The Adventures of the Early Church …

WHAT WAS IMPORTANT TO THEM ABOUT JESUS?

I recently read Be My Guest by Conrad Hilton, which tells the exciting story of how a Texas lad started with one lowly hotel in Cisco, Texas and built it into the most impressive hotel chain in the world. The Hilton Hotel story is the story of Conrad Hilton, and without him there is no story. It is he that made it an adventure.

The story of the early church is like that in that there is “one solitary figure” behind the story. It is he that made it an adventure. It is he that created the church and not the church that created him. Apart from him the church has no meaning.

When singer Pat Boone, who was at the time a member of the Church of Christ, discovered a closer walk with this man behind the story, he used the story of Conrad Hilton in an effort to explain what happened to him. It is one thing to take a room at a Hilton hotel, he said, but it is something else to be Mr. Hilton’s personal guest in the penthouse on the roof. Pat had known about Jesus for many years, he told us, but in his new walk he came to know the man himself. He had “checked in” at church all those years, but he found himself empty and lonely. So one day he opened the door to the One who knocked and moved up to a “penthouse” relationship.

That gets close to the secret of the early church. The world soon took notice that they had been with Jesus, and it was this that explains the power of their ministry. Jesus was with them and they were with him to the end. They watched as he was taken up in a cloud into heaven. He left a promise with them that they believed even unto death itself: I will be with you always, even unto the end of the age. If Peter and the others lost their faith for a time, it was so impressively regained that the rulers of the people marveled at the boldness with which they proclaimed the Jesus story, seeing that they were uneducated and untrained men (Acts 4:13).

That passage tells the secret, for it says the rulers “began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.” And they believed that Jesus was still with them, which explains how they, unlearned men who would not dare to confront the authorities, spoke with such boldness and confidence to those who heard them.

Early on in the adventure of the early church we see that it was the person of Jesus Christ as friend, teacher, Lord, and savior that was important, but foremost was the presence of Jesus as a living reality. One of Jesus’ appearances following his resurrection was to seven of his apostles out fishing. When John saw who it was he said to Peter, “It is the Lord.’: Peter responded with such excitement that he jumped out of the boat in his haste to reach Jesus, leaving John to man the boat. At this time there was hardly a theological Jesus in Peter’s mind. There was simply Jesus whom he loved as Lord and teacher, the one he had come to know, not by reading of him in the Scriptures, but by being with him in a real and personal way.

When we ask ourselves with the New Testament in hand what was important to them about Jesus, we are struck with at least one major surprise. His life story, his biography, was not important. When a British scholar was asked by a newspaper to prepare a biography of Christ, he rejected the invitation by explaining that there was no data for such an assignment. Since so many Lives of Jesus have been written, from Renan to Schweitzer, it is evident that all scholars have not been so candid. Judging by the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John we can only conclude that they had no interest in writing a Life of Jesus of Nazareth, for surely they could have had they deemed it important. Besides the birth narratives and one brief episode in his childhood, there is nothing at all about Jesus until he was thirty years old. Even then the story is mostly confined to just a few weeks of his life.

Some of the more curious Christians of later generations speculated on Jesus’ early life. One story they invented was that Jesus as a boy joined his playmates in making clay pigeons. The playmates watched as Jesus’ pigeons came to life and flew away. Another has little Jesus restoring life to a playmate that fell from a tree and died. These are part of what is now called The Apocryphal New Testament, which, while wholly unreliable, serves to show how void the New Testament is of all such sensationalism.

What was important to Mark was “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and that is how his record begins and that is what it is about. John resorted to hyperbole in saying that the world could not contain the books that could be written about Jesus (Jn. 21:25), and he admitted that he had left out many things that should be written (Jn. 20:30). Nonetheless what he did write was adequate for his purpose and for what he considered crucial: “These things have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ; and that believing you may have life in his name” (Jn. 20:31).

Luke’s account is especially interesting since he goes at it like an investigative reporter, and he reveals to us that there were “many” written records about Jesus, none of which really satisfied his purpose. So he “investigated everything carefully from the beginning” so as to prepare a “consecutive order” of the story. The records he had at his disposal, which probably included Mark (or a source used by Mark), must have been too disconnected to suit him, and maybe not accurate enough, for in his preface he wants his reader to know “the exact truth about the things you have been taught.” By this time a body of teaching was circulating over the Roman world about Jesus and his community. Luke laid it all out orderly, adequately, and truthfully —like a physician with his scalpel stripping away the fat and leaving it all lean. So if we want to know what the early church considered really important about Jesus we should read Luke.

And of course Matthew, but here the purpose is different since Matthew wrote for the benefit of Jewish readers. So it is important to him for Jesus to walk right out of the Jewish Scriptures as the Messiah, the fulfillment all the prophets had longed for. And Matthew was eager to present Jesus as Israel’s great teacher, one who clothed the mystery of the kingdom of God in parables.

Up to this point (the end of the first generation of believers) we can say that what the church saw as really important about Jesus was two things; (1) what Jesus was as a person, their love for him as friend, teacher, Lord, savior, and here their concepts would not likely make heavy theology; (2) “all that Jesus began to do and teach” as Luke puts it in Acts 1;1; now there was “the message” about a person, his ministry and his teaching, and they wanted it told right, and they now wanted it in writing.

In time a consensus began to form as to what Jesus meant to them. If the virgin birth (miraculous conception is a more accurate term) was not part of that consensus, being only in Matthew and Luke, there was consensus that his life did not begin in a manger but that it reached back into eternity itself. It was important to Matthew that when Jesus was on trial before the Sanhedrin and was asked point blank Are you the Christ? he answered unequivocally Yes, I am. It was on that occasion that Jesus told the Council that the Son of Man, a clear reference to himself, would soon be seated at the right hand of God (22:69).

It is John and Paul, however, who reflect a heavy theology of the preexistence or eternity of Jesus. John records Jesus saying “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn. 8:58), a declaration that so frustrated the Jews that they attempted to stone him. Beyond that John sees Jesus as the eternal Word of God that became man (Jn. 1:14). Paul reveals that Jesus previously existed in “the form of God,” then “emptied himself” and became man (Philip. 2:6-7), and the apostle sees him as “the image of the invisible God” and as one who existed before all other existence (Col. 1;15-17).

There can be no question but what the early Christians saw Jesus as one who came from another world. Down to the last book of the New Testament Jesus is heard saying “I am the first and the last, and the living one (Rev. 1:17), and he is called “the Word of God” (Rev. 19;13) as well as “the Lord of Lords and King of Kings” (Rev. 17:14).

Among the most important things about Jesus to his followers was that he was the Messiah, though they may have had only a superficial understanding of what this meant. For whatever reason Jesus did not permit those he cured (Mk. 5:43), the demons he encountered (Mk. I ;34) or even his disciples (Mk. 8:30) to reveal that he was the Messiah. This “Messianic secret,” as the scholars have come to call it, was to be kept until after his resurrection (Mk. 9:9). What is important to us is that the earliest disciples believed the secret even though they were puzzled as to what he might have meant by “rising from the dead” (Mk. 9:10).

In all these things that the first disciples believed about Jesus it says something to us that their faith was far from perfect. The faith of some faltered even as they looked upon the risen Christ, and even on the verge of his ascension into heaven some still had trouble with their faith (Mt. 28:17). And these were his own apostles who became the foundation of the church. This should give us pause to be gracious to each other in our faltering ways and not be quick to draw the line on each other. Their faith, like ours must often have been like the man who cried out to Jesus “I do believe; help my unbelief” (Mk. 9;24).

Even this struggle with faith helps us to understand what they believed (or tried to believe) about Jesus. It was the resurrection event that was both their strength and their weakness, for they believed it and yet they did not, as if it were too good to be true, as in Lk. 24:41: “And while they still could not believe it for joy and were marveling, he said to them, ‘Have you anything to eat?’”

While the resurrection was not the cause of their faith (since they already believed in Jesus), it authenticated their faith, especially after their hopes were dashed by the death of Christ. And so the resurrection became the heart of the proclamation. The resurrection meant that God had made Jesus both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36) and that he was now at the right hand of God in heaven (Acts 2;33). It even served as proof that God would one day judge the world (Acts 17:31). It was the grand truth that served as the basis for preaching repentance and remission of sins to the world (Lk. 24:47).

All this and much more is what was important about Jesus to the early church. The images they created to describe him, whether prophet, priest, king, mediator, judge, lamb, shepherd, physician, and many more, indicate that they were lost for words in telling what he meant to them. He was both the bread of life and the light of the world, the alpha and the omega and the bright morning star.

While Jesus is called “the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4) and certainly “the Son of God” (Mk. 1:1), the New Testament is hesitant to call him God per se. Except for one or two doubtful passages in John, none of the gospels goes so far as to call Jesus God. I say “doubtful” because the translation “the Word was God” (Jn. 1:1), which would be a clear instance of Jesus being called God, might better be rendered “The Word is of God” or, as in the New English Version, “what God was the Word was.” The reason for this is that there is no article the before God in the Greek, which makes for the same difference in English as The judge is the man, which makes the two nouns identical, and The judge is man, which gives the second noun adjectival form. So it is doubtful that Jn. 1:1 calls Jesus God though it certainly says that Jesus is of the nature of God.

Some versions have Jn. 1:18 call Jesus “the only begotten God,” but here we have a problem as to what the correct reading is since the old manuscripts differ, some having “the only begotten Son.”

In Jn. 20:28 we have a clear instance of Jesus being called “My Lord and my God” by the doubtful Thomas who now fully believes. But it strikes the reader as more emotional than theological, the response of a loving heart more than a serious effort to describe the nature of Christ.

There are a few other instances that may appear to call Jesus God, such as Tit. 2:13 and 1 Jn. 5:20, but in each case there is a problem either with the text or how it. should be interpreted. The bottom line seems to be that the early Christians did believe that Jesus was God, but, because of their strong Jewish heritage that insisted that God is one, they could never quite bring themselves to put it in writing. He was in the image of God, the form of God, the Son of God, and “what God was Jesus was,” but never unequivocally Jesus is God.

Do we not have the same problem? When we read of Jesus coming down from heaven to do the will of the one who sent him (Jn. 6:38), of God sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3) and of Paul saying “the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3), along with all the praying that Jesus did to his Father in heaven, we too are reluctant to say Jesus is God (period).

I like the way one theologian put it: “I believe that Jesus was God, but not that God was Jesus.” It seems that the New Testament tries to say something like that.

This problem led to what is called adoptionism, which is the theory that Jesus was like any other man, but one who so magnificently obeyed the will of God under such trying circumstances that God adopted him as a son. While this may appear to be supported by Jesus’ passion to do his Father’s will, adoptionism was named a heresy by the church and was not the belief of the early Christians. It is nonetheless an understandable heresy.

I conclude that it was the man himself, his magnificent and magnanimous humanity, that impressed the earliest believers most of all. While they came to see him as the Son of God and as the Messiah, and while this was confirmed by his resurrection from the dead, it was still the simplicity of the person, his transparent love, his forgiving spirit, his compassion for the dispossessed, his devotion to the heavenly Father, his courage in the face of danger, his commitment to his mission, and his tender, yielding attitude toward them that stole their hearts.

John did not lay his head on Jesus’ breast, a touching description of the love they had for each other, because he believed that Jesus was the Messiah. He loved him anyhow, deeply, and because he was Jesus. Jesus disarmed them by his utter unselfishness and awed them by his perfect, sinless humanity. Since they often talked things over apart from him, we can believe that they were sometimes speechless in his presence. His presence must have been overwhelming. The mystery was the man himself. Yet his love was so overflowing that they were comfortable, even overjoyed, in his company. Even their unbelief in the presence of the risen Christ was “for joy” (Lk. 24:41). We can believe that their joy was not so much that the Scriptures had been fulfilled or that he was authenticated as the Christ, but that their dear friend and teacher was alive again.

This is the great secret of the faith of the early church: they believed their dear, loving friend was still with them, even if he was in a sense their absent friend. This was the meaning of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The Holy Spirit was the presence of their absent Lord. And so they believed in the reality of what Jesus had promised - I will be with you always.

To the extent that we come to know Jesus like that, and not only truths about him, we too will have that secret power within us. It is the most liberating and life-changing concept in the history of thought. And, believe me, it is the only way to a religion of joy. —the Editor

From birth onward, the human and the divine were united in Jesus. Yet their union was so natural that the one never seemed to be something additional or accidental to the other. He was born and grew up like other children. He increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man (Lk. 2:52). He was hungry, tempted, tired, limited in knowledge;’ he could be indignant and angry, he was sociable and sympathetic, he prayed, and in the end he was crucified and killed. At the same time, he repeatedly made claims and performed actions that were appropriate only to God. Harry R. Boer, A Short History of the Early Church, p. 16.