Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine
Overview
About
01: Christianity as a Religion
Among world religions, Christianity is both the best and least known. Its political and cultural importance in Western civilization is obvious. Its institutional arrangements, theological disputes, and moral teachings are familiar. Less clear is the reason that the Christian religion; despised by many and declared dead many times; continues to draw adherents from every nation. The study of Christianity precisely as a religion offers clues.
02: What Is a Religion?
Definitions of religion disagree even on basic points. Still, they can point us toward some true elements. A look at inadequate definitions that emphasize membership, ritual, belief, and morals serves to construct a more adequate definition based on a way of life organized around the perception of ultimate power.
03: The Role of Religious Experience
The topic of religious experience is problematic. Science has trouble with human experience as evidence, and the more religious studies tries to be scientific using methods; the less attractive claims to religious experience using discourse seem. However, an analysis of Joachim Wach's definition of religious experience suggests how both etic and emic evidence can enrich such study.
04: Sourcing Christianity
Christianity drew from religious patterns in both Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures. Access to all ancient religious traditions is limited because of the nature of those traditions, the origin and nature of the sources, and the accidents of their preservation. A phenomenological approach that uses every available source and means of analysis enables the richest sense of Christianity as a religious experience and movement.
05: The Imperial Context
Christianity was born in the Mediterranean world of the 1st century CE, whose several layers of culture; including ancient patterns resistant to fundamental change affected the development of this new religion. Politically, the world was ruled by Rome; culturally, by Greek ideals. The ancient Hebrew national religion, Judaism, had spread across the Greco-Roman world and was the context from which Christianity emerged.
06: Greco-Roman Polytheism
Greco-Roman culture was polytheistic, and was permeated by religiosity of every sort. Religious behavior both reflected and reinforced the cultural system called patronage. The early empire saw a proliferation of such religious phenomena as prophecy, healing, and initiation into mystery cults. Even some forms of philosophy took on a religious character.
07: Greco-Roman Religious Experience
Extant evidence is slender, but indicates that people in Greco-Roman culture seemed to demonstrate the same range of attitudes toward ultimate power as people do today. Three examples give us a sense of genuine religious experience in antiquity.
08: The Symbolic World of Torah
Judaism in the 1st century was a vibrant and complex phenomenon. Diaspora and Palestinian Judaism show distinct characteristics, but even Palestinian Judaism was internally divided. All Jews, however, shared the same basic story, convictions, symbols, and practices, which can be called the symbolic world of Torah. The religious life of Jews in Palestine was polytheistic and revolved around three main loci: the Temple, the synagogue, and the home.
09: Palestinian Judaism in the Greco-Roman World
The competing sects of Judaism in Palestine expressed Jewish identity in response to Roman rule and Hellenistic culture through patterns of passive or active resistance. Sometimes these conflicts are so highlighted that the deep religious character of Palestinian Judaism is obscured. Four examples provide evidence for the consistency and variety of Jewish piety in Palestine.
10: Judaism in the Hellenistic Diaspora
Life in the Diaspora enabled Judaism to develop in distinctive ways. Most notably, it enabled an engagement with Greek culture that was more positive and pervasive. Alexandrian Judaism provides a glimpse of Jewish life in the Hellenistic Diaspora, with an increased importance of the synagogue, and a literature based on the Greek translation of Torah.
11: Jesus and the Gospels
The Christian Gospels offer at best a second-hand look at the religious experience of Jesus. We cannot recover the "historical Jesus," but we can draw some broad inferences concerning the Jesus of the Gospels from the judicious use of the deeds, sayings, and traits ascribed to him by those narratives.
12: The Resurrection Experience
A comparison to the founders of Buddhism and Islam sharpens the distinctiveness of Christian origins. It is not so much "Jesus' experience" that begins Christianity as his followers' claim to "experience of Jesus" after his death. The character of this experience can be approached through the claims the first Christians made about themselves, which involve the experience of a personal, transforming power.
13: Movement Meets World—Five Key Transitions
Christianity's rapid spread across the Mediterranean world in the first generation of its existence is even more remarkable given that it had to accomplish five transitions immediately: geographical, linguistic, cultural, sociological, and demographic. The Acts of the Apostles provides a narrative framework for Christianity's emergence, and shows the role played by such religious phenomena as baptism, fellowship meals, healings, speaking in tongues, visions, and prayer.
14: Ritual Imprinting and Politics of Perfection
Baptism, early Christianity's ritual of initiation, can usefully be compared to such rituals in ancient Greco-Roman and other cultural systems. Such comparison provides perspective on the conflict reported in two of Paul's letters Galatians and Colossians, between the apostle and members of communities who sought circumcision in addition to baptism.
15: Glossolalia and the Embarrassments of Experience
Forms of ecstatic speech were part of Hebrew and Greco-Roman tradition. It is not shocking, then, to find glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as a manifestation of spiritual possession in earliest Christianity. More difficult to answer is why such a powerful expression of the Holy Spirit's presence should be so quickly marginalized in Christianity.
16: Meals Are Where the Magic Is
Evidence from Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures testifies to the peculiar power experienced by participants in meals. The cultural contexts, however, offer a number of possible antecedents to Christian practice. What, then, was the precise meaning of the Christian meal? What is the appropriate way to interpret archaeological and literary evidence?
17: Healing and Salvation
Physical healing and exorcism are major components of Jesus' ministry in the Gospels and play a large role in the Acts of the Apostles canonical and apocryphal. In early Christianity, healing is associated with five distinct motifs. They are a sign of divine presence, of the healer's compassion, of stages of spiritual transformation, of restoration to community, and of faith.
18: Access to Power—Visions and Prayer
In all ancient religions, visions and prayer represent the two-way traffic between humans and the divine. The prayer of Jesus and his followers offers clues to their perception of that larger reality. The reported visions of Jesus, Stephen, Peter, Paul, and John provide glimpses of what they experienced.
19: The Holy Community
From the beginning, Christianity took the form of an organized community called the church (ekklesia). A major challenge to the new religion was establishing its boundaries. It needed to signal its distinctive character in contrast both to Greco-Roman clubs and Jewish synagogues. Metaphors for the church "God's Temple, Body of Christ" indicate some dimensions of early Christian self-understanding.
20: The Community’s Worship
One of the most important ways in which religion organizes existence is through ritual. In the New Testament, we catch glimpses of baptism, Eucharist, kinship language, foot washing, and the holy kiss. In the 4th century, Christian worship begins to create the elaborate sanctification of time known as the liturgical year and the sacramental system.
21: The Transforming Word of Scripture
Christianity's relationship to Scripture has always involved a tension-filled dialectic. Its first Scripture was the Torah shared with Judaism, which Christians reinterpreted in light of the paradoxical experience of the crucified and raised Messiah, Jesus. The decisive moment in forming the Christian canon came in the mid-2nd century, when Gnostics promulgated an alternative version of Christianity.
22: Teachers and Creeds
As religious communities expand, they tend to develop structured patterns of belief. Earliest Christianity was characteristically simple with respect to structure and creed. The Gnostic crisis of the 2nd century; together with the prophetic movement called Montanism; forced the issue of belief and structure. Orthodox Christianity located authority in the teaching office of the bishop, and developed the "rule of faith," which eventually became the creed.
23: The Power of the Saints
Christianity has retained its original power and a radical and sometimes subversive edge in the saints, who remind Christians of the priority of religious experience. The term "saint," meaning "holy one" was applied in the New Testament to all members of the community. Over time, the term began to denote Christians of extraordinary charisma, virtue, wonderworking, or transformed life, who revealed the power of the Resurrection and the humanity of Christ.
24: Christianities Popular and Real
There is an enduring tension in Christianity between official religion; which is all about controlled power and popular religion; in which power eludes official channels. Official religion claims to be real religion, tending to despise the popular. Academic study of religion tends to follow the same path. Only recently has scholarship paid due attention to popular forms of Christianity.