A Case of Mistaken Identity?
Rooted in κυριακόν (kyriakon), the English word “church” is the traditional translation of the Greek ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia). We may be practically stuck with it, but it’s a mistranslation, one that reinforces a misnomer at least as unhappy as Columbus’s tagging as “Indians” the aboriginal peoples who got to the Americas before he did.
The word κύριος (kyrios) means “lord”; κυριακόν (kyriakon) is the possessive. How one derives a form of kyriakon from ekklēsia is not only beyond my ken, but also that of many scholars who have noted this lexical curiosity. But we can learn from this misadventure: the discontinuity between the Christian individuals designated in the New Testament as ἐκκλησίαί (ekklēsiai, plural of ekklesia) and the historically identifiable societies we call “churches” is considerable.
The ekklēsiai of the apostolic age (roughly A.D. 33 to 70) were predominantly Jews who believed that Jesus was their prophesied Messiah. During that age believers who not of the seed of Abraham (i.e., “gentiles”) were “grafted in” to Israel on a case-by-case basis (Romans 11:17), sometimes to provoke Jews to jealousy (Romans 11:14). “Gentiles,” those who belonged to other nations (ἔθνη, ethnē, thus our word “ethnic”) were exceptions to a rule. In the New Testament we only have the names of three such exceptions: Cornelius (Acts 10), Titus (Galatians 2:3), and Epaphroditus (Philippians 2:25-30).
By What Authority?
Christ Himself was commissioned with authority (apostellō) only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15 :24). He restricted His disciples’ commission to them as well (Matthew 10:5-6). During the period of the Book of Acts is the history, the Gospel was preached to the Jew first, including the Greek-speaking (Ἕλληνι, Hellēni) Jews of the diaspora, such as Rome’s Jewish community (Romans 1:16).
God-fearing gentiles who stood in the rear of the synagogue as Paul preached were guests. His message was not intended for them. They would be, however, welcomed into fellowship with Jewish Christians if they believed that message and adhered to a few moral and dietary rules so as not to offend their Jewish brethren in Christ (e.g., Acts 15:20).
These non-Jews “besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath”—for which “almost the whole city” of Pisidian Antioch turned out the following week (Acts 13:44). When some synagogue leaders took offense at Paul and Barnabas’s outreach, they answered:
It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles (ἔθνη, ethnē, Acts 13:46).
But that decision was restricted to Pisidian Antioch: in the very next chapter we read that they traveled to Iconium “into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake, that a great multitude both of the Jews and of the Greeks believed” (Acts 14:1).
That was the only way Jews, Greeks or anyone else were going to hear the Good News in the Acts period: hearing required a preacher, and the preacher had to be commissioned:
. . . how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent (ἀποσταλῶσιν, apostolōsin)? (Romans 10:14b-15a)
Paul was the apostle (commissioned one) to the nations. If a city had no Jews, he’d travel through it without stopping on his way to one that had a synagogue (e.g., he passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia but stopped in Thessalonica, Acts 17:1).
The Dispensational Sea-Change
At the close of the Acts period Paul announced that the Gospel, the salvation-bringing (σωτήριον, sotērion) message of God, would thenceforth be authorized (ἀπεστάλη, apestalē), that is, made freely available, to all nations without distinction and that it would get through (ἀκούσονται akousontai) to them (Acts 28:28). If this didn’t mark an administrative (or dispensational) change on God’s part in his dealings with the human race, then nothing ever did.
Paul stayed put for two years. No more need to travel. His commission was over because it had been fulfilled. Thanks to him and his companions in Christ, every Jew in the Roman empire had been given a clear-cut opportunity to hear the Gospel (εὐαγγέλιον, euangélion, the “right message”) exactly once and then make a fateful decision for or against it. From now on, however, it would be freely available to all.
So, how did this overwhelmingly Jewish Christian enterprise, whose theology is unintelligible apart from the Hebrew Scriptures, come under the control of, not just non-Jews but also—let’s be frank—anti-Semites who worked to obscure if not also repudiate the Jewish roots of the Gospel?
Did second-century Christians have a bone to pick with synagogue leaders? I’m sure they did. But why weren’t Jewish Christians among the authors of these polemics? Were they all fed to the lions in the Colosseum? They seemed to have disappeared from the pages of history, leaving the stage to Jew-hating professors of Christ like Justin Martyr and other exponents of “displacement theology” like Origen.
There’s a frustrating silence when it comes to the historical record. We cannot discern any connection between the Jewish Christian train that entered the tunnel on one side of the mountain around 70 A.D. and the Gentile Christian locomotive that exited on the other in the mid-second century.
So, what happened?
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, a liberal 19th-century Anglican broad churchman (no dispensationalist!), asked that question. Despite his vast erudition, however, he couldn’t relate the “before” and “after” pictures of Christian communities in the first two centuries of our era. He only assumed, implicitly, that there had to be some connection. I owe to Otis Q. Sellers my awareness of the elegant prose that Stanley employed to delineate this question, and am happy to own a facsimile reprint of his magisterial Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (London, 1861, reprinted by Forgotten Books, 2012; many editions available on Amazon). I will first treat you to Stanley’s meditation and then to Sellers’s thoughts on its significance:
The first period [Stanley writes] is that which contains the great question, almost the greatest which Ecclesiastical History has to answer: How was the transition effected from the age of the Apostles to the age of the Fathers, from Christianity as we see it in the New Testament, to Christianity as we see it in the next century, and as, to a certain extent, we have seen it ever since? No other change equally momentous has ever since affected its fortunes, yet none has ever been so silent and secret. The stream, in that most critical moment of its passage from the everlasting hills to the plain below, is lost to our view at the very point where we are most anxious to watch it; we may hear its struggles under the overarching rocks; we may catch its spray on the boughs that overlap its course; but the torrent itself we see not, or see only by imperfect glimpses. It is not so much a period for Ecclesiastical History as for ecclesiastical controversy and conjecture. A fragment here, an allegory there; romances of unknown authorship; a handful of letters of which the genuineness of every portion is contested inch by inch; the summary examination of a Roman magistrate; the pleadings of two or three Christian apologists; customs and opinions in the very act of change; last but not least, the faded paintings, the broken sculptures, the rude epitaphs in the darkness of the catacombs, these are the scanty, though attractive, materials out of which the likeness of the early Church must be reproduced, as it was working its way, in the literal sense of the word, “underground,” under camp and palace, under senate and forum, as unknown, yet well known; as dying, and behold it lives.
This chasm once cleared, we find ourselves approaching the point where the story of the Church once more becomes history: becomes once more history, not of an isolated community, or of isolated individuals, but of an organized society incorporated with the political systems of the world. Already, in the close of the second and beginning of the third century, the Churches of Africa, now seen for a few generations before their final disappearance, exhibit distinct characters on the scene. They are the stepping-stones by which we cross from the obscure to the clear, from chaos to order. Of these the Church of Carthage illustrates the rise of Christianity in the West, the Church of Egypt that of Christianity in the East.
But the first great outward event of the actual history of the Church is its conversion of the Empire; and, in close connection with this, its first wide sphere in the face of mankind, is the Oriental world out of which it sprang, and in which the external forms of its early organisation can still be most clearly studied. In the usages of the ancient systems which have grown up on that soil—Coptic, Greek, Asiatic—we may still trace the relics, the fossilised relics, of the Old Imperial Church. In the period of the first Councils, and in some passages of the Byzantine Empire, the fortunes of the Eastern Church are identified with the fortunes of Christendom. Its connection with the general course of Ecclesiastical History in subsequent times depends chiefly on two developments of religious life of a very different kind from each other, the rise of Mahometanism, and the rise of the Church and Empire of Russia. (15-17; my emphasis)
Stanley’s reference to “Church” betrays a belief that there was some kind of corporate continuity, however camouflaged, between the “isolated individuals” of the first century and the “organized society incorporated with the political systems of the world” of later centuries; therefore, so goes the implicit logic, the symbol “Church” may be stretched to cover these disparate historical phenomena, to straddle the “chasm,” as it were.
Otis Q. Sellers did not share that belief. Before quoting Stanley, he once bluntly wrote: “Between A.D. 70 and A.D. 150 there is no recorded history so far as the people of God are concerned; and this is that period of time in which the transition was made from the age of the apostles, all of whom were Jews that believed, to the age of the so-called ‘Church Fathers,’ none of whom were Jews.”
One knows how to go about disproving this universal negative: point to the documentary or archaeological evidence that has been unearthed since 1861, evidence that is not merely, to quote Stanley again, a
fragment here, an allegory there; romances of unknown authorship; a handful of letters of which the genuineness of every portion is contested inch by inch; the summary examination of a Roman magistrate; the pleadings of two or three Christian apologists; customs and opinions in the very act of change; last but not least, the faded paintings, the broken sculptures, the rude epitaphs in the darkness of the catacombs . . . .
Sellers continued:
[I]f we consider all the research and discovery that has taken place in the more than 100 years that have passed since he wrote, we find no facts of any kind that shed any light upon that strange, silent, and secret period between A.D. 70 and A.D. 150. Thus, today we still stand amazed at how a great company of isolated individuals who believed that Jesus was the Christ, and these predominately Jews that believed, became in eighty years an organized society, incorporated with the political systems of this world, holding beliefs and practicing rituals which were unknown in New Testament times. Furthermore, how was it possible that the great company of “Jews that believed” should in such short time become a company of Gentiles of great power in the Roman Empire, and also become anti-Semitic and the leading persecutors of Israel? (Seed & Bread, 45, early 1970s)
He essayed an answer:
That stream which disappeared from view when the last word of the New Testament was written is not the same stream that emerged into view eighty years later. Christianity as we see it in the New Testament is not the Christianity that we see 100 years later; the ekklēsia (out-called ones) of the New Testament is not the Church of the Latin Fathers. To use the words of Dean Stanley—“when this chasm is once cleared, and we find ourselves approaching the point where the story of the New Testament once more becomes history”—we find a great theological conspiracy in operation whose evident purpose is to get the Jew out and get the Gentile church in, even going to the extreme of insisting that all Jews must desert their heritage and become Gentiles if they want to be any part of that which is called “Christianity.”
In elaborating upon what he deemed a “conspiracy” Sellers asserted propositions for which I hope my prefatory sentences prepared my reader:
This conspiracy can be seen in the idea, almost universally accepted in Christendom, that Israel was rejected and set aside at the Cross and has no further place in God’s program or purposes. All promises that God ever made to Israel are thrown up for grabs; and then the theft is justified by claiming that “the Church” is “spiritual Israel” and, therefore, is the real owner of Israel’s place and blessings. Thus, a sharp distinction is made between “the Church” and Israel, so that any Jew who would become a part of the church must sever himself from Israel.
Out of this comes the idea that the Book of Acts is the history of the beginning and growth of “the church.” The truth that Israel is still the center of all God’s activities throughout the Acts period is ignored or denied. “Get the Jew out and get the Gentile in” is the theological battle cry when men handle this book. Church theologians simply will not face up to the truth that in the eight-year period after the Resurrection, when thousands were flocking to the Savior, and doing so at the risk of their lives, there was not so much as even one Gentile among them. If any think otherwise, then let that Gentile be pointed out or named.
Traditional theology would prefer that we believe that out of the three thousand who came to know Christ on the day of Pentecost, there were many Gentiles, and that these fanned out over the Roman Empire to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, and to found Gentile churches even in such faraway places as Rome. The truth is ignored that this would make these men God’s commissioned ones to the Gentiles and set aside Paul’s claim that this was a prerogative in which he alone could boast. (Ibid.)
In summary:
It was a full-blown conspiracy when it first came to the surface in history. It is not known how it started or who instigated it, but all at once it was in full operation. Its chief purpose can be set forth in few and simple words. Its goal was to get the Jew out of all God’s plans and purposes and to get the Gentile in; to take every precious promise that God had made to Israel and apply each of them to organized religion called “the church,” and this a Gentile church, of course; to take the glorious Old Testament concept of the Kingdom of God upon the earth and make it to be a promise of “the church” in heaven. (Ibid.)
The story of this displacement is for another time. In the meantime, I challenge any reader to point to evidence that explains how in four score years first-century ekklēsiai, made up mainly by the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16), organically devolved into an anti-Semitic racket with whose “wrong division” of the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15) Christians are still coming to terms.