In a recent post I challenged readers
to point to evidence that explains how in four score years first-century ekklesiai, 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.
I had quoted from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s 1861 Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church. From it one gathers that there was much greater discontinuity between the Christian communities of the first century and those of the second than is commonly assumed.
Such discontinuity would partly explain the anti-Jewish aspects of the theology that emerged in the centuries after the events recorded in the New Testament, according which theology the promises God had made to Seed of Abraham were interpreted “spiritually” (i.e., figuratively) and to be redeemed by non-Jewish, often rather anti-Jewish Christians and their churches.
What has been unearthed in the century and a half since Stanley wrote?
Today I ordered a 2018 book (should arrive tomorrow) that, if it doesn’t answer my question, will almost certainly shed scholarly light on the matter. The book is Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church by Michael J. Kruger.
I usually call attention to books I’ve read, but here I’m willing to go out on a limb on the strength of Professor Kruger’s earlier work, especially his 2012 Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books, but also The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (2013) and (with Andreas J. Köstenberger ) The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (2010).
What has occasioned this post was my receipt today of one of Kruger’s. In it he notes with satisfaction the most recent of many positive reviews of Christianity at the Crossroads, this one by Walter Wagner, author of After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (1994). (Kruger lists other reviews here.)
I hasten to add that Professor Kruger, as President and Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament (NT) and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC, is not any kind dispensationalist.
I therefore do not expect him to buttress the arguably radical conclusions reached by the independent ultra-dispensationalist Bible teacher, my current object of study, Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992).
(This link will take you several of my posts on Sellers.)
And yet . . .
One of the reasons I wrote this book [Kruger blogs today on Canon Fodder] is because of the enormous gap in scholarship on the study of second-century Christianity. There just hasn’t been much done on this “Cinderella Century” (to use the phrase of Larry Hurtado). (My emphasis: AF)
I do, however, expect to take in from Kruger’s book the scholarly “lay of the land” regarding this “enormous gap” in the scholarship.
Whether it also sheds light on gap between the predominantly Jewish ekklesiae of the NT and the virtually all-Gentile post-Acts churches remains for me to see.
My post’s title uses Kruger’s reference to a 2012 post by NT and Christian origins scholar Larry Hurtado, “The Cinderella Century in Early Christianity?” The second century is (in Hurtado’s metaphor) the unfairly neglected step-child of NT studies. His post is of great interest (as is his sharp exchange with a combox critic). Hurtado claims chronological overlap between some canonical NT documents and some extra-canonical writings.
. . . the canonical line [Hurtado writes] is a theological one, and there is in fact some chronological overlap between some of the NT writings and some extra-canonical ones. . . .
. . . among the collection of early Christian texts usually referred to as “the Apostolic Fathers,” there are at least several more that likely overlap in time with some NT writings. . . .
For Patristics scholars, it appears that the second century is often treated as the warm-up period, before the real “game” gets going: That “game” usually focused on the creedal developments/controversies of the 4th century and later, the emergence of imperially-backed Christianity, the explosive development of Christian architecture and art, etc. By contrast, the writers/writings of the second century seem often to be treated as less interesting. (My emphasis: AF)
Our Stanley-inspired skepticism toward sociological overlap and our Sellersian reservation about theological overlap between the canonical and extra-canonical writers remain intact. But . . .
To be continued!