Blogging Through "Lord Jesus Christ": Second-Century Witness

The second-century was a bridge between the very earliest Christianity of the first century and the well-thought-out creedal formulations in the third and fourth centuries. How well did the second-century witnesses preserve and pass along the first-century heritage for the later creedal statements?

We look at that question in this last installment of my blog posts through Larry Hurtado's book Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Earlier posts:

Introduction

The Writings of Paul

The Q Source(s)

The Four Gospels

The Non-Biblical Jesus Books

For anyone looking at what the earliest Christians believed, Hurtado writes, the period from the year 70 to the year 170 "constitutes the key transitional period toward which became classical Christianity of subsequent centuries." It was "the time when dynamics that had been operative for decades earlier more fully came to expression."

Most scholars are concerned with how the second century set the stage for the way certain doctrines were set down in formal language in later years. In this portion of his book Hurtado, on the other hand, wants "to trace connections with, and further developments in, the earlier devotional phenomena of the first century."

What began as a Jewish movement in the first century saw more and more Gentile followers entering the faith--so much so that by the end of the second century it had become sufficiently visible to be ridiculed in Roman literature (e.g., Lucius, Celsus, Connelius Fronto).

During the early years of the second century, Hurtado identifies "proto-orthodox" believers--defined as those whose beliefs and practices "succeeded in becoming characteristic of classical, 'orthodox' Christianity." Such believers had "a concern to preserve, respect, promote, and develop what were then becoming traditional expressions of belief and reverence, and that had originated in earlier years of the Christian movement."

This also required them "to distinguish what they considered valid from invalid articulations of belief in Jesus."

He begins his review of second-century Christianity with a review of "first-century tributaries": The Epistle to the Hebrews (which he dates between 65-85), the "later Pauline texts" of Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.

Next he covers the most notable movements in the second century that proto-orthodox Christians regarded as unmoored from the traditions of earliest Christianity they felt duty-bound to preserve and pass along. Hurtado highlights that certain segments of scholarship would like to believe that all these competing definitions of authentic Christianity at least existed at the same time as what we regard as traditional Christianity--maybe even prior to it:

In [their] somewhat romanticized picture, the dominance of 'orthodoxy' is asserted to have been only a late and coercive imposition of one version of early Christianity that subverted an earlier and more innocent diversity. Indeed, what became orthodoxy is alleged to have been initially a minority or secondary version in most of the major geographical areas of Christianity's early success.

But the actual historical picture shows that "forms of Christianity that became designated 'heretical' seem to have emerged characteristically in settings where prior versions of Christianity represented emergent proto-orthodox faith and practice." What's more, several of the leaders of these divergent groups openly understood that they were espousing something very different than what they had inherited.

No, what we know as traditional Christianity didn't emerge from coercion:

There was, after all, no real means of 'top-down' coercive success for any version of Christianity [in the first 3 centuries]....Thus, if any version of Christianity enjoyed success and became more prominent than others in the first three centuries (whether locally or translocally), it was largely the result of its superior ability to commend itself to sufficient numbers of adherents and supporters.

Finally, Hurtado overviews the devotion to Jesus expressed by these "proto-orthodox" believers in the second century, including their hymns to him, martyrdom for him, and loyalty to the oldest narratives about him (the "Fourfold Gospel"--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

The first 150 years of what we now regard as traditional Christianity eventually gave way to church councils with well-thought-out formulations of Jesus' divine relation to God. But it was not the councils that dreamed up the divinity of Jesus. As Hurtado writes:

The struggle to work out doctrinal formulations that could express in some coherent way this peculiar view of God (as 'one' and yet somehow comprising 'the Father' and Jesus, thereafter also including the Spirit as the 'third Person' of the Trinity) occupied the best minds in early Christian orthodox/catholic tradition for the first several centuries. But the doctrinal problem they worked on was not of their making. It was forced upon them by the earnest convictions and devotional practice of believers from the earliest observable years of the Christian movement.

This is the main point of Hurtado's 700-page book. And it has application for believers today:

Probably the continuing vitality of Christianity will remain dependent upon how fully Christians engage the question of Jesus, and how radically they are willing to consider what devotion to him means for them.

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