Early Christianity

to call themselves Christians redefined their relationship with
Jewish law and the traditions of ancient Israel, and advocated new
truths based on Jesus’ teachings. Just as Christianity splintered
away from other forms of Judaism, so too, perhaps, there was a
risk that Christianity itself might fragment, as different groups or
individuals came to regard different versions or aspects of Jesus’
message as more significant. Such divergences of opinion may be
glimpsed in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, where the apos-
tle sought to remind his audience that the true message of Jesus
was not simply that he taught wisdom, but that through his death
and resurrection he showed himself to be humankind’s redeemer.
At the centre of such disputes lay disagreements about what
precisely constituted Jesus’ message and how (and by whom) it
should be interpreted. The existence of various apocryphal writ-
ings shows that there were speculations about Jesus’ message
other than those contained in the writings of the New Testament.
In the three centuries between Christ and Constantine, as Chris-
tianity intersected with the various systems of thought found
around the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean, it was perhaps inevit-
able that those who heard the Christian message would seek to
make sense of it in terms of the intellectual traditions with which
they themselves were familiar. Such is the frank admission of
the third-century Alexandrian theologian Origen. More to the
point, Origen hints how this could fracture the unity of Christian
orthodoxy:

Since Christianity appeared to men as something worthy

of serious attention... sects inevitably came to exist, not

at all on account of factions and a love of strife, but because

several learned men made a serious attempt to understand

the doctrines of Christianity. The result of this was that they

interpreted differently the scriptures universally believed to

be divine, and sects arose named after those who, although

they admitted the origin of the word, were impelled by

certain reasons which convinced them to disagree with one

another.

(Origen,Against Celsus3.12, trans. H. Chadwick 1953)

ORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY

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