An arguement with my father in which he urged me to go research what the original church was like (by which he meant the branch of Christianity that he was in, which started at the dawn of the twentieth century), caused me to wonder what the church was like back in Paul’s day. I read the New Testement on pretty much a continuous basis, so there are some things that I can infer, but very little that I know historically.
I would figure that most of they wouldn’t have kept most of the major Christian holidays (Christmas, Easter, etc.), since they hadn’t been invented yet. I also got the impression from one of Paul’s letters that they kept a Passover service that attempted to recreate the last supper with Jesus (and Paul took them to task for basically partying instead). From other sources I’ve read, it seems like many kept a Saturday sabbath (since the “official” change to Sunday didn’t come until Constantine, a few centuries later) or held the major sermons on Saturday.
In relation to this question, what branches of Christianity today would most parallel the first century churches?
I’d suggest reading the book of Acts, which deals almost entirely with the early church. To answer your question, they were practicing Jews who were the first followers of the Messiah.
Actually, there is very little that anyoneknows about what the church was like during the first century, and especially the first fifty years or so. You can learn quite a bit from reading the “Apostolic Fathers” (many sites offer English translations of those documents, or the fragments which remain; here are two: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/ (RC) and Early Church Fathers - Christian Classics Ethereal Library ). However, I think you will find that there are many things reported in them that are patently untrue. Frex, an early document claimes that James “the Lord’s brother” wore priestly vestments (including the famous “breastplate”) and conducted various services in the Temple. We know that such activities were restricted to lineal descendents of Aaron. Further, the same document (can’t recall at the moment which author; it’ll take some research, and I’m fresh out of the hospital after knee replacement) claimed that James was very holy and didn’t wash. This is in the STRICTEST contradiction to the ceremonial washings which were required of ALL observant Jews, both male and female. Therefore, the document is, at best, unreliable. :dubious:
Mmmm. Early docs I’ve read talk about celebrating the “first day of the week”, which is not Saturday. Other than that, I think you have the right idea.
Honestly? None. As far as duplicating dogmas, either strip away about 1700 years of papal rulings and councils from RC doctrines and you’re probably as close as anyone can come without a time machine. Some of the Pentecostal churches try really hard to duplicate them, and come fairly close on some issues; unfortunately the ones they work to come closest on are picky rules often described as “clothesline religion”.
If nobody comes up with a better answer, or you really want a bibliography, contact me at my pseudo on yahoo, and I’ll do it as soon as I’m getting around better and not hurting quite so much. It’s likely to take several weeks, as all my early church stuff got piled into a box, not organized (sorry).
I’ve read Acts, thanks. It’s more of a linear history than an exploration of beliefs. And even early in the churuch there were a large amount of non-Jews coming in, which meant that even practicing Christian Jews found their traditions challenged.
I haven’t read anything in the New Testement about it, but when I did research to join a discussion on Fark about the Pope’s recent proclomation against watching sports on Sunday, I came across this quote at tagnet:
… which is what I based my supposition on.
Yeah, darn those hundreds of years of history. I’m not sure quote what you mean by clothesline religion, though.
I’m going to collect all the odd things said about Constantine and Christianity and post them in the “historical myths” thread currently running in the Pit.
Whatever Constantine may have done regarding the regulation of commerce on Sunday, he did not make it the “official” day of worship since the Christians of the first cerntury had already done that.
Acts 20:7 And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight.
(Some hold that Paul, in Colossians 2:16, is lifting the requirement for Sabbath worship, but I don’t think that the verse is so strongly indicative of that position. There are other references by Paul to activities on the first day of the week, as well. I suspect that the argument that they indicate days of worship is possibly true, but they are not so clear as to be free of dispute.)
Justin Martyr expressly sets Sunday as the day of worship in his first Apology. (This would set the practice of Sunday worship as having been established prior to the period from 130 to 165.) And by 202, Tertullian remarked that Sunday had become the day of rest for Christians.
Note that the early Christians divided quite quickly into several different branches. Many, like the Gnostics, hardly anyone has heard of nor pays attention to their beliefs despite having origins earlier than the Pauline version. The winners write the history books (or Bibles).
But among the “core” early Christians, there were two main groups: the Jerusalem Church (headed by James the Just) and the Pauline faction. The Jerusalem Church considered themselves in charge of the whole shebang and were quite suspicious of Paul. There is quite a bit of discord between them and Paul revealed in the New Testament. They considered themselves Jews and were keen on any gentiles joining the Church to adopt Jewish practices. Hence, they would have observed Passover since Passover is a really major Jewish observance.
However, they were wiped out as a side effect of the Jewish rebellions, so Paul’s views won out.
The earliest writing I have read that refers to a Sabbath worship describes it as having no fixed leader, singing of a few Psalms, and the sharing of bread. But it no doubt varied significantly from group to group. Remember, even the issue of Jesus’s nature was interpreted in a lot of different ways in the beginning.
The first 300 years of Christianity consisted mainly of trying to keep the number of new “heresies” smaller than the number of old “heresies” being suppressed.
Since “Acts” was written by a Pauline flunkie, it has a noticable bias and shouldn’t be relied on that much with regard to very early Christian (pre-Pauline) practices.
It is then notable that the book of Revelation (90 - 100) refers to “the Lord’s Day” in its first chapter and the Didache (usually dated to the second century) states
Clearly, the practice of worship on Sunday can be found in the first century, even if it is not proven that it is “law.”
(The Didache, BTW, is a good source of information about the practices of the early church as it was written as an early attempt to establish order in the church. It is not a perfect guide in that we do not have an explicit date for its creation and we do not know which churches accepted or rejected its rule.)
It refers to rules about how both men and women should dress (but the rules are - of course - rather more onerous for the women). The main idea is modesty - no low necklines or high hemlines, etc. One of the primary sources for them is I Corinthians 11 (which talks mostly about hair; men must cut, but women musn’t), but there are a number of other passages which talk about modesty of dress and behavior - too many for me to pull up and insert just now. However, there are many searchable Bible texts online, as well as freebie downloads (e.g., http://www.e-sword.net ).
That was Paul’s doing. Why he thought it was any of his business to dictate hair length is beyond me. Here Jesus himself had long hair (based on all pictures of him; that there is a tradition in art of showing long-haired Jesus must be based on something), and then Paul comes along and tries to ban long hair on men. WTF? He was probably too ignorant to even realize that he was dissing the same Messiah and savior he was promoting. Why should anybody listen to this guy?
Hey, I don’t care about how long your hair is/isn’t.
I was merely trying to answer a question.
As for depictions of Jesus with long hair, there was NO representative artwork depicting him prior to Constantine, when Christianity became the state religion. Prior to that, he was most often represented as a lamb (literally); sometimes with cross, sometimes without. Probably beginning (very) late in the second century, artwork appeared depicting him as a youth with a lamb draped around his shoulders (likely a ripoff of Heracles and/or Mithras {who was, after all, the deity Constantine originally - maybe always? - worshipped?}).
In all probability, the only long hair Jesus had was his beard and the locks from the sides of the head that orthodox Jewish males still wear today (tzitzit?? Please don’t kill me if I’ve mutilated the term!). During the early centuries of the Roman Empire, short hair for men was the norm (except for those the Romans called barbarians). The Jewish practices (beard and whatever) made them more readily identifiable for riots, etc., in Alexandria and other places where there were large (and highly resented, because of their privileged status under Roman law) Jewish populations.
The word for these sidelocks in standard Hebrew is pe’ot. The Yiddish pronunciation is variously spelled payos, payess, peyis, etc. (Please don’t spell it “peyis” is my advice. Type one letter wrong and you’ll be sorry. Google suggested for “Payless” I should search. I need shoes on my head like I need a hole in my head.) Tsitsit are the fringes on the prayer shawl.
Why do you suppose, then, not only Jesus but his disciples are so consistently shown by artists to have long hair? I suggest it’s because of the Semitic origin of the Jews. Did you see that documentary on ths ancient history of the Jews where Abba Eban visits a Bedouin family in their tent in the desert and says “We started out like this”? The Bedouin men normally wore long hair in the old days. Look at any book by Wilfred Thesiger. I think it isn’t at all farfetched that Jesus and his disciples, at least the more traditional, provincially Jewish ones, wore long hair all around. Whereas Paul came from outside Palestine and was thoroughly Hellenized culturally, and civitus Romanus and all that.
Actually, I just scanned a couple of our “history of paintings” books and what I noticed was that from the fifth through the twelfth centuries, Jesus is nearly always portrayed with hair at least extending to the nape of his neck, and usually down to his shoulders. However, the other figures in the paintings typically have much shorter hair–either with “bowl” cuts or looking a lot like refugees from the mid-1970s, their hair not quite extending to the napes of their necks. This is true of all the men in the paintings, whether they are Roman soldiers, Jewish priests or Pharisees, or the Jewish apostles. From about the twelfth century on, the apostles show up more frequently with longer hair, but there was definitely a period when the hair of Jesus was much longer than anyone else’s.
I don’t have an exhaustive array of paintings, but it seems that the only other male figures with long hair are men from the Old Testament.
I have no explanation for this phenomenon, but it is what I have observed.
(I also recall seeing a couple of mosaics from before the fifth century in which Jesus is depicted with shorter hair, but I cannot find those images in these texts, so I will not claim that my memory is perfect on that point.)
Sorry about the length on this one, but it’s one of my areas of interest.
One cannot have a full understanding of the Early Church without keeping in mind the fact that its members lived under the daily threat of persecution. But it’s rather curious that this should have been the case. Romans were ordinarily highly tolerant of religious differences, and foreign-born deities often found their way into the Roman pantheon. The cases of individual cults being banned were quite rare, and usually quite understandable. Rome did its best, for example, to stamp out Druidism, because a) druids were the leaders of the anti-Rome factions in Gallic society, and b) druids performed human sacrifice – preferably Roman human sacrifice. The cult of Bacchus was frequently banned from the capital due to the notoriety of its revels. So what was so offensive about Christianity that its practitioners found themselves on the imperial (s)hit list?
Several factors came into play.
Being a tolerant bunch, Romans thought monotheism to be a pretty arrogant idea. This was not so much a problem with the Jews, since they didn’t push their beliefs on anyone else. And when the early Christians first appeared in Rome, they were regarded as nothing more than a Jewish sect. But this sect was different. It evangelized. And to be a Christian you had to reject all other gods besides your own. Not normal. Not Roman.
Christianity was a faith that appealed to the downtrodden, a message of hope in dark times. Relatively few Roman citizens took the least bit of interest in this. So the only ones left in the imperial city to join the new cult were slaves, foreigners and paupers. Not exactly an esteemed membership roster. And when these “lowlifes” began meeting in large numbers on a regular basis, neighbors started getting suspicious. Whisperings of “eating the flesh of Christus and drinking His blood” did nothing to improve the public image of the fledgling Church.
The Great Fire broke out in 64 AD and burned for a week. Early Christianity was an apocalyptic faith, whose members believed that Christus would return at any moment with fire and sword to punish the wicked and save the faithful. To them, the sight of the capital of the world in flames could only mean that the end had come. So their collective behavior in the face of this disaster left much to be desired, at least as far as the authorities were concerned. What was so offensive? How about running about gleefully screaming “Hallelujah”, refusing to help put out the flames, and haranguing the bewildered crowds with “I told you so” sermons?
Far from being the instigator of the fire, Nero took quick action to put it out and bring relief to the homeless. He dispatched his soldiers to demolish buildings to form fire breaks. He artificially lowered the cost of grain, shouldering the financial burden himself. He appointed all open spaces, including his own private gardens, as refugee centers. In short, he displayed admirable leadership capabilities. But the whisperings of his involvement in the fire started immediately. Nero, a poor specimen of manhood, implicated in the death of his own mother, and known to enjoy acting on stage (how incredibly vulgar!), had never been popular to begin with. Imagine his rage (oh yes, did we mention his temper?) when he learned that his quick thinking and generosity in the face of disaster were being ignored and that he was actually being blamed for the whole thing. Imagine further his reaction when he learned about these disgusting Christians and the way they had behaved. Quicker than you can say ”Christe, salva me!, the whole sect was outlawed and any of its members unfortunate enough to be caught found themselves serving as human torches at the next imperial banquet.
Much like reality TV today, the Romans found the persecuted Christians’ behavior oddly fascinating. Christians accepted death stoically, defiant of the Roman authority yet obedient to their faith to the very end. Many in the crowds at the Circus Maximus were moved by the sight of such amazing courage. As is usually the case, censorship and persecution proved counterproductive. These measures only enhanced the image of Christianity, especially among the urban poor. The sect moved underground, but grew (if you’ll pardon the expression) like wildfire.
Many aspects of the Early Church were heavily influenced by the atmosphere of persecution, and some even survive today. The sign of the cross. The “fish” symbol. The chi-rho monogram. All were secret symbols designed to identify Christians to one another. The Book of Revelations was written as a message of hope that one day the Dragon (Rome) would fall. The establishment of Christian feasts on pagan holidays allowed the true believers to be seen celebrating publicly on official nefasti days so as not to raise suspicions.
Thus ends the lesson (I’ve always sucked at writing conclusions).
It’s been ten years since I did my research so I don’t remember the source off-hand. I might have a copy of the paper somewhere at home, though. If I locate it, I’ll post the source.
tygerbryght
Tzitzit are the threads at the corners of the tallit, the 4-cornered Jewish prayer garment. There are two varieties of tallit. The tallit katan is a small tallit with a hole for the head, worn mostly only by the Orthodox, especially Chasids. The tallit gadol is the large prayer shawl, commonly worn at prayer (except when it’s not) by the Orthodox and Conservative, and sometimes Reform. The tzitzit are actually the most important part of the tallit.
Some of the Pentecostal churches try really hard to duplicate them, and come fairly close on some issues; unfortunately the ones they work to come closest on are picky rules often described as “clothesline religion”. 
I’m not sure quote what you mean by clothesline religion, though.