Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

245 Pages·2002·1.31 MB·English

by  Rod Bennett

FOUR WITNESSES
ROD BENNETT
FOUR WITNESSES
The Early Church in Her Own Words
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations (except those included within the patristic texts themselves)
have been taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, the Old Testament © 1952, and the
New Testament © 1946, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America.
Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States
of America copyright © 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English
translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica copyright ©
1997, United States Catholic conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with permission.
Cover art by Christopher J. Pelicano
Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum
© 2002 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-89870-847-8
Library of Congress Control Number 2001088858
Printed in the United States of America
This book is gratefully dedicated to the memory of John Henry Newman The
Fathers are primarily to be considered as witnesses, not as authorities. They are
witnesses of an existing state of things, and their treatises are, as it were,
histories—teaching us, in the first instance, matters of fact, not of opinion.
Whatever they themselves might be, whether deeply or poorly taught in
Christian faith and love, they speak, not their own thoughts, but the received
views of their respective ages.
Primitive Christianity: Essays and Sketches, 1833-1836
Contents
Introduction
A Note about Historical Accuracy
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Clement of Rome
Ignatius of Antioch
Justin Martyr
Irenaeus of Lyons
Afterword
Appendix—Catholic Teaching in the Early Church
Timeline
Endnotes
Introduction
The early Church is no mystery. As a matter of fact, most believers would be
astonished to learn just how much we do know about the first three hundred
years of Christian history. We have, for example, much inspiring history about
the founding of her many congregations throughout the ancient world. We
actually know the names of some of her earliest pastors, and in a few cases we
have their writings to read. We still have harrowing accounts of her persecution
by the Pharisees and by the pagan Romans. We know what sorts of heresies
attacked the early Church and, once again, the very names of the heretics who
stood against her. We have hymns and prayers and poetry preserved from this
period. We have epitaphs from Christian tombs. We have doctrinal statements,
Bible commentary, and sermons dating from these days. We have responsive
readings used in church; in fact, we have a good deal of information about how
the Sunday services were conducted. To put it briefly, we have (contrary to
popular belief) a very vivid picture of primitive Christianity—and a picture that
is open for investigation by anyone. Some Christians speculate that when
Constantine legalized the faith in A.D. 313 many half-converted pagans corrupted
the Church by introducing elements retained from their old beliefs. If you are
anything like me, you will be amazed to discover that we have literally
thousands of pages of documentation dating from long, long before this
legalization—much of which is, to the emperor Constantine, as distant backward
in time as the Declaration of Independence is to President George W. Bush. And
this information is reliable. Most of us have heard, I suppose, of “apocryphal”
Christian writings from the first and second centuries; spurious books like The
Gospel of Thomas and The Acts of Paul. These were pseudo-scriptures
manufactured by early cults like the Gnostics and Manichees to shore up their
false teachings; they were condemned by the Church as soon as they appeared.
But this same Church produced post-New Testament writings; works that, while
not to be classed with the inerrant Word of God, do accurately represent the
character, teachings, and practices of the very earliest Christians. Priceless
artifacts such as The Martyrdom of Polycarp, The Epistle of Barnabas, and The
Shepherd of Hermas—all of these come down to us with as much
trustworthiness as any ancient document, as reliable as the Jewish Antiquities of
Josephus or Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Romans. All of today’s Christian
scholars agree that these invaluable records really are authentic productions of
the early Church. There is nothing “apocryphal” about them. They have all the
authority—not, indeed, of Scripture—but of history.
And yet, like most modern believers, I have lived practically all of my
Christian life knowing next to nothing about any of this. Until I discovered these
writings a few years ago any vague ideas I might have had about the early
Church came straight out of old C. B. DeMille movies. I honestly did not think it
was possible to know much more—or I believe I would have tried harder.
Looking back, I can see that I had a very sincere (but completely ungrounded)
conviction that the period from Revelation to Constantine was Terra Incognita—
a gaping “Dark Continent” on the map of history. After all, I had spent quite a
lot of time in denominations, para-church movements, and “home-cell” groups
whose publicly announced intention was “to restore the pure Christianity of the
early Church”. Not one of them had ever sent me back to any first-or second-
century documentation for evidence. So who knew? Who could have imagined
—with so many competing versions of “pure New Testament Christianity” on
the market out there—that finding out what the early Church was like might be
as simple as opening up the records and having a look?
Like many of you readers, I suspect, I have been familiar with the Scriptures
since childhood—to my eternal benefit. Raised in a strong, Bible-believing
branch of Protestant Evangelicalism, I was taught to glory in the famous
Reformation rallying cry of “Sola Scriptura”—the fiery conviction that the
Bible and the Bible alone constitutes the basis for Christian belief. We saw this
as the only way to prevent mere “traditions of men” from creeping into our
religion. But was it perhaps this honorable passion to defend the uniqueness of
Scripture that eventually led us to neglect such a huge treasure chest of
testimony about the early Church? In our sincere eagerness to be “Bible
Christians”, had we perhaps come to undervalue the witness of God’s hand in
Church history? I really had to start taking this possibility seriously when I
learned that even my Reformation heroes had not hesitated to reference these
ancient writings. Even Luther and Calvin—the very men who taught us Sola
Scriptura in the first place—knew and respected these venerable saints whom
ancient custom has given the title Fathers of the Church. They quite often used
the writings of early giants like Ambrose and Augustine to bolster their various
arguments. In fact, I eventually discovered that John Calvin had not only
affirmed the testimony of these Church Fathers but unequivocally declared that
for the first six hundred years of her existence on earth the Church had remained
“pure and undefiled”.
This was good enough for me—good enough, in fact, to start at least one old-
fashioned Baptist from the Bible Belt looking into the lives and teachings of
exotic sounding characters like “Cyprian of Carthage”, “Gregory Nazianzen”,
“Epiphanius of Salamis”, and “Didymus the Blind”. Poking around in a local
Christian bookshop one rainy afternoon, I stumbled upon a set of books entitled
The Ante-Nicene Fathers (“ante-Nicene” refers to the period prior to the Council
of Nicaea, held in A.D. 325). They were squirreled away on a back shelf—at least
ten volumes, reprinted from an old nineteenth-century edition issued in England
by an Anglican publisher. I gingerly cracked the covers, apparently the first
customer to do so. Within five minutes I knew that I had just dropped down the
rabbit hole into Wonderland. Two whole volumes in this set—big, fat, hard-
bound library books stuffed with tiny print—did not have a word in them written
later than A.D. 200. I do not mind saying that I leapt in with both feet.
The first thing to go was my “gap theory”—that is, my nebulous notion that a
tactful three-hundred-year silence keeps “pure, early Christianity” locked safely
away in the Platonic world of ideals. Right off the bat I encountered four
eloquent witnesses squarely straddling this alleged gap between apostolic and
postapostolic Christianity. To begin with there was Clement of Rome and his
Epistle to the Corinthians—a book written, by conservative estimates, about the
same time as the Gospel of John. I also discovered Ignatius, an early pastor of
the church at Antioch and a man described by several ancient writers as “a
hearer of the apostles”. We have at least five certified epistles of Ignatius; all of
them composed in or about A.D. 107 . . . which dates them to within a decade of
the close of the apostolic age. Justin Martyr reports that the Church had spread
across the known world by his time—the year 150. And Irenaeus of Lyons, in
his massive, five-volume work Against Heresies, wistfully recalls studying his
theology at the feet of Polycarp. Polycarp was personally taught by John the
Beloved, who was personally taught by Jesus Christ, who was personally taught
by God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Which, obviously,
kicked my convenient “gap” beliefs right in the pants. There is no gap. My four
witnesses had eliminated this option forever. And I suddenly realized, with a
little trepidation, that I was actually going to have to start dealing with the early
Church from now on . . . rather than just identifying myself with her.
Pushing ahead, I moved beyond my initial encounter into a period of intense
study. In fact, for nearly a year I read little else but the Bible and these four
Apostolic Fathers. Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons,