Lecture two, there went forth a stream, the growth of the Christian Church. Last time I taught the class Brian Howard produced his timeline in the form of a calendar, a very nice calendar, that has the quotation from the Oads of Solomon from which the title of this lecture is taken. And each month has dates and dates in Church history and the contemporary current calendar for 1998. So I've enjoyed using that timeline this year. And Rob Futo also inspired by that same quotation there went forth a stream, produced a little booklet for witnessing a very fine book in which he set forth the principles of Christian faith for people that are being introduced to it. So a couple of ideas of some things that you can do in connection with Church history. The title there went forth a stream comes from the Church in the East, the Oads of Solomon, we think produced in the Church in Syria, perhaps in the second century, although the date is by no means clear, the prayer will come from one of the Church leaders in the West from the city of Rome, climate of Rome, pastor in the Church of Rome, who died about the year 100 AD. And I use this prayer from climate because it contains so many of the elements that made it possible for the early Church to grow. There went forth a stream. And as we pray with this ancient Church Father, climate of Rome, we catch a glimpse of some of the features and strengths of early Christianity that made it possible for that stream to reach both to the East and to the West. Let us pray. Grant unto us, Lord, that we may set our hope on thy name and open the eyes of our hearts that we may know thee. We beseech thee, Lord and master, to be our health and sucker. Pray those among us who are in tribulation, have mercy on the lowly, lift up the fallen, show thyself to those in need, heal the sick, turn again the wanderers of thy people, feed the hungry, ransom our prisoners, raise up the weak, comfort the faint heart. Let all nations know that thou art dot alone, and that Jesus Christ is thy son, and that we are thy people and the sheep of thy pasture. We praise thee who are able to do these and better things than these through Jesus Christ, the high priest and guardian of our souls, through whom be glory and majesty to thee both now and throughout all generations, forever never, amen. Years ago my son Allen was studying in graduate school at Indiana University, and he was taking a class in early Christian history from a professor who really was not a professing Christian by any means. And as this professor described the triumph of Christianity, he expressed a great deal of amazement, that Christianity, small, sect, part of Judaism, originating in a out-of-the-way Roman province, not very important place, and without great power among the early followers of Christianity, amazement, that of all the possibilities for the triumph of 81 religion in the Roman world, that Christianity was the one that did triumph. How could that be? He said, it really had nothing going for it. Well my lecture today is an attempt to answer Professor Flanagan and to understand something of why Christianity not only grew, but eventually, China. As we look at the spread of Christianity, we can see it in different ways, first of all, we can look at the spread of Christianity as a cultural movement, cultural spread. As we go through this course, and the next semester's course in Reformation Modern Church History, we'll be looking at the six cultural transitions took place in the spread of Christianity, as identified by Professor Andrew Walsh, who teaches the history of missions at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Walsh talks about six frontiers, cultural frontiers, across which Christianity moved at very critical times in its history, and he says that as Christianity moved from one cultural milieu to the next, it did it just in the nick of time. Without that cultural movement, humanly speaking, it would have died. We come to the first of those cultural movements, the movement from Judaism to the Gentile world. The earliest Christians, of course, were Jews, and it is one of the marvels of history that Christianity entered a second phase at all because of the resistance on the part of Jewish Christians, including some of the Apostles at first, to see Christianity move beyond the bounds of Judaism into the Gentile world. But in the book of Acts, we have Antioch, we have the Jerusalem Council, and above all, we have the missionary work of the Apostle Paul, and we see Christianity moving then from its Jewish roots into the next phase of its history into the Gentile world. And as Professor Walsh points out, just in the nick of time, because the Jewish state disappeared in the Wars of AD-70 and AD-135, but by the time the Jewish state disappeared in those wars with the Romans, Christianity was firmly planted in its second cultural context, the culture of the Greek-O-Roman world. So that is one way to look at the spread of Christianity from a Jewish sect to a religious faith embraced by Gentiles far and wide, as well as by Jews. Second way to look at the spread of Christianity is to see it as a social movement. When Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, he said, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were influential, not many were of noble birth. And that continued to be true, not only for the church at Corinth, but for the church throughout the Roman world. The early church was largely made up of common people. People sometimes call the people of the lower classes. Actually the opponents of Christianity were not slow to pick up on this and to use it as an instrument against the Christians. Celsus was one of the early opponents of Christianity, answered by Aregion, we will study this later. But Celsus said this, the Christian message is like this, let no one educated, no one wise, and no one sensible come near. By the fact that Christians admit that these people are worthy of their God, they show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable, and stupid, and only slaves, women, and little children, it was part of Celsus's attack on the Christian faith. Well in a sense it was true. And Christians did not deny this charge, a Christian apologist, minutious phalic said that many of us are called poor, it's not our disgrace, but our glory. There were many poor people who were members of early church. Women were accepted as full members of the church, and probably in the early church as throughout most of church history women have made up a larger percentage of the members of the Christian church than men. And even more remarkable slaves were accepted as full members of the church, and participated equally in the worship of the community. In fact, we think that a slave whose name was Calistus became Bishop of the Church of Rome in the early third century, perhaps the most important, post in the Christian church at that time. So many of the people who embraced Christ and joined the Christian church were poor people, but there were some, as also true in current, who were from the higher classes. By Nero's time, that would be 80-60s, Christianity was beginning to infiltrate the families, the noble families of Rome, in fact, all fighting from prison in Rome in Olympia and said all the saints in your greetings, especially those who belonged to Caesars also. So even at that early date there were some Christians who were high placed in government. There's evidence that in Domitian's time, that would be in the 90s, the Emperor's cousin and wife were Christians, we're not absolutely sure about all the details here, but apparently these two people were bad-ished or put to death. And their two young sons totally disappeared from history. They had been designated as Domitian's heirs, and it could well be that the presumptive heirs of the throne of Roman Emperor before the end of the first century were Christians. And the historian Hardack puts it this way, what a change, 30 years after the fearful persecutions of Nero, the heirs to the throne were brought up in a Christian house. In the syllabus, there is the writing by a climate of Alexandria in the late second century. What kind of rich person can be saved? And the very fact that this church father would preach a sermon on this topic shows that people with wealth were beginning to become part of the Christian church, and this was now a question to be answered. As you read that, you'll find some very interesting material from this early church father, not a very clear idea yet of salvation through faith alone in Jesus Christ. But climate's answer to the question is a moderate one, the person who does not set his heart on wealth and put it first, like the rich young ruler did, the person who does not do that certainly can be saved and be part of the Christian church. So Christianity moves culturally out of Judaism into the Greek or Roman world. It moves throughout the social levels of the Roman Empire, although the large majority of Christians remain people, described as people of the lower classes, common people. And then we need to look at the geographical movement. And of course to do that, we need to look at a map of the Roman world. Now look at the movement first to the west and then to the east. In the book of Acts, we see the beginning of the movement of Christianity to the west, up into Asia Minor and from there over into Greece and from there to Italy, to Rome, and perhaps even in the apostles' heads of the spread of Christianity to Spain. By the end of the first century, the areas in red have become Christian centers. You can see that Asia Minor is the most Christianized area of the Roman Empire, this area here. That's the real Bible belt of the first century. It's strange to get off because there are very, very few Christians there today. But by the end of the first century, Asia Minor was the center of Christianity and there were other places too that had also become in part Christian. The yellow areas on the map indicate the spread of Christianity by the year 185. And by then we can see that Christianity has not only spread more widely in this area, but all the way over into Gaul. There was a persecution here in Leo and the year 177 in which a Christian bishop was put to death. And there's a Christian center up in Germania around Cologne and Trier. There are Christian churches in different parts of Spain and also Christians in different locations in North Africa. North Africa is part of the Roman Empire. The red line indicates the extent of the Roman Empire and North Africa from Egypt all the way over to Eumidia and Mauritania were included in Roman Empire. The tradition is that Mark first established the Christian church in Alexandria. It's hard to know how to treat some of these early church traditions about the establishment of Christianity in various places because almost every church, every church, wanted to claim a big name. Even Scotland gets into the act and claims Andrew the Apostle who also is claimed by Russia if that's the case Andrew traveled widely and evangelized in many different places and in different languages. So we have to treat I think those traditions with some caution Mark Shaw in his history of the Kingdom of God in Africa says until more evidence is produced we should neither rule out St. Mark's role in Egyptian Christianity nor endorse the tradition as it stands. Later Christianity will move further south into Africa outside the bounds of the Roman Empire into Newvia and into Ethiopia and we will look at that movement as we come to the later history. So Christianity begins to make its way into the west and spreads widely by the end of the second century. It's sometimes forgotten that Christianity moved also to the east. In fact, I have a book in my library by JC1, the history of the early Christian church of the year AD 500, it's a very fine book, but Professor 1 says this, the birthplace of the church stood on the boundary between the east and the west. It is significant that this infant religion as soon as it was strong enough to leave the cradle marched straight to the west, but it did go straight to the west and the book of Acts tells us the beginning of that story of the spread of Christianity to the west, but it also went to the east with Sam Moffitt's history of Christianity in Asia. We really don't have an excuse now for not knowing something about the remarkable spread of Christianity to the east. The first New Testament translation was in Syriac in the east, the first Christian hymnbook, the Odes of Solomon, which I referred to earlier, was produced in Syria, the first known church building, especially constructed for Christian church. You know, anything about is in the east, in Odessa, or Dura Europa's, both have claims on that, and just in the last issue of Christianity today, I read the work of a team of archaeologists from North Carolina State University in Jordan who think they have discovered uneven earlier Christian church at Ankara, but that's in the east as well. So the first known church building is in the east, and perhaps the first Christian king and Christian state in Armenia or Eastern Turkey a hundred years before Constantine. So I say all of that to stress the importance of not leaving out the history of the spread of Christianity to the east. I'd like to focus on two aspects of that eastern spread. One is represented by the two red lines here and another by the two blue lines farther north. The red lines represent the spread of Christianity to India. The tradition is that the Apostle Thomas went to India. Most of these traditions about where the Apostles went and what happened to them are probably legendary, but there is more reason to believe that the tradition that Thomas went to India is a true tradition. The Christians in India, the Mar-Toma Christians, who still look back to Thomas as the founder of their church. Samuel Moffitt in his book evaluates this tradition by saying most opinions range from possible to probable, with a discernible trend toward the latter. Moffitt is very cautious scholar, so if he says it's probable, then we can take his word for it that Thomas probably reached India. And then we know that there is another tradition in the late second century, about 120 years after the date for the martyrdom of Thomas in India, a secondary journey or missionary left the Roman world. This time from Alexandria in Egypt, the head of the church there, the head of the Catacetical School, president of the seminary, we would say, left this important center in the Roman world, his name was Pantinas, in order to preach Christ to the Brahmins and philosophers in India, those are the words of St. Jerome in the fifth century. The visit of Pantinas to India, Dr. Moffitt says, is not to be dismissed lightly. There are indirect, presumptive indications from the period of his mission that tend to support the later references to his journey. And not only does Christianity spread very early to India, but it also spreads in this area, into Syria, from Syria to Odessa, and the little kingdom of Austrian in eastern Turkey, or Armenia, just across the Euphrates, that we think became the first Christian state with a Christian king, a hundred years before Constantine, the first Christian emperor in the Roman world. And from Odessa on to Arvela, just across the Tigris, near ancient Nineveh, this area produced a very famous eastern theologian, whose name was Tation, chiefly known for the Diatesseron, that is the life of Christ that he compiled from the four Gospels. And amazingly, from Arvela, into Persia, and all the way into Afghanistan. By the end of the second century, there were churches as far east as Persia and Bactria, or Northern Afghanistan, from Syria, to Mesopotamia, to Persia, to Afghanistan, and down into India. Before the end of the second century, the faith, the Christian faith, was unquestionably spreading across the great continent of Asia as vigorously as it moved Western into Europe. Now I want to come to another question, and that is why did Christianity spread? Professor Flanagan said it had nothing going for it, and he could not understand how this feeble religion with its non-descript followers could make such an impact on the world. Well, the first answer to the question, why did Christianity spread certainly has to be the power of the gospel? It's not an answer that every historian would see it first, but certainly a Christian historian sees that there is something supernatural about the spread of the Christian faith. The world into which Christianity came, both east and west, was a world full of religions. Sometimes people have made the point that Christianity came into a vacuum, and people were looking for something to believe, and so they light-stone to Christianity because it wasn't anything else. Well, that's very far from the truth. Roman world particularly was filled with warring sex and rival faiths. There were the traditional pagan religions. Not in the heyday of paganism, the Greek or Roman gods, but not yet gone from the empire, in fact still on a popular level, very strong. We can read the book of Acts and find Paul encountering the pagan religion, that listra in the worship of Zeus and in Athens in the worship of gods and goddesses, including an unknown god and Ephesus in the worship of Artemis or Diana, as she was told by the Romans. Although the traditional pagan religions were still alive, there were also the mystery religions, great variety of eastern religions, promising a sense of belonging and personal salvation, which did not come from the traditional gods of Greece and Rome. You really had no personal relationship with these gods. You just tried to stay on their good side. But the mystery religions promised a great deal more, salvation and fellowship with the god or the goddess, and there were many of these. From Persia came the worship of Mithras, from Egypt, the worship of Isis, from Asia-Mina, the worship of Sebele and numerous mystery religions. And Pompeii was discovered two centuries ago, the ruins of Pompeii. One of the first structures uncovered in that Roman city was an ophthalate temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis. In addition to the mystery religions, the philosophies provided a kind of religious allegiance for some people, stoicism, epicureanism, and other philosophies had moved away from theory to practical religious commitment by the end of the second century and promised through rational processes the discovery of a good life and even hope beyond death. And then as part of the religious mix of the Roman Empire, there was the imperial cult, the worship of the emperor, beginning with the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. There was a tendency to deify the Roman emperor after he had died, but at the time we come to a gusthus, the living emperor was beginning to be viewed as a god to be worship. And Romans practiced the worship of the emperor, it was really a very small thing that was required, simply bowing before the image of the emperor or taking a little piece of little pinch of incense and burning it in a flame before some symbol of the emperor, and that was viewed as a unifying patriotic act to hold the empire together. A Rome promoted a kind of amalgamation of all these religions. You can believe in all of them if you wanted to. The only thing that was absolutely required was the worship of the emperor. Edward Gibbon in his famous decline in fall of the Roman empire offered a cynical view of Rome's attitude toward all these religions, as is what he said, the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, by the magistrates as equally useful and thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence but even religious concord. But then Christianity comes into this and stirs up all kinds of trouble. So yet beginning in the New Testament and we see it continuing in the history of this time in the Roman Empire because Christianity and Judaism were the only two exclusive religions of the time. You could not add anything else to Christianity or to Judaism. And this became a source of prostitution not because Christians were Christians but because Christians were Christians only. The magistrates often charge Christians this way. You do not worship the gods. You do not sacrifice to the Empress. All they had to do was sacrifice to the Empress and worship the gods and all would be well. But not only was the exclusiveness of Christianity, a source of prostitution. It was a source of great strength and I think this is one of the reasons Christianity did strengthen. When historians put it this way there were too many calls, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from. You could pile one religious insurance on another and yet not feel safe. Christianity made a clean sweep. You can see the appeal of that. Arnold Toynbee and many others have said that in the modern world for Christianity to survive it must give out its claims to exclusiveness and make common cause with other religions. But the reason that survived and grew and even flourished in the early church was that it did not do that. If it had done that, it would have long since disappeared from history. Not only do we have the power of the gospel but we have the witness of Christians. Christianity was victorious because the early Christians outlived, out thought and outdied the world around it. The role of the apostles I've already said is somewhat uncertain, although Paulus almost certainly made it highly probable that he made it to India. And we know that Peter died in Rome. We know that John went to Ephesus and was in prison for a time on the island of Pateness but the legends about the other apostles are probably just that. Whatever the apostles did in the spread of the gospel and the Lord gave the great commission to them but he also gave it to everyone. And we know that the ordinary Christians were missionaries. In the early period, the second calling of every Christian was to be a missionary. The gospel was carried by merchants along the trade routes and by soldiers from post to post as these Christians went throughout the empire and also into the east one loving part setting another on fire. These Christians were able to witness by word but they also witnessed by D. Tatellion put it this way in memorable words. It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand known us. Tatellion is saying this is what the pagan say about us. It's not what Christians are saying about each other but the watching world says this about the Christian church. They say see how they love one another, how they are ready even to die for one another. And that love that Christians had for each other overflowed the community of faith and reached out to people in the world so that the church father Ignatius could talk about a love for widows and for orphans for the oppressed for those in prison for the hungry for the thirsty for the abandoned babies that were left to die. Christians had a reputation. People loved each other and even loved those that persecuted them. The Scottish historian James Oars said the new spirit of self-denying love which Christianity breathed into the world awoke wonder from its very strangeness. This was strange and people began to wonder about it and to be brought into the faith because they were so impressed by the conduct of these Christians. And Christians witnessed as we'll see next time in the lecture on persecution by their deaths. Again Tatellion put it in famous words, blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Of course not everybody was converted who saw the martyrs put to death but we have many stories, true stories of jailers and magistrates and people in the stands watching the courageous death of Christians who abandoned their pagan faith and joined the Christian Church sometimes to be martyred themselves right from the spot. Somebody has said that martyred was the Christians opportunity, the opportunity of the early church for mass evangelism. They could not hold great rallies and public preaching services but as thousands watched Christians die that was their opportunity for mass evangelism. Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses let us throw all everything that hinders and run the race set before us with perseverance. Question is what is the status of children in the early church slaves were fully accepted, women were fully accepted. Children were certainly part of the church. The question of infant vatsism I'll try to deal with later. Do we have records of infants being baptized and how early do we have records of infants being baptized. But as we come to see the the worship, the community itself in its own life. There are really rather two churches, the church before vatsism and the church after vatsism. Really one church but vatsism marks the significant move from you might say they out accorded into the inner court. And the children and the non-baptized adults would take part in many of the activities, the worship of the church. But the Lord sufferers was reserved for the baptized members of the church. We probably can't answer that question as much detail as we would like. As far as I know, there is not much evidence. Maybe it's there and we just haven't found it. It would be a good topic for somebody to investigate more fully. Exactly what role did the children have in the early church. Another question? Yes sir. Question is what happened to Paul. I suppose that debate will go on until we all get to heaven and ask Paul. I didn't had no expert on this. You need to ask Dr. Byron some of the New Testament professors but I tend to think my interpretation is that Paul went to Rome was in prison, was released and traveled back to the Eastern Mediterranean, was re-arrested, taken back to Rome, and put to death in Rome during the persecution of Nero in the 60s, about AD 64. That would mean he did not make it to Spain. I wish he made it to Spain. It's nice to think of Paul evangelizing the East and saying, now I'm finished with that, I'm going to Rome, but if you are already evangelized, I'm going to go to Spain. But there are different ways to read that evidence and I'm not sure he made it to Spain. Probably in my opinion, probably not, but his heart was certainly there and he wanted to go there. On the other hand, as I showed you on this map, there are Christian communities in Spain, very early on by 185. There are Christian sinners in Spain, so if Paul didn't make it to Spain, somebody made it to Spain. But after Paul, as I pointed out, we really don't know the names of the missionaries. There are traders, there are soldiers, there ordinary people, people like Priscilla Nicola, quite a different duo there. They were in Rome, they went to offices, they went back to Rome, they ended up in Corinth, so as merchants, they traveled about spreading the gospel and I think that's the normal way that Christianity did spread as well as through the soldiers in the heart.