Welcome to the Early Church! 

We are excited to embark on this journey with you through the foundations of the Early Church.

Before diving into the lessons, we invite you to download your Free Course Guidebook. You can click 'Resources' and then 'Download' to get your digital copy now. This essential resource is tailored to enhance your learning experience, providing you with a comprehensive overview of the course structure, key topics, and additional reading materials. It's your roadmap to navigating the rich history and enduring legacy of the early church. 

What's Inside Your Guidebook?

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• An outline of the course curriculum
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• Detailed descriptions of each lesson
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• Key figures and events to watch for
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• Thought-provoking questions for reflection
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• Recommended readings to further your study
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Ready to get started? By clicking 'next,' you can immediately start with Lesson One and step into the world of the early Christians, uncovering the challenges they faced, the faith they exhibited, and the incredible growth of Christianity.

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:11 In the arid southeastern desert of Syria,

00:14 where the winds blow hot and the sands still

00:16 hold their secrets, there sits an old border city.

00:19 Like an oasis among the sunburnt hills,

00:22 the city sits on the edge of the Euphrates, the river that

00:24 gave it life.

00:26 A bustling place of trade, for most of its history,

00:30 257 AD, when shopper the first, he was an Iranian, successfully siege the city from the

00:36 Romans who had owned it.

00:38 It was a year-long siege, and while really bad for the inhabitants, it ended up being

00:42 good for historians.

00:44 You see, in an attempt to fortify the city walls, the citizens took sand and they filled

00:49 in the buildings that were attached to the inner side of the walls.

00:53 And because of this action, much of the city's buildings that were along the walls and the

01:00 preserved. The city today is called Dury Eropus, and it gives us a fascinating picture of what life

01:08 and war was like in the mid-200s during the Roman Empire. This is a time still early in church

01:14 history, a formative period for the church. To look at Dury Eropus is to see what life was like

01:21 for normal people who dwelled in mid-sized cities. And what do we see? We see a world dripping with

01:30 sophistication, diversity, and its own share of horror.

01:35 One way you can think about Dury Eropis

01:37 is to think about modern day New York,

01:39 but on a much smaller scale.

01:41 In fact, one historian has drawn just such an analogy.

01:45 For not only was Dury a diverse and colorful like New York,

01:49 it's also laid out in a similar grid pattern.

01:52 So John Noble Wilford has said this,

01:54 \"New Yorkers would have felt at home

01:56 \"in the grid pattern of the streets

02:00 Jews worshiped in the same block not far from a Christian house church, as well as a shrine to Greek and palmarine deities.

02:09 Scholars said that different religious groups seem to maintain their distinct identities with Indura.

02:15 There are tons of religious spaces left over Indura Eropus. There's a temple to Zeus,

02:22 Adirgatus,

02:30 synagogue, whose beautiful artwork still survives, a painting of Samuel, anointing David.

02:37 But also, Indura is the oldest surviving Christian house church that we've found, and it contains

02:43 what some archaeologists think may be the oldest Christian paintings in existence.

02:49 The house appears to have a small hall-like room that was added later by the owners and

02:54 was probably the meeting place for the small Christian community.

03:00 scenes from the Bible.

03:02 Jesus is the good shepherd,

03:03 the healing of the paralytic,

03:05 Jesus and Peter walking on water,

03:07 and a large fresco, the biggest one there,

03:10 shows three women arriving at the tomb on Easter morning.

03:14 Now in your minds contrast the image

03:17 of this little house church

03:19 with one of the great gothic cathedrals of Europe.

03:22 In just a few centuries, Christianity will grow

03:26 from Dura-like churches to Notre Dame-like churches.

03:30 began here, in the little place with a few ragtag, unnamed, now forgotten Christians,

03:36 and many like them, who were transformed by a message of good news about Jesus Christ.

03:42 The house church at Dura Europa also shows us something else.

03:48 Christians, Jews, and pagans live side by side, just like in major cities today.

03:53 The ancient world, as we'll come to see, has a lot in common with our own.

04:00 Duriropus is also known to us as the first battle site in human history to use chemical

04:06 warfare during the siege I talked about.

04:10 And though Christians will live side by side with Jews and pagans, at times the Romans will

04:15 choose to persecute both groups, Christians and other minorities within the empire.

04:21 One thing about life in the ancient world that was certain is that life was uncertain.

04:30 history, well, we could learn a lot. But we would also be left with lots of gaps, speculations,

04:36 and questions. But blessedly for us, the church from the very beginning was always a writing

04:43 church. From the gospels to Paul, Peter, James, and John's letters, among others, the

04:48 church has always been founded on the written word. After Paul died and the next generation

04:53 of Christians took up the baton, they too were prodigious writers, and much of their authorship

05:00 today. In fact, and this is just an interesting point of trivia, it was Christians who made

05:05 books as you and I know them today, popular. You see Christians preferred to write in codices,

05:11 instead of the much more popular scrolls of the time. The Codex allowed for easy crop referencing.

05:17 You could go back and forth, and so you could read multiple letters at once. So you have

05:22 Christians to thank for the modern book. But this raises the question, who were these

05:30 Though their occupations vary, they were priests, bishops, scholars, philosophers, lawyers, ex-military, intellectuals, and community leaders.

05:41 Most surviving writings come from men who at least had some education, which is why they could read and write for us at all.

05:48 We often call the more authoritative, trustworthy, and important writers, fathers.

05:54 And that should tell you something already.

06:00 or professors, and if they were writing today, we would not call them influencers either.

06:06 To call them fathers means they are part of a family, our family, and that they are supposed to be

06:13 out for our good. One early father was named Basel, and he was made a bishop, and at that ceremony,

06:19 he said, \"I myself have been appointed to the position of father by reason of the station the

06:30 Calling them fathers means they are pastoral.

06:34 And in fact, most of them, their profession was a pastor.

06:38 But more than that, Father language was taken directly from scripture.

06:43 Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4, 5, that he is their father in Jesus Christ.

06:48 And he addressed Timothy and Titus as his true children in 1 Timothy 1, 2, and Titus 1, 4.

07:00 And St. Peter calls other Christians of his own generation the fathers in 2 Peter 3-4.

07:08 So how many then fathers are there? Well, that's actually hard to say. There's no authoritative list.

07:15 But normally depending on where you look, it's about a hundred.

07:19 Depending on what time period they wrote and where they wrote, we can divide them into different groups.

07:30 Latin fathers and the Syriac fathers,

07:33 as well as sometimes the additional desert fathers.

07:38 They can also be broken up into two broader groups,

07:41 Greek and Latin fathers,

07:43 sometimes also called Eastern or Western fathers.

07:46 And this is because of the language that they wrote in.

07:49 Perhaps the most popular grouping though,

07:51 is by time period.

07:52 There were the anti-Nysian fathers,

07:54 the Nician fathers, and the post-Nysian fathers.

08:00 or get any of this down pat. In this course, we are not going to worry about these classifications,

08:05 but if you're interested or wanted to do more research on your own,

08:09 you should at least be familiar with the different ways that the fathers are classified.

08:13 So here's another question for you. How does one become a father? Again, there's no one way.

08:20 The fathers have earned their status over centuries by general consensus and not by

08:30 tried to establish some type of standard criteria on what makes a father or father,

08:35 and it's generally struck. To be a father, Vincent said you had to meet four criteria.

08:40 You had to have sound doctrine, holiness of life, the church had to approve or

08:46 recognize you as such, and you had to have written in antiquity. There can't be any new

08:50 fathers. In addition to the 100 or so fathers, 37 of them are given the title

09:00 You get the words like doctrine from the same root word.

09:03 And because they're very preeminent,

09:05 their influence is important.

09:07 In fact, it's so important that these 37 stand above the rest.

09:12 Now, of these 37, eight are known as the Great Fathers.

09:17 And they're the cream of the crop, you might say,

09:20 four wrote in the east and four wrote in the west.

09:23 The Eastern doctors are, at the nacias of Alexandria,

09:30 of Caesarea and John Chrysostom.

09:33 And the Western doctors are Ambrose, Jerome,

09:38 St. Augustine, and Pope Gregory.

09:43 The study of the church fathers is called Patristics.

09:46 You might sometimes see it in older books called Patrology.

09:49 And that's what I did my graduate work in,

09:51 and I'm guessing why they asked me to teach the course.

09:54 So what are we going to study in this course?

09:56 Why does it matter?

10:00 courses on patristics take one of three roads.

10:03 First, you can just move through history chronologically,

10:07 beginning to end, covering major topics

10:09 and characters along the way.

10:11 A second road might be some courses pick a father

10:14 for each lecture and they biographically move

10:17 through each one, covering the major developments

10:19 that that father did along the way.

10:22 Or third, perhaps the most popular,

10:24 many courses follow the history of doctrinal development

10:30 contributions along the way.

10:32 But I'm not actually going to do any of those approaches.

10:36 Instead, I'm going to experiment with you and take a hybrid approach.

10:40 I'm going to do my best to immerse you in the world of the fathers.

10:45 This means seeing not only what they wrote and the developments that occurred,

10:50 but also understanding their context. It means spending time on what ordinary Christians did, how they worshiped, how they died.

11:00 I want us to see the fathers as leaders and pastors working in a social context,

11:05 and there are strengths and weaknesses to this kind of approach.

11:08 Let's start with the weaknesses.

11:10 This way of learning history means that we can't go very deep into doctrine or biography.

11:16 In fact, I won't spend too much time on any one father's personal story.

11:21 If you like what you hear about a father,

11:23 if a lecture piques your interest,

11:25 you can easily find out more on a simple Google search.

11:30 is that we have to balance learning about the fathers

11:34 with the context they wrote in and the important developments

11:37 that they produced.

11:39 And that sometimes means that we'll get the balance wrong.

11:42 If I do my job correctly though, I hope I'll leave you hungry for more,

11:46 almost dissatisfied with what we've covered and wishing that more was said.

11:51 But there's strengths to this approach too.

11:53 The strength of this approach is that it's balanced.

11:56 I know, I know. I said that's a weakness. But it's also strength.

12:00 By balancing study between the fathers, their context, the developments, we get a richer

12:05 picture of the early church and a wider picture of the time period.

12:11 Another strength is that we will get to see the diversity and strength of early Christianity

12:16 in which the fathers wrote.

12:18 What I hope will emerge is a complex picture, where what matters to early Christians shines

12:23 through, but also that there was tremendous challenges, conflicts, and struggles too.

12:30 inheritance is a story of consensus, often met through prayer, debate, disagreement, and then

12:36 Concord. In this course, I will be copiously quoting from the fathers. And that's because I

12:43 don't just want to talk about them. I want you to hear from them. I want you to sit at their feet

12:48 for a little bit of time. I want the words they wrote thousands of years ago to reverberate with

12:53 the same love and power and insight that has preserved those words to this day. So at the

13:00 corny. I want to introduce you to some spiritual relatives that you've likely never met.

13:06 By faith, we believe that one day we'll meet all these fathers in Christ. They are not really dead,

13:11 but to use Scripture's language, asleep. To hear from them is to hear from your future friends,

13:17 and to learn from them is to think richly, deeply, and profoundly.

13:23 Our journey will cover a period from the generation after St. Paul up to a time just

13:30 500 years of history. This particular course you're watching right now is part one of what will

13:36 eventually be a part two course. But in this section, we will cover much of the context of the

13:41 early church. We'll learn about early Christian anxieties, persecutions, apologetics, worship,

13:47 sacraments, and the importance of the Bible in patristic thought. In a later course, we'll

13:52 focus more on heresies, controversies, the emergence of monasticism, and the legacy that the fathers

14:00 One thing you'll notice is how conflict and debate move things forward in church history.

14:06 For example, read the New Testament letters and what do you find in the writings of Peter,

14:10 of Paul, of James, and others?

14:13 Conflict and debate.

14:15 Major issues quickly arise, needing a council to solve them in the Bible.

14:18 We call it the Jerusalem Council.

14:20 And the New Testament is filled with debates, things like, can a Christian eat food purchased

14:25 in pagan temple markets?

14:27 One is it appropriate to speak in tongues?

14:30 communication, what is the role of women in the church, what is the role of the Jewish

14:34 law and believers, and many more like this. So much of the New Testament is

14:39 occasioned by conflict or debate. Now when the New Testament period ends and we

14:46 start looking at the writings of the next generation, the first Church Fathers,

14:50 we find that debate and conflict continue to be perennial mainstays of

14:55 the church. And that's amazing. Since it's true that the church will grow by leaps

15:00 It often seems to do so despite itself, but also as we'll see, the conflict and debate

15:06 move the church forward and grant it a rich tradition, grounding it in the Bible, and through

15:12 its explanations and confessions that are developed.

15:16 I'm Bruce Hillman, scholar and resident at 1517, and I am looking forward to spending

15:21 time with you in the next few lectures and introducing you to my friends, the church

15:26 fathers.

15:30 extraordinary. Some are bombastic and rude, while others are patient,

15:35 winsome, and encouraging.

15:37 Sometimes they are defiant in the face of persecution. And other times they

15:40 have an ironic wit.

15:42 For example, when St. Lawrence was slowly being roasted alive,

15:47 he says to the Roman prefect who condemned him as if Lawrence was about

15:51 to be served as a Roman meal, it is done. Eat it up. Try it, whether it is

15:56 nice, raw or roasted.

16:00 though they admit discouragement, like John Chrysostom,

16:03 who in a little training manual for priests,

16:06 betrays a personal confession.

16:08 Unless a priest's sermons always match

16:11 the great expectations formed of him,

16:13 he will leave the pulpit of victim

16:15 of countless years and complaints.

16:18 No one ever takes into consideration

16:20 that a fit of depression, pain, anxiety,

16:23 or in many cases anger may cloud the clarity of his mind

16:27 and prevent the productions from coming forth

16:30 and that in short, being a man, he cannot invariably reach the same standard or always be successful,

16:38 but will naturally make many mistakes. You can see that there is a sense to a down-to-earth

16:46 realism in the Fathers, and as you will see, all of the Fathers love Jesus and the Word,

16:52 and they want you to see Him as they do, and all of them contribute to the Christianity we now

17:00 So let's start this journey together as we travel back to the ancient past and meet our ancestors of the faith.

17:07 I'll leave you with a small passage from the greatest poet among the fathers, Prudentius.

17:13 Here he realizes the depth of his sin, but also the hope he has in Christ.

17:19 Thus I, by my loquacious tongue, from the heaven of silence and lead, into perils unknown and dark.

17:30 confident in his virtue and faith.

17:33 I am as one whose unnumbered sins

17:35 have shipwrecked on the rolling seas.

17:39 How easily can I be shipwrecked?

17:41 One untaught and seefearing arts.

17:44 Unless you, Almighty Christ,

17:46 stretch forth your hand with help, divine.

17:50 (upbeat music)

18:00 [MUSIC]

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:11 A Jewish scholar called Daniel Boyarin recounts an amusing antidote.

00:15 Every day for 30 years, a man drove a wheelbarrel full of sand

00:19 across the Tijuana border into the US.

00:22 The customs inspector dug through the sand each morning

00:24 during a thorough search, but could never find any contraband.

00:30 He asked the man to be straight up and honest, what was he smuggling and how was he able to do so?

00:36 Wheel barrels, of course, the man said.

00:38 I know I know, Daniel Boyarren isn't going to get any comedy specials on Netflix, and this joke probably rates even below dad jokes.

00:46 But it does show us something.

00:48 How we interpret something is often skewed based on our preconceived biases.

01:00 he did not consider that the wheelbarrel was the thing being smuggled. He was so convinced

01:05 the contraband was in the sand, he never stopped to consider the wheelbarrel.

01:10 So too, the lines between what made someone a Jew and what made someone a Christian in

01:15 the very early days of the church was rather porous and sometimes confusing. It depended

01:22 on where you looked. Even Christians themselves did not always realize if they were Jews living

01:30 new religion. It's sort of like the old obstacle illusion of the duck or the rabbit.

01:36 Which one do you see?

01:38 And while this problem of identity gets solved rather early on, it also reveals that from

01:44 the earliest days after Christ's ascension, Christianity needed to explain to outsiders

01:50 who and what it really was. And it also means that Christianity never began completely

02:00 and defined by Gentile culture on the other.

02:04 In this lecture, we want to look at the context

02:07 of the early church and what normal Christians faced

02:10 or could expect to face in their lives

02:13 during this time of identity formation.

02:16 This is the background in which the fathers,

02:19 almost all of whom were pastors,

02:21 had to preach and live within

02:23 before Christianity became the official religion

02:26 of the Roman Empire.

02:27 This was the setting in which moms,

02:30 neighbors and friends lived out their faith. If you were a Christian back then, this was your story.

02:37 To make our first observation, I want you to think of a donut. Now, what do we call the space

02:44 in the middle of a donut? A donut hole, right? We call the donut hole, of course, but the problem is,

02:51 a donut hole doesn't actually exist. It's just the space where the donut is not.

03:00 A doughnut hole is a term that can only be defined through something else, in this case

03:05 a doughnut.

03:06 Well, the term \"Christian\" was at first under debate because it was not clear if it was

03:13 a word that functions more like doughnut, a real thing, or doughnut hole.

03:19 You see, some people thought that Christianity was just another form of Judaism, making it

03:24 more like a doughnut hole because it would have to exist through Judaism, be defined

03:30 In other words, calling someone a Christian just meant calling them something like a Pharisee or a Sadducee or an Essene types of Jews or today something like Orthodox or a form Jews.

03:41 But others began to think of Christianity as closer to how donut works.

03:46 That is, it's its own thing and it needn't be seen or defined through Judaism. It was distinct.

03:52 Why is this important?

04:00 conscious of the other.\"

04:02 That is, from the start, Christianity was always defined or in interaction with and

04:09 through others by Jews on the one hand, you could read the biblical book of Galatians

04:13 to see that, or by Romans on the other, who saw Christianity early on as unpatriotic

04:21 and strange.

04:23 And this meant that Christianity from the start never had to grow up as a singularly

04:30 religion, it was always growing up aware of the others who critiqued it, challenged it,

04:36 differed from it, but also who contributed to its expression. Christianity birthed from Judaism,

04:44 but it made strange claims that Jews could not tolerate. These mostly came down to the

04:49 observations of Jewish laws and rituals. From even as early as in the New Testament,

04:54 Christians did not follow kosher, and all the observations of other Jewish laws.

05:00 Jewish rabbis and teachers often did not see them as Jews. Before the robust evangelism of the

05:06 Gentiles by Paul, many Christians just thought of themselves as Jews, to whom the revelation of

05:12 the Messiah had come. They thought they were good Jews, living in the fulfillment of Old Testament

05:17 prophecies about the Messiah. They thought they were in a new age of Judaism. But Jewish leadership

05:30 and how Christians called Jesus Lord, which for them clearly made Christianity its own thing,

05:35 and not to be defined through Judaism. And then on the other side were the Romans.

05:41 They found Christianity unpatriotic and strange, for reasons we'll talk about in the next lecture.

05:48 For them, Christianity was deviant and dangerous to the public good, because it was unpatriotic.

06:00 then thought Christianity was false because it was new.

06:04 It didn't have the right to make cosmic claims to truth because it didn't exist just

06:09 a few years ago.

06:10 Its newness was proof of its falsity.

06:15 Christians had to deal with these others who rejected them and did not let them sit

06:19 comfortably in any pre-established categories.

06:22 Some of the earliest Christian writings will encounter in this course deal with these two

06:27 groups and how they interact with Christians.

06:30 matter. Because if you were a Christian back then, even if you never faced persecution,

06:36 you had to make sacrifices, emotional, financial, psychological, and existential.

06:44 And once you hear the reasons you will understand why many of the first converts were poor,

06:50 because they had less to lose. So the first one, emotional. To be an early Christian meant

07:00 or atheism today, they know what it's like to convert to Christianity,

07:05 and it often means losing many of the things that support and give or gave meaning to one's life.

07:12 To become a Christian was to abandon in many cases, generations, and centuries of Jewish faith,

07:18 or Roman privilege.

07:20 It could mean alienation from your neighbors, and in the small villages and neighborhoods of the ancient world,

07:26 being a pariah in your own town.

07:30 Families turned on each other, parents were grieved and hurt,

07:34 and separations, divisions, and public shaming took place.

07:38 The emotional toll, the sacrifice, was enormous.

07:42 Then there was financial.

07:44 Becoming a Christian was not a good investment strategy.

07:48 Some Christians felt compelled to close their shops,

07:51 for example, like if their shop made idols or sold supplies

07:55 to pagan temples.

07:56 But others faced blacklisting from pagans or Jews.

08:00 In addition, the young church needed money to support the mission, church plants, and

08:04 the care and support of widows and orphans, converting to Christianity was expensive.

08:11 And then there were psychological issues.

08:13 The church family came to replace actual families, since those families were often fractured

08:19 or divided over the new faith.

08:22 Doubt and second guessing, especially in the face of persecutions, caused tremendous

08:26 mental stress.

08:30 commonplace. Pagan families thought you had joined a harmful cult. Jewish families thought you

08:36 had abandoned the faith and become a blasphemer. And because Christianity was small and new,

08:41 there was always reason to return to the easier, less stressful life of Judaism or paganism.

08:48 And lastly, existential sacrifices. This is a crisis of personal identity and meaning.

09:00 that the church needed to give an answer to.

09:03 And it confessed boldly that the answer was,

09:05 \"You are in Christ. You are a Christian.\"

09:08 If Christianity ministered to the other challenges,

09:11 on this one they spent the most time.

09:15 Patristic writings share a general broad theme,

09:19 penetrating most deeply into the mystery of Christ,

09:22 that is, who he was and his nature.

09:25 From the earliest Christians we knew this,

09:28 that whatever Christianity is,

09:30 it is obsessed with Christ.

09:33 There is no Christianity without Christ.

09:36 So to enter the Patristic period and read the fathers

09:39 is to desire to know Christ more.

09:42 Christianity, after all, is supposed to be good news.

09:45 It is supposed to have an answer to existential dread.

09:49 Christians proclaim that God has come to earth

09:51 to do a new thing, to break old ways and cycles.

09:56 Christ literally re-inscribes the world

10:00 with new meaning. But with all this going on, debates, conflict, and emotional stress,

10:08 why would anyone join the church and why did it grow in the first place? Well,

10:13 theologically, we would say it grew because the Holy Spirit had good news to bring to those

10:18 who would hear, and because Christians showed amazing care for their neighbors,

10:22 critics, and persecutors. And it made non-Christians shocked and amazed.

10:30 we know about Christians, not from Christian writings themselves, come from critics, like

10:36 Pliny the Younger, a critic from the first century.

10:40 He was a Roman governor in what is today Turkey.

10:43 He comments that Christians were known in communities because of their weekly gatherings,

10:47 where they held communion.

10:49 Now, communion services were private at this time, for baptized Christians only, so pagans

11:00 Pliny was told that Christians were cannibals who eat bodies and drink blood and practice

11:06 incest because they call each other brother and sister and they practice love feasts and

11:11 they also refuse to worship the emperor.

11:15 But Pliny also heard good things and if other pagans were hearing similar things, then Christianity

11:21 must have been seen as a major contradiction.

11:30 repeat in turn a hymn to Christ as to a God and to bind themselves by an oath, not to commit adultery,

11:37 not to break their word, and not to deny alone when demanded.

11:42 Pliny would go on to persecute Christians, but he gives us other vital bits of information,

11:47 like how the church was demographically diverse, many persons of every age, of every rank,

12:00 Most Christians were poor.

12:02 Another early Roman critic, Celsus, wrote in 178 AD,

12:07 \"We see wool dressers, cobblers and fullers.

12:11 The more uneducated and common individuals,

12:14 not daring to say a word in the presence of their masters

12:18 who are older in age.\"

12:20 Celsus was impressed, though, however, by Christian morality

12:24 and the loyalty they showed to each other.

12:30 and preaching, commenting that when they get a hold of children in private and silly

12:35 women with them, they are wonderfully eloquent.

12:39 But for Celsus, this eloquence was in a context.

12:43 They were more eloquent than he expected, but in fact were, quote, \"like frogs holding

12:49 a discourse around a swamp or worms in a conventicle in a corner of the mud.\"

13:00 were poor. \"With us you will find unleaded people, tradesmen and old women,

13:07 who though they are unable to express in words the advantages of our teaching,

13:11 demonstrate by acts the value of their principles.\" Justin Martyr, a church father,

13:17 will spend more time with next lecture, wrote as early as 1.55 saying, \"We, who loved,

13:30 those who are in need.

13:32 Indeed, the Christians did, in ways that never had happened before.

13:36 Remember, this is a time period without any social programs or support.

13:39 There's no social security, free or subsidized healthcare, no social welfare housing, no

13:45 food stamps.

13:46 Many people were left to just starve and die, especially widows, whose husbands often

13:51 died fighting in Rome's wars.

14:00 their own people to become beggars, and the Christians support not only their own, but

14:05 also our poor.

14:08 By 251, the church at Rome was supporting 1500 widows and deeply impoverished people

14:15 that we have on its widows' role.

14:17 In 252, in Carthage, a huge ancient city in North Africa that was part of the Roman Empire,

14:23 was struck by a plague.

14:25 And the bishop there, a church father named Cyprian, ordered his deacons to care for

14:30 But there was more.

14:32 Christian's social customs developed.

14:34 In one of the earliest extra-biblical writings in existence, is a little worship guidebook

14:39 called the Diddakke, translated the teaching.

14:43 In it, Christians are required to lodge anyone who calls themselves a Christian for up to

14:47 three days free of charge.

14:49 It also says that if the person tries to stay more than three days, you can be have full

14:53 assurance that they are not a Christian.

15:00 people could expect back then.

15:02 Christians dressed modestly and caused little trouble,

15:06 looked to make converts even to those who abused

15:08 or persecuted them.

15:10 Interestingly, perhaps they were also purposefully

15:14 not political.

15:16 Christians rarely served in the army,

15:19 one of the only, if not the only way,

15:21 to have a chance at upward mobility in Rome.

15:24 They avoided jobs in political administration

15:28 or as magistrates.

15:30 they did not want to come into contact with idolatry and the required sacrifices, and also because

15:36 they did not want to have a hand in the system that condemned other Christians to death.

15:41 So this refusal to be politically involved made the Romans even more suspicious of Christianity

15:47 and whether or not it was truly supportive of Rome. Most Christian converts early on were women,

16:00 while in the New Testament makes reference to a woman whose husband was not a believer.

16:05 Most common were widow converts.

16:08 Most women were girls when they married, and the common age was 13 or 14.

16:13 But often they were married off to much older men.

16:16 So usually the men died in battle or of old age, leaving a lot of young women as widows

16:20 and without any social change or support.

16:23 In Christianity though, they found support, love, and hope.

16:30 America was raided and its goods confiscated from church members.

16:34 The surviving catalog lists 38 women's veils, 82 women's tunics, 47 pairs of women's slippers,

16:42 but only 16 men's tunics.

16:45 Also astonishing and controversial were slave conversions.

16:50 When slaves and masters attended church together, once they were gathered together, they became

17:00 heard of an unimaginable at the time period. As one scholar has noted, \"Christians accepted

17:06 slavery as the eternal condition of man, but from Judaism's history of being slaves in Egypt

17:12 knew that God was an emancipator.\" So this was the setting, and also the contradiction,

17:19 that Christianity was in the first century and in the few that followed. From the inside debates

17:30 temptation to let other groups define what Christianity was.

17:34 Christians faced emotional and physical temptations and harms.

17:38 Conversion was costly.

17:40 Christians were often misunderstood, and in some cases,

17:43 they were even seen as being dangerous cannibals or incestuous perverts.

17:48 But Christianity was also known for its love of neighbors.

17:52 It's good public morals.

17:54 It's care for the poor, sick, and abandoned.

17:57 It was kind to those who were mean to it.

18:00 and consistently took care of its own.

18:04 In this contradiction, the church fathers lived and wrote.

18:08 The remainder of the course will focus more on the interior life of the church,

18:12 what Christians believed, how their practices shaped their life,

18:16 and how the father spoke into new challenges.

18:19 But this context won't fully come to a close until Constantine becomes emperor

18:24 and makes Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire.

18:30 For all that, the contradictions in Christianity make a target of persecution and violence

18:35 on it.

18:36 It is to this extremely formative period of time, Christian persecution, and the martyrs

18:43 that we'll turn to next.

In Session 3, we delve into the era of Christian persecution and martyrdom, uncovering the reasons behind the martyrdom of early Christians, their theological understanding of this ultimate sacrifice, and their conduct in the face of relentless persecution.

Throughout this video, we'll explore how martyrdom served as a profound witness, authenticating believers' faith through their willingness to emulate Christ's Passion and \"take up the cross.\" This lesson also tackles the challenges faced by the Church in dealing with believers who faltered under persecution, leading to significant theological debates on forgiveness and sin, resolved by the influential Church Father Cyprian. Join me as we examine the strength, unity, and complex dilemmas of the early Christian.

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:11 Probably the first famous martyr in the early church, not mentioned in the Bible,

00:16 is the church father and bishop from Antioch, modern-day Turkey, named Ignatius.

00:21 We don't know when he was born, but he died sometime around 108 AD.

00:30 caravan from Turkey to Rome for sporting death in the city capital.

00:34 As he travels, he writes letters to seven churches, similar to what John did in the book

00:39 of Revelation, teaching the churches some final teachings before he is to be executed.

00:45 His letters will end up being well read by all Christians in the early church for centuries.

00:51 In one letter, we call it his letter to the Romans, he writes to the very congregation

00:56 that will soon see him martyred in their city.

01:00 I'm not too anxious about this, but because he thinks that out of love for him, the church will muster whatever influence it has and try to get him set free.

01:10 But he writes to warn them and plead them not to do this. I know that sounds strange for us.

01:16 In perhaps the most famous passage of the letter, he says he wants to die for his lord, and will even try to convince the beasts to eat him.

01:30 All I pray is that I may find them swift.

01:33 I am going to make overtures to them, so that, unlike some other wretches whom they have been

01:38 too spiritless to touch, they may devour me with all speed.

01:42 And if they are still reluctant, I shall use force on them.

01:46 This is the first stage in my discipleship, and no power visible or invisible must grudge

01:51 my coming to Jesus Christ.

01:53 Fire, cross, beast fighting, hacking and quagering, splintering of bone and mangling of limb,

02:00 of my entire body, let every horrid and diabolical torment

02:05 come upon me, provided only that I can win my way

02:08 to Jesus Christ.

02:11 How did we get here?

02:13 How did we get from talking about widows' roles

02:16 to the hacking of limbs?

02:18 To read Ignatius' letters is to see what anxieties

02:22 beset the early church.

02:24 For not only is Ignatius writing to teach the major churches

02:30 a form of loyal discipleship is his view, but also that the Christian life should be seen as

02:36 being lived out in the imitation of Christ. And sometimes that may mean imitating Christ's passion.

02:44 Ignatius' writings are anxious about a few things. First, like a few church fathers before him,

02:51 he wants to establish that Christians should listen to the bishop. He says in his letter to

03:00 In another place he writes, \"It is proper for you to conduct your practices to correspond closely with the bishop.\"

03:08 This anxiety of listening to the priest or the bishop is common in the earliest Christian writings we have.

03:14 A church father before Ignatius, named Clement,

03:17 and we think he might have personally known Peter or Paul, though there's some debate on whether he actually wrote the letter given in his name,

03:25 but no debate exists on the age of that letter.

03:30 Clement to the Corinthians, in 96 AD, so we're talking very early in church history,

03:35 the anxiety is one of unity or lack thereof. Just like Paul's letter to the Corinthian church,

03:42 it appears that the congregation had not fully fixed its problems by the time Clement wrote.

03:48 Clement believed that unity came from the bishop, the shepherd, priest, or pastor,

03:54 who along with the presbyters, that is elders, should rule the church in goodly kindness.

04:00 But the congregation must follow them.

04:02 This is Christ's command.

04:04 Clement says, quote, \"Now the gospel was given to the apostles

04:08 for us by the Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus the Christ was sent from God.\"

04:13 That is to say, Christ received His commission from God

04:17 and the apostles theirs from Christ.

04:20 And as they went through the territories and townships preaching,

04:24 they appointed their first converts to be bishops and deacons

04:30 If the congregation does not listen to the bishop or priest,

04:34 Clement says, \"It's shameful, my dear friends,

04:37 shameful in the extreme and quite unworthy of the Christian training you have had,

04:42 that the loyal and ancient church and Corinth,

04:45 because of one or two individuals,

04:47 should now be reputed to be at odds with the clergy.\"

04:51 Notice that Clement shows us that already in his time, in the early 90s,

05:00 apostolic succession.

05:02 This idea is one, all the church fathers

05:04 we're going to study will hold without exception.

05:07 What it means is that one of the ways that you can know

05:11 that a Christian interpretation of the Bible is right

05:14 and not wrong is that you can trace the most important

05:17 doctrines and teachings back to the apostles themselves.

05:21 After all, we have one holy apostolic faith

05:25 as the creed will later confess.

05:30 Clement and Ignatius. People needed to be told to listen to the clergy over and over again,

05:36 because apparently they weren't doing it. For Ignatius, who is on his way to martyrdom,

05:43 the stakes are high. Without unity around the bishop, martyrdom will divide the flock.

05:50 The bishop should be the living embodiment of Christ, and if necessary, like Ignatius says,

06:00 of community unity, the undershiprer that holds the community together, both inside

06:05 and as a visible symbol outside.

06:08 Okay, so now let's turn our attention to Christian persecution and martyrdom more

06:13 directly.

06:15 It cannot be overstated that almost no experience in the history of the Christian church was

06:22 more formative after the events of the New Testament than the around 300-year persecution

06:28 of Christians.

06:30 gives Christians an identity. And as Elizabeth Castelli points out, it also gives them a memory.

06:37 That memory, the memory of the martyrs, shapes Christian life, even up to this very present moment.

06:45 To be called to die for the name is something every Christian must consider at least a possibility.

06:50 And we know the church father, Tertullian's famous maxim, \"The Blood of the Martyrs,\" is the

07:00 row, but not just in its population. It also grows theologically. For example, remember

07:08 in the quote I said earlier from Ignatius that he wanted to win his way to God. He goes

07:14 on to say a few sentences later, still pleading with the Roman church to let him suffer in

07:18 Diomarder and not get involved, that the pangs of birth are upon me have patience with

07:23 me, my brothers. And don't shut me out from life. Do not wish me to be a stillborn.

07:30 Here is one who only longs to be gods.

07:33 Do not make me a present of him to this world again, or to lude him with things of earth.

07:39 Suffering me to attain to the light, light pure and undefiled.

07:42 For only when I am come tither shall I truly be a man.

07:46 Leave me to imitate the passion of my God.

07:49 I am yearning for death with all the passion of a lover.

07:53 Earthly longings have been crucified.

07:55 In me there is left no spark or desire for mundane things.

08:00 of living water that whispers within me, \"Come to the Father.\"

08:06 Why does Ignatius want to die? It's strange. Is he a madman? Is he a sadist? It's very easy to

08:13 dismiss him and other martyrs as crazy. But the popularity of his writings shows that most

08:18 Christians at the time resonated with his words. They too wanted to be free from sinful life and

08:30 If you've ever asked yourself, what's the meaning of life?

08:34 Or felt that your spiritual life was just sort of coasting along.

08:38 Or if you've ever desired to desire God more,

08:42 then maybe you too can make some sense of the deep desire

08:46 to hear the murmur of living water that whispers inside you to come to the Father, as Ignatius says,

08:52 to be with Jesus.

08:54 Like the woman at the well in scripture, who begged to know how she could get the living water Jesus spoke of,

09:00 the small, mostly poor, and now persecuted church

09:03 wanted that same living water.

09:05 And martyrdom was one of the only ways

09:07 they could have assurance of getting it.

09:11 But before we get into the theology of martyrdom,

09:13 what they believed about it,

09:15 let's spend a little time on persecution of Christians

09:18 in the Roman Empire.

09:19 Persecution in the church lasted about 300 years

09:23 until Constantine became emperor and converted to the faith.

09:27 But unlike what you may have heard before,

09:30 Most of the persecutions of the Christians

09:32 was actually very small.

09:35 Persecution was localized, sporadic, and episodic.

09:39 There was no empire-wide persecutions

09:41 that affected all areas.

09:43 The worst persecution happened

09:44 under the Emperor Diocletian,

09:46 but even this didn't happen everywhere.

09:49 And part of the reason for that

09:50 was that persecution was often up to the local magistrate.

09:54 Sometimes Christians were persecuted

09:57 because they were seen as troublemakers,

10:00 faster required to scapegoat.

10:02 When persecutions occurred,

10:04 they were violent, brutal, and spared no one.

10:07 But in most cases,

10:09 magistrates saw persecuting Christians

10:11 as more trouble than it was worth.

10:13 There was just bigger fish to fry.

10:16 But why would the Romans want to

10:17 persecute the Christians anyways?

10:20 Some of the reasons we saw in the last lecture,

10:23 some Romans thought the Christians were cannibals,

10:26 eating aborted babies and practicing incest.

10:30 people were dangerous to the common good.

10:33 But by and far, the number one reason Christians

10:35 were persecuted was because they were exclusive.

10:39 Rome was extremely tolerant of all religions,

10:43 but like all progressive states,

10:45 it was not tolerant of intolerance.

10:48 Rome didn't ask for much, a small sacrifice to Caesar.

10:52 In return, you can do what you want.

10:55 It's hard for people to realize today

10:57 that many people in the ancient world

11:00 period, did not actually believe in the existence of the pagan gods, or if they did, not all

11:07 of the stories about them were necessarily true.

11:11 It's Christianity that gives us the idea in the West that belief or faith in something

11:17 is more important or authentic than the practices of religion.

11:21 For most people in the ancient world, it didn't matter if the gods were real or not, and many

11:26 people just didn't care.

11:30 You did.

11:32 Not belief.

11:33 Ritual was important.

11:35 Ritual did a few things in the ancient world.

11:38 It united a diverse society under a common theme of the common good.

11:43 So you sacrifice to the gods because doing so shows your loyalty to your city and to

11:48 your god.

11:49 Perhaps the gods are real, or perhaps they're not.

11:52 But by making the public sacrifices, you are showing solidarity for the good of the city,

11:57 for the public good.

12:00 Imagine we are a bunch of people waiting in line to take a bus somewhere.

12:05 Two people come over and cut the line.

12:07 The rest of us get upset and start yelling at them.

12:10 But they reply to us that what is most important is what you believe about buses,

12:15 and not what you do in queuing to get on one.

12:17 The line cutters in the analogy are the Christians.

12:21 They seem odd, rude, and exclusive.

12:23 Who do they think they are?

12:25 To the Romans, these people are causing trouble,

12:30 and believing that they alone have the truth.

12:33 The fact that the Christians also wouldn't serve

12:35 in the army or government gave more evidence

12:38 to the Roman mindset that the Christians

12:40 were really against Rome.

12:42 And that is something that Rome was not willing to tolerate.

12:46 So what did the Romans want the Christians to do?

12:50 Are you ready for it?

12:51 In most cases, light an incense stick

12:54 and drink a small sip from a tiny glass of wine.

12:57 That's it.

13:00 they would have to eat a small morsel of meat. These foodstuffs, along with the incense,

13:04 would be performed at a pagan temple in front of a statue or an altar. And that's it. Once you

13:10 did it, you would get a certificate from the government, called a \"le belly,\" and that would

13:15 protect you from any possible prosecution or accusations of not doing your civic duty.

13:20 So, unlike the crime of murder or theft, being accused of Christianity was very easy to undo,

13:30 imagine how tempting it would be to light that incense stick or take that sip of wine,

13:35 then you could just go home.

13:37 And if you were accused of being a Christian, you not only faced the persecution of the

13:41 government, but the pressure to apostatize at home.

13:46 One North African martyr, a woman named Perpetua, recounts a confrontation with her own father.

13:53 \"Father,\" I said, \"for the sake of argument, do you see this vase or whatever you want

14:00 He said, \"Yes, I see it.\"

14:03 And I said to him, \"Can you call it by any other name than what it is?\"

14:07 And he said, \"No, you can't.\"

14:10 So I said, \"I cannot call myself anything other than what I am, a Christian.\"

14:16 Merely hearing this word upset my father greatly.

14:19 He threw himself at me with such violence that it seemed he wanted to tear my eyes out.

14:30 public shaming and potentially even violence against you. For the Romans, their favorite way of

14:36 punishing anyone in the ancient world was by shaming and doing violence to the physical body.

14:43 Roman penal systems made a spectacle of the body. It was the place of Roman inscription.

14:51 The Romans wrote their power on human bodies by mangling, torturing, and goring them, and this

15:00 But as we'll see, that was a double-edged sword.

15:04 The word martyr actually translates to \"witness.\"

15:09 And so the mangled gourd bodies of the Christians,

15:12 on the one hand, seemed to speak that Rome had dominated in one.

15:17 But like Christ on the cross, for the Christians,

15:20 the martyr's bodies became a living witness, martyr,

15:23 of Christian faith, courage, and discipleship.

15:30 of Roman brutality and how Christians were actually killed.

15:34 They could be crucified upside down with the head down to Mach Jesus

15:38 and to increase the time it takes to die.

15:40 In Arabia, they were killed by axes.

15:43 In Macedonia, they were hung by their feet above a fire

15:47 where they were roasted slowly until they died of aphyxiation.

15:51 In Alexandria, noses, ears, and hands were severed.

15:55 In Antioch, they were roasted alive on a grill.

16:00 with broken pottery shards while naked and hung up by one foot.

16:04 In Pontus, which is over by the Black Sea,

16:07 they drove pointed breeds under their fingernails,

16:10 poured molten lead down their backs,

16:12 and did unmentionable things to their genitals.

16:15 Almost all martyrs everywhere were killed naked, as Christ was,

16:20 since Romans enjoyed both shaming the person

16:23 and leaving the bodily canvas open for all their torture

16:27 to be seen by the crowds.

16:30 important aspect of martyrdom and memory.

16:33 Martyrdom in the ancient world was always public.

16:36 It was never behind the scenes.

16:38 It was meant to be public, to shame.

16:41 But the Christians in defiance used it as an opportunity

16:45 to witness to their faithfulness

16:47 and the love of their faith in Christ.

16:49 If you read the church fathers and the stories of the martyrs,

16:53 you'll find that a common theme emerges,

16:55 that martyrs win and are guaranteed a seat in heaven.

17:00 Others teaching then that martyrdom was another form of salvation beyond belief?

17:04 No.

17:06 The theology of martyrdom is based on the New Testament.

17:09 There, mention of the martyrs is always connected with heaven.

17:13 Stephen, the first martyr in scripture, sees heaven open up and Jesus come for him in Acts,

17:17 chapter 7.

17:19 And in Revelation, the martyrs are under God's throne, awaiting justice.

17:23 So the early church connected martyrdom with assurance.

17:30 Why? Because you demonstrated beyond doubt that your faith was genuine.

17:35 Also, you proved yourself to be a good disciple.

17:38 In another very famous martyrdom account,

17:41 an elderly Christian named Polykarp is killed.

17:45 An account of his execution exists, and it sounds a lot like Ignatius.

17:49 Here's a small excerpt.

17:51 \"I have wild beasts, the pro-council warned.

17:54 If you do not repent, I will have you thrown to them.

17:57 Send for them.

18:00 Do not despise the wild beasts, I will order you burned alive.\"

18:04 You threaten with the fire that burns for an hour and in a little while will be quenched,

18:09 the old man replied, \"But you are unaware of the fire of judgment to come, and the fire

18:13 of which the eternal punishment is kept for the wicked.

18:16 Why do you delay?

18:17 Bring on what you will.\"

18:19 Notice Polycarp's similar willingness to die for the Lord, or take a third account, a

18:30 Justin Martyr, rusticus says, \"If you don't do as I tell you,

18:33 you will be tortured without mercy.\"

18:36 Justin says, \"We ask nothing better than to suffer

18:38 for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and so be saved.

18:42 If we do this, we can confidently and quietly stand

18:45 before the fearful judgment seat

18:47 of the same God and Savior when in accordance

18:50 with the divine ordering, all this world will pass away.\"

18:54 The Martyr was a public witness to Roman injustice

19:00 The martyr let his or her body become an imitation of the passion

19:04 and showed everyone who watched that there must be something powerful and amazing and incredible about this new faith

19:10 that these people would be willing to be tortured and killed in this way.

19:14 Some of the stories show this witness so powerfully that they're still hard to read today.

19:20 And one of those is the passion of perpetual and felicity.

19:25 In it we learn of a young perpetual,

19:30 waiting execution.

19:31 She's a new mom and had recently given birth

19:34 and was desperate to see the child weaned.

19:38 Other Christians end up helping her bribe the guards

19:41 so she can breastfeed her baby.

19:43 And the breastfeeding brings her great comfort and joy.

19:46 But don't rush through this moment if you read it.

19:49 Don't miss it for what's really it is.

19:51 Here is a mother who is spending her last few days

19:55 of life in a dirty prison,

19:57 happy to give her newborn child her milk

20:00 her baby will live on.

20:02 These are the tender moments of a mother and child,

20:06 but also knowingly the last.

20:08 All Perpetua has to do is light some incense

20:12 and she can go home and be with her child,

20:14 but she won't do it.

20:16 Perpetua asks for prayer for strength,

20:19 and she receives a dream the night before her death.

20:22 In it, she climbs a ladder

20:24 on which various sharp weapons are attached.

20:26 Below the ladder is a serpent.

20:28 She interprets this to mean

20:30 for not only physical torture but spiritual warfare and temptation. If any of you are parents

20:38 out there watching this, you know how deep and insane Perpetua's love for Jesus must have been.

20:45 She took Jesus' command to love him even above family very seriously and was killed by beasts.

20:51 Such is the witness of many of the martyrs. They show us in their deaths the sacrifice of Christ.

21:00 a sacrifice to the church. That is what

21:03 tertullian means when he says the blood of the martyrs is seed.

21:07 Just as Christians sacrifices brought life to the church so the martyrs

21:12 sacrifice gives witness to the power of God, of faith, and the implicit joy and

21:17 treasure of knowing Jesus. And if you lived back then, would you have the courage

21:22 to be a martyr? Don't feel bad if you say no because most people back then did not

21:30 obligatory sacrifices when put on trial. Most did not accept martyrdom. And over time,

21:36 this created a major crisis in the early church. And it's the last thing we'll turn to in our

21:41 lecture today. Jesus had said in the gospels that if you deny him before men, he will deny you

21:47 before his father. So some Christians believe that if you were given an opportunity for martyrdom

22:00 and ended up making the sacrifices, it became a problem too big to ignore.

22:05 The Christians who face persecution and then sacrificed, that is, they didn't go through

22:10 it martyrdom, they became known as the \"lapsee\", which is translated in English as \"the lapsed\".

22:17 It literally means though \"the fallen\".

22:19 And that should tell you a lot.

22:21 The lapses were compared to the fallen angels, the damned.

22:25 But these people were genuine Christians who had let fear overcome them.

22:30 re-enter the church in Christian fellowship.

22:32 And this caused a huge debate and ensued on sides

22:36 that formed on whether or not the Lapsi

22:38 had committed the unpardonable sin,

22:40 or whether they could be welcomed back

22:42 into the graces of the church.

22:44 The matter went on for a long time,

22:46 but was finally solved by a church father named Cyprian.

22:51 Cyprian became a Christian in 246 AD

22:54 and was from a wealthy family.

22:56 He became a priest a year after his conversion

23:00 Carthage in North Africa. Soon after the Emperor Dicius passed a law that required Christians

23:06 to sacrifice to Caesar and the gods and to receive a certificate proving the fact.

23:11 And the law went into effect January 1st, 250. Within three weeks, the pope, Fabian,

23:19 had already been martyred. Cyprian received a dream telling him to flee, so he ran to

23:23 a friend's house in the countryside. The authorities came looking for him, but they never found

23:30 was brutal, but it only lasted 14 months. And when it was over, Cyprian returned, and he found that

23:37 most of his congregation had decided to make the obligatory sacrifice, that is, most of his

23:42 church was now made up of lapse. The tradition had been not to let them back into the church.

23:48 Also, Cyprian himself was accused of being a lapse by some other Christians because he had

23:54 ran away to the countryside. But he didn't technically meet that definition since he was never put

24:00 Cyprian will solve the question of the lapsed through his ministry and writings,

24:05 and we can summarize his argument to this as follows.

24:09 Cyprian wants the church to be unified, and therefore he wants the lapsi to be welcomed back in.

24:15 But he has to convince the church of this,

24:17 and he has to show that the Christians who lapsed didn't commit the unpardonable sin.

24:22 To do that, he very cleverly goes to a famous passage on love in 1 Corinthians 13.

24:30 Saint Paul writes, \"If I deliver my body over to be burned,

24:34 that is martyrdom, but have not love, I gain nothing.\"

24:40 Cyprian argues that if we don't have love, we are nothing.

24:45 He says that martyrdom in and of itself

24:47 is not another means of salvation,

24:49 since Saint Paul says that a true martyrdom

24:53 is not about what one does, but about how one does it.

24:57 In other words, simply dying for the faith

25:00 enough, a true martyr is one who dies for Christ and his or her neighbors. The martyr must die as

25:06 an act of love, not just as a legalistic checkpoint on a list. Cyprian further explicates that Christ

25:15 taught that murderers are not just those who kill other people, but true murderers are those who

25:21 hate their brothers or sisters. Here's how Cyprian puts this in his own words. Whoever hates his

25:30 Not arrive at the kingdom of heaven, nor does he live with God.

25:34 He cannot be with Christ, who preferred to be an imitator of Judas rather than of Christ.

25:40 What a sin that is, which cannot be washed away by a baptism of blood.

25:44 What a crime that is, which cannot be executed by martyrdom.

25:49 So do you hear what Cyprian is saying here?

25:52 Hate of a brother is a worse sin than lapsing.

25:56 Why?

25:57 Because being a martyr is no reward if we hate one another.

26:00 That is true, then failing to forgive and welcome back

26:04 lapsed brothers and sisters is tantamount to hating them.

26:07 With this argument, Cyprian will eventually win the day

26:11 and the church will welcome back the lapsed.

26:14 So in closing, let's summarize.

26:16 Martyrdom creates a memory in the church

26:18 that lasts to the present day.

26:21 It shows loyalty and love of Christ

26:23 and gives witness to Christ's power for the Christians.

26:26 It re-inscribes Roman attempts and dominance

26:30 death or the gates of hell cannot stop the spread of the gospel.

26:34 And finally, martyrdom advances theology by tackling deep questions like what gives

26:40 assurance and what are the limits of forgiveness.

26:43 In the end though, martyrdom is about unity.

26:45 The church is unified under one Lord Jesus, to whom ultimate loyalty and obedience is

26:51 given.

26:52 It is Jesus who is the head of the church and the source of its unity.

26:56 But Jesus requires the church to listen to the bishops, the elders, because they are

27:00 shepherds. And those bishops and all Christians should live their lives as witnesses, if necessary

27:06 imitating Christ in his passion and if not, then imitating him in all other ways that they can.

Welcome to Session 4! Today we'll examine a pivotal shift in the Early Church's approach to faith and reason. Initially skeptical of philosophy, the Church Fathers gradually integrated it with theology, enriching Christian apologetics—a tradition of defending the faith. We'll explore the journey from rejection to integration, highlighting key figures like Tertullian with his staunch faith-based stance, and Justin Martyr, who embraced a philosophical approach to explain and defend Christian beliefs. Additionally, we'll examine how pagans perceived philosophy and delve into Athenagoras' sophisticated philosophical arguments on the Trinity. This lesson invites you to see how the early Christians navigated the waters of faith and intellect, crafting a legacy of thoughtful, reasoned belief.

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00:11 We live in a world of ever-changing and fast-paced technology.

00:15 My iPhone becomes obsolete in a few years,

00:17 faster Internet infrastructure is upgraded every decade,

00:20 medical breakthroughs are common,

00:22 at home workspaces have left office buildings empty.

00:25 Even ancient categories are under debate,

00:30 ours is simply an age of fast-paced change,

00:33 and it can be dizzying,

00:34 but we all buy into the myth of progress,

00:36 that the young, the new, and the novel are probably better.

00:40 The point is, we are used to change

00:42 and experience a lot of it in our lives.

00:45 But the ancient world was not this way.

00:47 Christianity as a new religion suffered a major problem.

00:51 It was new.

00:52 This was not a good thing.

00:54 For ancients, the old was better,

00:57 because it had a long history of debate and scrutiny,

01:00 most important, it had proved itself valuable by lasting.

01:05 By surviving centuries of change, a thing proved itself true by being old.

01:09 That's why the Romans gave the Jews a dispensation from worshiping the emperor.

01:13 They respected the Jewish religion because it was thousands of years old, even though

01:18 they thought it was rather stupid, but they respected it because of its antiquity.

01:22 There had to be truth in it, or it just wouldn't have lasted this long.

01:30 But God was a Roman criminal and a Jewish blasphemer who neither practiced philosophy or rhetoric.

01:37 Not a good starting point.

01:39 Therefore, it was only a matter of time before the church would have to defend the truth claims it made,

01:44 and in the ancient Roman world, that meant engaging in both the claims that Christianity itself made,

01:50 its own reasonableness, and how those claims were superior to other systems of truth, like philosophy.

02:00 to meet the challenge.

02:01 Diverse group of men, they are now called the apologists,

02:05 from the Greek word apology,

02:08 which means speaking in defense of something.

02:10 Their job was to show the reasonableness of Christianity

02:14 and why it was true.

02:16 Already though, we're in hot theological water.

02:19 If our faith is made true by how reasonable it is,

02:23 then that implies that faith is just a product

02:26 of human reason, just like a building

02:30 And many Christians and church fathers were reticent to argue that what made Christianity

02:36 true was that it seemed reasonable.

02:39 After all, Saint Paul himself had said in his first letter to the Corinthians that

02:44 our faith was folly and are preaching foolish.

02:49 Faith, many argued, cannot be what ends up on the other side of an equal sign after you've

02:54 plugged in all your rational arguments.

03:00 faith on these grounds.

03:02 One Greek critic, Celsus, writes, \"Some Christians do not even want to give or receive a reason

03:08 for what they believe, and use expressions such as, 'Do not ask questions just believe,

03:14 and your faith will save you.'\"

03:16 Others quote the Apostle Paul, \"The world's wisdom is evil and foolishness is a good thing.\"

03:22 To many Romans, Christianity just sounded absurd.

03:30 could find God through logic, they would not need special revelation.

03:35 So they were skeptical at first to engage in philosophy or debates.

03:40 In this lecture, we're going to look at three apologist fathers, Tertullian, Athenagoras,

03:46 and Justin Martyr.

03:48 You'll see they are quite different in their approach, style, and thinking.

03:51 But each will make important contributions to the faith and spawn what will eventually

04:00 Let's start with Tertullian.

04:02 When you think of Tunisia today,

04:04 what image comes to mind?

04:06 Hot desert sands, calls to prayer,

04:08 busy and crowded marketplaces perhaps?

04:11 Just before 155 AD, a centurion and his wife

04:15 end up in this far-flung sandy and rough place

04:18 and give birth to a son,

04:20 Quintus Septimus Florence Tartellianus.

04:24 Tertullian for short.

04:26 In the history of the Church Fathers,

04:30 quite like Tartullian.

04:32 In my experience, students of Patristics

04:35 and early church history loved Tartullian.

04:37 He's his own man.

04:39 When other people run from controversy,

04:41 Tartullian runs into it.

04:42 He's smart, he knows it, and he picks intellectual fights

04:46 with anyone who disagrees with him.

04:48 And he can turn a phrase, he's witty, he's funny,

04:51 and he's utterly dangerous to engage in and debate.

04:54 He's the Christopher Hitchens of the early church,

04:56 but on Christianity's side.

05:00 humiliate all the detractors who put you down for your faith,

05:04 and you never seem to have a good reply,

05:05 Tertullian will take care of it.

05:08 Tertullian is born in North Africa in 155 AD,

05:11 and he receives an excellent education.

05:14 He becomes an expert in Greek classics and Roman law,

05:17 likely going on to become a lawyer.

05:19 In fact, and although this is debated,

05:21 some scholars think he was an extremely famous

05:24 and well-known legal scholar in the empire,

05:27 which if true makes his conversion to Christianity,

05:30 more shocking.

05:32 Tertullian was 35 when he converted to the faith,

05:35 and he was not happy with his life up until that point.

05:38 Though successful and married, he had frequent affairs

05:41 and felt a meaninglessness and existential crisis

05:44 that he couldn't shake, it wouldn't go away.

05:47 One day, he attended some local games

05:49 where Christians were martyred.

05:50 He was highly impressed by their witness,

05:53 how they bravely died, didn't curse their enemies,

05:56 cared for each other in prison

06:00 and that they were willing to die for what they believed in.

06:03 He was intrigued.

06:05 We don't know who taught him the faith,

06:07 but he eventually converted and was baptized.

06:10 We don't know much about his role in the church after this.

06:13 A later writer says he became a priest,

06:15 but this is debated and most scholars

06:17 don't think it very likely.

06:19 We do know at some point he was responsible

06:21 for training candidates for baptism in the faith.

06:24 Tertullian though is a lawyer through and through.

06:27 That's his style.

06:28 He wants to win every argument.

06:30 in like it was a court case. He's an excellent orator, and he used the North African rhetorical

06:36 style, which was known for being aggressive and a-serbic, except for St. Augustine, who's also from

06:41 North Africa. Tertullian is the most quoted of all the Church Fathers in history, and this

06:47 remains true up till today. Though I'm not sure that being in second place for a number of quotations

06:52 would have made him very happy. Let's look at just a few ways he defended the faith.

07:00 He is not trying to just say Christianity is right.

07:04 He is also saying that Roman and Greek philosophy and morals and ethics are wrong.

07:10 For example, the Romans had long accused the Christians of being atheists,

07:15 because they only believed in one God instead of all the many gods.

07:19 From this, the Romans said that Christians were irreligious.

07:23 Dertelian argues that forcing people to make the sacrifices, like the Romans do,

07:30 false, since true religion must be a free choice. Otherwise, it's just dumb. Why?

07:37 Well, what God or God's want forced homage. He says not even a human being would care

07:43 to have unwilling homage rendered to him. In a different source, Tertullian gives us

07:48 a glimpse of how Christianity has a long history of religious liberty. It is a fundamental

07:55 human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own conviction.

08:00 One man's religion neither harms or helps another man.

08:03 It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.

08:07 It is Tertullian who gives us the famous maxim,

08:11 \"The Blood of the Martyrs\" is the seed of the church.

08:13 Though more accurately what he really wrote was,

08:16 \"The Blood of Christians is Seed.\"

08:18 Tertullian is also the first person to use the word \"Trinity.\"

08:22 And he writes the first book ever in the church on a sacrament.

08:26 It's a treatise on baptism.

08:30 church mother. All of these sayings are found in works that are apologetical, that is defending

08:36 Christianity against some other accusation. One thing that really gets cartilian upset

08:43 is philosophy. Now this is a little strange, so bear with me, but in this time period,

08:48 philosophy is not called philosophy. The word that they use for that which we call philosophy

09:00 Greek life. And this gives you a clue into how philosophy was

09:04 viewed in the early Christian century. Philosophy was life, not

09:10 just thinking about the meaning of life. It was life itself. For

09:15 Romans and intellectuals of the day, philosophy was a formative

09:19 practice, a means of instilling ethical and moral values on a

09:23 person and creating a good society. Rufus, a pagan

09:30 as, to find out by discussion what is fitting and proper and then carry it out into action.\"

09:39 So it's not just thinking, it's doing to. A Christian writer, also around this time,

09:46 Clement of Alexandria, wrote a treatise on Christian ethics called the Tudor, and said

09:52 the purpose of the work was to \"heal the passions, improve the soul, and train someone in a virtuous

10:00 So, the point is philosophy was a moral project, a project of making someone virtuous by converting

10:08 their behavior and affections.

10:11 So when Tartullian sounds off about philosophy, he has this in mind.

10:15 He sees it as a worldly wisdom in competition with divinely revealed truth.

10:20 So, Tartullian is an apologist, but he's against philosophy.

10:30 He believed that philosophy led to heresy and that it was shameful and debased.

10:36 Tertullian, like any intellectual of the day, knew that the teachings of Christianity

10:41 still had a lot in common with other philosophies like Stoicism or the teachings of Plato, as well as some others.

10:48 But for him, philosophy was a choice to deny the truth of God.

10:53 Why? Because Tertullian believed that any truth found in philosophy must have first been given by God in the Bible

11:00 was later bastardized by philosophers. He says at one point, \"Where is it, I pray you,

11:07 that you all have this so like us in the poets and philosophers. The reason simply is that

11:12 they have been taken from our religion.\" At another point, he writes of the philosophers,

11:19 and that these are doctrines of men and demons, produced for itching ears of the spirit of

11:24 this world's wisdom, for philosophy is the material of the world's wisdom, the rash

11:30 of the nature and dispensation of God.

11:32 Indeed, heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy,

11:36 a way with all attempts to produce a modeled Christianity

11:40 of stoic, platonic, and dialectical composition.

11:44 We want no curious disfuseation after possessing Christ Jesus,

11:48 no inquisition after enjoying the gospel,

11:51 with our faith we desire no further belief.

11:55 This is also how Tartullian answers the charge

12:00 the newness. The Jewish scriptures, he says, are older than the philosopher's works.

12:05 The pagan poets and philosophers, he argues, stole their best ideas from Moses.

12:10 Thus, Tartullian uses the argument from antiquity that the Romans are so loved against them.

12:17 Our books are older than yours. Na na na na na na na. That's essentially his argument.

12:21 In the end, though, Tartullian will himself die a part of a heretical sect of Christianity called the Montenas.

12:30 similar to some modern-day Pentecostal or charismatic groups, but they believed that the

12:34 Holy Spirit gave new revelations to people not found in Scripture. It was popular in North Africa,

12:40 and Tartullian liked its very strict ethical requirements. But unfortunately, in the end,

12:46 he died a bitter, exiled, and angry man. Now contrast him with our next apologist,

12:54 Justin. He's very different. He lived before Tartullian, and was eventually martyred.

13:00 His last name wasn't Martyr, we just call him Justin Martyr.

13:03 He was born in 100 and he died in 165.

13:07 He's considered the church's first official apologist.

13:11 Now interestingly, Justin was a philosopher by trade.

13:15 Before he was a Christian, that's what he was trained in.

13:17 And he wore a philosopher's cloak his whole life.

13:20 And that was back then similar to like a doctor wearing a white coat today.

13:25 He was trained in stoicism, platonism, and other philosophies.

13:30 Justin was a good debater, but much more charitable and gentle than Tartullian.

13:35 In fact, he was almost as opposite.

13:38 One day, before he was a Christian, Justin was walking on a beach when he came upon

13:43 an old man.

13:44 The two stuck up a conversation, which Justin later records.

13:49 Does philosophy then make happiness?

13:52 Surely, an only philosophy, said Justin.

13:56 What then is philosophy the man asked?

13:58 And what is happiness?

14:00 Justin replies, \"Philosophy is a knowledge of what really exists, and a clear perception

14:06 of the truth, and happiness is the reward of such knowledge and wisdom.\"

14:12 But what do you call God, the old man asked?

14:15 A long conversation then ensues where the old man convinces Justin that if he really

14:20 wanted to know the truth, he should read the Bible, especially the ancient prophets of

14:24 Israel, for they announced the truth to men.

14:30 like the philosophers, but filled with the Holy Spirit.

14:34 Intrigued, Justin rushed out to find a copy of the scriptures,

14:37 and he later wrote, \"Immediately a flame was kindled in my soul,

14:41 and I was possessed by a love of the prophets

14:44 and of those men who are friends of Christ.

14:47 I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.\"

14:52 Justin will go on to write important works

14:54 in Christian apologetics, defending the reasonableness

15:00 He writes works to two different audiences as well.

15:03 Some of his works are to pagans and others to Jews.

15:06 Justin's contribution was to make Christian thought and belief understandable to audiences like Jews and Romans, who thought it either blasphemous or absurd.

15:16 Particularly, he spent time explaining the relationship between Jesus and God the Father.

15:23 And this was a real point of confusion and frustration by both Jews and pagans.

15:30 and so they accused Christians of having two gods by worshiping Jesus as God.

15:35 Romans thought it illogical that Christians could claim to worship one God

15:40 while confessing at least two.

15:42 Justin's great contribution is to use a philosophical word that is also used in the Bible

15:50 to help critics see the logic of what we later call the Trinity.

15:55 And that word is logos.

16:00 will eventually be replaced by a fuller, more accurate trinitarian theology.

16:05 But only after the church takes Justin's lead,

16:08 contra-tertullian, and appropriates philosophical language into Christian use.

16:15 Briefly, logos is just the Greek word for \"word.\"

16:19 But it was used in philosophy and by philosophers to mean something deeper.

16:24 It could mean both speech and wisdom and reality.

16:30 says that God the Father can be thought of as similar to Plato's Supreme Being.

16:35 And the Logos, which the Bible says is Jesus, is the mediator between the Father and creation.

16:42 So, and this is a little confusing, but it's like this, the Logos is like the thought in

16:48 God's head that is eternally generated but breaks forth in creation and takes on flesh

16:56 in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

17:00 of the logos, pagan thought can have truth in it, since all truth that is real must come from God.

17:07 And remember, logos just means rational as well. So Justin gives the church a place to start,

17:13 a common ground in witnessing about the truth of Christ, but also on philosophical terms.

17:20 Philosophically, what Justin is doing is showing that the Trinity has one God,

17:30 How is this possible?

17:32 Because a person and a thought are distinct, but a thought is a person's thought.

17:39 This will be challenged as inadequate in later Trinitarian teaching, but it sets the groundwork.

17:45 And here's the point.

17:46 The church will end up needing philosophical language to make its truth claims logical against charges of absurdism.

18:00 has are rational and understandable to others.

18:04 In addition to using philosophical language,

18:07 Justin responds to the criticism

18:09 that Christians were incestuous cannibals

18:11 by setting the record straight.

18:14 While doing this, he also says that though

18:17 pagans find Christians quirky and sometimes morally

18:20 reprehensible, 'cause they don't make the sacrifices,

18:23 that pagans are in no position to judge

18:26 since pagan morality is terrible.

18:30 that adultery, promiscuity, licentiousness, pedophilia, prostitution, and sporting violence

18:36 were all common and accepted. In fact, the pagan morality was so bad that the government even

18:43 benefited by supporting it, the moral depravity bringing in lots of tax revenue that Rome was

18:48 happy to collect. And just in contrast this, with Christian morality, which he says is superior,

19:00 divorce and remarriage.

19:02 The worst part of pagan thought and morality

19:05 is what we now call relativism.

19:08 This is Justin's opinion.

19:09 Justin says that there is no real virtue or vice,

19:13 but only by opinion are things considered good or bad.

19:17 Justin also dialogues with the Jews.

19:20 His famous work, A Dialogue with Trifo,

19:23 is a conversation between him and Trifo,

19:25 a Jew that he tries to convert to Christianity.

19:30 Christianity by the way Christians live that they live

19:33 righteously and die as martyrs, since he knows that Jews are

19:36 impressed by righteousness. But when Trifo does not enjoy the

19:40 attempts at being converted, Justin then criticizes the Jewish

19:43 people for their hardness of heart. He says, for your eyes,

19:46 your ears are closed and your eyes are blinded, and the heart

19:50 is hardened. Jeremiah has cried, yet not even then do you

19:53 listen, the law giver is present, yet you do not see him to the

20:00 yet you do not understand.

20:02 You have now need of a second circumcision, though you glory greatly in the flesh.

20:08 In the end, Justin himself will become a martyr.

20:12 He critiques the work of a philosopher who then reports him to the local magistrate,

20:17 Rusticus, who then has Justin killed.

20:20 Now, Justin's legacy is vast, and his appropriation of philosophy will become an indispensable part

20:30 finding language to proclaim its greatest truths and mysteries.

20:34 There were many other Christian apologists of course as well, though we don't have time

20:38 to get into them.

20:39 One deserves a passing introduction though, and that is a thinigorus.

20:44 He's the most philosophical of the apologists, defending Christianity against charges of cannibalism

20:50 or atheism.

20:52 But perhaps his greatest contribution is that he is the first father to make important

21:00 Trinitarian formulations.

21:02 The apologists lived in a dangerous time for Christianity,

21:06 but they bravely testified and gave witness to the truth

21:09 that they believed.

21:10 They also pushed the boundaries

21:12 between philosophy, reason, and faith.

21:14 Next, we'll turn to the Bible itself

21:17 and its role in patristic thought and formation.

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