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R e v i e w
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 10
 December 2004 
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A "Christian Church" in Antiquity?
This is the first volume in a series entitled The Baker History of the Church published by Baker Books in Grand Rapids, Michigan. To judge from this volume, the publishers have not stinted in their intention of producing a well-informed and readable general history of the Church, complete with a timeline of early Christianity, extensive suggestions for further reading, notes, and an index. The author, a professor in New Zealand, draws upon many standard as well as specialized works, and he includes references published as recently as 2003. It is a serious and generally judicious work reflecting a Reformed view of the early Church.
But from a Catholic point of view, the way in which the available historical evidence on the nature of the early Church is interpreted frequently involves downplaying and sometimes even leaving out a number of salient topics and facts. The historical evidence about the early Church that modern scholarship has developed is, of course, more or less common to all scholars, and so how this evidence is interpreted is very important. Ivor Davidson appears to have examined most of the available evidence, and the broad general picture he paints turns out to be that of a Church composed of believers professing definite doctrines within a Church purveying both word and sacraments. This Church is organized around leaders called "bishops, presbyters (or ‘elders,’ later ‘priests’), and deacons" (181). Such a broad picture of the early Church was surely inevitable for anyone honestly looking at the available evidence.
The author nevertheless sometimes seems curiously reluctant to conclude from evidence that he himself presents that this creedal, sacerdotal, hierarchical, and inescapably visible Church was indeed the Church that Jesus founded upon the apostles. He is sometimes reluctant to describe it as a Church, preferring to call it a "community," and even, unhappily, as a "Jesus movement." He resorts to phrases such as the "mainstream Christian position" when what he evidently means is the teaching of the Church’s magisterium. Similarly, he too often speaks about the Church’s "leaders" when his own evidence makes clear that the early Church was led by bishops. He actually devotes more space to the development of rabbinic Judaism than to the development of the Church’s episcopacy.
But the way he subtly downplays the role of the bishops is nothing compared to the way he largely leaves out the role of the bishop of Rome in the Church of the first three centuries. This omission begins with his treatment of the simply enormous role indisputably played by the apostle Peter in the New Testament accounts; this Petrine role, though, is treated only briefly in a couple of paragraphs in a chapter entitled "Paul: Missionary, Teacher, Martyr."
This kind of treatment is duplicated in the author’s account of the early papacy. He first deals with the papacy in a brief section of a chapter entitled "Christian Thought in the West"—and then only because he has to explain the famous list of the popes drawn up by Irenaeus. But the author quickly denies that Irenaeus intended "the Church of Rome to be seen as the ultimate arbiter of other churches" (228–9).
Similarly, he deals with the more developed papacy of the 250s only in a lengthy section on Cyprian of Carthage. The papacy rates only two entries in the book’s index, and the book’s timeline of early Christianity lists not a single Roman bishop! While nobody would expect a Reformed scholar to accept the papacy, surely as a historian he needed to deal with the fact of it. It is as if a historian of the United States were to omit any description of the presidency in the American constitutional system, merely mentioning from time to time the actions of individual presidents when unavoidable for the intelligibility of his narrative.
One further huge omission in this history is the author’s failure even to mention the proper name by which the Church of Christ was commonly known in antiquity. The term "Christian Church" used by the author (and by the Baker series) was a term virtually unknown in antiquity. The proper name of the Church in those days (as first attested to by Ignatius of Antioch in one of his letters dating from the first decade of the second century, and subsequently in copious documentation—eventually to be verified in the official acts of the Council of Nicaea) was the Catholic Church! Yet this term does not rate even an entry in the book’s index.
—Kenneth D. Whitehead
The Birth of the Church: From Jesus to Constantine, A.D. 30–312
By Ivor J. Davidson
Baker Books
400 pages
$29.99
ISBN: 0801012708
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