An 11-Day Study On Challenges To Biblical AuthoritySample

HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT THE EARLIEST CHRISTIANS BELIEVED?

THE FOUR S’S OF ORTHODOXY, FROM JESUS TO IRENAEUS (AD 30–AD 180)

The question before us is, How do we know what the earliest Christians really believed and how were they able to reliably pass core theology down before there was a functional canon of Scripture? In other words, how was the early message of Jesus’ resurrection and other core doctrines that Paul received protected and transmitted among early Christians?

It is crucial to recognize that the ancient world was predominantly an oral culture. That is, societies were used to functioning without books. We, however, live in a post-Guttenberg world, so many of us have a hard time imagining how an oral culture could produce a reliable history. Oral tradition is often caricatured as crude storytelling along the lines of the telephone game we all played as kids. This is an inaccurate picture, to say the least.

Richard Bauckham, professor of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews, has done extensive research on oral tradition and eyewitness testimony in the first-century Jewish context. He writes, “Trusting testimony is not an irrational act of faith that leaves critical rationality aside; it is, on the contrary, the rationally appropriate way of responding to authentic testimony. Gospels understood as testimony are the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical Jesus.” He further notes that modern skeptics of testimony find themselves in an awkward position because “it is also a rather neglected fact that all history . . . relies on testimony.” In other words, you can dispense with testimony as a legitimate source of knowledge only if you are willing to dispense with the ability to discover anything about the past.

With the importance of testimony in mind, New Testament scholar Darrell Bock uses four S’s to describe the organic process by which orthodoxy was maintained until there was a functioning canon of Scripture.

1. Scriptures

The earliest Christians were Jewish. Consequently, they took as their starting point the worldview of Jewish monotheism. This group saw continuity in what God had done in the Old Testament (i.e., the Hebrew Scriptures) and what God was doing now through Jesus the Messiah. Therefore it was natural and common for them to read the Hebrew Scriptures at public worship services. Notice Paul’s words in light of this reality: “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). The foundational documents of the earliest Christians were the Hebrew Scriptures. They were the theological baseline.

2. Summaries

Early Christians memorized and recited doctrinal summaries alongside the Hebrew Scriptures when they gathered for worship in house churches as they spread out across the Greco-Roman world. These oral texts were later embedded in written texts. It is important to highlight that these summaries often included the technical language of “delivered” and “received,” language that related to how Jewish rabbis passed on formal tradition to their disciples.

3. Singing

How did you learn the words to “Amazing Grace”? Did you sit down and memorize it, or did you absorb it over time? The same was true for the earliest Christians. When they gathered, early Christians sang their theology in hymns to show their devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ (Philippians 2:5–11 and Colossians 1:15–20 are two of the most famous in the NT). And just like catchy songs you can’t get out of your head, the theologically rich lyrics stuck with them. Here is a classic passage concerning Yahweh (YHWH) in the Old Testament: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. . . . To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance” (Isaiah 45:22–23). Now look at the hymn the earliest Christians were singing to Jesus: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11). The very same exaltation due to YHWH in Isaiah 45:23 is now due to Jesus Christ as well. And this essential belief is in place from the very beginning.

4. Sacraments

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were practiced on a regular basis in the local church context, and they both pictured the basic elements of the salvation story as core theology (cf. Matthew 28:19–20; 1 Corinthians 11:23–26; Ephesians 4:4–6). Essentially you have a theological object lesson going on every time each of these ordinances is practiced in early Christianity.

These creeds, hymns, and practices predated the writing of the New Testament documents. (Remember that this was an oral culture and most people in the ancient world could not read.) Think of these last three S’s as “oral texts” that the earliest Christian community recited and practiced before a completed New Testament existed. These foundational beliefs (sometimes called the “rule of faith”) established the nonnegotiable core of orthodoxy from the very beginning.