The Period of Jesus

The core source for the pre situationncy of Christianity as a religious movement organized rough the figure of Jesus is the Bible, in particular Acts, which says that "the disciples were called Christians early in Antioch" (Acts 11:26) and which implies the universalist/catholic character that the church building was subsequently to assume. In the first part of Acts 11, Peter establishes that the mission of the church service extends to both Jews (circumcised) and Gentiles (uncircumcised), more specifically to those of Judea (Acts 11:1) and to the Grecians (Acts 11:20), i.e., ethnical non-Jews on one hand and Hellenized Jews on the other.

Of special honor is the fact that representatives of the "church which was in Jerusalem" (Barnabas) and of the church in Tarsus (Saul/Paul) assemble for more than a year in Antioch, education new articles of faith (Acts 11:29). Eberts (306-7) characterizes the teaming of Barnabas and Paul as the portentous Christian mission. The year in Antioch can also be interpreted as time spent by 2 Christian apostolic leaders rationalizing Church direction so as to irrevocably include Jew and Gentile while maintaining a connection to the church's roots in Jerusalem. To put it another way, Acts 11 is an early exercise in establishing th

[I]n turning from Pharisee to Christian, Paul simply transferred his temperament to the other side of the line and that the Christian Church that he founded thus transmissible and carried into Europe the stamp of his Levantine regard for the monolithic consensus (Campbell 379).

Jerusalem, spot of the Temple and Jesus's final ministry and death, was of first importance: "Jerusalem was considered the centralize of the [Jewish] faith, the central point from which faith emanated and to which the faithful were to return for effectiveness and nourishment" (Eberts 310).

Initially, Jerusalem was the missional province of the Twelve of Galilee, the immediate heirs of Jesus's ministry who obtained the first converts to what everyone seems to have considered a radically reformist Judaism that "appealed both to the Pharisees' reek that the revealed will of God was a matter [of] . . . intense serious-mindedness and also to the ordinary Jew's feeling that too much of the pious scrupulousness about the law had ended in petty(a) ceremonial niceties that missed the central point of religion" (Chadwick 15).

The puritanistic Donatists employ "rebaptism" to purge sinners altogether from the church in quest of an domineering spiritual ideal; Augustine led the view that saints and sinners could remain in the church, and the Edict of Unity formally dissolved the Donatist Church (Bokenkotter 73). Arianism, affirming absolute divinity and unitary structure of God, denied the divinity of Jesus. It was the intimately prominent and long-lasting controversy, following Constantine's (possibly politically expedient) conversion in 312 to Christianity; two generations later, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the state religion.

Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and illuminate of the Roman Empire. Vol. 2. New York: Modern Library, n.d.

Basically this meant that bishops had formed alliances with public secular authorities all over Western Europe. In 754, the papacy allied itself with the Frankish kings, and in 800
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