J. G. Davies' The Early Christian Church

J. G. Davies' The Early Christian Church

Originally published 1965; this edition was published by Barnes & Noble 1995. This is a scholarly history of the Christian church from its Jewish roots through roughly the fourth century. There's a lot of important information here, but unfortunately written in the style that you might expect of a British professor of that era. Don't expect to sit down and blast through it in a couple of afternoons. But if you want a detailed, objective analysis of the subject, this is certainly one book to consider. I consider myself to have a pretty substantial vocabulary, but I on a number of occasions found myself having to look up a word in the dictionary. It would have helped if some of the more technical terms had been defined at first use.

My impression from reading the book is that while he is writing a scholarly, objective account, Davies was a Christian--although of a rather liberal theological bent. I suspect that pp. 8-15 will irritate many fundamentalists, since Davies accepts the validity of the Quelle theory of common origins of the materials in the Synoptic Gospels, and gives some credence to the German Form Criticism school that played such a prominent role in destroying Christianity as a literal faith--provoking twentieth century fundamentalism (which creates its own set of problems for Christians of an intellectual bent). At the same time, Davies doesn't seem to have followed the dusty road down to complete disbelief that led to Social Darwinism and ultimately, to Auschwitz.

This more mainstream Christianity (where mainstream is understood as a more intellectual, more questioning form of the faith that was Protestantism before about 1860) makes Davies' book a worthwhile counterbalance to a more fundamentalist approach. Truth is often reached by examining multiple theories and models.

One of the areas where I have always been rather weak in my knowledge of the history of Christianity is from the end of the period covered by the book of Acts to Constantine. I recognized a lot of the names--Eusebius, Tertullian, Cyprian, John Chryostom--but I generally knew the name and nothing else--just that they were "church fathers." They came after the Apostles, before Constantine, but I often knew little more than the name and "second or third century A.D." This book gives a detailed description of what dozens of bishops, theologians, and Roman emperors did with relation to the Church.

I will warn you that the detailed discussions of the fine theological points that seemed terribly important in many of these early struggles are often sleep inducing. In some cases, I can see why the differences of opinion mattered, because they influenced how people lived. Gnostic teaching (which Davies asserts absorbed bits of Christian lingo and literature, but was not a Christian offshoot), by teaching that the spirit and the body were separate, was able to justify that the sins your body committed had no effect on the soul, and therefore there was no reason to put any great effort into doing what you wanted. It is pretty clear where that leads--and why that's a bad idea.

But many of the other disputes were over such subtle points that classical Greek (a language awash in specialized words for subtle philosophical points) was sometimes unable to adequately explain them--and his attempts to render these distinctions in modern English bored me silly. I guess third century theologians had insufficient important points to argue.

Davies examines the changing style of worship, which varied significantly from region to region and century to century, as well as how architecture changed for church buildings--something a bit less abstract that I found a welcome change. I was both surprised and saddened to see how early a cathedral was established at Abu Dubai--one of those reminders that the aggressive militancy of Islam crushed Christianity out of a part of the world that had Christians for hundreds of years when Arab armies came through, giving people the choice (on the battlefield) of conversion or death, and off the battlefield, the choice of an extraordinarily heavy taxation on assets, or conversion. Islam's pretense that its success was because people wanted to believe it is pretty well belied by the methods used to achieve that success.

This is a pretty grim book in places. There are plenty of embarrassing reminders that the early Christian church wasn't filled with saintly figures who cared only about spreading the Gospel. As Davies makes clear, when Christianity went from a persecuted underground cult to a religion that was recognized and then finally established by the Roman Empire, it attracted people whose motivations left much to be desired. This should not be a surprise, of course, but it does remind you that there are times that being a persecuted minority can be an advantage.