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The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth inspired a small company of Jews in Palestine around the year 30 to make the confession that "Jesus is Lord." Some two thousand years later, this small group had grown into a global community of Christians comprising approximately a third of the world's population. Although extraordinarily diverse in faith and life, all of the many Christian communities of the present trace their origins in one way or another to the earliest centuries of the household of faith they call the church.
The conviction that Jesus is Lord of all people immediately caused the first Christians to break out of the ritual enclosure created by the Jewish Law, and Christianity rapidly spread beyond its earliest environs in Jerusalem. Greek rather than Hebrew soon became the language most widely used among the early Christians. Under the leadership of Paul the Apostle and other evangelists, Christians quickly began inviting Gentiles to confess faith in Christ and to join Christian communities. This evangelism presented Christians with a difficult question. How could the church reconcile the profession of the new faith with the claims of the Judaism from which it originated?
An intense struggle with this question clarified the Christian commitment to spreading the Christian faith without requiring new converts to observe the Mosaic law, and the church grew rapidly among Gentiles. Christian groups requiring the observance, the law of the Old Testament, including the Ebionites, waned and soon vanished. By the year 100, the Mediterranean shore was dotted with Christian congregations. A few hundred years later, the entire Mediterranean basin was thick with communities confessing Christ as Lord.
The early church faced formidable external challenges to its existence. It quickly incurred the hostility of the Judaism from which it had sprung and soon thereafter gained the enmity of the pagan religions throughout the Roman Empire. Christianity was also challenged by Gnosticism, a new religion which blended several streams of ancient religious life. Intellectuals steeped in the traditions of Greek and Roman philosophy also leveled harsh criticism against the Christian movement. This occasioned the attempt of apologists of the second and third centuries to couch the Christian message in the language and philosophies of the ancient world. While this was occurring, Roman Emperors periodically harried the church with sometimes bloody persecution. The persecutions led to martyrdom for thousands while others lapsed and offered worship to the pagan gods. Finally, the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 313 required the church to face the fearsome tests of social acceptability and the accumulation of great wealth. These events and other factors, including great disappointment because Jesus did not return quickly after his ascension, produced internal developments as well. Formative patterns of worship and procedures for the admission of new believers developed in this period. Baptism became the means of entry into the church and a sacramental meal early known as the "Eucharist" sustained the communion of the church with its Lord. Questions about how to deal rightly with Christians who had lapsed during persecutions raised difficult matters of internal discipline and self-understanding. This became the focus of the protracted Donatist controversy in the fourth century. Rising unease with the church's comfort in the world after the conversion of Constantine also led to the emergence of monasticism, a way of life apart from the world for those who aspired to spiritual perfection. Throughout this period the growth of Christian congregations spurred the emergence of regional as well as congregational structures and also led to the emergence of a hierarchically ordered threefold ministry including the offices of bishop, priest, and deacon.
Christians discovered themselves divided over difficult theological questions. The Apostolic Fathers of the late first and second centuries pioneered efforts to resolve these questions, often as they responded to heresies arising within the church, including Marcionitism, Docetism, and Montanism. These heresies raised old questions about the faith of the Old Testament and new ones about the person of Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit. Eventually the church began to ask how Jesus could be truly divine and human, and this question would soon be related to questions about the divinity of God the Father and the Holy Spirit. In the fourth century, the presbyter Arius, for example, taught that Jesus was a created being subordinate to God the Father. A clear answer affirming the divinity of Christ was forcefully presented by the bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. Individual theologians, however, could not decisively resolve these questions which created the Trinitarian and Christological controversies. To face and resolve such urgent issues, the church developed norms: an agreed upon body or canon of Scripture and creeds. One of these creeds, the Old Roman Symbol, an ancestor of the Apostles' Creed, emerged from the liturgical life of the church. Other creeds and definitive statements came from the ecumenical councils of the church, gatherings of bishops from throughout the ancient church summoned to address disputed questions. The Council of Nicea I in 325 and the Council of Constantinople I in 383 spoke to the divinity of Christ and his place within the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From these councils came the Nicene Creed. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 pronounced on the two natures of Christ, the one human and the other divine.
Through nearly five centuries, the church grew in the embrace of the Roman Empire, an embrace at first hostile and later cordial. After the conversion of Constantine, the church was closely identified with the Empire. When Rome fell in 410 and the Roman Empire fell to barbarian invaders in 476, the church was again challenged for its life and entered into a new era, an epoch eventually to be called the middle ages.
