Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

Introduction

The early Church is no mystery. As a matter of fact, most believers would be astonished to learn just how much we do know about the first three hundred years of Christian history. We have, for example, much inspiring history about the founding of her many congregations throughout the ancient world. We actually know the names of some of her earliest pastors, and in a few cases we have their writings to read. We still have harrowing accounts of her persecution by the Pharisees and by the pagan Romans. We know what sorts of heresies attacked the early Church and, once again, the very names of the heretics who stood against her. We have hymns and prayers and poetry preserved from this period. We have epitaphs from Christian tombs. We have doctrinal statements, Bible commentary, and sermons dating from these days. We have responsive readings used in church; in fact, we have a good deal of information about how the Sunday services were conducted. To put it briefly, we have (contrary to popular belief) a very vivid picture of primitive Christianity—and a picture that is open for investigation by anyone. Some Christians speculate that when Constantine legalized the faith in A.D. 313 many half-converted pagans corrupted the Church by introducing elements retained from their old beliefs. If you are anything like me, you will be amazed to discover that we have literally thousands of pages of documentation dating from long, long before this legalization—much of which is, to the emperor Constantine, as distant backward in time as the Declaration of Independence is to President George W. Bush. And this information is reliable. Most of us have heard, I suppose, of apocryphal Christian writings from the first and second centuries; spurious books like The Gospel of Thomas and The Acts of Paul. These were pseudo-scriptures manufactured by early cults like the Gnostics and Manichees to shore up their false teachings; they were condemned by the Church as soon as they appeared. But this same Church produced post-New Testament writings; works that, while not to be classed with the inerrant Word of God, do accurately represent the character, teachings, and practices of the very earliest Christians. Priceless artifacts such as The Martyrdom of Polycarp, The Epistle of Barnabas, and The Shepherd of Hermas—all of these come down to us with as much trustworthiness as any ancient document, as reliable as the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus or Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Romans. All of today’s Christian scholars agree that these invaluable records really are authentic productions of the early Church. There is nothing apocryphal about them. They have all the authority—not, indeed, of Scripture—but of history.

And yet, like most modern believers, I have lived practically all of my Christian life knowing next to nothing about any of this. Until I discovered these writings a few years ago any vague ideas I might have had about the early Church came straight out of old C. B. DeMille movies. I honestly did not think it was possible to know much more—or I believe I would have tried harder. Looking back, I can see that I had a very sincere (but completely ungrounded) conviction that the period from Revelation to Constantine was Terra Incognita—a gaping Dark Continent on the map of history. After all, I had spent quite a lot of time in denominations, para-church movements, and home-cell groups whose publicly announced intention was to restore the pure Christianity of the early Church. Not one of them had ever sent me back to any first- or second-century documentation for evidence. So who knew? Who could have imagined—with so many competing versions of pure New Testament Christianity on the market out there—that finding out what the early Church was like might be as simple as opening up the records and having a look?

Like many of you readers, I suspect, I have been familiar with the Scriptures since childhood—to my eternal benefit. Raised in a strong, Bible-believing branch of Protestant Evangelicalism, I was taught to glory in the famous Reformation rallying cry of "Sola Scriptura"—the fiery conviction that the Bible and the Bible alone constitutes the basis for Christian belief. We saw this as the only way to prevent mere traditions of men from creeping into our religion. But was it perhaps this honorable passion to defend the uniqueness of Scripture that eventually led us to neglect such a huge treasure chest of testimony about the early Church? In our sincere eagerness to be Bible Christians, had we perhaps come to undervalue the witness of God’s hand in Church history? I really had to start taking this possibility seriously when I learned that even my Reformation heroes had not hesitated to reference these ancient writings. Even Luther and Calvin—the very men who taught us Sola Scriptura in the first place—knew and respected these venerable saints whom ancient custom has given the title Fathers of the Church. They quite often used the writings of early giants like Ambrose and Augustine to bolster their various arguments. In fact, I eventually discovered that John Calvin had not only affirmed the testimony of these Church Fathers but unequivocally declared that for the first six hundred years of her existence on earth the Church had remained pure and undefiled.

This was good enough for me—good enough, in fact, to start at least one old-fashioned Baptist from the Bible Belt looking into the lives and teachings of exotic sounding characters like Cyprian of Carthage, Gregory Nazianzen, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Didymus the Blind. Poking around in a local Christian bookshop one rainy afternoon, I stumbled upon a set of books entitled The Ante-Nicene Fathers (ante-Nicene refers to the period prior to the Council of Nicaea, held in A.D. 325). They were squirreled away on a back shelf—at least ten volumes, reprinted from an old nineteenth-century edition issued in England by an Anglican publisher. I gingerly cracked the covers, apparently the first customer to do so. Within five minutes I knew that I had just dropped down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Two whole volumes in this set—big, fat, hard-bound library books stuffed with tiny print—did not have a word in them written later than A.D. 200. I do not mind saying that I leapt in with both feet.

The first thing to go was my gap theory—that is, my nebulous notion that a tactful three-hundred-year silence keeps pure, early Christianity locked safely away in the Platonic world of ideals. Right off the bat I encountered four eloquent witnesses squarely straddling this alleged gap between apostolic and postapostolic Christianity. To begin with there was Clement of Rome and his Epistle to the Corinthians—a book written, by conservative estimates, about the same time as the Gospel of John. I also discovered Ignatius, an early pastor of the church at Antioch and a man described by several ancient writers as a hearer of the apostles. We have at least five certified epistles of Ignatius; all of them composed in or about A.D. 107 . . . which dates them to within a decade of the close of the apostolic age. Justin Martyr reports that the Church had spread across the known world by his time—the year 150. And Irenaeus of Lyons, in his massive, five-volume work Against Heresies, wistfully recalls studying his theology at the feet of Polycarp. Polycarp was personally taught by John the Beloved, who was personally taught by Jesus Christ, who was personally taught by God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Which, obviously, kicked my convenient gap beliefs right in the pants. There is no gap. My four witnesses had eliminated this option forever. And I suddenly realized, with a little trepidation, that I was actually going to have to start dealing with the early Church from now on . . . rather than just identifying myself with her.

Pushing ahead, I moved beyond my initial encounter into a period of intense study. In fact, for nearly a year I read little else but the Bible and these four Apostolic Fathers. Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Justin Martyr became my constant daily companions, and I let the spirit of their pure and undefiled Christianity wash over me like a bath. I actually seemed to live for a while in this, the Church’s holiest and most Spirit-filled age; the age of secret baptisms in the catacombs, of the figure of a fish knowingly etched in the dust between friends, of Christians thrown to the lions and Peter crucified upside-down.

But as I did—as I immersed myself in this faith nineteen centuries younger than my own—I slowly began to notice that I was doing a great deal more than just investigating an interesting subject; I was undergoing a profound spiritual transformation.

I had expected, I think, to hear and be moved by the well-known stories of heroes and martyrs. What I had not expected to hear was clear, unambiguous teaching from these heroes and martyrs—the actual doctrine of primitive Christianity set down in black and white. Yet here it was, nevertheless: plain, substantive instruction about what the early Church actually believed—and much of it on hot-button topics that have become hopelessly controversial in our own time. I found that these four witnesses were not a bit shy about interpreting the holy Scriptures written so recently by the Apostles in whose steps they followed. They interpreted them vigorously, boldly, and with authority. . . leaving me, I’m afraid, in something of a pickle when I noticed that their interpretations often differed considerably from my own. Don’t get me wrong. I still held firmly to Sola Scriptura. But honestly, what’s a young fellow to do when he finds himself in a theological disagreement with four men who got their Bible training more or less directly from the Apostles? Looking back, I can see that when I first opened these books I was thinking of myself as an archeologist, perhaps breaking the ancient seal of King Solomon’s Mines to plunder his dusty relics. But before long I felt as if my flashlight beam had fallen upon King Solomon himself sitting among his treasures—alive, energetic, and still ready to impart his royal wisdom to anyone with ears to hear.

How I dealt with this remarkable encounter—how it changed me forever and how it renewed the youth of my spirit—I really won’t be able to explain until you have experienced something of these four witnesses for yourselves. Which, of course, is my excuse for writing the book you now hold in your hands.

It occurred to me that if this information were just a bit more accessible—if there were not quite so much of it buried under purple Victorian translations or petrified by lifeless, clinging academic critique—then ordinary believers like me would not have to work quite so hard to get at it. In fact, I thought I could see a compelling human drama entangled in all this dusty fine print; a drama that might go on to work its rejuvenating magic in many more lives if only someone could write it up in a more approachable style. This is where I began to feel that I might be of help. The Lord knows that I am no scholar. In fact, I am not much more than a Christian bookworm, with an amateur’s interest in history. But I will own up to a certain knack for storytelling—along with an intense persuasion that this particular story needs telling right now. This, I suppose, is what finally gave me the courage foolishly to rush in; an impatient conviction that this material is simply too amazing to remain a best-kept secret any longer, even if it has to be presented by an author whose only real qualification is enthusiasm.

Way back in the early 1960s, writer Margaret T. Monro penned a few short but prophetic words that seem to me very appropriate for quoting here. In the introduction to her excellent little book Enjoying the New Testament she wrote:

The progressive paganization of society is now putting twentieth-century Christians in close rapport with their first-century brethren. The world has not quite relapsed into its pagan state, but it has gone far enough to give us a new sense of kinship with these spiritual ancestors of ours. Dark as our sky is, theirs was darker, for they lacked all the encouragement of Christian history, to us such a precious support.¹

Has the dark sky done anything but darken since then? And as Monro’s twentieth-century now becomes our twenty-first, do we not need the encouragement of Christian history more than ever?

My fervent hope is to spread this precious support just a bit farther abroad. May the Holy Spirit use this new book to kindle in your hearts—as He has in mine—a bit of the fire and passion of your spiritual ancestors as they write to us from across the centuries in their own words.

The early Church is no mystery . . . thanks be to God!

Can any who spend several years in the seats of learning, be excused if they do not add to that of the languages and sciences, a knowledge of the Fathers?—the most authentic commentators on Scripture, as being both nearest the fountain, and eminently with that Spirit by whom all Scripture was given.

John Wesley—An Address to the Clergy

A Note about Historical Accuracy

In these pages I have proposed to tell the authentic story of early Christianity by presenting large verbatim excerpts from the four earliest non-canonical Christian writers whose works have survived down to our own time—the four witnesses of my title. In doing this my goal has been (as far as possible) to let the early Church speak for herself. But I have also felt the need to set each excerpt in its historical context as well. Who were these books written to, and under what circumstances? What emergencies were being dealt with? What hopes and dreams and fears were being addressed? I felt that it was only by portraying these things—sketching out the landscape, so to speak, behind each excerpt—that I could hope to make the ancient writings truly understandable. I have based these reconstructions solidly upon the very best scholarship available to me. Naturally however, any additions to or explanations of the naked text itself would necessarily admit a certain amount of subjectivity into the work. Choices had to be made between competing scholarly opinions and judgments had to be drawn up when clear documentary evidence was lacking. I frankly own up to this subjectivity—and also to using certain novelistic devices imported from the storyteller’s art that would be inappropriate in a more scholarly work. All this should be understood in the context of my previously stated goal; to tell a true tale, certainly—but also to tell a tale that engages the heart as well as the mind.

Acknowledgments

I had the opportunity to submit this text to several genuine experts on the early Church, most notably to Mr. Mike Aquilina, whose wonderful book The Fathers of the Church (Basilica Press) I heartily recommend to anyone who might wish to delve deeper into the subject at hand. Many other kind, intelligent people offered their thoughts, prayers, and encouragement as well; chief among these were Mark Shea, Jim Henry III, Geoff Horton, Mike Hertenstein, Fr. Tim Hepburn, Gary and Kathie Lundquist, Jim Peavy, and Erick Soto.

Several members of the Church Triumphant need mentioning also, writers whose profound effect on Four Witnesses will be obvious to anyone familiar with their works: Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis de Sales, and, particularly, Hilaire Belloc.

Finally, I wish to extol the patient virtue of my devoted wife, Dorothy, who brought a timely word from the Lord at a crucial moment, keeping Four Witnesses alive. May God bless and keep her.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.

Hebrews 12:1

Abbreviations

ACW  Ancient Christian Writers series. Mahwah, N.J., Paulist Press.

ANF  Ante-Nicene Fathers. 10 vols. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, revised by A. Cleveland Coxe. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995.

CCC  Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2d ed. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.

CEC  Chadwick, Henry. The Early Church. London: Penguin Books, 1973.

EHC  Eusebius Pamphilus. History of the Church. Translated by G. A. Williamson. London: Penguin Books, 1989.

FEF  The Faith of the Early Fathers. 3 vols. Translated and edited by W. A. Jurgens. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1970-1979.

NPNF1 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. 1st series. 10 vols. Edited by Philip Schaff. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995.

NPNF2 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. 2d series. 14 vols. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995.

Clement of Rome

Let us fix our gaze upon the Blood of Christ and understand how precious it is to the Father, because, poured out for our salvation, it brought to the whole world the grace of conversion. Let us pass in review all the generations and learn the lesson, that from generation to generation the Master has given an opportunity for conversion to those who were willing to turn to Him.¹

A man named Clement, pastor of the church at Rome during the decade of the 90s A.D., wrote these tender words to his fellow Christians living in the Greek city of Corinth—the very same Corinthians to whom the Apostle Paul had addressed two New Testament epistles about thirty years earlier. Both Origen, the third-century scholar, and Eusebius, author of the world’s oldest book of Church history (written in A.D. 325), knew this letter of Clement well. They tell us that its author is the same Clement mentioned by name in the Bible as the fellow worker of Paul, who labored side by side . . . in the gospel with the great Apostle and whose names are in the book of life (Phil 4:3).² But four witnesses notice how even at this early date the Church feels the need to turn the eyes of her people backward in time to marvel at the saving works of God in history. It seems fitting, then, as the Church enters her third millennium, to take these ancient words to heart again for ourselves. Let us begin this exploration of the testimony about the early Church by passing in review all the generations back to Clement’s own time, where his Epistle to the Corinthians preserves a fascinating snapshot of the gospel of Christ being lived out by believers who received it from the lips of Christ’s own disciples.

Feed My Sheep

To understand Clement’s role in God’s plan for the early Church we really need to begin even farther back—by reliving some of the childhood of the congregation he eventually came to shepherd. Sadly, the actual details of our subject’s life have been lost to history; all that survives with certainty is the Epistle itself. Yet if we look very carefully at the pages of Scripture and at the history of those amazing times, we do begin to see an outline—the life and times, not of Clement himself perhaps, but of his family in Christ. It is true that without an actual biography of Clement much of the backdrop of his priceless letter has to be sketched in with hypothesis and speculation. The story of Clement’s home church, however, is known with quite a bit of accuracy, and with this story guiding the way we can at least learn about the events that would have shaped the course of his Christian adventure here on earth.

In fact, it may be that the best place to begin Clement’s story is found within the pages of the New Testament itself. There, in the final chapter of the Gospel of John, we find recorded the single event that seems chiefly to have forged the pattern of his destiny. Significantly, it is an event, not from the life of Clement himself, but from the life of the Apostle whom Tertullian (writing about A.D. 200) tells us ordained him for ministry by the laying on of his own hands.

Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. He said to him, Feed my lambs. A second time he said to him, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. He said to him, Tend my sheep. He said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, Do you love me? And he said to him, Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep. (Jn 21:15-17)

The scene is a private breakfast along the shore of Tiberias. The Bible tells us that a charcoal fire burns on the beach: on the menu—some simple bread and one or two of 153 miraculous fishes just pulled out of the lake at the word of Christ. Present at this apostolic meal are Simon Peter, Thomas, Nathanael of Cana, and two other unnamed disciples; also James the son of Zebedee and his younger brother John—the eyewitness who will later record the episode in the Gospel that bears his name. John pauses here to tell us This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead (21:14).

It is sobering to notice that the Lord asks His heartrending question three times—once for each of Peter’s three denials on the night before the crucifixion. Surely the phrase Peter was grieved must be putting the matter mildly. But notice also that even in his grief the Apostle shows his great faith. Look within me, he seems to cry out. "Look with all your omniscience, Son of the living God. Though I am a sinful man, though I betrayed you as badly as Judas, whatever else may be true, you know that I love you." And Jesus does know it. Ultimately, this scene is not about the past but about the future.

Feed my sheep. These words are full of profound meaning. All through His Passion and right up to His Ascension, Jesus seems to be acutely concerned—even beset—over the future of His fragile little flock. Recall that earlier, on the night in which He was betrayed, Jesus, "deeply troubled, had lifted His eyes to heaven and called out a great high-priestly prayer for this ragged band of working men and ne’er-do-wells:

Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee. . . . I have manifested thy name to the men whom thou gavest me out of the world; thine they were, and thou gavest them to me. . . . I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from thee; and they have believed that thou didst send me. I am praying for them; I am not praying for the world but for those whom thou hast given me, for they are thine. . . . And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in thy name. . . . But now I am coming to thee. . . . Sanctify them in the truth. (Jn 17:1b, 6a, 89, 11 -12a, 13a, 17)

Sanctify them in the truth. Jesus has come to give humanity the words of truth given to Him by His Father. But now that the Son is going back to the Father, how will the world know that He was ever here? And that He really was sent by God? How will His work be preserved and continued? How will future generations learn the words of eternal life that belong to Jesus alone, and, just as importantly, how can they know that they have learned them correctly? And understood them correctly?

It has been too little commented upon, but when Jesus made the simple statement, I am the good shepherd (Jn 10:11), He made one of His most startling claims to divinity. Every Jew in Palestine would have been familiar with this ancient prophetic title—a prophecy that when the Messiah did finally come, He would come as God in the flesh.

The word of the LORD came to me: ‘Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord God: Ho, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep’  (Ezek 34:1-3). So begins one of God’s greatest pledges to His wayward people, given late in Israel’s history through the prophet Ezekiel. Over long ages of time He has sent them prophet after prophet in hopes of turning their hearts toward home. But the warnings of these true shepherds have been continually undercut by false shepherds—false prophets who prophesy out of their own minds (Ezek 13:2), who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing (13:3), who say,  ‘Says the Lord,’ when the Lord has not sent them (13: 6), who prophesy  ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace (13: 10). Against these evil shepherds the Lord rises to continue:

As I live, says the Lord God, because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild beasts, since there was no shepherd; and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep. . . . Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when some of his sheep have been scattered abroad, so will I seek out my sheep; and I will rescue them. . . . I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the crippled, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will watch over; I will feed them in justice. . . . I will save my flock, they shall no longer be a prey. . . . And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. . . . And they shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them. (Ezek 34:8, 11-12a, 15-16, 22-24b, 30)

It was into this context—a culture steeped in Old Testament literacy—that Jesus, the humble carpenter out of Nazareth, dropped the words that must have resounded like thunderclaps:

"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling