Kingdom, Cross, and Crucible: Part Six

From Joseph Smith to Jesus: A Historical Reckoning

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Part Six: Christ Contested: Proliferation and Domestication

The Jesus movement did not become Christianity in a straight line. It was incredibly pluralistic in the earliest decades, with many theologically varied communities competing for narrative dominance. Understanding this early diversity and how it was eventually suppressed tells us something essential about how religious movements work and what survives when prophets fail.

I. The Tradition’s Self-Account vs. the Historical Record
II. The Initial Explosion: Many Movements, Many Names
III. The Oral World: Literacy, Memory, and the Shape of Tradition
IV. Paul’s Contested Gospel: Diversity at the Source
V. The Associational World: Collegia of the Kingdom
VI. The Acts Apologetic: Luke’s Harmonized Origin Story
VII. The Didache: A Surviving Strand of Jewish Jesus Practice
VIII. The Gospel of Thomas: The Wisdom Trajectory
IX. Prophetic Disappointment: Festinger and Eliade
X. Paul’s Firstfruits and the Acute Eschatological Expectation
XI. The Delayed Parousia: From Paul to 2 Peter
XII. The Range of Responses
XIII. The Parting of the Ways: Anti-Jewish Rhetoric and the Gentile Turn
XIV. Coordination, Homogenization, Suppression

Continued from Part 5.

I. The Tradition's Self-Account vs. the Historical Record

The hindsight version of early Christian history that most people in the Western world have absorbed over more than a millennium is likely familiar to my readers. The tradition holds that Jesus founded a church, the apostles carried its message outward from Jerusalem in a reasonably coherent form by a coordinated missionary program, a period of persecution tested and refined the community's faith, and the formal definition of orthodox doctrine at the councils of the fourth century simply systematized and ratified what had been believed from the beginning. In this account, diversity was deviation. Heresy was chosen departure from an original unity. The doctrines, practices, and liturgy that became orthodoxy were always the meaningfully primitive ones.

The historical record tells a more complex and peculiar story.

The work of a generation of scholars – crystallized recently in the 2021 study After Jesus, Before Christianity, authored by Hal Taussig, Cynthia Kittredge, and a team of researchers working under the Early Christianity and Its Literature project – has assembled a picture of the first two centuries of the Jesus movements that is almost unrecognizable from within the tradition's self-account (i.e., the canon). What the evidence shows is not a single movement with a uniform message radiating outward from a central source, but an extraordinary proliferation of diverse, largely independent communities scattered across the Mediterranean world, experimenting with different practices, different leadership structures, different understandings of who Jesus was and what his significance meant, and different relationships to the Jewish tradition that had produced him. These communities shared a reverence for Jesus as their formative figure. Beyond that, the diversity was remarkable and the doctrinal uniformity that later tradition would impose was largely absent in the first two centuries.

Some of these communities were organized around prophetic leadership; viz. wandering charismatics who moved between settlements, carrying sayings traditions and proclamations that were understood as continuing the prophetic work Jesus had begun. Others were organized around localized household networks, meeting in the homes of relatively prosperous patrons, developing what looks more like a collegium or voluntary association than anything resembling a later church. Some maintained close connections to Jewish practice and identity. Others moved quickly toward Gentile contexts and left Jewish observance behind for the most part. Some developed elaborate cosmological and genealogical systems – the various “knowledge” movements scholars retrospectively label Gnostic – that interpreted Jesus's significance in terms drawn from Platonic philosophy and Jewish mysticism rather than from the apocalyptic tradition that the Synoptic Gospels preserve. Some, like the communities whose voice comes through most clearly in the Q material and the Gospel of Thomas, appear to have been primarily interested in Jesus as a wisdom teacher whose sayings provided guidance for living with little apparent interest in the developed atonement theology that was central to Paul. For this reason, it is to some extent anachronistic to cluster all of these movements under the term “Christianity” as that category would later come to be defined. This is why more recent scholarship will frequently refer to these groups instead as “Jesus movements” or “Anointed movements.”

What is historically striking about this refreshed picture is the implication it carries for the question of which strand of early Christianity represents the original. The answer appears to be: none of them, exclusively. The proto-orthodox tradition that would eventually produce the Nicene Creed was one minority strand among many, and its earliest traceable forms do not fully reflect its later creedal articulations. Over the centuries, however, it became influential, increasingly well-organized, and increasingly effective at marginalizing its competitors. But on the whole, it wasn’t the earliest or the most historically continuous with the specific world of first-century Galilee. The diversity was the original condition of the Jesus movement’s spread.

Rather than diversity being a secondary product of heresy preceding a natural consolidation, it was the condition from which everything else developed. And what grew out of the third and fourth century’s consolidation (i.e., the proto-orthodox synthesis, the Catholic Creeds, the rise of the institutional church) was the outcome of specific historical contingencies – not the inevitable unfolding of what “Christianity” essentially was. Contingency is the concept that the tradition’s self-account most consistently suppresses. It is the idea that a guiding hand of Providence was driving the historical development and that things could not have gone otherwise. To acknowledge contingency meant that James might have lived longer and become the “rock” upon which the later church would be built (rather than Peter), that Jerusalem might not have been destroyed in 70 CE, that Constantine might have patronized a different sect, that the communities producing the Gospel of Thomas or the Didache might have achieved the organizational coherence and political alignment that the proto-orthodox tradition eventually did.

In other words, orthodox Christianity is not what Christianity had to become. It is what one strand of an extraordinarily diverse movement managed to become under specific historical conditions that no one designed and no one could have predicted. The remainder of this part of the series will trace how that happened. The first task, however, is terminological. Before tracing how the early diversity was suppressed, we must reckon with the fact that even the name we instinctively reach for – Christian, Christianity – does not belong to these earliest communities. It was imposed on them largely from the outside at first, and its imposition shapes what we see in retrospect.

II. The Initial Explosion: Many Movements, Many Names

Before tracing the explosion of diverse movements that followed the crucifixion, there is a prior and more fundamental problem to address: what do we call these movements and the people within them? The default answer of “Christianity” turns out to be deeply problematic, and working through why illuminates the character of the diversity itself.

The Christianity Seminar – a successor project to the Jesus Seminar, whose findings were published in 2021 as After Jesus, Before Christianity by Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, Hal Taussig, and a team of researchers – spent two years investigating what the people loyal to Jesus actually called themselves during the first two centuries. Their conclusion was that the word Christianos appears only three times across the approximately 138,015 words of the Greek New Testament, and never once in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, nor anywhere in the letters of Paul. For comparison: the name Jesus appears 1,002 times. Disciples (students) appears 241 times. Judean/Jew appears 147 times. Paul appears 169 times. But Christianos appears only three times. The earliest Jesus movements did not self-identify as such.

The problem begins with transliteration. The contemporary English word Christian is not a translation of the Greek Christianos; it is a transliteration – a representation of the Greek letters in Latin alphabet form that carries the word’s sound across without carrying its meaning. The Greek word is made up of two components. Christos is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Messiah, meaning “anointed with oil.” In Israel, kings, prophets, and priests were anointed; the anointed one was the king. The suffix -ianos means “belongs to the party of.” The Gospel of Mark uses this same suffix when it refers to the Hērōdianoi – the Herodians, those who belong to the party of Herod – as among those who plot against Jesus (Mark 3:6). Translated rather than merely transliterated, Christianos means “one who belongs to the party of the Anointed,” viz. one who belongs to the party of the anointed king of Israel. The term is therefore not a purely religious identity label. It is a theo-political one, carrying explicit counter-imperial freight. Proclaiming someone Christos was, as Part Three and Four of this series established at length, precisely the kind of claim that would inevitably catch Rome’s attention. Belonging to the party of such a figure was, by extension, a chargeable political offense.

When the word migrated from Greek into Latin, it was transliterated rather than translated: Christianos became Christianus in Latin. But “anointed” in Latin is a completely different word – unctus – meaning Christianus had no native Latin meaning. It became a loan word, like umbrella from Italian or avatar from Sanskrit; a foreign-sounding term associated in the Roman mind with Judean provenance and, given Rome’s ongoing difficulties with Judean resistance movements, with the potential to cause trouble. Roman writers probably understood Christus as the name or title of a foreign individual from a region associated with rebellion, signaling resistance. There is also an orthographic possibility worth noting: Christus could be sounded as Crestus in Latin (i.e., “the good one”)  since confusion of I and E was common. The historian Tacitus, writing around 116 CE in his account of the great fire under Nero, uses both Crestiani and Christus, and describes this cult as a “degenerate superstition” originating in Judea – stereotypes he also applies to Judeans generally. Tacitus is making a distinction within types of Judeans; for him, Christianus signals Judean provenance and its associated potential for disorder, not a distinct non-Jewish religious identity. Cicero had earlier used the same language of “outlandish superstition” about Judean practices generally (Pro Flacco 67–68).

The three occurrences of Christianos in the New Testament bear this political freight out in each case. The first, in Acts 11:25–26, is an almost throwaway aside: it was in Antioch that the students (disciples) were first called “those who belonged to the party of the anointed.” The passive construction, “were called,” indicates an external label, applied by outsiders, not a self-designation adopted by the group. Translated rather than transliterated, the passage records not the birth of a religion but a shift in outside perception: from “students of the anointed” to “party of the anointed.” The second occurrence in Acts 26:27–29 comes during Paul’s trial before King Herod Agrippa II, a client ruler of Rome. Agrippa asks Paul: “Are you so quickly persuading me to belong to the party of the anointed?” That question – read with its proper political meaning – is no mild inquiry about religious conversion. It is a Roman client king asking whether Paul is inviting him to join a movement that claims a rival king of Israel. That Paul is in chains when Agrippa asks this question is not incidental. The third occurrence is probably the latest in the New Testament, found in 1 Peter 4:14–16. It comes in the context of Roman persecution: “If any of you suffers as one who belongs to the party of the anointed, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name.” Belonging to the party of the anointed is, from the Roman magistrate’s perspective, a criminal political charge. The seminar suggests this may represent the moment the external label begins to be adopted as a badge of resistance by the group itself, much as many nicknames begin as slurs and are eventually reclaimed.

The earliest external usage of the Latin Christiani that can be securely dated comes from the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan, fixed to Pliny’s governorship of Bithynia between 111 and 113 CE. We previously reviewed this citation in Part Two of this series. Pliny writes to Trajan asking for guidance on how to process those he calls Christiani. Both men know the term and neither has to explain it. In Pliny’s account, belonging to this group is sufficient grounds for a chargeable offense under Roman law, punishable by death. The AJBC seminar argues that the most prominent association of Christianos in the second century is with people who are threatened, imprisoned, or killed by agents of the Roman Empire – consistent with its basic meaning as a political party label for those loyal to a rival claimant to Israel’s throne. The distribution of the word's usage across these two centuries is itself telling. Christianos is essentially absent from first-century literature, appears only sparsely in the early second century, and becomes concentrated almost entirely in the late second century – at which point it is driven overwhelmingly by two writers.

Approximately 35% of all uses of the word in the first two centuries were made by just two men: Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, writers of the late second and early third centuries. Excluding them, the word appears roughly 215 times across two centuries of literature – its most intensive use concentrated in the Gospel of Philip, a late second-century composition that uses it seven times. The dating implications matter here: both Acts (which the Acts Seminar dates after 125 CE) and 1 Peter (more recently dated after 150 CE) are likely early to mid-second-century compositions, meaning the word appears in those texts roughly contemporaneously with its use by Pliny and Tacitus. What this suggests is not that Christianos marks the emergence of “Christianity” in Antioch in the early first century, as the traditional reading of Acts 11:26 implies, but rather that Pliny, Tacitus, and the author of Acts shared a common early second-century Roman bureaucratic term for a troublesome subgroup of Judean-associated people. The term was probably not in wide use much before 100 CE. In the seminar’s formulation, it was most likely an imperial administrative label applied from outside, and only subsequently adopted as a badge of honor and resistance by some of the communities to which it was applied.

If Christianos was an external label, what did these communities call themselves? The seminar’s two-year research effort identified at least 24 actual self-designations in surviving documents; the visible remnant of what must have been several hundred names across a field of movements that were too diverse and too loosely networked to have settled on any common vocabulary. Some used language drawn from the school environment, since Jesus was called teacher and he referred to his followers as students – the primary Greek word for which, typically rendered in English as “disciple,” is straightforwardly the ordinary Greek word for student. Others named themselves by their relationship to the anointed: People of the Anointed, Adherents of the Anointed, Confidants of the Anointed, Friends of the Anointed, Sisters and Brothers of the Anointed, Intimates of the Anointed. The political and social overtones of anointed-king language were explicit in these names: they positioned the communities as belonging to the movement of a conquered people’s national figure over against Rome’s claimed sovereignty. The seminar also identified ten names used by specific groups in surviving writings whose variety is itself evidence of the pluralism this section is arguing:

1.      Chloe’s People (1 Cor 1:11)

2.     The Way (Acts 9:2)

3.     The Enslaved of God (Acts of Paul and Thecla 37:3; Shepherd of Hermas 2:4)

4.     The Perfect Day (Gospel of Truth 17:10–11)

5.     Faithful Brothers (Colossians, opening and closing)

6.     Brothers, Sisters, Siblings – used across many writings, with James and 1 Peter as representative examples

7.     The Migrants and Aliens (James 1:1; 1 Peter 1:1)

8.    The Children (Matthew 18:2–7; 19:10–15)

9.     The Members (Odes of Solomon 3:2; 6:2; 8:14)

10.  Order of Melchizedek & The Altar (Hebrews 13:9–16).

None of these names uses the word Jesus. Most allude to activities, values, or social arrangements rather than to the person of the founder. And none of them maps onto what the later tradition would come to mean by “Christian.” As the seminar observes, naming is connected to identity: when we use an inaccurate name, we pre-determine what we expect to find. Despite the distinctions in nomenclature, however, one broad commonality does run through nearly all of these otherwise divergent communities, and here we examine it before documenting the divergences. Apart from their differences in practice, theology, organizational structure, and relationship to Jewish observance, most first and second century Jesus groups identified themselves in some way with Israel. This identification was partly religious, of course, but more specifically national. The seminar argues that the dominant framework for self-understanding in the ancient Mediterranean was ethnic and national: one’s people, one’s nation, one’s ancestral homeland and its gods. The Roman Empire had systematically disrupted those ethnic-national ties for the peoples it conquered, displacing populations, absorbing nations into the cosmopolis of Rome, and demanding loyalty to the emperor’s divine claims over local ancestral ones. The result was a widespread crisis of belonging among the conquered peoples of the Mediterranean basin.

Israel offered something the other available options did not. The Isis and Osiris cults, the Eleusinian mysteries, the Dionysian clubs: these drew on the prestige of Egypt and Greece, historic civilizations whose ancient power was widely acknowledged. Israel, by contrast, was a small, repeatedly conquered nation that had rarely dominated anything. Yet for people whose own nations had been similarly crushed by Rome, that very smallness was part of its appeal. Three features of Israel drew conquered peoples to it specifically. First, its monotheism: the claim that a single God created and ruled the whole world was increasingly intelligible in an empire that had made the world seem larger and more unified. Second, its ethics: the Torah’s demanding standards of justice and behavior attracted attention across the empire, including among philosophers, and non-Israelite people were already visiting synagogues to learn more about them before the Jesus movements spread. Third, its writings: Israel’s scriptures repeatedly commanded care for other peoples, welcomed outsiders into the community of Israel, and offered a story of creation and divine purpose in which all nations had a place.

This national-belonging dynamic shapes how a key word in the New Testament should be read. The Greek word ethnos means nation or people. It is the root of the English word ethnic. Paul uses it 45 times in his letters. In standard English New Testament translations, it is almost always rendered “Gentile,” a term that in later Christian usage came to mean a non-Jewish person categorically distinct from a Jew. That reading is an anachronism. In 1st-century Greek, ethnos carries no sense of distinguishing those who follow Jesus from those who do not, and no sense of “Christian versus Jew” as opposing categories. It means, straightforwardly, nation or people. When Paul identifies himself as belonging to the people of Israel and invites others from the ethne to join him, he is not constructing a Christian-versus-Jew binary. He is positioning the people of Israel at the top of an ethnic hierarchy and inviting other nations, other displaced peoples, to find their new national belonging within the larger Israel that had spread across the Mediterranean. His declaration in Galatians 3:28, “there is neither Judean nor Greek, there is neither enslaved nor free, there is neither male and female, for all of you are one in the Anointed Jesus,” is not a statement of abstract spiritual equality or an erasure of ethnic difference. It is an argument about national belonging: since all peoples can belong to the God of Israel through participation in the Anointed community, the claim to belong to different nations no longer divides. In Paul’s framing, participation in associations of the Anointed is adoption into a greater Israel open to all nations.

This shared identification with Israel is the one thread that most of these communities held in common. Beyond it, the divergence was considerable. The manner of that identification varied sharply: some communities maintained full Torah observance and understood themselves as a sect within Judaism; others, following variations of Paul’s logic, abandoned most Torah practice while claiming the inheritance of Abraham; still others engaged Israel’s texts and imagery while developing theological frameworks the synagogue would have found unrecognizable. The shared orientation toward Israel was a common starting point that endured throughout the first four centuries. Beyond that shared starting point, in order to understand why the early Jesus movements were diverse from the very beginning, we have to begin where the whole story starts: not with Pentecost or with the council in Jerusalem from Luke-Acts, but with the crucifixion itself and the shattering and scattering of individual human beings who had each, in their own way, staked everything on the man who had just been executed by Rome.

Jesus's followers were not a monolithic group even during his lifetime. A Galilean fisherman who had dropped his nets to follow the Kingdom proclamation was not the same person as a tax collector who had walked away from a profitable Roman franchise. The woman healed of an affliction was not the same person as the Pharisee who found in Jesus's teaching a challenge to everything he had been trained to uphold. The Zealot-adjacent nationalist who hoped the Kingdom proclamation was a prelude to insurrection was not the same person as the contemplative who found wisdom in Jesus’s witty aphorisms. Each of them had followed Jesus for their own reasons, brought their own frameworks to what they experienced, and invested their own hopes in what the Kingdom might mean for their own world. When the cross eventually came, each of those people had to find their own answer within their own social networks to the same catastrophic question: what did any of it mean now?

The initial explosion of meaning-making that followed was uncoordinated, individually processed, and geographically dispersed. As we have seen, Paul's own account in 1 Corinthians 15 lists multiple recipients of resurrection appearances across what appears to be a fairly short period – years, no more than a decade. Peter, then the Twelve, then more than five hundred at once, then James, then all the apostles, then Paul himself on the road to Damascus, which is already years later and geographically removed. Instead of thinking of them as coordinated experiences managed by a central authority, the historical viewpoint sees them as an outbreak of vision and interpretation across scattered communities of people who were each trying to absorb the inversion of everything they had expected. A fisherman in Galilee was drawing one set of conclusions from his grief and his vision. A Jerusalem-based follower was drawing another. James and Jesus’s family likely had their own perspective. And within a few more years, Paul would draw another still and would spend much of his subsequent career arguing against versions of the gospel that were spreading through other so-called apostles and evidently competing with his own.

The diversity that the After Jesus, Before Christianity project documents through the second century was no mere secondary corruption of an original unity. It was the direct downstream consequence of that initial explosion of uncoordinated, individual and communally processed, geographically dispersed responses to prophetic disappointment (itself a subject we shall take up in greater detail in a subsequent section). The movement was plural almost from the first moment because the experience that generated it was plural – many people, many locations, many frameworks, resulting in many distinct answers to the question of what had actually happened and what it now meant – a field of movements, all growing from the same traumatic seed and all reaching in different directions toward the light.

III. The Oral World: Literacy, Memory, and the Shape of Tradition

There is a feature of the world in which these early movements operated that modern readers consistently underestimate, and that fundamentally shaped how the Jesus tradition traveled, changed, and congealed into the forms we eventually encounter in the written documents. The earliest Jesus communities were, overwhelmingly, oral communities — and the implications of that fact for how we understand the tradition are more far-reaching than most popular treatments acknowledge.

The literacy rate amongst first-century Jewish Galilean peasants was almost certainly below three percent, and quite possibly below two. The figure is difficult to establish with precision because our evidence is inferential, drawn from the material culture of the period, the distribution of inscriptions, the sociological profile of scribal activity, and comparative analysis with other agrarian societies at similar levels of economic development. But the scholarly consensus, developed most recently by Catherine Hezser in Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (2001) and grounded in the baseline established by William Harris's Ancient Literacy (1989), is that the ability to read was rare and the ability to write was rarer still. Reading and writing were specialized professional skills, concentrated among scribal elites, administrative functionaries, and the priestly and Pharisaic classes whose institutional roles required the production and interpretation of documents.

The ordinary population of Galilee and Judea, the peasant farmers, fishermen, day laborers, and artisans who constituted the vast majority of the people Jesus addressed and from whom his earliest followers were drawn, lived in a world organized around the spoken word as opposed to the written text. Even the later tradition acknowledges this: Acts 4:13 describes Peter and John as agrammatoi kai idiotai, unlettered and ordinary, a phrase that in the social vocabulary of the ancient world meant specifically illiterate. These were primarily the people to whom Jesus had entrusted the continuation of the movement, and the tradition they carried forward was carried in their voices, their memories, and the communal practices through which those memories were performed and transmitted. The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (1989) by Louw-Nida claims “almost universal literacy in NT times” as the historical rationale for reading Acts 4:13 as primarily meaning that the disciples lacked formal rabbinical training, but this is flatly contradicted by the modern scholarship on ancient Mediterranean literacy. Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan's broader historical framing of Galilean peasant illiteracy builds on this same consensus and is on considerably firmer ground than the Louw-Nida lexicon's offhand historical aside.

Thus, the earliest transmission networks were oral. And as Part Two established, the tradition was not transmitted by verbatim memorization – the recording-device model of memory that the older scholarship assumed has not survived the cognitive research that has accumulated since Bartlett. What the oral performance research adds is a precise structural account of what transmission actually looked like. The foundational work here is Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s studies of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans, conducted in the 1930s and extended by Lord in his landmark 1960 study The Singer of Tales. What Parry and Lord documented through years of fieldwork with illiterate bards who performed Homeric-scale epic poems from memory, was that oral tradition operates not by verbatim memorization but by flexible performance within a traditional framework. The singer internalizes a repertoire of themes, patterns, formulaic phrases, and narrative structures, and then performs the tradition anew each time – expanding here, contracting there, adapting the emphasis to the audience and the occasion, adding material that illuminates the meaning of the story for the present context, omitting material that is less relevant. Each performance is recognizably the same story. No two performances are verbatim identical. Fidelity, in an oral culture, means recognizable continuity of pattern, theme, and significance but not word-for-word accuracy.

Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983) was the first sustained application of this framework to the New Testament, and its central argument is consequential for our study here. Kelber observed that the transition from oral to written was not a neutral act of preservation. Writing doesn’t simply store oral tradition in a new container; it ruptures it. The oral tradition was fluid, local, and contextually responsive; each performance was shaped by the community present, the occasion, and the immediate needs of the gathering. The written Gospel fixes, standardizes, and depersonalizes what had been living communal speech. It can circulate beyond the community that produced it, be read by communities the author never imagined, and resist the adaptive performance that had kept the oral tradition alive and relevant. As I have argued, Mark’s Gospel was more than the oral tradition written down. It was largely a qualitatively different kind of object – one that freeze-framed elements of a specific community’s performed version of the tradition into a form that would travel, be copied and read aloud to new audiences, and eventually displace other versions that had been equally alive in other communities.

James Dunn’s Jesus Remembered (2003) deepened the model further by insisting on a distinction the Parry-Lord framework (developed on secular epic poetry) did not require: the tradition being transmitted was not merely a collection of stories about a named figure but the communal practice of remembering that figure. What the earliest communities transmitted was not always Jesus’s words as such – and certainly not a retrievable archive of what he said on specific occasions – but the community’s living, repeatedly performed, socially shaped memory of those words. Dunn calls this “oral traditioning”: an ongoing communal activity rather than a transmission event. The implication is significant for qualifying the deductions we can make on individual sayings and pericopes within the New Testament. What the Gospels preserve is not individual eyewitness memory, however accurate. It is the residue of decades of communal performance, shaped by the various communities that interacted with and iterated it, adapted to the specific situations those communities faced, and carrying within its final written form the marks of the social process that produced it.

The communal meal was the primary context in which this oral traditioning took place, and this is why it became a central liturgical practice across many distinct Anointed movement communities. When the early dispersed communities gathered to break bread, they told stories about their revered prophet/Messiah. They recounted received sayings and performed pericopes of the tradition in the specific sense that oral cultures perform their formative narratives: not as recitation but as living speech, addressed to the present situation, carrying the authority of the founding figure into the ongoing life of the community. The sayings were alive in the mouths of the people who used them, and they evolved in the process. Not through carelessness or corruption, but through the normal process by which oral tradition adapts itself to the community that carries it.

In all probability, what congealed first and most consistently were the elements that served the most immediate communal functions: the death narrative, which provided the framework for understanding the central trauma; the sayings that addressed the community’s most pressing practical questions about how to live together, how to relate to outsiders, and how to understand their own identity; and the short, pithy, memorable aphorisms that were easiest to preserve in oral circulation precisely because their compression made them indelible and therefore resistant to drift. The things that were added or expanded as received tradition moved through communities were, as the oral transmission model predicts, specifically the kinds of material that helped each community express the meaning of their exalted leader’s life and death for their present circumstances. A community facing persecution expanded the tradition’s material on suffering and endurance. A community negotiating its relationship to Judaism expanded the tradition’s material on the law and the prophets. A community in conflict with rival claimants to apostolic authority expanded the tradition’s material on the commissioning and authority of the disciples. The tradition evolved in the directions the communities required of it. This is precisely what makes the criteria of authenticity discussed in Part Two so valuable while remaining tentative: they are tools for distinguishing the earlier core from the later communal elaboration, even when both are woven together in the same written text in ways that may seem inextricable.

Understanding this oral world is essential for understanding why the early Jesus movements were as diverse as the historical record shows them to have been. A tradition transmitted through oral performance in disparate, autonomous, loosely networked communities operating without central authority cannot be monitored, corrected, or kept uniform. The written Gospels selectively froze specific versions of received oral tradition into textual form while simultaneously using that material to articulate their own version. Kelber’s rupture argument makes clear that the freezing was itself an act of selection that suppressed everything it did not preserve. The diversity was the predictable consequence of how oral tradition works when it moves through a network of independent communities. To a certain extent, the suppression of that diversity began the moment someone picked up a pen.

IV. Paul’s Contested Gospel: Diversity at the Source

The clearest evidence that the early movement was contested and diverse from its earliest recoverable moment comes from Paul himself – the earliest author in the New Testament and the one whose letters give us the closest thing we have to a real-time account of the movement's first generation.

Paul is explicit and often anguished about the fact that his apostleship is disputed and his gospel is not the only one spreading rapidly. In Galatians, he describes a confrontation with Peter at Antioch in which he opposed Peter to his face because Peter's behavior was inconsistent with the gospel Paul proclaimed. With barely suppressed fury, he warns the Galatians against “some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ” (1:7) – rival missionaries who are preaching what he calls a different gospel. In his second letter to the Corinthians, he is forced to defend himself against competitors he mocks with scathing sarcasm as “super-apostles” (11:5; 12:11); figures of apparent prestige and rhetorical sophistication who have made inroads into a community Paul considers his own. The Corinthian correspondence as a whole is a window onto a community already splitting along factional lines, with different members aligning themselves with different apostolic figures and different theological emphases concerning the meaning of resurrection and other foundational matters. Rather than the picture of a unified apostolic church carrying a coherent message under the supervision of Jerusalem, Paul’s letters reveal a contested, pluralistic, energetically competitive religious field in which Paul is one significant voice among several – and not always the dominant one in any given community. The diversity was evidently there at the beginning of the missionary work, visible in the earliest documents we have, acknowledged and argued against by the most prolific early Christian author.

Another early figure whose marginalization in the later tradition is itself evidence of the eventual homogenization process we will be tracing throughout Part Six is James, the brother of Jesus. James appears in Paul’s letters as a figure of authority in the primitive Jerusalem community. In Galatians 1:19, Paul names him alongside Peter as one of the two leaders he met during his first visit to Jerusalem. In Galatians 2:9, James is listed first among the “pillars” of the Jerusalem community (before Peter and John), suggesting a primacy that the later tradition, which focused on Peter, would work to obscure. And it is James who, in Paul’s account of the Antioch incident, sends emissaries whose arrival causes Peter to withdraw from table fellowship with Gentiles – a detail that establishes James as the authority to whom even Peter deferred on questions of Torah observance and communal practice.

Although Paul claims James’s approbation in his mission to the Gentiles, the James who emerges from Paul’s letters is a figure whose understanding of the Jesus movement was fundamentally different from Paul’s. Paula Fredriksen's When Christians Were Jews (2018) reconstructs this early Jerusalem community in detail: its members attended the Temple, kept Torah, and understood Jesus's resurrection as the eschatological signal that God's Kingdom was imminent rather than the founding event of a new soteriology. Both Pauline and Jerusalem communities agreed it was the first act of the general resurrection that Jewish apocalyptic tradition had long anticipated. Yet as we have seen in Part Five, Paul appears to have departed significantly in his atonement and salvation in relation to Jesus’s death. James’s community appears to have understood Jesus within a Jewish framework that required continued fidelity to the law – circumcision, dietary regulations, Sabbath practice. The conflict between Paul’s Gentile mission, which increasingly dispensed with Torah requirements, and the Jerusalem community’s insistence on them, was something of a theological rupture about the most basic question the movement faced: what did it mean to follow Jesus? Was the movement a renewed Judaism or something categorically new altogether? Both men would have considered themselves messianic Jews, but James’s answer and Paul’s answer were ultimately incompatible – and Paul’s letters are the evidence that the incompatibility was recognized and contested in real time.

James's fate matters to this argument directly because rather than argument or persuasion, it was his removal from the field that determined which version of the movement's central question would survive to shape the tradition. Josephus records James’s execution in 62 CE, in a passage whose authenticity is confident (Antiquities 20.9.1). The high priest Ananus, during an interregnum between Roman governors, convened the Sanhedrin and had James and certain others condemned and stoned. The act was controversial enough that some of the city’s leading citizens protested to the incoming governor, and Ananus was deposed from the high priesthood as a result. The detail is significant: James’s execution provoked outrage among people with no particular investment in the Jesus movement, and perhaps some with even a modicum of sectarian animosity toward it. This suggests James had achieved a level of social respectability and civic presence in Jerusalem that went beyond the marginal sect of Jerusalem Jesus followers whose memory would scarcely survive.

James’s death and the subsequent catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE effectively eliminated the Jerusalem community as a center of authority. The Torah-observant, Jewish-framework version of the Jesus movement that James had led did not disappear instantly, but it was fatally weakened – first by the loss of its primary leader, then by the loss of the city that had been its base. What survived and proliferated was Paul’s version: the Gentile mission, the communities of the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, the tradition that would eventually dominate the canon and develop into the creeds. The proto-orthodoxy that emerged was the survivor. And the figure it marginalized most thoroughly was no secondary Gnostic or heretic, but the brother of Jesus himself whose understanding of the movement’s meaning was closer to its Galilean origins than anything Paul’s communities would preserve. Yet to say Paul’s version “survived” is itself an oversimplification. What the 2nd-century evidence shows is that Paul’s eventual prominence was neither immediate nor secure. His survival as a theological authority was itself a contested, delayed, and substantially accidental development – a story the tradition’s self-account has largely suppressed.

In retrospect, Paul dominates the New Testament. He is credited as the author of as many as fourteen letters and is the hero of the second half of Acts. Many of the core debates in later Christian doctrine – faith versus works, free will versus grace, letter versus spirit – revolve around interpreting him. If the New Testament is understood as the record of Christianity’s beginnings, it is natural to assume Paul’s voice held center stage from the start. But that assumption does not survive contact with the 2nd-century evidence. Paul’s own letters show that he struggled to find an audience and had trouble holding on to supporters. He was a former persecutor of the movement who proved a quarrelsome figure within it, claiming a superiority of intimacy with the Anointed that many disputed. At the time of his death, he may have had good reason to feel alone and abandoned, with many Jesus followers having turned their backs on him. A long silence followed. Nearly a century after his death, he began to be name-checked by an aggressive group of partisans who had rediscovered his legacy, while others reacted with hostility or relative indifference to this obscure figure from the past.

Most 2nd-century writings by those belonging to communities of the Anointed do not mention Paul at all. The three writers of that century who do mention him explicitly – Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna – follow a remarkably consistent pattern: they cite Paul only when writing to communities he founded, honoring him as that community’s founding figure and martyr, not as a theologian or doctrinal authority. Clement has a copy of 1 Corinthians probably because, as he tells us, he had been approached by a group of Corinthian leaders seeking his intervention. The letter would have served as a natural reference point for that correspondence; he alludes to no other Pauline letter and his presentation of his own Roman community’s ideals shows little distinctively Pauline influence. Ignatius refers to Paul explicitly only twice – once in tandem with Peter as a pair of martyrs associated with Rome, and once when writing to the Ephesians (a community Paul founded), calling them “fellow initiates of Paul” and noting that Paul “in every letter” remembers them. The latter claim is mistaken: Ephesus does not appear in every Pauline letter, suggesting Ignatius knew of Paul’s reputation as a letter-writer to his communities without having read those letters carefully, if at all. What superficially resembles Pauline influence in Ignatius – phrases like “inherit the kingdom of God” or “things visible and invisible” – are drawn from a common stock of phrases that were not unique to Paul and appear in writings by authors who never mention him. Polycarp follows the identical pattern, citing Paul’s authority in his letter to the Philippians (once again, a community Paul founded), but his other letters, referenced by Irenaeus as multiple, have not survived possibly because they contained no useful reference to Paul and were therefore not copied by later collectors with a stake in establishing his authority.

Beyond indifference, Paul attracted active hostility. The writer Hegesippus, who journeyed to collect traditions among Judean Jesus followers in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba War (132–135 CE), appears to directly reject a statement matching Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:9 as contrary to a saying of Jesus. More vivid is the anti-Pauline polemic preserved in the popular Clementine novels, a fictionalized account of early missionary activity that survives in two 4th-century editions. In this story, the hero Peter engages in repeated verbal battle with an opponent named Simon Magus – the arch-heretic of early Christian legend – whom the reader easily recognizes as a thinly disguised Paul: a figure with no connection to the earthly Jesus, claiming independent visionary authority, preaching a gospel incompatible with Torah observance, and ultimately defeated and discredited by Peter’s superior authority. The portrait is a precise inversion of the Paul of Galatians who openly boasts of telling Peter to his face that he was wrong. Justin Martyr, a major second-century writer who explicitly opposed the controversial teacher Marcion multiple times, is completely silent about Paul in his surviving work. This is remarkable given that Paul, who interprets Israel’s scriptures as pointing toward the messiah in ways closely parallel to Justin’s own argument in the Dialogue with Trypho, would have been a natural ally. The most plausible explanation is that Paul’s association with Marcion made him too compromised to cite. Anti-Marcionite tracts from this period have largely not survived; one possibility, suggested by AJBC, is that they went too far in attacking not only Marcion but his chief authority figure, making them useless to later generations who needed Paul rehabilitated.

It is Marcion (c. 90–160 CE) who is responsible for the prominence Paul eventually achieved. Marcion is the earliest figure in the historical record to have treated Paul’s letters as authoritative scripture, assembling the first Pauline collection in a definitive order and making extensive rather than superficial use of Paul’s actual ideas. He is the earliest witness to the existence of 2 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon as Pauline documents. Marcion used Paul to establish the theological basis for a community life organized around the separation of the Jesus movement from Israel’s religion entirely – arguing that the message of Jesus had always been directed beyond Israel, and projecting that separation back to the very beginning as something intended from the start. His network of Jesus clubs stretching across the Roman Empire was substantial enough that other communities were compelled to respond. And the response – the flurry of literary activity in the mid-2nd century aimed at rehabilitating Paul for proto-orthodox use – produced something paradoxical: in domesticating Paul, his promoters ensured his survival.

They rehabilitated Paul by stripping him of his distinctive ideas. Acts subordinates Paul entirely to the Twelve, reducing his independent visionary authority to a single call and depicting him as receiving instruction from the Jerusalem disciples, in direct contradiction to Paul’s own account in Galatians. The Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus) – unknown to Marcion and first clearly referenced by Irenaeus two generations after Marcion – were almost certainly composed to align Paul more closely with proto-orthodox social conservatism, countering the radical Paulinism that the Acts of Paul and Thecla embodied. The result was a figure stripped of anything recognizable of the man who wrote the authentic letters. As AJBC concludes: “We probably owe to Marcion the prominence of Paul in the later Christian tradition.” The Paul of the canon, the Paul who appears to have always been central, always authoritative, always orthodox, is a construction of the mid-2nd century, shaped as much by those who needed to contain him as by those who revered him. What the evidence from Paul’s own century and the century that followed actually shows is not a pillar of early Christianity but a contested, partly forgotten, eventually conscripted figure – one more indicator that the tradition’s origin was far more diverse, and its eventual shape far more contingent, than the canonical story conceals.

V. The Associational World: Collegia of the Kingdom

To understand the social reality of those rapidly spreading early communities – what they actually looked like from the inside, how they were organized, how their members related to one another – requires setting aside the institutional meanings that later centuries loaded onto the movement's earliest vocabulary. The terms were Paul's but the ecclesiastical freight was not. Before the early Jesus communities resembled anything we would recognize as churches, they resembled something considerably more ordinary in the landscape of first-century Roman civic life. They resembled clubs.

The Roman world of the first and second centuries was populated by an extraordinary density and variety of voluntary associations – collegia, thiasoi, synodoi – organized around shared trade, shared worship, shared ethnic identity, or simply the shared desire for regular fellowship, a decent meal, and the assurance of a proper burial. The phenomenon was ubiquitous. John Kloppenborg authored Christ’s Associations (2019) which represents the most scrupulous scholarly effort to situate the early Jesus movements within this social world. His work documents the sheer range and ordinariness of these organizations across the Roman Mediterranean. There were associations of craftsmen; viz. fullers, leather-workers, builders, purple-dyers. There were associations organized around the cult of a particular deity: devotees of Isis, of Dionysus, of Mithras, of the Syrian goddess Atargatis. There were associations of immigrants from a particular city or region, maintaining cultural identity and mutual support in diaspora. There were associations organized around nothing more specific than neighborhood proximity and the desire for congenial company at a shared table.

A limestone sarcophagus inscription from Hierapolis in western Turkey, dated to the late second or early third century CE, captures the texture of this associational world concretely. A man named Publius Aelius Glykon left money in his will to two local trade associations: 200 denarii to the guild of purple-dyers, with the interest to be distributed at the Festival of Unleavened Bread; and 150 denarii to the guild of carpet-weavers, with the interest split between the Festival of Pentecost and the Roman new year festival of Kalends. Glykon’s three Roman names mark him as a citizen. His participation in Greek urban civic life is visible in his engagement with the local guilds. And his bequests for grave ceremonies on two Judean holy days align his family with Israel across an indefinite future, though he does not explicitly identify himself as Judean. Here in a single inscription is the layered identity the associational world produced: Roman citizen, Greek urban participant, and Israel-affiliated, all at once, held together through the network of voluntary associations that organized daily life in the provincial cities of the empire.

The defining communal practice of these associations was the shared meal. For most of the first two centuries, the reclining communal meal was the primary gathering of every community associated with Jesus or the anointed. The practice was not distinctive to Jesus movements; it was the Mediterranean associational norm. Clubs of all kinds hosted reclining meals at which members reclined on couches, shared food and wine, conducted business, settled disputes, sang, argued, and listened to readings. The Greeks had originated the style centuries earlier, insisting that the meal expressed equality among participants, though in practice that equality had initially been limited to wealthy free males. By the first century, the principle had extended to include enslaved persons and women in many contexts, even if full equality remained more aspiration than reality. Among the Jesus communities, the reclining communal meal became the context in which the oral tradition was performed: stories about Jesus were told, his sayings were recited and interpreted, the community’s identity was enacted and renewed. It was, as the historian Andrew McGowan has documented, the only known practice of Jesus communities for the first 90 years, and all groups continued gathering around meals for something like the first 235 years of the common era.

What the meal looked like varied considerably across communities. Some gatherings, like those visible in the Gospel of Luke’s story of Levi’s feast for Jesus, foregrounded the mixing of classes and social statuses: toll collectors, sinners, and the respectable together at table, the meal as enacted argument for inclusion across social boundaries. Others, like the meal community visible in the Gospel of Thomas, used the reclining gathering as a context for substantive intellectual exchange, including between men and women, sometimes contentious. The Gospel of Thomas preserves a scene in which a woman named Salome challenges Jesus directly over his uninvited presence on her dining couch. The exchange that follows ranges across questions of spiritual oneness and communal belonging. That a woman challenges a male teacher in a semi-public setting and that the exchange is recorded as serious theological dialogue both speak to the experimental quality of gender relations in at least some of these meal communities. A prayer preserved in the Nag Hammadi collection, the Prayer of Thanksgiving, closes with the note that after the prayer was said, “they welcomed one another and went to eat their holy food, which had no blood in it.” The reference to bloodless food signals continuity with Judean dietary practice, placing the meal within the framework of the Israel-identification that most of these communities shared.

Less regularly but with comparable communal significance, these same communities practiced bathing together. Bathing was a pervasive social institution throughout the Mediterranean world. Roman emperors counted baths among their great gifts to the cities of the empire; by the end of the second century the city of Rome had more than 300. Judean communities throughout the diaspora maintained their own bathing practices, with neighborhood pools often found between houses and shared by multiple households. The practice had both practical and metaphorical dimensions: washing the body carried connotations of moral cleanliness, release from humiliation, separation from corruption, and renewal of communal identity. Among the Jesus communities, bathing carried its most immediate antecedents from Judean practice and from the dramatic elaboration of that practice associated with John the Baptizer (i.e., Bather), whose Jordan River pilgrimage away from the Roman-constructed pools near the Jerusalem Temple was, as Part Three of this series examined, as much a political act as a ritual one. The practice spread through the Jesus communities in this spirit: as a social event in which the loss and indignity of life under empire could be washed away in company, and a new sense of belonging to a purified community could be renewed.

The Greek word for this bathing practice is baptizo, whose ordinary meaning is simply to wash, immerse, or thoroughly dip. Like Christianos, it has been transliterated rather than translated into English: the word baptism carries a later Christian institutional meaning that the original Greek word did not yet have in its first and second century contexts. Section XIV of this part will return to the implications of that transliteration. For now, it is enough to note that the meals and the bathing together constituted the associational infrastructure of the Jesus communities: two social practices, one primary and one occasional, through which the community enacted its identity, reinforced its belonging, and performed its resistance to the order that empire had imposed on the nations.

Paul's own letters confirm these same associational features in the specific communities he wrote to when he is giving instructions about how they should organize their common life. His associations met regularly, typically in private homes or rented dining spaces. They too shared meals together – meals that were often simultaneously social gatherings, religious observances, and expressions of communal identity. They collected dues or contributions from members, which funded the shared meals, maintained any common property, and crucially – they ensured that members would receive a proper burial, a concern of considerable urgency in a world where the unburied dead were objects of horror and pity. They had officers: a president or patron, a treasurer, sometimes a secretary. These roles were typically functional rather than sacerdotal: they managed the money, organized the meetings, and maintained order at the table. They had rules governing behavior at meetings, the admission of new members, the adjudication of disputes, and the expulsion of members who violated communal norms. And they cultivated among their members a distinctive vocabulary of fictive kinship (brothers and sisters, father and mother) that expressed the association’s identity as a chosen family bound by voluntary commitment rather than by blood.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians about the proper conduct of their common meal, he is addressing exactly the kinds of problems that the administrative records of Roman associations document with striking regularity: viz. who eats first, how the food is shared, the obligation not to humiliate those who have nothing. Disputes about precedence at table, about the quality and quantity of food distributed to members of different status, about whether wealthy members were receiving better portions than poorer ones – these are the ordinary headaches of association life across the Roman world, and Paul’s letters address them in terms that would have been immediately recognizable to anyone who had participated in a Greco-Roman collegium. The Lord’s Supper, in its earliest recoverable form, was not a liturgical rite performed by ordained clergy in a consecrated space. It was a shared meal in a private house, organized along lines that closely resembled the communal dining practices of every other voluntary association in the Roman Mediterranean. Of course, with the critical difference that the meal was understood to reenact and make present the table fellowship of Jesus himself, with all the radical social content that table fellowship carried.

When Paul instructs his communities about the collection of funds, the contribution he is gathering from his Gentile churches for the Jerusalem community, the language and the logic closely parallel the dues structures of Greco-Roman associations. When he addresses internal disputes and insists that community members settle their disagreements within the community rather than taking them before Roman courts, he is articulating a principle that was standard practice in association life: associations governed themselves internally, maintained their own disciplinary procedures, and regarded external legal intervention as a failure of communal solidarity. When he uses the language of adelphoi – brothers – to address his communities, he is deploying the same fictive kinship vocabulary that association members across the empire used to describe their relationship to one another.

Te implications of this parallel extend beyond organizational detail to the question of social composition. Consistent with the AJBC seminar’s conclusions, Kloppenborg and others have documented that Greco-Roman associations were among the few social spaces in the Roman world where people of different status could share a table and participate in a common life on something approaching, though never fully reaching, equal terms. Associations included freeborn citizens and freedmen, sometimes slaves (with their owners’ permission), occasionally women in leadership roles, and in the case of associations organized around non-Roman cults, a mix of ethnic and cultural backgrounds that would have been unusual in most other social settings. In this respect, the mixed membership of the Pauline communities was not without precedent in the associational landscape. Part Four of this series noted that the early Christians chose to name their gatherings with the political term ekklesia – the word for the formal civic assembly of enfranchised citizens, which was far more exclusive than the voluntary associations – and that the gap between the word’s political connotations and the community’s inclusive composition was itself the point. But the social reality of the gatherings, as opposed to the political claim embedded in their name, was recognizably continuous with the associational world rather than alien to it.

What was genuinely radical was not the mere fact of mixed membership but what the Pauline communities claimed that mixing meant. In a typical Greco-Roman association, status differences persisted at table even when people of different status shared the same room: patrons received larger portions, sat in positions of honor, and were publicly acknowledged as benefactors whose generosity sustained the group. The hierarchy was softened, not abolished. The association provided a social space where people of different ranks could gather, but it did not claim that those ranks had been dissolved. To the contrary, Paul’s communities made precisely that claim. The previously cited declaration in Galatians 3:28 – “for all of you are one in the Anointed Jesus” – was a theological assertion that the categories themselves had been rendered inoperative within the community of adopted Israel. When Paul rebukes the Corinthians for allowing wealthy members to eat first and eat better while poorer members go hungry, he is not merely enforcing good manners at a shared meal. He is insisting that the status distinctions the associational world tolerated at table are incompatible with the community’s foundational claim about what the table enacts. The Kingdom table, as Part Three of this series firmly established, was organized by a different principle: need rather than status, inclusion rather than obligation, the last made first. That principle, grounded in the specific practice and proclamation of Jesus himself, was what distinguished the ekklesia from the collegium it otherwise resembled. Thus, Paul’s management of his early Anointed associations preserves Jesus’s table practice without reinventing the voluntary club format that was ready-made for the movement.

Diaspora Jewish communities had their own well-documented relationship to this associational world. The synagogue itself, in the diaspora context, functioned in many respects as a Greco-Roman association – a voluntary gathering organized around shared religious practice and ethnic identity, regularly meetings, fund collection, communal discipline, etc. Gentile “God-fearers” was a category of non-Jewish sympathizers who participated in synagogue life without undergoing full conversion, and they occupied a social position that was itself characteristic of the permeable boundaries of the associational world: people could affiliate with a group, attend its meetings, contribute to its funds, and participate in its social life without necessarily adopting the full range of obligations that defined core membership. When Paul’s Gentile converts entered his communities, many of them were entering not from a position of complete unfamiliarity with Jewish religious practice but from a position of prior association – God-fearers who had already been participating in the synagogue’s associational life and who now transferred their affiliation to a new community organized around the proclamation that the God of Israel had acted decisively in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The value of the associational model for the argument I am developing here is that it makes the earliest Jesus communities suddenly concrete, contextually located, and socially legible in a way that the later elaborated ecclesiastical tradition tends to obscure. When we hear the word “church” (ekklesia), we tend to picture something shaped by centuries of institutional development: buildings, clergy, liturgy, hierarchy, ecclesiastical law. The earliest ekklesiai were none of those things. They were small groups meeting in private houses, sharing meals, pooling resources, singing hymns, reading scripture, settling disputes internally, caring for their sick and burying their dead. In other words, they were doing exactly what every other voluntary association in the Roman world was doing, with the distinctive addition of the shared conviction that the crucified Jesus had been raised and that his return was imminent.

This locates them in the social world they actually inhabited rather than in the ecclesiastical world that would eventually claim them as its origin. It makes visible that the Jesus movement did not begin as a founded institutional church. Instead, it began as a network of small, voluntary, loosely coordinated associations – collegia of the Kingdom, if you like – whose organizational form was simultaneously borrowed from the diaspora Jewish synagogue and the most ordinary and most available associational model in the Roman civic landscape. The rapidly evolving and extraordinary theological content was housed in an ordinary social container. What made it dangerous, what made it spread, and what made Rome eventually take notice was not its organizational form but the content of what was proclaimed at its table and the loyalty it demanded of its members.

The ekklesia of God was organized like a collegium. But its members had transferred their pistis (faith) – their loyalty, their allegiance, their binding trust – from Caesar to a crucified Galilean prophet whom they believed God had vindicated, and that transfer placed them in a posture of competing allegiance that the Roman civic order would eventually target for prosecution.

VI. The Acts Apologetic: Luke’s Harmonized Origin Story

Against this backdrop, the Acts of the Apostles presents a picture so tidied, so ordered, and so diplomatically managed that its apologetic purpose is transparent. Acts was written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, traditionally dated close to Luke’s composition in the 80s-90s CE. However, this section will argue for a later dating, likely in the early second century. It is best understood as the second volume of a unified theological project with a specific rhetorical intention: to present the early Christian movement as the legitimate continuation of biblical Judaism, spreading outward from Jerusalem in an orderly and Spirit-guided progression, under the supervision of recognized apostolic authority, and posing no threat to the Roman civic order.

The political edge of the original proclamation – the counter-imperial vocabulary of euangelion and ekklesia and basileia we have previously examined in detail – is consistently softened in Luke-Acts. Pilate finds no fault in Jesus not once but three times before finally yielding to the crowd, as if to exonerate Rome of responsibility for an execution that the titulus crucis itself framed as a political act. Roman officials throughout Acts are depicted as fair-minded or sympathetic: the centurion Cornelius, the proconsul Sergius Paulus, the town clerk at Ephesus who defends Paul before the crowd. The movement is repeatedly shown to be law-abiding, philosophically respectable, and no threat to Roman civic order. Luke is writing for a world in which Christians need to explain themselves to Roman authorities, and the explanation he crafts is calibrated for that audience. The donkey-riding counter-procession, the table-turning prophetic indictment, the Kingdom-as-challenge-to-Caesar – none of this political electricity survives intact in Luke's retelling.

The harmonized council of Acts 15 sits in almost comic contrast to Paul's account in Galatians 2. In Luke's version, the Jewish-Gentile question is resolved in a single meeting under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, with all parties reaching consensus. In Paul's version, the same meeting produces an agreement that Paul immediately finds ignored in practice, followed by open confrontation at Antioch. Luke's version presents the kind of unity that a later tradition, looking back and needing to find its origins coherent, would want to have existed. Paul's version presents the kind of messiness that actually happens when human beings with strong convictions and competing agendas try to resolve fundamental disagreements about the nature of their shared movement.

The historical accuracy that Acts does possess is partially genuine. However, it actually strengthens rather than undermines the case for its literary character. The concept scholars use here is verisimilitude: the simplified appearance of historical truth created by a skilled author who knows his sources. The author of Acts demonstrates remarkably accurate knowledge of civic titles in the cities of the Aegean – the politarchs of Thessalonica, the Asiarchs of Ephesus, the correct designation of the governor of Malta – and of the practical realities of Mediterranean sailing. But the pattern of what Acts gets right and what it gets wrong is revealing. Where the author’s literary sources are rich, viz. Josephus on Felix, Agrippa, and the Jewish revolutionary movements; Seneca on Gallio, Acts provides detailed and fleshed-out portraits. Where the sources are thin, Acts drops names like wallpaper, knowing just enough to create the appearance of historical specificity without adding anything that the sources themselves do not contain. And where the author has no literary source to draw from and would need local knowledge – the geography and civic structures of Judea and the Galilee – the errors begin to accumulate. The author thinks Nazareth was a polis, a specific type of Greek city status that it was not. More strikingly, when Acts has the rabbi Gamaliel deliver a speech referencing the Jewish revolutionaries Theudas and Judas the Galilean, it gets their chronological order exactly backwards. It has Gamaliel placing Theudas before Judas, when in fact Judas acted decades before Theudas. The error is explicable only if the author was reading Josephus imprecisely, since Josephus mentions Theudas just before discussing the sons of Judas in a passage that a careless reader could easily missequence (see Antiquities 20.5.1-2). It is not explicable if the author had independent knowledge of the events. The pattern extends beyond this single error.

Steve Mason has demonstrated broader literary dependence of Acts on Josephus’s Antiquities, most visibly in Acts 21:38, where a Roman tribune asks Paul, “Then you are not the Egyptian who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand assassins out into the wilderness?” Every element in that single verse – the Egyptian Prophet, the sicarii assassins, and the false prophets who led followers into the wilderness – appears in Antiquities 20.8, in three adjacent but distinct narratives that the author of Acts has compressed into one confused sentence. The Egyptian led followers to the Mount of Olives and promised the walls of Jerusalem would fall; the sicarii were urban dagger-assassins who operated at festivals; the wilderness deceivers were a separate category of prophetic impostor. Luke conflates all three into a single figure. The directionality is clear: it is easy to explain Acts as a garbled compression of Josephus, and impossible to explain Josephus as an expansion of Acts’ single verse into three richly detailed independent narratives. If this dependence holds, it also constrains the dating of Luke-Acts, since the Antiquities was published in 93–94 CE. The authorial portrait that emerges is not of an eyewitness or a companion of eyewitnesses, but of an industrious if flawed reader. Of someone sitting in the Aegean world, probably in the early second century, who could consult Josephus and other literary sources and who knew the cities of Greece and Asia Minor from direct experience, but who had never set foot in the Galilee and whose knowledge of Judean affairs was entirely mediated through texts.

Perhaps the most consequential feature of Acts, however, is what it omits. Acts reflects no awareness of, or carefully suppresses, the extraordinary plurality of early Jesus movements that the documentary evidence now recovers. The communities that produced the Gospel of Thomas, the various Gnostic texts, the prophetic wandering-charismatic movements visible in the Didache, the household assemblies experimenting with radically egalitarian leadership structures – none of them appear in Acts's account of Christian origins. Luke tells a tidied story of orderly expansion under apostolic supervision. But Paul himself, purportedly Luke's traveling companion in Acts's account, confirms that any apostolic supervision was one mired by conflict and disputation. Taken together, the documentary evidence tells a story of simultaneous, uncoordinated, explosively diverse proliferation across networks and channels that Acts does not describe and may not have known about.

The apologetic purpose is visible not only in what Acts includes but in the specific shape of its inclusions. The repeated pattern of Roman officials finding no fault in the apostles – Gallio dismissing charges against Paul in Corinth, the town clerk at Ephesus defending him before the crowd, Festus and Agrippa finding nothing worthy of death or imprisonment – is too consistent to be coincidental. Here, Luke is constructing a legal brief for the movement's civic respectability, the same argument that structures his passion narrative, where Pilate declares Jesus innocent three times before yielding to the crowd. The question this raises for historical reliability is whether an apologetic author with a consistent rhetorical purpose of this kind can be trusted to preserve evidence that would undermine it. The documentary evidence suggests: not reliably. The diversity Acts fails to describe was likely convenient rather than invisible to its author.

When Paul writes to the Romans, he is writing to a community he has never visited – a community that already exists, with no account in Acts of how it got there. The movement was moving faster in all directions than any centralized narrative of its origins could account for.

VII. The Didache: A Surviving Strand of Jewish Jesus Practice

One of the earliest and most direct pieces of evidence that entire communities of Jesus followers existed without the theological framework that Paul made central, that is, without developed atonement theology or resurrection as a load-bearing conviction, comes from a document that survived against great odds.

The Didache, or “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” is a composite text whose final compiled form most scholars date to roughly 100–120 CE, though individual components are almost certainly much earlier, potentially reaching back to the middle of the first century. The document was known by title in antiquity – Eusebius mentions it, and the Apostolic Constitutions evidently drew on it – but the text itself was lost for centuries until a single complete manuscript was discovered in 1873 in the Codex Hierosolymitanus, a Greek manuscript housed in a library in Constantinople.

What the Didache preserves is a window into a community of Jesus followers whose practice and theology look strikingly different from anything in Paul’s letters, but seems to preserve variants of the Q sayings. It may well preserve a more primitive Jewish version of the movement. The community is organized around itinerant prophets and teachers who travel between settlements carrying the tradition. There is no single bishop, no developed hierarchical structure; the document instructs the community to elect “bishops and deacons” (plural, functional roles) and to treat genuine prophets as their “high priests,” deserving of tithes. The community’s relationship to Judaism is immediate and contentious: non-Christian Jews are referred to simply as “hypocrites,” and the community is instructed to fast on different days and pray differently from them – markers of a group that has recently separated from the synagogue but is not far removed from it. Jewish prayer forms persist in the eucharistic liturgy, including the invocation “Hosanna to the God of David” and the Aramaic petition Maranatha – a “Come, Lord.” Its ethical teachings also echo the plausibly authentic sayings of Jesus:

Didache	Matthew	Luke
1:2 And all things you would not want done to you, do not do to another person.	7:12 In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.	6:31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
1:3 Bless those who curse you, and pray for your enemies, and fast for those who persecute you.	5:44 But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.	6:27-28 Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
1:3 For what credit is it to you, if you love those who love you? Do the people of the nations not do the same?	5:46-47 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same?	6:32 If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.
1:4 If someone gives you a blow on your right cheek, turn to him the other also, and you will be perfect.	5:39 But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.	6:29 If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.
1:5 Give to everyone who asks you, and do not demand it back.	5:42 Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.	6:30 Give to everyone who begs from you, and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
8:2 Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debt, as we forgive our debtors. And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one; for thine is the power and the glory forever.	6:9-13 Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. [Note: The ending Didache doxology “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever” is absent from the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of Matthew (including Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) but was added by scribes to many later manuscript copies]	11:2-4 Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.

The document is, as Bart Ehrman has noted, almost certainly a composite rather than a literary unity. Scholars have long recognized that it assembles several originally independent sources: the Two Ways ethical instruction, a “church order” governing liturgical practices and the treatment of itinerant prophets, and a brief closing apocalyptic discourse anticipating the Lord’s coming on the clouds. These components may have been composed in different times and places, assembled by a final editor – the “Didachist” – who provided transitions and interpolations. The Two Ways material, in particular, has deep roots: closely parallel texts appear in the Q sayings material, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Apostolic Church Order, and perhaps most significantly, the Manual of Discipline from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The consensus is that both the Didache and Barnabas drew their Two Ways teaching from an independent, now-lost Jewish source. The absence of distinctively “Christian” language in this section and its clear parallels in the Qumran literature confirm what the rest of the document already suggests: this is a community still firmly embedded in the world of Second Temple Judaism, following Jesus within Jewish categories rather than departing from them.

What makes the Didache most significant for the argument of this part in the series, however, is what is conspicuously missing. There is no developed atonement theology in the Didache. The eucharistic prayers in chapters 9 and 10 give thanks for “the knowledge and faith and immortality” made known through Jesus, and for “the holy vine of David” revealed through him. There is a Paschal resonance to the liturgical language – a sacrificial framework rooted in Jewish practice (relating to the Passover of God’s destroying angel) is discernible in the meal’s structure and solemnity. But there is no indication that Jesus’s death is understood as the mechanism of salvation, no vicarious substitution, no “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.” Jesus is referred to as God’s pais — a word that can mean “child” or “servant,” carrying messianic overtones without the Pauline freight of atoning martyrological sacrifice. The community understands Jesus as a revealer of knowledge and life rather than a sacrifice whose death purchases forgiveness.

And there is no hint of resurrection. This silence is as striking as the absence of atonement, and the two silences together combine to suggest a very early iteration of the Jesus movement. Here is a community that venerates Jesus, follows his teaching, practices baptism and eucharist in his name, organizes its communal life around his authority, and expects an eschatological culmination – the brief apocalyptic discourse in chapter 16 anticipates the Lord coming on the clouds – but the resurrection of Jesus himself plays no role in any of it. For Paul, the resurrection was fundamentally load-bearing: “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). For the Didache community, faith apparently functioned perfectly well without it. Their faith was centered in Jesus’s life and teachings.

The convergence with the Q source is also significant. If Q existed – and the Two-Source Hypothesis that the majority of scholars accept requires it – then it, too, was a collection of Jesus’s sayings and teachings without a passion narrative or resurrection account. The Didache is not an isolated anomaly. It is part of a pattern: converging evidence that entire streams of the early Jesus movement centered on Jesus’s teaching and practice rather than on his death as a salvific event. These were communities for whom the question “how does Jesus save?” would have been answered not with Paul’s theology of cross and resurrection but with something closer to: by revealing the path of life, by teaching the way of righteousness, by making known the knowledge of the Father.

In short, the Didache preserves a surviving strand of the Jewish wing of the early Jesus movement – a community that never adopted Paul’s theological innovations because it was still operating within more traditional Jewish categories, following Jesus as teacher and revealer within a framework continuous with Second Temple Jewish practice. That this strand survived at least into the early second century, when the document reached its final compiled form, is evidence that the Pauline synthesis was subset rather than normative to the first century movement, and was not self-evidently correct or original even to communities who shared the same founding figure. What Paul built was one version of the movement in contest with the itinerant apostolic teaching of several “other gospels.” The Didache community is one example of his competition.

VIII. The Gospel of Thomas: The Wisdom Trajectory

If the Didache represents a surviving strand of the Jewish wing of the early movement, the Gospel of Thomas represents something in a different direction: a community oriented not toward Jewish ritual practice or Pauline atonement theology but toward the sayings of Jesus as the vehicle of salvation – what the text itself calls hidden wisdom, and what traditional scholarship has categorized as “Gnostic.” As a later section of this part will examine, that categorical label carries its own significant problems. For now it is enough to describe what Thomas actually contains, and what it does not.

The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus preserved in a Coptic manuscript discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, with earlier Greek fragments found at Oxyrhynchus (dating roughly 130–250 CE). It contains no narrative framework – no birth story, no miracles, no passion, no crucifixion account, no resurrection. It opens with the declaration: “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas recorded. And he said, ‘Whoever discovers the meaning of these sayings will not taste death.’” The entire document is organized around this premise: that the sayings themselves, rightly understood, are the vehicle of salvation.

The dating of Thomas is contested. Bart Ehrman places the document itself most likely in the second century, noting that the alternative theological perspectives embedded in many of its sayings cannot be securely documented before that period. However, Elaine Pagels argues for a late first-century date, roughly 90–100 CE, contending that the Gospel of John was written partly to refute the theology found in Thomas (hence John’s placing Thomas in the embarrassing doubter role during the resurrection appearances). If true, this would require Thomas to be earlier than or contemporary with John. John Dominic Crossan and other scholars have argued persuasively that an earlier layer within Thomas may date back to the middle of the first century, making at least some of its traditions as old as anything in the canonical Gospels. Even scholars who favor a later date for the compiled document generally concede that individual sayings within Thomas may preserve older forms of traditions also found in the Synoptics.

This last point is worth underscoring. When Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels preserve different versions of the same saying, the Thomas version is sometimes simpler, more direct, and less theologically elaborated – which, by the standard criteria of oral tradition analysis, suggests it may be closer to an earlier form. Thomas’s version of the blind leading the blind is a single declarative sentence; Luke’s version poses it as a rhetorical question, and Matthew’s is only slightly longer. Matthew’s parable of the Kingdom as cast net/fisherman offers a theological interpretation that Thomas does not. Thomas’s version of the “prophet is not welcome in his hometown” saying as two parallel statements. Matthew and Luke both situate the saying in an elaborated scenario in which his fellow Nazarenes are amazed at his wisdom and dramatize his rejection by his own kin. These patterns do not prove that Thomas always preserves the earlier form, but they demonstrate that the traditions it contains were not simply copied from the canonical Gospels. Thomas represents an independent line of transmission – a separate stream through which sayings of Jesus traveled, were shaped, and preserved.

Thomas	Matthew	Luke
8 And he said, “The man is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without difficulty. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”	13:47-50 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”	N/A
9 Jesus said, “Now the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered them. Some fell on the road; the birds came and gathered them up. Others fell on the rock, did not take root in the soil, and did not produce ears. And others fell on thorns; they choked the seed(s) and worms ate them. And others fell on the good soil and it produced good fruit: it bore sixty per measure and a hundred and twenty per measure.”	13:3-9 And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. If you have ears, hear!” [vv. 18-23 then offer an elaborate explanation]	8:5-8 “A sower went out to sow his seed, and as he sowed some fell on a path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on rock, and as it grew up it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!” [vv. 11-15 then offer an elaborate explanation]
16 Jesus said, "Men think, perhaps, that it is peace which I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know that it is dissension which I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword, and war. For there will be five in a house: three will be against two, and two against three, the father against the son, and the son against the father. And they will stand solitary."	10:34-36 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”	12:51-53 “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
26 Jesus said, “You see the mote in your brother's eye, but you do not see the beam in your own eye. When you cast the beam out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to cast the mote from your brother's eye.”	7:3-5 “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”	6:41-42 “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”
31 Jesus said, “No prophet is accepted in his own village; no physician heals those who know him.”           (cf. Mark 6:4: “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown and among their own kin and in their own house.”)	13:57 And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor except in their own hometown and in their own house.”	4:24-27 And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land,  yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”
32-33 Jesus said, "A city being built on a high mountain and fortified cannot fall, nor can it be hidden." Jesus said, "Preach from your housetops that which you will hear in your ear. For no one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel, nor does he put it in a hidden place, but rather he sets it on a lamp stand so that everyone who enters and leaves will see its light."	5:14-16 “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”	8:16-17 “No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar or puts it under a bed; rather, one puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.
34 Jesus said, “If a blind man leads a blind man, they will both fall into a pit.”	15:14 Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.”	6:39 He also told them a parable: “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?”
96 Jesus said, “The kingdom of the father is like a certain woman. She took a little leaven, concealed it in some dough, and made it into large loaves. Let him who has ears hear.”	13:33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”	13:20-21 And again he said, “To what should I compare the kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

Not all of the Thomas sayings are parallel to the Q sayings in the Synoptics, however. The theological paradigm of Thomas is distinctive. The document’s full title identifies its author as Didymus Judas Thomas, and both “Didymus” (Greek) and “Thomas” (Aramaic) mean “twin.” The text’s implicit claim is that Thomas is the twin of Jesus, and the “secret” the reader is invited to discover is that they too can become Jesus’s twin – can find the divine within themselves through proper understanding of the sayings. This is a radically different soteriology from Paul’s or that of the Didache. For Paul, salvation comes through participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, an event external to the believer, accomplished by God’s action in history. For the Jewish Didache community, salvation comes through righteous adherence to Torah observance and the anticipation of the eschatological fulfillment heralded by Jesus. But for the Thomas community, salvation comes through gnosis – interior knowledge, self-discovery, the recognition of one’s own divine origin. Saying 3 declares: “When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father.” Saying 70 puts it more starkly: “That which you have [within you] will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves. That which you do not have within you will kill you if you do not have it within you.”

The absence of passion, resurrection, and atonement in Thomas is not incidental. It follows directly from this soteriology. If salvation is a matter of interior knowledge rather than historical event, then Jesus’s death and resurrection are simply irrelevant to the soteriological project. The “living Jesus” of Thomas’s opening line is not the risen Christ of Paul’s proclamation, he is the spiritually exalted Jesus whose words are still alive, still capable of conferring life on those who understand them. The community behind Thomas had no need for a passion narrative because the passion wasn’t where they located Jesus’s saving significance. They located it in his wisdom speech.

For the argument I am making here, the Gospel of Thomas provides the third panel in a triptych that makes the diversity of early Christianity concretely visible. The Pauline communities built their faith on the death and resurrection of Jesus as a cosmic salvific event, with the cross and resurrection at the theological center. The Didache community preserved a Jewish practice-oriented faith centered on Jesus’s teaching and the Paschal significance of the communal meal, with no developed atonement or resurrection theology. The Thomas community pursued salvation through hidden wisdom and self-knowledge, with no narrative of Jesus’s death or resurrection at all. These three trajectories represent not minor variations on a common theme but fundamentally different answers to the most basic question any religious movement must address: what is the nature of the problem, and how does the founder’s significance solve it?

None of these communities would have recognized the others’ version of the faith as complete or adequate. And none of them – neither Paul’s, nor the Didachist’s, nor Thomas’s – can claim to be the singular, original, undistorted continuation of what Jesus himself intended (though the Didache community may be closest). The evidence for diversity is visible in the earliest documents we possess, to say nothing of the communities whose documents don’t survive to us due to collapse, suppression, or assimilation. Those remaining evidential threads of diversity that do survive to us persisted in forms the proto-orthodox tradition eventually worked strenuously to suppress well into the second century and beyond. The category through which many of those suppressed documents have been read, viz. “Gnostic,” is itself part of the story of how the suppression has been retrospectively framed, a point this series will take up directly when examining the range of responses the movement’s diversity produced.

IX. Prophetic Disappointment: Festinger and Eliade

Part Five examined the psychological and cognitive conditions under which the resurrection conviction formed in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion. The question this section addresses is what happened when the expectation that conviction generated – the imminent return, the completed harvest – failed to materialize. The preceding sections have shown that not all early Jesus communities built their theology around physical resurrection and cosmic atonement; the Didache community and the traditions preserved in the Gospel of Thomas demonstrate that entire strands of the movement functioned without those proto-Orthodox convictions. But for those communities that did embrace the reversal of expectations, that built their faith on the proclamation that God had raised the crucified Jesus and that the harvest inaugurated by that resurrection was imminent, the failure of the expected consummation posed a specific and acute theological crisis. To understand why those communities took the specific forms they did, and why they changed so rapidly in the decades that followed, requires understanding something about the psychology and sociology of prophetic disappointment. This is an extension of the question previously explored around what social and psychological conditions produced the resurrection appearances and the redefinition of the cross – here we analyze how subsequent generations in those communities dealt with the perpetual delay of Jesus’s second coming and the Parousia.

Jesus proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. The evidence this series has assembled across previous posts makes this as clear as historical inference can make anything: he believed the transformation was coming soon, in the lifetimes of those around him, and he enacted its values in the present as both a foretaste and a provocation. His followers shared that expectation. They had left families and livelihoods. They had followed him to Jerusalem at Passover believing that something decisive was about to happen. When Jesus was then crucified and those early followers eventually embraced a revisionist understanding of Jesus’s mission and death, part of their acceptance of this reversal included a continuation and intensification of their apocalyptic expectation. Visions of the living Jesus persisted, and so too their hope in an imminent eschaton.

The social psychology of prophetic disappointment was given its most famous empirical treatment by Leon Festinger, whose 1956 study When Prophecy Fails documented in real time what happened to a small UFO doomsday group when the predicted apocalypse failed to materialize. Festinger's finding was counterintuitive and has proven remarkably durable: prophetic failure, under certain conditions, does not destroy belief. It intensifies it. The conditions Festinger identified are specific: the believer must be deeply committed, must have taken irreversible action based on the belief, must be part of a community of fellow believers, and must receive social support from that community in the aftermath of disconfirmation. When these conditions obtain, the response to failure is typically not abandonment of the belief but reinterpretation of it – and increased missionary activity, as if the energy that can no longer be directed toward waiting for the end is redirected into persuading others to join the community that is now managing the delay.

To be clear, Festinger's study was a single ethnographic case – a small mid-twentieth century American group – and applying its model to first-century Jewish apocalyptic movements is an analogical argument, not a direct application. John G. Gager, whose Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (1975) was among the first sustained applications of social-scientific criticism to the New Testament, argued that the conditions Festinger identified recur with sufficient regularity across different cultural contexts to make the model analytically useful rather than merely illustrative. The argument is not that first-century Galilean fishermen and mid-twentieth century American suburbanites were psychologically identical, but that committed communities managing the failure of a central conviction follow recognizable patterns across cultures and centuries. The early Jesus movement fits Festinger's model with uncomfortable precision. The followers were deeply committed; many had abandoned ordinary life to follow Jesus and taken irreversible action. They were part of a community. And in the wake of their initial dispersal after the crucifixion, they regrouped variously and continued to commune around Jesus. They gathered, they supported one another, they had experiences they interpreted as confirmations of the belief rather than refutations of it. And then they went out and began to proclaim the message with remarkable speed and energy. Not in spite of the crucifixion but, in their reinterpretation, because of it.

Mircea Eliade's framework – rooted in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) – adds a deeper structural layer to Festinger's social psychology. For Eliade, apocalyptic movements are fundamentally attempts to escape what he calls the terror of history: the crushing weight of unredeemed, contingent, meaningless time. The millenarian community constructs a relationship to sacred time, a sense that history is moving toward a meaningful culmination, that insulates it from the randomness and injustice of ordinary historical experience. When the expected climax does not arrive, the community faces a choice: surrender to the terror of history, or reconstruct the relationship to sacred time on new terms. Communities that survive prophetic disappointment, in Eliade's account, do so through what he calls the revalorization of the myth – the absorption of the failure into the mythic narrative in a way that transforms it from falsification into confirmation. The myth is resilient precisely because it can absorb almost any historical outcome by reinterpreting it as a test, a fortuitous delay, a hidden fulfillment, or a sign that the community was not yet ready.

The trajectory Eliade describes runs through recognizable stages: from the acute eschatological expectation of the founding moment, through the crisis of disappointment, through the mythic reabsorption of the failure, toward the institutionalization of what had been a charismatic movement and the eventual interiorization of the expected transformation. The end of the world becomes, gradually, a metaphor for inner renewal. The coming Kingdom gradually becomes the interior kingdom of the soul or the distant kingdom of the afterlife. What began as a proclamation about the imminent transformation of the present world order becomes over generations a set of practices, rituals, and doctrines that manage the ongoing deferral of the expectation while preserving its emotional and communal force. The German sociologist Max Weber called this process the routinization of charisma – the inevitable transformation of a prophetic movement organized around a founding figure's personal gifts and authority into an institution organized around offices, procedures, and inherited tradition.

X. Paul's Firstfruits and the Acute Eschatological Expectation

Paul's letters give us a clear window onto the precise moment when the first stage of this process was underway. They demonstrate that an eschatological expectation was still very much alive two decades after the crucifixion/resurrection experiences, and still very much oriented toward an imminent apocalyptic end for those then living.

“I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.” (1 Corinthians 7:29-31)

The most illuminating passage may well be Paul's treatment of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul describes Jesus as the firstfruits of the resurrection – aparche, the first portion of the harvest, offered as a pledge and foretaste of the full harvest to come. The term would be discernable to both rural and urban believers across the Mediterranean; it literally means the first product of a crop that has become ripe for harvesting. This material reality coincides with a precise theological claim rooted in the specific logic of first-century Jewish resurrection belief. Understanding the firstfruits claim in that context illuminates both the urgency of Paul's expectation and the nature of the transformation it subsequently underwent.

Jewish belief about resurrection in the first century was not the individualized, uniquely localized event centered on Jesus’s exaltation that later Christian tradition would develop. The idea that each person, at death, passes individually into an afterlife where they will be judged, rewarded or punished, and subsequently resurrected possibly millennia later was foreign to Jewish thinking on the subject. Contrarily, it was a corporate, eschatological, this-worldly expectation: the resurrection was something that would happen to all the righteous dead at once, at the end of the worldly age, as the climactic act of God's vindication of Israel and the establishment of the divine Kingdom on earth. It required a transformation of the present world, in which the dead would be raised and the living transformed, and the whole creation renewed in accordance with the justice and abundance that the prophets had predicted.

In this framework, Paul's claim that Jesus has been raised as the firstfruits carries maximally urgent implications: if the firstfruits have been offered, the harvest is underway. If Jesus has been raised as the first of the general resurrection, the general resurrection – and with it the full arrival of the Kingdom – is an immediately impending even rather than a distant future one. The firstfruits do not precede the harvest by centuries or more than a millennium. It is a matter of days or weeks. Paul's language isn’t speaking metaphorical comfort to people expecting a long wait. It is the pressing announcement of an eschatological process already in process and pending completion.

“For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

(1 Thessalonians 4:15-17)

This is why Paul can write to the Thessalonians that those who have already died since accepting the gospel will not miss the coming transformation – the Parousia of the Lord – because the dead in Christ will rise first, and then those who are still alive in the present will be caught up with them. These early communities did not expect a long interval between Jesus’s resurrection and the general resurrection. He wrote to people who, like himself, expected the general resurrection imminently and are troubled because some of their numbers have died before it arrived. As the wheel of time pressed onward, the unexpected deaths of fellow believers caused anxiety. Paul's reassurance is that the end is so near that the dead will barely have preceded the living.

As Paul's letters preserve it, the earliest stratum of Christian expectation was not a belief in a distant Second Coming preceded by a long interval of church history. It was the belief that the harvest was underway, that Jesus's resurrection was its first installment, and that the completion was nearing culmination. Those early communities were living, as Paul's language everywhere suggests, in the narrow interval between the firstfruits and the full ingathering.

XI. The Delayed Parousia: From Paul to 2 Peter

The duration of waiting stretched and still the harvest did not come. It requires no special interpretive lens to see that the documents which follow Paul in the chronological sequence of the New Testament record a progressive adjustment of the expectation to the reality of delay.

The adjustment is visible first in the handling of time. Mark's Gospel – written forty years after the crucifixion, a full generation after Paul's urgent firstfruits language – still preserves a sense of apocalyptic imminence, probably re-intensified by the destruction of the Second Temple. Jesus tells the disciples in Mark that the Son of Man will come in power within the lifetime of the present generation: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (13:30). The statement is unambiguous, and its presence in the earliest Gospel is itself one of the most powerful arguments for its authenticity; no community managing the delay of the parousia would have invented a saying that so directly and testably predicted an imminent end. The saying was already becoming an embarrassment by the time Mark wrote it down, which is precisely why Mark’s redactors work to mitigate the prophetic failure.

Writing a decade or more after Mark, Matthew preserves the saying but softens it with contextual additions. Matthew inserts verse 24:36 – “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" – which immediately follows and functionally qualifies the generation saying by shifting emphasis from the nearness of the end to its unknowability. The sequence in Matthew creates a subtle tension: yes, it will happen within this generation, but no one knows exactly when. That rhetorical move absorbs some of the predictive specificity. Matthew also expands the Olivet Discourse considerably compared to Mark, embedding the generation saying within a longer passage that includes the parables of the ten virgins, the talents, and the sheep and goats; all of which are oriented toward readiness and faithful waiting over an indeterminate period rather than emergent expectation of an imminent end. The cumulative effect is that the generation saying is still present but is now nested within material that counsels patient endurance rather than immediate eschatological tension.

Luke, writing roughly contemporaneously with Matthew, goes slightly further: he introduces a significant qualification, having Jesus warn the disciples against those who claim the end is near: “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them. When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately” (21:8-9). Likely written a decade or more after his Gospel, his Acts narrative of the forty days between resurrection and ascension followed by the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost also implies a more extended interval between the resurrection of Jesus and the completion of the eschatological program.

The latest Gospel, John, has predictably moved furthest of all: his developed, realized eschatology – the insistence that eternal life is a present possession of the believer, that the judgment has already occurred in the response to Jesus, that the Paraclete (i.e., the Comforter or Holy Spirit) is the continuing presence of Jesus in the community – represents a thoroughgoing spiritualization and interiorization of what the earlier tradition had expected as purely an imminent if future historical event. For John, not unlike the Thomasine tradition, the Kingdom that was coming soon has become a reality already present in the spiritual life of the believing community.

The second letter of Peter is possibly the latest document in the New Testament, written perhaps as late as 125 CE. It’s almost certainly pseudonymous, and makes the management of delay explicit in a way that earlier documents only imply. In chapter 3, the author directly addresses the mockery of skeptics who ask: where is the promise of his coming? Everything goes on as it always has. His response is the classic apologetic of the delayed Parousia – “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (3:8). The Lord is not slow; he is patient, not wanting any to perish. The delay is reinterpreted as mercy rather than failure. The expectation is preserved, but its imminence has been evacuated. In principle, it is now indefinitely deferrable, which makes it a qualitatively different expectation than what Paul expressed with the language of firstfruits and harvest.

The trajectory from Paul to 2 Peter spans roughly seventy-five years. In that interval, an expectation of imminent cosmic transformation – corporate, this-worldly, pressing – has been progressively interiorized, spiritualized, postponed, and eventually institutionalized into the framework of an ongoing community that is no longer waiting for the end of history but managing its indefinite continuation. This is exactly the trajectory that Eliade's stages describe and that Weber's routinization of charisma explains. It is perhaps a betrayal of the original vision, but simultaneously an extension of the work of redefinition that revised the earliest communities understanding of Jesus’s identity and the purpose of his untimely crucifixion. It is yet another example of what happens to a prophetic movement when the world fails to cooperate with its vision.

XII. The Range of Responses

The diversity of early Jesus movements documented throughout this series can be understood in part as the range of different responses to the fundamental challenge the movement faced after the crucifixion: what did Jesus’s significance mean, and how was his community to continue?

As the preceding sections have shown, the answers were radically divergent. The Didache community preserved a strand of Jewish Jesus practice largely centered on teaching, ethical instruction, and Paschal liturgy – without developed atonement theology and without resurrection as a load-bearing conviction. The Gospel of Thomas pursued salvation through hidden wisdom and interior self-knowledge, locating Jesus's saving significance in his speech rather than in his death. Neither of these communities experienced the delay of the parousia as the kind of existential crisis it posed for communities built on Pauline theology. The Didache community had its own eschatological horizon, viz. chapter 16's anticipation of the Lord coming on the clouds is unmistakably imminent in tone, but its faith was not structurally anchored to the resurrection proclamation as the inaugural event of the harvest. The delay of the parousia did not threaten the Didache community's theological foundations the way it threatened communities for whom the resurrection was the load-bearing conviction, the firstfruits whose logic demanded an imminent ingathering. The Thomas community, oriented entirely toward interior wisdom rather than historical event, had no eschatological stake of that kind to disappoint at all.

A further dimension of the range of responses warrants examination of our categories. The movements associated with the texts recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 have been possibly prematurely grouped under the label “Gnostic” since their discovery, and that label has shaped every subsequent assessment of what they represent and why they were suppressed. But as recent scholarship has argued with increasing force, “Gnosticism” as a historical category does not survive serious scrutiny – and its deconstruction is evidence of how thoroughly the winners of the 2nd-century doctrinal competition have shaped the terms in which we assess the losers.

The familiar stereotype of Gnosticism assembles a coherent narrative: a religion of body-haters, who believe material existence is evil and that our human task is to escape the world through the acquisition of interior knowledge of our true divine essence. This composite picture – cosmic dualism, world-denial, salvation through gnosis – appears consistently across both scholarly and popular treatments. The problem, as Karen King documents in What Is Gnosticism? (2003), is that this myth does not actually exist in any recoverable text. The writings we call Gnostic might contain some elements of the stereotype to some degree, but never all of them, and never in the same way. No single so-called Gnostic writing instantiates the full picture. The word “Gnosticism” itself does not appear until the theologian Henry More coined it in the 17th century, more than a millennium after the supposed phenomenon.

Irenaeus, the 2nd-century bishop of Lyon whose Against Heresies is the primary ancient source scholars have mined to construct the category, uses hairesis as a polemical label against specific teachers and schools – but no ancient writer uses the term “Gnosticism” to name a coherent movement, any more than anyone in the 1st or 2nd century used “Christianity” to name a unified religion. King’s analysis shows that the category was constructed in 19th-century biblical scholarship as a substitute for “heresy” – a way of designating an “other” over and against the normative self of Christianity. As she puts it: “The fixation on origins has tended to distort the actual social and historical processes of literary production because the purpose of determining the origin of Gnosticism is less historical than rhetorical. It is aimed at delimiting the normative boundaries and definition of Christianity.” Gnosticism was made a thing not because it was observed to exist but because it was useful for thinking – specifically for creating a boundary that defined what authentic Christianity was not.

What happens when the label is set aside and the texts are read without it? King’s study of the Secret Revelation of John – one of the Nag Hammadi texts most frequently cited as a primary example of Gnosticism, surviving in three copies within the collection itself – offers an instructive demonstration. The text opens with a scene in which John, brother of James, is accosted at the Jerusalem Temple by a Pharisee named Aramanios, who tells him that his teacher, the Nazarene, deceived him with error and turned him from the traditions of his fathers. John retreats to the desert in grief, asking questions about origins and belonging: how was the Savior appointed? Who is his father? The Temple, already the text’s setting, does not exist after 70 CE; the questions John asks are questions about what belonging to Israel means when Israel as a geographic and institutional reality has been devastated. The vision that follows – in which John receives revelation of a divine monarchy with nothing ruling over it – is not mystical body-hatred but a literature of counter-belonging: a response to the crisis of communal identity after the destruction of the Temple, relocating sovereignty and identity in a higher realm beyond Rome’s reach. In the context of the Roman Empire, a vision of “a monarchy with nothing ruling over it” would have sounded not like escapism but like resistance. Read without the Gnostic presupposition, the text is a recognizably human wrestling with power, history, and what it means to belong to a people whose world has been shattered. It is closely paralleled in its concerns to the book of Revelation, the letter to the Hebrews, and the wider literature of Jewish and Jesus-movement responses to Roman devastation.

The AJBC seminar uses an analogy from the fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin to describe what is methodologically at stake. In Le Guin’s parody of academic research, a fictitious field of “therolinguistics” (the study of animal languages) has long compared penguin script to dolphin language because both are movement-based and written in water. The comparison produces consistent formal matches but never illuminates the content of what penguins actually communicate. A scholar finally asks what would happen if penguin were studied not from the perspective of dolphin but from the perspective of bird – since penguins are, after all, birds. The shift in comparative category transforms what the evidence can reveal. The Nag Hammadi texts have been studied, since their discovery in 1945, as Gnostic, measured against the stereotype of Gnosticism and found to confirm it. The question King and the seminar are asking is: what if they are not Gnostic at all, but simply part of the diverse literature of 2nd-century Jesus movements? What would we see if we released them from that category and read them on their own terms? The answer King’s work begins to demonstrate is that they are more complex, more various, and more humanly legible than the Gnostic framework allows. They are engaged with questions of power, belonging, and meaning that connect them to the same world inhabited by the Didache community and the Pauline communities and the Thomas community, rather than marking them off as a separate and deficient species.

What removing the Gnostic category from the range of responses reveals, then, is not a thinning of the evidence but a thickening of it. Without a tidy “Gnostic” pole at one end of the spectrum, the actual diversity of the 2nd-century movements becomes more visible in its complexity. Texts previously dismissed as the deviant outer edge of orthodoxy’s competition turn out to be engaged with the same fundamental questions of identity, resistance, and meaning that animated every other community in the field. The Nag Hammadi library, in King’s formulation, has only this in common at its core: the texts were found together in the same jar in the Egyptian desert. Beyond that, they are a population of diverse writings that resist any single category – which is itself the point. Removing the label restores the diversity rather than dissolving it. In this light, the proto-orthodox suppression that buried those texts in the Egyptian sand becomes not the elimination of a coherent rival system but the targeted destruction of a range of voices that the emerging orthodoxy found incompatible with its own claims to singular authority – a suppression, as Pagels documented in The Gnostic Gospels (1979), that was more successful in practice than in principle. The texts survived. The category imposed on them to explain why they deserved suppression is less durable.

The proto-orthodox tradition that eventually curated the canon and produced the creeds managed the deferral through the development of institutional structures – the episcopate, the canon, the creed – that created a framework for the ongoing life of the community in historical time. Rather than living in the narrow interval between the firstfruits and the harvest, proto-orthodoxy revised the paradigm so that they were understood to be living in the age of the church, the period between the first and second comings of Christ, with an institutional structure designed to sustain the community through what had become an indefinite wait by the second century. The Second Coming had been pushed out to the horizon, where it could serve as the ultimate telos of history without requiring any particular urgency about when it would arrive.

XIII. The Parting of the Ways: Anti-Jewish Rhetoric and the Gentile Turn

The other consequential dimension of the movement’s evolution that deserves a final word is the result of the escalation of anti-Jewish rhetoric across the New Testament documents. This escalation tracks precisely with the sociological trajectory we have been tracing: as the movement became increasingly gentile in composition, increasingly distant from the synagogue, and increasingly centered outside Palestine, its rhetorical hostility toward Judaism intensified in direct proportion to its separation from it. Even in the Didache movement which oriented itself as the true sect within Judaism, their rhetoric reflects animosity toward non-believing Jews as hypocrites and outsiders.

The broader geographic and temporal context is important as the Jesus movement spread. The Gospel authors were almost certainly writing outside Palestine – whether in Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, or comparable diaspora urban settings – composing narratives about a Jewish world from within a gentile one. They were writing after 70 CE, after the destruction of the Temple had dispersed the Jerusalem community and fatally weakened the Torah-observant strand that James had led. And they were writing in the wake of what Paul’s own letters document as the essential failure of the Jewish mission: the anguished argument of Romans 9–11, in which Paul wrestles with why most Jews have not accepted the gospel, had by the late first century hardened from theological consternation into sectarian hostility.

The textual evidence follows a clear trajectory as we have seen. In Mark, Jesus’s opponents are specific Jewish groups – Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, chief priests – and the disputes are recognizably intra-Jewish. By Matthew, the rhetoric has escalated sharply: chapter 23’s sustained diatribe against the “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites” is among the most bitter passages in the New Testament. And Matthew alone includes the crowd’s declaration at the trial – “his blood be on us and on our children” (27:25), a sentence whose consequences for Jewish communities across subsequent centuries are difficult to overstate. By the Gospel of John, the escalation reaches its apex: specific opponent groups have collapsed into “the Jews” as a monolithic hostile category, and Jesus declares to his Jewish interlocutors, “you are from your father the devil” (8:44). The movement from Mark to John is the movement from intra-Jewish debate to anti-Jewish polemic.

This is the rhetoric of a family splitting apart. The bitterest hostility comes not from outsiders encountering Judaism for the first time but from a community in the process of separating from its parent tradition – a process scholars call “the parting of the ways.” The escalation reflects the specific pressures of communities competing with the synagogue for gentile God-fearers, defining their identity against the tradition that had given them birth, and needing to explain to themselves and to potential converts why the people who should have recognized their messiah had largely refused to do so. The theological answer the tradition increasingly settled on, that “the Jews” had rejected and killed their own messiah, was a product of these specific first-century sociological pressures. Sadly it became detached from that context, read as timeless theological truth rather than as the polemical rhetoric of a bitter separation, and the consequences were carried forward into centuries of persecution that the original authors could not have foreseen and probably did not intend.

Paula Fredriksen’s reconstruction underscores how late and how contingent this separation was. For the movement’s entire first generation (roughly 30 to 70 CE), the Jerusalem community under James and Peter remained a central pillar of the movement, and it was a community that understood itself as Jewish without qualification. James’s execution by Ananus in 62 CE, which we examined in Section IV, was followed eight years later by the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jerusalem community. This effectively removed both the personal leadership and the communal anchor that had kept the movement tethered to its Jewish origins. It was in that vacuum with James dead, the Temple gone, and the Gentile mission increasingly dominant that the rhetorical separation accelerated into the theological hostility the Gospel authors would encode in their narratives.

Yet even this account of rhetorical acceleration and escalating separation may overstate how clean and early the parting actually was. The Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin, whose work has been central to the Christianity Seminar’s study of the first two centuries, has argued that the traditional parting-of-the-ways model is itself a partially retrospective construction. In Boyarin’s reading, what has been mistakenly understood as two different religions, Judaism and Christianity, separating cleanly in the 1st or 2nd century was in fact a sustained period of intermingling, cohabitation, and complex encounter that extended across at least the first four centuries of the common era. There was no clean parting. There was a long, contested, mutually entangled process of differentiation in which the boundaries were porous, disputed, and differently drawn depending on which community, which city, and which decade one examines.

Boyarin encourages replacing the parting-of-the-ways model with an understanding of the Jesus peoples and the people of Israel as participating together in a series of complex encounters with the specific imperial reality of Rome’s triumph over nation and people. Both were conquered peoples navigating the crisis of national belonging that empire had produced. Both were drawing on the resources of Israel’s tradition to do so. The sharpening of rhetorical boundaries that the Gospel trajectory documents, and the eventual institutional separation that the councils and creeds would formalize, were outcomes of a process that unfolded across centuries, not a clean break that happened in the first or second. Fredriksen’s reconstruction of the parting as late and contingent is confirmed and deepened by Boyarin’s – even the rhetoric of separation didn’t produce the reality of separation as quickly as either tradition’s later self-account suggests. What the first two centuries show is less a parting of ways than a prolonged argument between siblings who hadn’t yet fully accepted they were no longer living in the same house.

XIV. Coordination, Homogenization, Suppression

Before we consider how that coordination operated institutionally, a prior question demands attention: how did the intellectual framework of “orthodoxy versus heresy” come to exist at all? The answer lies in another act of transliteration – another case in which a Greek word was carried across into Latin and eventually English with its original meaning lost and a new, loaded meaning invented in its place.

The English word heresy is a transliteration of the Greek hairesis, whose basic meaning is “choice” – specifically intellectual choice, the choosing of a school or philosophical position. The word carried no inherently negative meaning in its first-century usage. When Acts 5:17 refers to “the party (hairesis) of the Sadducees,” it uses the word in its precise ordinary sense: a school or philosophical faction. This is also how Josephus uses it in describing the four schools of first-century Israel. When Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians 11:18 – “I hear that when you meet as a community there are haireseis among you” – the context makes clear he views the divisions negatively, but there is no indication he thinks one school should be excluded from the community; his concern is factional division within a shared fellowship, not the expulsion of deviants from a pure body.

Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon writing in the mid-2nd century, is the figure the tradition usually credits with the first systematic treatment of heresy. Yet as Mark Vincent demonstrated for the Christianity Seminar, the translation of Irenaeus’s title as Against Heresies is anachronistic. The original Greek title is On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Knowledge – a title that signals polemical engagement with rival teachings, not the excommunication of deviants from a pure body. The Latin title Adversus Haereses was formulated centuries after the work’s composition, after the debate between teachers and schools in Irenaeus’s time had escalated into actual expulsion from the community. When Irenaeus himself writes that competing schools break up because students desire to become teachers themselves – forming new teachings out of new opinions – he is describing the internal dynamics of school competition, not the corruption of pure doctrine. Justin Martyr’s mid-2nd-century engagement with Marcion is similarly revealing: his original work is titled To Marcion, a teacher addressing a teacher, a persuasion attempt according to the rules of rhetoric, but when the 4th-century historian Eusebius references the same work, he calls it Against Marcion, reflecting the heresy-orthodoxy vocabulary of his own later period. The retitling is a small but telling instance of how the winners rewrote the record of earlier, more fluid disputes in terms that retrospectively vindicated their own framework.

The strong negative sense of hairesis as excommunicating false belief becomes visible only in the late 2nd century, in the writing of the North African teacher Tertullian. In his treatise Concerning the Prescription of Heretics, Tertullian declares: “The heretic is no longer considered a member of the party of Christus” (ch. 16.2). Now the heretic is not a rival teacher within a shared community but someone expelled from it entirely, identified with those who follow false gods. The transliteration chain – Greek hairesis to Latin haereses to English heresy – almost guarantees anachronistic reading. The word arrives in English already carrying Tertullian’s meaning, and that meaning is then silently imported back into 1st and 2nd-century texts that used the original Greek word in its neutral sense. Heresy is a Christian invention, and a late one. Significantly, Judaism faced the same conditions of diversity and competing schools in this period and did not take the same route: the rabbis maintained their tradition of dispute and multiplicity of valid opinion; the category of heresy as institutional exclusion did not become their organizing framework. That the Jesus movements moved in a different direction, toward creed, canon, and the anathemas of the councils, was a contingent development of the 3rd and 4th centuries, not an inevitable trajectory from the beginning.

Underlying the shift from orthopraxis to orthodoxy – from correct practice to correct belief – is itself one of the most consequential reversals the tradition underwent. Both the Jesus movement and the Judean tradition from which it emerged were organized primarily around practice: what one did, how one lived together, how one observed the Sabbath or the meal or the prayer. The internal debates of the earliest communities, as Irenaeus himself documents, arose not from theological propositions about the nature of God but from actual practices – how to respond to Roman persecution, what roles women could hold, how to conduct the communal meal. These were orthopraxis questions. The insistence on correct belief, creedal subscription, and doctrinal conformity was a development of the third and fourth centuries, driven by the specific institutional needs of a movement increasingly embedded in Roman imperial structure. It was not the original organizing logic of the Jesus movements. It was a late imposition that the tradition’s self-account then read backward across two centuries of evidence that do not actually support it.

There is a third instance of the transliteration problem that connects directly to the associational practices examined in Section V. The Greek word baptizo means, in its ordinary usage, to wash, immerse, or thoroughly dip – it is an everyday word describing an everyday practice. The English word baptism is not a translation of it but a transliteration, carrying the sounds of the Greek across without carrying the meaning. And like Christianos and hairesis, it arrives in English already freighted with later institutional meaning that its original Greek usage did not carry. In the first and second centuries, baptizo referred to what the early communities actually did: they bathed together, washing away the accumulated indignity of life under empire, marking transitions in communal belonging, and enacting the moral renewal that the Judean bathing tradition associated with commitment to righteous life.

The first-century historian Josephus describes John the Baptizer’s practice in precisely these terms: a washing of the body that presupposed the soul was already cleansed by right behavior, a consecration of communal commitment rather than the conferral of grace by a ritual act (Antiquities 18.117). Tertullian, writing in the late second century, lists the range of places these bathings could happen: “a sea or a pool, a stream or a fount, a lake or a trough” (On Baptism 4). The list is social and practical, not liturgically restricted. Only gradually, as the second century moved toward the third and communal membership in specific movements became more explicitly defined, did the bathing practice shift from a social enactment of Israel-belonging and communal renewal into a formal Christian rite of initiation. The shift happened, but it was relatively late. Reading it back into the first century, as “baptism” inevitably invites us to do, imposes the institutional outcome on the social practice that preceded it, in the same way that reading Christianos as “Christian” imposes the later religion on the earlier political movement. The transliteration problem is not merely semantic. Each instance of it represents a point where the tradition’s later self-understanding has been quietly smuggled back into the evidence, making the development look more inevitable, more unified, and more institutional from the beginning than the historical record supports.

The process of institutional coordination began with pruning the library itself.

The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were selected through a process that extended from the second through the fourth centuries CE. There were many Gospels, Epistles, Apocalypses, and countless other types of literature from this early period left on the cutting room floor. Most of them do not survive to us except for passing mention by heresiologists of the second and third-centuries. The canon as we know it was formally defined only in the late fourth century, and even then it was contested in various regions for decades. Some documents that were widely used and deeply revered in early Christian communities – the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the letters of Clement – did not make the final cut. Some that did – Revelation, Hebrews, 2 Peter – were disputed by serious figures in the early church for generations. And then there are the documents that were actively suppressed: the texts recovered from Nag Hammadi in 1945, which Elaine Pagels documented thoroughly in The Gnostic Gospels (1979). The library we have is a curated library, which means our sources are theologically shaped.

Yet, the curation was not total and its incompleteness is itself telling. As we have seen, the canon that emerged contains genuine internal tensions that harmonizing efforts haven’t fully resolved: Paul's theology of grace sits uneasily alongside James's theology of works; John's realized eschatology pulls against Mark's imminent apocalypticism; Revelation's cosmic dualism coexists awkwardly with Luke's progressive salvation history. Proto-orthodoxy preserved a library that resists the very uniformity it claimed to represent. What the selection process suppressed was not theological diversity as such – the canon it produced is diverse – but the most radical expressions of that diversity: traditions that denied the salvific significance of Jesus's death entirely, that located salvation in completely interior knowledge rather than historical event, that maintained Jewish observance as a non-negotiable framework. The suppression was targeted rather than comprehensive. And the selectiveness of the suppression is evidence of the diversity that was present from the earliest stages.

The coordination and homogenization extended well beyond the selection of texts. The decisive historical mechanism of that process has a specific name and a specific date. Constantine’s conversion in the early fourth century was the pivot on which the tradition’s political character turned. When the Roman Emperor embraced Christianity – when the cross went from being the symbol of an executed subversive to being emblazoned on the shields of Roman legions – the movement that had begun as a counter-proclamation to imperial authority became, in a remarkable reversal, a favored instrument of that same authority. Within decades of Constantine's legalization of the faith, Theodosius would make it the empire's official religion. The theological adjustments required to make this transition comfortable were enormous, but incremental. A message about the coming inversion of the existing power structure was difficult to preach from inside the palace. A proclamation that the hungry would be filled and the rich sent away empty was awkward when the institution proclaiming it was accumulating land, wealth, and political influence at a pace that would have been difficult to distinguish from the behavior of any other Roman institution.

The solution, developed over centuries and in many variations, was essentially to relocate the Kingdom. What Jesus had proclaimed as a coming transformation of the present social order – a real, material, earthly reversal of the arrangements of power and wealth – was gradually reinterpreted as a spiritual reality, either interior and personal (the Kingdom of God is within you) or distantly eschatological and postponed (the Kingdom will be fully realized in heaven, after death). Both moves accomplished the same thing: they evacuated the Kingdom proclamation of its immediate political content and transformed it into something that could coexist peacefully with, and eventually actively bless, the most powerful and wealthy institutions in the Western world.

I have written on this blog about the same dynamic in LDS institutional history – the way the radical communitarian impulse of early Mormonism, the law of consecration, the United Order, the prophetic critique of wealth and hierarchy, was progressively managed, softened, and ultimately replaced by an institutional culture of remarkable affluence and hierarchical deference. The pattern is not uniquely Mormon, and it is not uniquely Christian. It is what institutions do with radical figures at their origin. The radical gains a following resisting the existing institutional powers. As the institution perseveres resistance and begins to gain power, the founder becomes the authority. The authority is then managed by the institution. And the institution, whose primary interest is its own continuity and influence, finds ways to preserve the founder’s name while domesticating the founder’s message into something the institution can gain by.

The unity that Acts retrojects onto the beginnings of the Jesus movement was imposed. What we call orthodox Christianity is the residue of a centuries-long process by which one strand of the original explosion – eventually better organized, more politically adept, increasingly aligned with the institutional interests of empire, and benefited by happenstance – gradually coordinated, correlated, and homogenized the diversity it had inherited. It suppressed the alternatives until the suppression itself became invisible in its own historical accounting. What survived was presented as what self-evidently had always been. Nag Hammadi and other more recent fortuitous discoveries have since better informed us of what had been lost, and what may remain for discovery.

What survived has been presented as inevitable. But it wasn’t, it was merely contingent. The tradition that became Christianity was one outcome among several that were genuinely possible – dependent on James’s untimely death, on the destruction of Jerusalem, on the organizational advantages Paul’s Gentile networks happened to realize, on the specific political calculations of fourth-century emperors. Change any of those factors and the tradition that claims to represent the original meaning of Jesus might look as foreign to us as the Gospel of Thomas now does. Contingency does not diminish what survived. But it ought to permanently dismantle the assumption that what survived was destined to. Instead of thinking of diversity as the problem orthodoxy solved, we should understand it as the condition that orthodoxy suppressed.

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Recommended Reading

Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig. After Jesus, Before Christianity (2021). HarperOne.

Paula Fredriksen. When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (2018). Yale University Press.

Catherine Hezser. Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (2001). Mohr Siebeck.

William Harris. Ancient Literacy (1989). Harvard University Press.

Werner Kelber. The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983). Fortress Press.

Albert Lord. The Singer of Tales (1960). Harvard University Press.

James D.G. Dunn. Jesus Remembered (2003). Eerdmans.

John Kloppenborg. Christ's Associations (2019). Yale University Press.

Andrew McGowan. Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (1999). Oxford University Press.

Leon Festinger. When Prophecy Fails (1956). University of Minnesota Press.

John G. Gager. Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (1975). Prentice-Hall.

Mircea Eliade. The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954). Princeton University Press.

Steve Mason. Josephus and the New Testament (2003). Hendrickson.

Karen King. What Is Gnosticism? (2003). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Elaine Pagels. The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Random House.

Daniel Boyarin. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2004). University of Pennsylvania Press.

This is Part Six of a seven-part series. Part Five — Resurrection and Atonement: The Persistence of the Vision of Jesus — examined the resurrection tradition, the evolution in atonement meaning-making, and the Emmaus story as the community's most earnest account of its own experience. Part Seven, the final installment, will bring the series home: what remains, what it means, and why any of it still matters to someone who no longer believes in the supernatural framework that built the tradition.