Adventures of the Early Church . . .

WHEN THE TIME WAS RIPE

When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son. - Gal. 4:4

While the unique character of the Christian story is generally admitted, it nonetheless, like all other things in this world, took place in a given civilization and in a particular culture. By civilization is meant the world order at that time, with its rise and fall of nations, its way of life, its social institutions. By culture is meant the things of the mind, ideas and philosophies, education, art, music and architecture.

So, we are speaking of “the situation” or “the condition,” what the Germans call the sitz im leben, that served as the context or the “home” for the beginning of the Christian faith. The above text says when all these things in civilization and culture were “just right,” or as Phillips renders it “When the proper time came,” God invaded history in a special way in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The phrase literally means “When the fullness of time came,” as if to suggest that history was ripening for the great event that would satisfy a yearning that had burned in the human heart for centuries. History was fulfilling itself, tiptoeing up to the one event that would change the world forever, something like gently filling a jug up to the brim. Or like the shooting of a movie scene. Ready! Camera!

Even though the “movie” that followed was a miracle story, its setting was in earthen vessels. The producer may have been in heaven and the audience may have been angelic, as Eph. 3:10 would suggest, but the stage for the unfolding drama was what we now call “the ancient world” with all its stark and cruel reality. It was the world of Judea and the Herods and Rome and the Caesars.

So it was with the Old Testament story. The great nations and their emperors were drafted into the service of the God of heaven as if theirs was a special call. Cyrus the Mede is referred to in Scripture as “the anointed of the Lord” even when it acknowledges that he did not know the God who called him. And the wicked Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon is called “the Lord’s battle ax,” while the Assyrians are referred to as “the rod of my anger.” When an ancient pharaoh had a dream he could not recall, which was part of the drama that made Joseph governor in Egypt, and when a Persian monarch assuaged his insomnia by having the record of heroic deeds read to him, which was crucial to Esther saving the Jews from destruction, it was God at work manipulating events so as to fulfill his purposes.

It is evident that the unfolding drama of Scripture did not take place in a vacuum, but in the ongoing events of human history. God called Jeremiah even from his mother’s womb “to be a prophet to the nations,” and when Isaiah referred to God’s mission in history he used such language as “the Lord will extend his hand a second time to recover the remnant which is left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coast lands of the sea” (Is. 11:11). And so the Old Testament does not hesitate to affirm that “the Most High rules the kingdom of men, and gives it to whom he will” (Dan. 4:25).

It is not surprising, therefore, that God set in motion the Christian story by influencing the minds of pagan emperors of Rome. Luke begins at the beginning when writing to a Greek official: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Lk. 2:1-2).

A decree from Rome calling for a census, the first of its kind, may appear as not particularly significant, but it was necessary to the script, for the Producer had to move a young maiden, pregnant with the Christ child eighty miles, from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea, so that “the Ruler” destined to bring peace to all the world would be born in “the smallest of the villages of Judah” as foretold by the prophet Micah. There was something special about Micah’s message, not only because he preached love, justice, and a humble walk with God as the essence of religion, but also because he held out hope in an age of despair that the great nations of the earth would one day be at peace, that they would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and study war no more. It was a call for peaceful coexistence.

Micah did a very unusual thing. He based his hopeful message upon the conviction that “a ruler in Israel” would rise to bring peace to a decadent world. He went on to name the village, Bethlehem Ephrathah, the second term being its ancient name, as the place of origin for this new ruler. While other prophets spoke of a coming Messiah, only Micah, a man of the country, dared to name the place of his birth. The prophecy was “a sleeper” through the centuries, with little attention given to it. But the God of heaven, who always watches over his word to perform it, did not forget that the Christ was to be born in the city of David.

Augustus, who ruled Rome for 44 years, did far more to build the cradle for Christianity than to issue a decree that positioned the virgin Mary in Bethlehem at the right time. His name was really Octavian, but the senate proclaimed him Augustus because he transformed a republic into an empire and displaced war and decadence with peace and prosperity. They said of him that he found Rome a city of brick and turned it into a city of marble. He built temples, basilicas, libraries, theatres, roads, and along with it lowered taxes. In bringing peace to a large part of the world he was able to cut his army in half, but still he opened up travel routes and secured them against brigands by having guard stations along the way. Merchants could not only travel the world in peace but the evangels of the gospel as well. His rule of nearly half a century, longer than any other emperor, brought such peace as the world had not known for two centuries. He made the time ripe for the coming of the Christ, for the gospel could not have had free rein in a war-torn world.

But the emperor, whose reign is sometimes called “the Augustan Reformation,” did what few rulers ever attempt in that he tried to make the people good as well as happy, and moral revolutions are hard to come by. Rulers usually leave moral reform to saints and prophets. It was because of his influence that the people became more conscious of morals and religion, art and philosophy, law and order. He sought to revive such ancient ideals as character and courage. Many slaves were freed. He awarded family life and parentage in a world that had chosen childlessness through abortion, infanticide, and contraception. He encouraged the great writers in his empire, the likes of Livy, Virgil and Horace, to write in behalf of moral and religious reform.

While the senate in naming him Augustus assumed him to be more than a man even if less than a god, he was hardly an exemplary figure and as for religion he was no more than a skeptic. He gained his power by forcing the hand of Cleopatra, who ruled the riches of Egypt and who loved Mark Antony, Augustus’ rival. Once he had military leverage over her, he demanded that she kill Antony. She refused, but Antony, supposing his lover to be dead, mortally wounded himself. When he learned the report to be false, he made his way to her and died in her arms. Augustus, waiting outside with his army, allowed Cleopatra to bury her lover. She stood before Augustus to hear the terms he offered. Finding them unacceptable, she returned to her quarters, clad herself in her royal robes, and then put an asp to her breast and died.

And so Octavian became Augustus and built the Roman Empire with the wealth of Egypt —and thus prepared the world for Jesus Christ! It may strike us as strange that the God of heaven would use such means to accomplish His purposes, but we are to remember that God was working within human history, and that is the stuff of history. Say what we will about their morals, the Greeks and the Romans were “tutors unto Christ,” as they are sometimes called, even when they were often homosexuals and gained their thrones through assassination.

His efforts less than realized, Augustus came to see that moral reform awaited a religious renaissance. He helped to set the tone, for in his time agnosticism lost its appeal and the people came to suspect what their poets had told them, that the fear of the gods is the youth of wisdom. Even the cynical Ovid yielded: “It is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.” So a world empire was at least ready to hear the Christian message. And that empire had set in motion a long reign of peace, the pax Romana it was called, and they had built roads that stretched from one great city to another and secured them. The seas were safe from pirates. In a few years an apostle of Jesus Christ could “appeal to Caesar” and journey all the way to Rome under protective custody, with no obstacle but the weather. The Romans had ripened the time for God to send the star of Bethlehem.

But that is not all. Beside political unity, law and order, and international peace, the world also needed a unity of language. The official language was Latin, another gift of the Romans, but the common language of the people was Greek, bequeathed by the conquering armies of Alexander the Great generations earlier. These two languages, along with Aramaic, the vernacular of Palestinian Jews, were the languages that Pontius Pilate wrote above the Cross of Christ, and they were the two languages that communicated to an entire empire. The koine Greek was not the Greek of Sophocles or Plato, but of the common man, the housewife and her written recipe, the soldier and his letter home. For a time linguists were baffled by “biblical Greek,” supposing it to be some special “Holy Ghost lingo,” but it was soon discovered that it was so common as to be lost in the everyday life of an ancient people. While classical Greek could be found in ancient libraries, the koine Greek was to be found only in the writings of the common folk in the form of letters, diaries, recipes, etc., now called papyri (plural for papyrus).

And this was the Greek of the New Testament and the language of the gospel as it reached out all over the Graeco-Roman world. Adolph Deissmann, one of the linguists who searched these things out, found papyri from every century of the Christian era, which not only attests to the language of the New Testament but allows for a better definition of the words it uses.

Greek language and culture became so dominant that even the Jews scattered over the Greek world no longer used their native Hebrew or Aramaic, and they soon translated their Old Testament Scriptures into Greek, about 200 B.C. This translation is known as the Septuagint, and it became the Bible of the early church. While Greek ideas had some influence on Christian thought, such as the concept of the Logos, the religious influence was mostly Jewish. The Greeks, for instance, were radically polytheistic, while Judaism was adamantly monotheistic, and it was of course the conviction that “the Lord is one God” that became as much Christian as it was Jewish.

Indeed, the Jewish influence upon the early church was so extensive that we shall be aware of it throughout this series. The first Christian scriptures were Jewish. The first Christians were themselves Jewish. The one they proclaimed as Lord was Jewish. The church in its corporate worship and organization was strikingly similar to the Jewish synagogue. This is why Jn. 4:22 has Jesus saying, “Salvation is of the Jews.” Neither Jesus nor the early church would have ever said that about the Greeks or Romans.

And yet but a fraction of the Jews became Christians. The earliest enemies to the new faith were not as much the Romans as the Jews. This points up how disadvantaged Christianity was as a new religion among the old and politically powerful cultures of the world, which had their own religions. Persia gave its support to Zoroastrianism and India gave its allegiance to both Hinduism and Buddhism. Confucianism was identified with China, then one of the great empires.

The Greeks supported many religions, whether the Eleusian mysteries or such cults as Mithra and Dionysius, and with these the Christian faith had to compete. If we identify Christianity with Israel, it could be only as a minority religion, and even so Israel as an obscure people did not compare with the great ancient empires. The Christian faith had to find its strength in something more than great world empires. True, it eventually became the official religion of the Roman Empire, but this was not until the fourth century, beyond the time of “the early church” and the era of its greatest power.

We remind ourselves in this series that the New Testament did not produce the early church, but it was the early church that produced the New Testament. To understand the New Testament, therefore, we do well to understand the climate in which the church emerged. If the Greeks and Romans were tutors unto Christ, we need to know something of what they contributed. If the Christian faith is “the culmination of Judaism,” as it is sometimes put, then we need to understand the Jewish foundations. Already we have seen that the Romans provided law and order, international highways, security of land and sea, and political unity. The Greeks lent their language, literature, and ideas. The Graeco-Roman world as a whole created a tone and a soul, a hunger for certainty, and a cultivation of mind and spirit that opened hearts to the gospel message. Judaism gave the Person and the faith as well as the characters for the opening drama.

Now that we have some grasp of how the time was made ripe for the invasion of Christ into human history, we are better prepared to move on to our next installment on “The Faith that Made the Difference.” —the Editor