the other uh very strong religious political power in the Sanhedrin and rather than their focus being on the temple they felt it was much more important to have obedience to the law of Moses and you may remember back on one of the last lectures on Judaism we had the Scribe or the priest named Ezra who pointed out that there were 613 of those laws and so the Pharisees were experts in the law and they were interpreters of of the law and we do find that Jesus comes in conflict with this group of people uh quite a bit as well as the Sadducees the Sadducees and Pharisees are the ones that Jesus will have the most conflicts with now one group that was far removed from society in Jerusalem were the essenes uh they stayed on the outskirts of town where there were caverns and caves and the most important thing to this very conservative withdrawn group was to make sure that scripture would be preserved and so the essenes spent hour after hour each day just copying scripture over and over and over again and then they would put it in some sort of protective sstn and then they would hide that jar uh somewhere in the caves and we still have archaeologists today who are discovering uh new copies of scripture that were done by the essenes some over 2,000 years ago and then we uh lastly have a very large group called the zealots and many believe that most of Jesus followers came from this group uh the zealots were the ones most opposed to Roman control because they could not afford this Roman occupation with the amount of taxes that were being taken from them and so they are zealous uh to take back Jerusalem as a Jewish City and therefore the zealots have a great deal of hope that the Messiah this promised Warrior deliverer uh that God is going to send to them will arrive at any time and there were many would be Messiahs during the time of Jesus and of course Jesus followers believe him to be the Messiah although he will turn out to be a very different kind of Messiah than what they had hoped for remember they they hoped for a messiah who would come with the sword to conquer Rome and Jesus again will end up being a very different kind of Messiah the most important events for the Christian religion happen in in a span of about 50 days and uh ironically uh just so happens we're at the time of year that we're at the very beginning of that stretch of time uh this is uh what we refer to as Holy Week within the Christian tradition and it begins on a day called Palm Sunday when Jesus comes into Jerusalem and is greeted as a Conquering Hero by the crowds there many have come to believe that he is the Messiah at this point and the Pharisees and Sadducees are there in Jerusalem and they're very angry and some of them are very afraid of Jesus and they are already scheming to bring about the end of Jesus life on this Palm Sunday when all of the poor are lining the streets to welcome Jesus uh we then see Jesus go through uh days of giving his final teachings to those in Jerusalem on Monday Tuesday and Wednesday and then on Thursday Jesus makes the decision to celebrate the Jewish Passover with his disciples and so uh we have him securing a small apartment apartment an upper room uh where he takes uh the two of the elements used in a Passover seder Mill and he transforms their meaning and this becomes an extremely important Christian ritual or Sacrament in which Jesus Takes the bread and breaks it and says that the bread is now his body and he takes the cup of wine and blesses it and says that that is now his blood and so the understanding is that as the disciples partake of that bread and that cup uh they are therefore taking Jesus into themselves uh later that Thursday night Jesus is arrested he is betrayed by one of his disciples named Judas and he goes through a series of illegal trials throughout Thursday night and into the early uh hours of Friday morning and then at 9:00 on Friday morning Jesus is crucified and uh this is a common form of execution for criminals uh Jesus uh matter of fact was not even crucified alone according to the stories within the uh Christian religion we have two other thieves who are uh crucified on either side of Jesus a typical uh means of death here is by Suffocation that eventually uh your muscles get so tired that you're no longer able to draw yourself up to take a breath and so Suffocation would be the primary way that one would die if a person lasted a very long time on a cross than sometimes just exposure to the elements would bring about uh death but Jesus does not last long on the cross uh because uh It is believed that he received some very severe beatings before being crucified and the most common belief is that Jesus lasts approximately 6 hours from about 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon uh we then have uh Jesus being buried which is quite unusual we had two wealthy men secure permission to remove Jesus body from the cross and have him uh buried in a tomb this was unusual because usually the common criminal the body would just be allowed to Decay and fall from the cross and there were known to be ravenous dogs that would hang around the place of crucifixion uh in order to eat that which would fall from the cross so definitely not a pleasant scene by any means at all uh and then we have the called Holy Saturday in which and this is surprising to many Christian people but the belief is that on this holy Satur Saturday that Jesus descends down to Hell and frees those who are imprisoned in hell and then on Sunday morning we have the tomb where Jesus was placed is empty the stone uh that covered the tomb was rolled away and uh we have the belief that Jesus has been resurrected this is not the same as resuscitation res recitation is to bring someone back to life uh Resurrection was a very unique event to believe that someone is brought into an entirely new way of life and this resurrected Jesus begins making several appearances uh over the next 40 days after these 40 days we have Jesus giving final directions to his disciples telling them that they need to go throughout the world and continue his teachings and then uh Jesus ascends uh in into the sky back into the heavens where it is believed that he returns to the one that he called God the Father uh one of the last things that Jesus tells his disciples is to make them a promise that uh the holy spirit will be given to them and so that event concludes this most important 50 days uh for the Christian religion on the day of Pentecost which is the Jewish celebration of the Harvest uh we have this event where the disciples are hiding in a small apartment apartment in Jerusalem and enormous wind and then flames in the shape of tongues come down from the sky and fill the room and the disciples pour out from that apartment into the streets of Jerusalem and they begin telling the story of Jesus in all sorts of different languages uh languages that they had never been trained to learn but suddenly this holy spirit gives them all of these different languages to speak to all of the different people who have come into Jerusalem for for this celebration of the Harvest and so this is when the Christian uh religion really begins to spread rapidly who were these very first uh Christians well first of all they weren't called Christians they were simply uh known as members of the way uh that's what the teachings and the life of Jesus were uh uh the earliest name given to that was simply the way and so that's what these very first Christians were were called uh eventually there's a city to the north called Antioch uh to the north of Jerusalem and it is there that the people who spread the teachings of Jesus are called little Christ or Christians uh but the disciples who uh had followed Jesus that's what the term disciple means one who follows Jesus are now seen as Apostles which means a one who is sent and so those who had followed are now those who are sent and they become the earliest leaders of this church in Jerusalem uh we do have with very few exceptions this first generation of Christians being Jewish people who had adopted the belief that Jesus was the Messiah they had been waiting for just turns out that he was a much different Messiah rather than conquering with the sword he allowed himself to be uh defeated and through that defeat through the death on the cross these early Christians perceive a greater spiritual victory that comes from that uh we do have some names we need to go over here uh it seems that the chief among these disciples or Apostles was a fellow named Peter his name was was actually Simon and Jesus changed his name to Peter which means the Rock and Jesus on one occasion even told Peter that it was on him the rock that he would build his church uh John is another one of the early disciples he was probably the youngest of the disciples and he appears to be the only one who lived to old age uh without being martyred uh we have most of the disciples and early followers of Jesus are eventually arrested and they are executed and that's what makes them a martyr um Mary Magdalene very important female disciple of Jesus uh contrary to popular opinion nowhere in the New Testament has she ever called a prostitute a lot of people uh make that uh mistake of thinking that she is a prostitute perhaps she was but nowhere in the story is it ever said that she is a prostitute uh Steven and Philip significant as two of the very first deacons turns out these disciples become so busy uh with the work that they need to do that they don't have time to take care of some of the needs of the poor and the widows and so they create this office of the deacon and the deacons will take care of those sorts of needs important thing to have down in your notes about Steph is that he is believed to be the very first Christian martyr uh that he accuses a group of Jewish people leaving worship of being responsible for Jesus death and they become so angry at him for his accusations that they throw rocks at him until he has died as a matter of fact the story actually uses the euphemism of saying he falls asleep and uh so we have Steph as our very first Christian martyr um James is believed by many to be a brother of Jesus a half brother of Jesus uh because of the teaching of the Virgin birth of Jesus um James was also a very important leader of that early church Church in Jerusalem and then perhaps most significant for making our transition to the next generation of Christian religion is a fellow named Paul who never met Jesus and was actually uh known as Saul of Tarsus and someone who sought to execute Christians and he was on a trip to a place called Damascus where he heard there were Christians hiding out and uh while he is on his journey he is knocked to the ground and blinded and according to the story the voice of Jesus comes from the heavens and asks Saul why he is persecuting uh Jesus and it's at that moment that Saul converts from being the Christian killer to becoming a very important Christian Missionary and Paul becomes extremely significant in that he takes the Christian religion beyond the boundaries of Judaism because up until this time Christianity had been understood as a small sect of rebellious Jews but now Paul begins taking this story of Christ the teachings of Christ uh and actually it's not so much the teachings of Christ as it is what Paul views as the significance of who Christ is and he takes that message all over the Roman Empire and the Christian religion begins expanding as something Beyond Judaism at that point although there were some wealthy and educated Christians the vast majority of Christians appear to be uh the poor and the uneducated and again it was a heavily persecuted religion and so um the most common place of Christian worship was actually at in the cemetery or what they called The Catacombs and uh the early Christians would go out there to worship very very early on a Sunday morning before the sun had even uh risen and they would um sing songs there were hymns very early on in the Christian tradition be the offering of prayer but the most important part of worship was the observance of communion or the Eucharist in which the bread and the cup would be taken and there were some Christians who were very strongly tied into the Jewish tradition that continued to worship on Saturday rather than Sunday uh some of the earliest holy days that were important of course the day of worship on Sunday because of the resurrection of Christ except for those that remain true to the Sabbath tradition of Saturday and then one Sunday a year would be recognized as the uh celebration of Christ's resurrection and that would be Easter and uh Easter was actually a replacement eventually of a pagan holy day it would later on in a few centuries later it would become a replacement of the vernal equinox of celebrating uh the arrival of the season of spring and then we also have no Christmas observed early on in the Christian calendar but instead we have the day of January 6th celebrated as the day of epiphany and uh that means the the appearance of a God has taken place in Jesus and so uh that's uh really what is observed long before Christmas Christmas will once again become a replacement of a pagan holy day uh Pentecost which was the rece reception of the holy spirit is a very early holy day and then often times because Friday was the day of the crucifixion we see that as a day of fasting and uh meditation and prayer and preparation for the day of worship um in addition to communion or Eucharist uh being the highest act of worship we have another very early practice called baptism within the church in which an individual who wished to be initiated into the church would either have water poured over their head or if there was enough water it would be completely submerged uh beneath the water and uh this would only happen on Easter Sunday and most commonly they would have a three-year time of training and teaching of what it meant to be a Christian before the person would be baptized um we have the worship service again typically taking place out in the cemetery or if we have a wealthy Christian who has a home large enough sometimes he or she would host the other Christians as long as they're keeping a careful eye out uh for the authorities because again in some areas Christianity was not persecuted nearly as severely as it was in other areas and again prayer singing of hymns uh hopefully someone would be wealthy enough to have a copy of scripture and so there would be readings from scripture and someone would make commentary on that and then the people would come together for a common meal and of course the highest ACT within that common meal again is the reception of communion or the Eucharist for almost 300 years the Roman Empire would view the Christian religion as a dangerous revolutionary rebellious movement against against the empire and so again it it would increase and decrease from time to time on how much persecution was taking place but there were some times in which it was a very systematic organized persecution in which church leaders would be rounded up and uh they would be publicly martyred as a warning uh to others to recant or go away uh from this Christian religion uh this faith in cresus um pictured here is an early Bishop who's a fine example of martyrdom for the Christian religion this is Ignatius it's Bishop of Antioch and as they arrested him in Antioch they began to the Roman soldiers guarding him make a long journey back to the capital of Rome because that's where they want his execution to take place so that everyone sees it and it will be a warning but during his trip there are other small churches that have banded together like militias and they send letters to Ignatius that they have a plan to break him out and free him and Ignatius uh responds to these plans by writing seven letters himself and all seven of his letters uh give us insight into how martyrdom was seen as something uh that would enhance one's reputation even make one a saint in the Christian tradition and so Ignatius in all of his letter says no do not uh come to break me out this is God's will for me to die for my faithfulness to Christ and that's exactly what happened and rather than it becoming a warning sign to Christians and scaring them it begin something that inspires other Christians as they see Ignatius now as a hero of the faith uh one of the men who had planned to break Ignatius out became a bishop himself his name was polycarp and polycarp gets to a very old age uh 86 before he is finally arrested and as he is about to be executed about to be martyred uh the accusation made against him is that he is an atheist Because he believes in an invisible God of course many of the Romans have statues and pictures of their gods saying this is what the gods look like and here you have one who worships an invisible God and so the charge against him is that of atheism and instead right before he dies polycarp turns and points at all of his accusers and says no out with the atheist you're the atheist uh not me because you do not believe in the god of Jesus Christ and so he takes that charge of atheism and turns it against them but it fortunately unfort does not turn out any better for polycarp he is also martyred uh because of his uh faithfulness to the Christian religion another important element that we see developing in early Christianity is the apologist tradition uh pictured here is yet another martyr Justin Martyr and rather than saying philosophy and the teachings of other religions as something that's antithetical to the Christian religion we have just in making the argument that all other philosophies are attempting to get close to the ultimate truth or the absolute truth that you see within the Christian religion and uh this is what we mean by apologist not making an apology in the sense of saying you're sorry about something but an apology is a defense of One's Own philosophical or religious positions and so Justin is the finest representative of an early Christian apologist one who defends the teachings of the Christian faith and one of his primary teachings was that all truth belongs to God so whether you find it in Moses or whether you find it in Plato whether you find it in Cicero uh all of that is truth but again it's all truth that is partial truth and the absolute or ultimate truth is found in Christianity and so this is a a different view that we have developing and it's one that is still uh parts of modern-day Christianity of seeing other teachings not not so much as against Christianity but partial truth rather than the whole truth of Christianity and Justin again a very early example representing that opinion and then things changed dramatically when we come to the early 4th Century of the Common Era the Roman Empire had become so large that it wasn't believed that a single Emperor could rule over the entire Empire so the empire was first divided in half and then it was divided again in half and so we have four Emperors that are all regional Emperors but eventually we have one of these Regional Emperors growing so strong that he decides he wants to bring the entire empire together under his sole control his name is Constantine and Constantine goes on a variety of military campaigns and eventually does uh take one of the other regions of the Empire and then he takes yet another so there's only one that's now out of his control and the night before he is to go into battle against this rival Emperor linius he receives a vision in which he is instructed to place a symbol called the labber room on the Shields and helmets of his soldiers now what is significant about this symbol called the labber room it consists of two Greek letters the kai or the key and the letter row and Kai and row uh was a very common Christian symbol because it's the first two letters in the term Christ and so here we have this Pagan Emperor going into battle with this Christian symbol and it is Constantine strangely who uh now is not so much converting to the Christian religion but certainly accepting it as a religion alongside the other Roman religions and so now after all of these centuries almost 300 years of persecution which it was extremely dangerous to be a Christian now it's an officially sanctioned religion of the Empire now this date is not on the slide but please get it down in your notes in the year 313 of the Common Era or ad we do have the signing of an edict called the Edict of Milan and the Edict of Milan in 313 is is the official formal ending of Imperial persecution of the Christian faith now this does not make anything better for Jewish people because one of the uh primary prejudices biases that develops as the Christian religion continues to grow is that Jewish people are responsible for killing uh Jesus and so therefore we continue to have Jewish persecution anti-Semitism throughout the unfolding centuries but this is the end of Christian persecution as it becomes an officially recognized religion of the Roman Empire and again Constantine is hardly what we would call an Orthodox Christian because he continues to worship the other uh Roman gods alongside worshiping Christ as a matter of fact he refuses to be baptized until he is on his deathbed because one of the most common beliefs of Christians during this time was that after you were baptized you were only allowed one more sin one post-baptismal sin and if you had more than one sin after you were baptized and you would lose your salvation and Constantine is one who had adopted that belief and so he waited until he was on his deathbed to be baptized this officially sanctioned acceptance of Christianity makes the Christian religion look very different than it had ever looked before rather than small groups that are fearing persecution gathering in a small home or at the cemetery early in the morning we now have these enormous structures these sanctuaries that are built where everyone comes together to worship and rather than the stress being on a local community with local leaders we start to have a hierarchical system of uh archbishops and Bishops and the Bishops over a group of priests and eventually the development will come about of the bishop over all Bishops who will be the Pope in the western tradition of Christianity well there were many people that were uh not at all happy about this change in Christianity uh they felt that it should continue to be a very tough and demanding faith and so we do have the development against constantinian Christianity that is a monastic form of Christian uh of the Christian religion and we see this monastic reaction come about in two major approaches one would be an individual monk would move out into the desert or out into the Wilderness where he would rely on individuals coming to visit him to bring him food but his life would be spent in meditation and prayer and fasting a pictured here is one of our earliest examples if not the earliest example of an aesthetic Christian monk this is St Anthony okay St Anthony is uh sometimes referred to as an anchorite desert monk okay one who had moved out into the Wilderness and he waits uh for friends and followers to come find him in the desert to bring him just a little more of food uh when it's not during a time of fasting but again this is the athetic tradition where you are completely alone as an isolated individual practicing this form of monasticism the other tradition is called the citic tradition and the citic tradition would be a group of men and eventually a group of women but never men and women together but a group of men monks or a group of women nuns who would voluntarily form a self-sufficient community uh where they would have a small garden uh and then uh you would have some people responsible for growing the crops you would have others responsible for cooking the meals uh you would have uh worship where you would come together every day in some monastic forms up to nine times a day you would be required to come together for some sort of worship and it was a commitment to living as simply uh as possible but rather than living completely alone uh living in a community and our first best example of this is a fellow named pomus and one thing to know about the pomian style Monastery is you could not just go there one day and sign up and say I want to be a part of this you would actually have to stand outside of the gate and you would have to show how dedicated you were until they decided within the monastery to open the gates and welcome you and as part of the community uh just as a quick aside here if any of you have ever seen the movie Fight Club which is one of my favorites uh you notice that the they set up a pomian style community and uh this is uh that part of the movie if you've seen it is copied from this uh early form of monasticism of one having to stand outside the doors of the home in the movie Fight Club until Tyler Duran uh the leader of the group decides to let you in to be part of the community uh coincidentally uh many of these who came to join the pomian style Monastery were not even Christians they had not heard the Christian story they were simply attracted to this simple idea of living in a self-sufficient community and it's only after they came into the community that they would hear the Christian story and convert and be baptized

this is your first lecture on the religion of Christianity after the Jewish people had a century of relative Freedom that being from around 165 BCE uh to 63 BCE or BC we then find that the Roman Emperor Pompei comes into Jerusalem and takes over the city and so once again we find the Jewish people being under foreign control Imperial control uh there are four sociopolitical parties that you need to be aware of among the Jewish people pertaining to their response to this Roman occupation and uh this is very important for understanding the background at the time when Jesus of Nazareth would have been born uh he was born sometime between the year 6 and four BCE or BC uh first of all we have two very conservative groups that hold the majority of the power you see them pictured here in their religious Court called the Sanhedrin they called the Sadducees and the Pharisees uh very similar to our Republicans and Democrats that uh comprise Congress today the Sanhedrin had these two uh religious political parties that held all of the Power the Sadducees felt that the most important thing was that the people had the temple and as long as the Jewish people had the temple the Sadducees were so wealthy they were willing to pay whatever taxes Rome would demand because it really wouldn&#39;t hurt them in the pocketbook like it would the much poorer Jewish people so the Sadducees again felt as long as they had the temple uh then therefore they had God&#39;s presence with them and everything was just fine the Pharisees were the other uh very strong religious political power in the Sanhedrin and rather than their focus being on the temple they felt it was much more important to have obedience to the law of Moses and you may remember back on one of the last lectures on Judaism we had the Scribe or the priest named Ezra who pointed out that there were 613 of those laws and so the Pharisees were experts in the law and they were interpreters of of the law and we do find that Jesus comes in conflict with this group of people uh quite a bit as well as the Sadducees the Sadducees and Pharisees are the ones that Jesus will have the most conflicts with now one group that was far removed from society in Jerusalem were the essenes uh they stayed on the outskirts of town where there were caverns and caves and the most important thing to this very conservative withdrawn group was to make sure that scripture would be preserved and so the essenes spent hour after hour each day just copying scripture over and over and over again and then they would put it in some sort of protective sstn and then they would hide that jar uh somewhere in the caves and we still have archaeologists today who are discovering uh new copies of scripture that were done by the essenes some over 2,000 years ago and then we uh lastly have a very large group called the zealots and many believe that most of Jesus followers came from this group uh the zealots were the ones most opposed to Roman control because they could not afford this Roman occupation with the amount of taxes that were being taken from them and so they are zealous uh to take back Jerusalem as a Jewish City and therefore the zealots have a great deal of hope that the Messiah this promised Warrior deliverer uh that God is going to send to them will arrive at any time and there were many would be Messiahs during the time of Jesus and of course Jesus followers believe him to be the Messiah although he will turn out to be a very different kind of Messiah than what they had hoped for remember they they hoped for a messiah who would come with the sword to conquer Rome and Jesus again will end up being a very different kind of Messiah the most important events for the Christian religion happen in in a span of about 50 days and uh ironically uh just so happens we&#39;re at the time of year that we&#39;re at the very beginning of that stretch of time uh this is uh what we refer to as Holy Week within the Christian tradition and it begins on a day called Palm Sunday when Jesus comes into Jerusalem and is greeted as a Conquering Hero by the crowds there many have come to believe that he is the Messiah at this point and the Pharisees and Sadducees are there in Jerusalem and they&#39;re very angry and some of them are very afraid of Jesus and they are already scheming to bring about the end of Jesus life on this Palm Sunday when all of the poor are lining the streets to welcome Jesus uh we then see Jesus go through uh days of giving his final teachings to those in Jerusalem on Monday Tuesday and Wednesday and then on Thursday Jesus makes the decision to celebrate the Jewish Passover with his disciples and so uh we have him securing a small apartment apartment an upper room uh where he takes uh the two of the elements used in a Passover seder Mill and he transforms their meaning and this becomes an extremely important Christian ritual or Sacrament in which Jesus Takes the bread and breaks it and says that the bread is now his body and he takes the cup of wine and blesses it and says that that is now his blood and so the understanding is that as the disciples partake of that bread and that cup uh they are therefore taking Jesus into themselves uh later that Thursday night Jesus is arrested he is betrayed by one of his disciples named Judas and he goes through a series of illegal trials throughout Thursday night and into the early uh hours of Friday morning and then at 9:00 on Friday morning Jesus is crucified and uh this is a common form of execution for criminals uh Jesus uh matter of fact was not even crucified alone according to the stories within the uh Christian religion we have two other thieves who are uh crucified on either side of Jesus a typical uh means of death here is by Suffocation that eventually uh your muscles get so tired that you&#39;re no longer able to draw yourself up to take a breath and so Suffocation would be the primary way that one would die if a person lasted a very long time on a cross than sometimes just exposure to the elements would bring about uh death but Jesus does not last long on the cross uh because uh It is believed that he received some very severe beatings before being crucified and the most common belief is that Jesus lasts approximately 6 hours from about 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon uh we then have uh Jesus being buried which is quite unusual we had two wealthy men secure permission to remove Jesus body from the cross and have him uh buried in a tomb this was unusual because usually the common criminal the body would just be allowed to Decay and fall from the cross and there were known to be ravenous dogs that would hang around the place of crucifixion uh in order to eat that which would fall from the cross so definitely not a pleasant scene by any means at all uh and then we have the called Holy Saturday in which and this is surprising to many Christian people but the belief is that on this holy Satur Saturday that Jesus descends down to Hell and frees those who are imprisoned in hell and then on Sunday morning we have the tomb where Jesus was placed is empty the stone uh that covered the tomb was rolled away and uh we have the belief that Jesus has been resurrected this is not the same as resuscitation res recitation is to bring someone back to life uh Resurrection was a very unique event to believe that someone is brought into an entirely new way of life and this resurrected Jesus begins making several appearances uh over the next 40 days after these 40 days we have Jesus giving final directions to his disciples telling them that they need to go throughout the world and continue his teachings and then uh Jesus ascends uh in into the sky back into the heavens where it is believed that he returns to the one that he called God the Father uh one of the last things that Jesus tells his disciples is to make them a promise that uh the holy spirit will be given to them and so that event concludes this most important 50 days uh for the Christian religion on the day of Pentecost which is the Jewish celebration of the Harvest uh we have this event where the disciples are hiding in a small apartment apartment in Jerusalem and enormous wind and then flames in the shape of tongues come down from the sky and fill the room and the disciples pour out from that apartment into the streets of Jerusalem and they begin telling the story of Jesus in all sorts of different languages uh languages that they had never been trained to learn but suddenly this holy spirit gives them all of these different languages to speak to all of the different people who have come into Jerusalem for for this celebration of the Harvest and so this is when the Christian uh religion really begins to spread rapidly who were these very first uh Christians well first of all they weren&#39;t called Christians they were simply uh known as members of the way uh that&#39;s what the teachings and the life of Jesus were uh uh the earliest name given to that was simply the way and so that&#39;s what these very first Christians were were called uh eventually there&#39;s a city to the north called Antioch uh to the north of Jerusalem and it is there that the people who spread the teachings of Jesus are called little Christ or Christians uh but the disciples who uh had followed Jesus that&#39;s what the term disciple means one who follows Jesus are now seen as Apostles which means a one who is sent and so those who had followed are now those who are sent and they become the earliest leaders of this church in Jerusalem uh we do have with very few exceptions this first generation of Christians being Jewish people who had adopted the belief that Jesus was the Messiah they had been waiting for just turns out that he was a much different Messiah rather than conquering with the sword he allowed himself to be uh defeated and through that defeat through the death on the cross these early Christians perceive a greater spiritual victory that comes from that uh we do have some names we need to go over here uh it seems that the chief among these disciples or Apostles was a fellow named Peter his name was was actually Simon and Jesus changed his name to Peter which means the Rock and Jesus on one occasion even told Peter that it was on him the rock that he would build his church uh John is another one of the early disciples he was probably the youngest of the disciples and he appears to be the only one who lived to old age uh without being martyred uh we have most of the disciples and early followers of Jesus are eventually arrested and they are executed and that&#39;s what makes them a martyr um Mary Magdalene very important female disciple of Jesus uh contrary to popular opinion nowhere in the New Testament has she ever called a prostitute a lot of people uh make that uh mistake of thinking that she is a prostitute perhaps she was but nowhere in the story is it ever said that she is a prostitute uh Steven and Philip significant as two of the very first deacons turns out these disciples become so busy uh with the work that they need to do that they don&#39;t have time to take care of some of the needs of the poor and the widows and so they create this office of the deacon and the deacons will take care of those sorts of needs important thing to have down in your notes about Steph is that he is believed to be the very first Christian martyr uh that he accuses a group of Jewish people leaving worship of being responsible for Jesus death and they become so angry at him for his accusations that they throw rocks at him until he has died as a matter of fact the story actually uses the euphemism of saying he falls asleep and uh so we have Steph as our very first Christian martyr um James is believed by many to be a brother of Jesus a half brother of Jesus uh because of the teaching of the Virgin birth of Jesus um James was also a very important leader of that early church Church in Jerusalem and then perhaps most significant for making our transition to the next generation of Christian religion is a fellow named Paul who never met Jesus and was actually uh known as Saul of Tarsus and someone who sought to execute Christians and he was on a trip to a place called Damascus where he heard there were Christians hiding out and uh while he is on his journey he is knocked to the ground and blinded and according to the story the voice of Jesus comes from the heavens and asks Saul why he is persecuting uh Jesus and it&#39;s at that moment that Saul converts from being the Christian killer to becoming a very important Christian Missionary and Paul becomes extremely significant in that he takes the Christian religion beyond the boundaries of Judaism because up until this time Christianity had been understood as a small sect of rebellious Jews but now Paul begins taking this story of Christ the teachings of Christ uh and actually it&#39;s not so much the teachings of Christ as it is what Paul views as the significance of who Christ is and he takes that message all over the Roman Empire and the Christian religion begins expanding as something Beyond Judaism at that point although there were some wealthy and educated Christians the vast majority of Christians appear to be uh the poor and the uneducated and again it was a heavily persecuted religion and so um the most common place of Christian worship was actually at in the cemetery or what they called The Catacombs and uh the early Christians would go out there to worship very very early on a Sunday morning before the sun had even uh risen and they would um sing songs there were hymns very early on in the Christian tradition be the offering of prayer but the most important part of worship was the observance of communion or the Eucharist in which the bread and the cup would be taken and there were some Christians who were very strongly tied into the Jewish tradition that continued to worship on Saturday rather than Sunday uh some of the earliest holy days that were important of course the day of worship on Sunday because of the resurrection of Christ except for those that remain true to the Sabbath tradition of Saturday and then one Sunday a year would be recognized as the uh celebration of Christ&#39;s resurrection and that would be Easter and uh Easter was actually a replacement eventually of a pagan holy day it would later on in a few centuries later it would become a replacement of the vernal equinox of celebrating uh the arrival of the season of spring and then we also have no Christmas observed early on in the Christian calendar but instead we have the day of January 6th celebrated as the day of epiphany and uh that means the the appearance of a God has taken place in Jesus and so uh that&#39;s uh really what is observed long before Christmas Christmas will once again become a replacement of a pagan holy day uh Pentecost which was the rece reception of the holy spirit is a very early holy day and then often times because Friday was the day of the crucifixion we see that as a day of fasting and uh meditation and prayer and preparation for the day of worship um in addition to communion or Eucharist uh being the highest act of worship we have another very early practice called baptism within the church in which an individual who wished to be initiated into the church would either have water poured over their head or if there was enough water it would be completely submerged uh beneath the water and uh this would only happen on Easter Sunday and most commonly they would have a three-year time of training and teaching of what it meant to be a Christian before the person would be baptized um we have the worship service again typically taking place out in the cemetery or if we have a wealthy Christian who has a home large enough sometimes he or she would host the other Christians as long as they&#39;re keeping a careful eye out uh for the authorities because again in some areas Christianity was not persecuted nearly as severely as it was in other areas and again prayer singing of hymns uh hopefully someone would be wealthy enough to have a copy of scripture and so there would be readings from scripture and someone would make commentary on that and then the people would come together for a common meal and of course the highest ACT within that common meal again is the reception of communion or the Eucharist for almost 300 years the Roman Empire would view the Christian religion as a dangerous revolutionary rebellious movement against against the empire and so again it it would increase and decrease from time to time on how much persecution was taking place but there were some times in which it was a very systematic organized persecution in which church leaders would be rounded up and uh they would be publicly martyred as a warning uh to others to recant or go away uh from this Christian religion uh this faith in cresus um pictured here is an early Bishop who&#39;s a fine example of martyrdom for the Christian religion this is Ignatius it&#39;s Bishop of Antioch and as they arrested him in Antioch they began to the Roman soldiers guarding him make a long journey back to the capital of Rome because that&#39;s where they want his execution to take place so that everyone sees it and it will be a warning but during his trip there are other small churches that have banded together like militias and they send letters to Ignatius that they have a plan to break him out and free him and Ignatius uh responds to these plans by writing seven letters himself and all seven of his letters uh give us insight into how martyrdom was seen as something uh that would enhance one&#39;s reputation even make one a saint in the Christian tradition and so Ignatius in all of his letter says no do not uh come to break me out this is God&#39;s will for me to die for my faithfulness to Christ and that&#39;s exactly what happened and rather than it becoming a warning sign to Christians and scaring them it begin something that inspires other Christians as they see Ignatius now as a hero of the faith uh one of the men who had planned to break Ignatius out became a bishop himself his name was polycarp and polycarp gets to a very old age uh 86 before he is finally arrested and as he is about to be executed about to be martyred uh the accusation made against him is that he is an atheist Because he believes in an invisible God of course many of the Romans have statues and pictures of their gods saying this is what the gods look like and here you have one who worships an invisible God and so the charge against him is that of atheism and instead right before he dies polycarp turns and points at all of his accusers and says no out with the atheist you&#39;re the atheist uh not me because you do not believe in the god of Jesus Christ and so he takes that charge of atheism and turns it against them but it fortunately unfort does not turn out any better for polycarp he is also martyred uh because of his uh faithfulness to the Christian religion another important element that we see developing in early Christianity is the apologist tradition uh pictured here is yet another martyr Justin Martyr and rather than saying philosophy and the teachings of other religions as something that&#39;s antithetical to the Christian religion we have just in making the argument that all other philosophies are attempting to get close to the ultimate truth or the absolute truth that you see within the Christian religion and uh this is what we mean by apologist not making an apology in the sense of saying you&#39;re sorry about something but an apology is a defense of One&#39;s Own philosophical or religious positions and so Justin is the finest representative of an early Christian apologist one who defends the teachings of the Christian faith and one of his primary teachings was that all truth belongs to God so whether you find it in Moses or whether you find it in Plato whether you find it in Cicero uh all of that is truth but again it&#39;s all truth that is partial truth and the absolute or ultimate truth is found in Christianity and so this is a a different view that we have developing and it&#39;s one that is still uh parts of modern-day Christianity of seeing other teachings not not so much as against Christianity but partial truth rather than the whole truth of Christianity and Justin again a very early example representing that opinion and then things changed dramatically when we come to the early 4th Century of the Common Era the Roman Empire had become so large that it wasn&#39;t believed that a single Emperor could rule over the entire Empire so the empire was first divided in half and then it was divided again in half and so we have four Emperors that are all regional Emperors but eventually we have one of these Regional Emperors growing so strong that he decides he wants to bring the entire empire together under his sole control his name is Constantine and Constantine goes on a variety of military campaigns and eventually does uh take one of the other regions of the Empire and then he takes yet another so there&#39;s only one that&#39;s now out of his control and the night before he is to go into battle against this rival Emperor linius he receives a vision in which he is instructed to place a symbol called the labber room on the Shields and helmets of his soldiers now what is significant about this symbol called the labber room it consists of two Greek letters the kai or the key and the letter row and Kai and row uh was a very common Christian symbol because it&#39;s the first two letters in the term Christ and so here we have this Pagan Emperor going into battle with this Christian symbol and it is Constantine strangely who uh now is not so much converting to the Christian religion but certainly accepting it as a religion alongside the other Roman religions and so now after all of these centuries almost 300 years of persecution which it was extremely dangerous to be a Christian now it&#39;s an officially sanctioned religion of the Empire now this date is not on the slide but please get it down in your notes in the year 313 of the Common Era or ad we do have the signing of an edict called the Edict of Milan and the Edict of Milan in 313 is is the official formal ending of Imperial persecution of the Christian faith now this does not make anything better for Jewish people because one of the uh primary prejudices biases that develops as the Christian religion continues to grow is that Jewish people are responsible for killing uh Jesus and so therefore we continue to have Jewish persecution anti-Semitism throughout the unfolding centuries but this is the end of Christian persecution as it becomes an officially recognized religion of the Roman Empire and again Constantine is hardly what we would call an Orthodox Christian because he continues to worship the other uh Roman gods alongside worshiping Christ as a matter of fact he refuses to be baptized until he is on his deathbed because one of the most common beliefs of Christians during this time was that after you were baptized you were only allowed one more sin one post-baptismal sin and if you had more than one sin after you were baptized and you would lose your salvation and Constantine is one who had adopted that belief and so he waited until he was on his deathbed to be baptized this officially sanctioned acceptance of Christianity makes the Christian religion look very different than it had ever looked before rather than small groups that are fearing persecution gathering in a small home or at the cemetery early in the morning we now have these enormous structures these sanctuaries that are built where everyone comes together to worship and rather than the stress being on a local community with local leaders we start to have a hierarchical system of uh archbishops and Bishops and the Bishops over a group of priests and eventually the development will come about of the bishop over all Bishops who will be the Pope in the western tradition of Christianity well there were many people that were uh not at all happy about this change in Christianity uh they felt that it should continue to be a very tough and demanding faith and so we do have the development against constantinian Christianity that is a monastic form of Christian uh of the Christian religion and we see this monastic reaction come about in two major approaches one would be an individual monk would move out into the desert or out into the Wilderness where he would rely on individuals coming to visit him to bring him food but his life would be spent in meditation and prayer and fasting a pictured here is one of our earliest examples if not the earliest example of an aesthetic Christian monk this is St Anthony okay St Anthony is uh sometimes referred to as an anchorite desert monk okay one who had moved out into the Wilderness and he waits uh for friends and followers to come find him in the desert to bring him just a little more of food uh when it&#39;s not during a time of fasting but again this is the athetic tradition where you are completely alone as an isolated individual practicing this form of monasticism the other tradition is called the citic tradition and the citic tradition would be a group of men and eventually a group of women but never men and women together but a group of men monks or a group of women nuns who would voluntarily form a self-sufficient community uh where they would have a small garden uh and then uh you would have some people responsible for growing the crops you would have others responsible for cooking the meals uh you would have uh worship where you would come together every day in some monastic forms up to nine times a day you would be required to come together for some sort of worship and it was a commitment to living as simply uh as possible but rather than living completely alone uh living in a community and our first best example of this is a fellow named pomus and one thing to know about the pomian style Monastery is you could not just go there one day and sign up and say I want to be a part of this you would actually have to stand outside of the gate and you would have to show how dedicated you were until they decided within the monastery to open the gates and welcome you and as part of the community uh just as a quick aside here if any of you have ever seen the movie Fight Club which is one of my favorites uh you notice that the they set up a pomian style community and uh this is uh that part of the movie if you&#39;ve seen it is copied from this uh early form of monasticism of one having to stand outside the doors of the home in the movie Fight Club until Tyler Duran uh the leader of the group decides to let you in to be part of the community uh coincidentally uh many of these who came to join the pomian style Monastery were not even Christians they had not heard the Christian story they were simply attracted to this simple idea of living in a self-sufficient community and it&#39;s only after they came into the community that they would hear the Christian story and convert and be baptized

Transcript for:Introduction to the History of Christianity

Transcript for:
Introduction to the History of Christianity