Testament canon were understood to have been written by an apostle or to
have apostolic authority.
The crucial responsibility for Christian doctrine belonged to the of¿ ce of
bishop. The most important leaders at the very beginning of Christianity
were itinerants: Jesus, the apostles, and the prophets. Local leaders were
bishops, presbyters, and deacons, all of whom were about equal in status,
essentially meaning that each church had several bishops. By the 2nd
century, only one bishop presided over each church. Since the bishops were
responsible for correspondence with other churches, the network of bishops
became a secondary social location for Christian teaching and especially for
deciding which teachings were “heresies.”
The Great Church rejected attempts to establish alternative sources of
authoritative teaching in addition to the apostolic teaching handed down by
the succession of bishops. The most important attempt to establish a new
source of authority was Montanism, named after Montanus, a Christian
leader in Asia Minor. He advocated a New Prophecy and called himself the
Paraclete (that is, the Holy Spirit). In rejecting Montanism, the Great Church
made a crucial decision about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit: The era of
prophecy and new revelations of the Spirit was past.
The essential early Christian doctrines are found in brief summaries. The
boundaries of sound Christian teaching were often expressed in “rules of
faith,” which later developed into trinitarian creeds. Statements of the rule
of faith found in early Christian writers are typically trinitarian, mentioning
God the Father, Jesus the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. A basic narrative
is given of Jesus’s life, including usually birth, cruci¿ xion, resurrection,
ascension, and return. Interestingly, the orthodox theological writers up to
about A.D. 500 have come to be called “church fathers.” Ŷ
Chadwick, The Early Church, chaps. 2–4.
Martyr, Apology in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1.
Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, chap. 2.
Suggested Reading