Early Christianity Quotes

The first persecution of the Church took place in the year 67, under Nero, the sixth emperor of Rome.

GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.

Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

Cyprian was not issuing a new decree but was keeping to the most solid belief of the Church in order to correct some who thought that infants ought not be baptized before the eighth day after their birth. . . . He agreed with certain of his fellow bishops that a child is able to be duly baptized as soon as he is born.

The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great

If we believe that he [Jesus Christ]really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New Testament]father upon him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor.

Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.

It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.

Union of action appears historically to have been the original bond of the Christian church. Whoever was willing to receive Christ as his master, to join His people, and to walk according to their rules, he was admitted to the Christian society. We know that in the earliest church there existed the strangest varieties of belief, some Christians not even believing that there would be a resurrection of the dead.

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.

In the first century A.D., members of the growing Church in Corinth were enthusiastic about the gospel. Almost all were recent converts to the Church. Many were attracted to it through the preaching of the Apostle Paul and others.

The Gnostics were rapidly driven out of business by the hierarchical orthodox Christians.

As a Fundamentalist I had discovered while I was in college that it is possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about AD 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than did old Ignatius or Clement, who had been taught by the very apostles themselves, just what the Church is and what it should look like.

Paul's lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.

For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament.

The early Christians condemned false doctrine in a way that sounds almost unchristian today.

I was in a fascinating meeting where one man had been in China recently. A Chinese professor has found evidence that Christians reached Western China before 90 AD. Before 90 AD! The idea isn't all that astonishing when we think about it. That's what the disciples thought they were supposed to do! And, I'm sure, the disciples just said, "That's it. Let's go!" And they all wound up dead. But everyone else did too!

And we find from Church history that the primitive Christians thus understood it; for that women did actually speak and preach amongst them we have indisputable proof.

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

In the third century after Christ the faith continued to spread.

The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.

It was my study of the two Corinthian letters that first caused me to concentrate my attention more directly on the relation of the apostle Paul to the older apostles.

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.

But Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church-with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility-is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time.

If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another.