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The Early Church Was Catholic—and Christian

Refuting claims that the early church did not teach fundamental Christian doctrines

Trent Horn

When people debate what the early Church taught, most assume the debate is between Protestants and Catholics over doctrines such as the authority of the Church or the nature of the sacraments. But a growing number of non-Christians claim the early Church did not teach fundamental doctrines such as the Trinity that unite Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox.

For example, during a prayer meeting I led for our local youth group, a young woman came up to me with a copy of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. “Have you read this?” she asked. “It has really shaken my faith!”

I said, “It’s just a novel, right? Why does it bother you?” She told me the book has a disclaimer that says that even though it is a work of fiction, the novel’s story is based on historical facts related to the Church. This includes the alleged “fact” that Jesus’ first followers didn’t believe he was God. And it’s not just secular authors or university professors who make this argument.

Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Oneness Pentecostals all call themselves Christians and claim the first Christians shared their beliefs, but each of these groups denies as least one of these five fundamental doctrines of Christianity:

  1. The Father is God.
  2. The Son is God.
  3. The Holy Spirit is God.
  4. There is one God.
  5. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons.

Christ’s divinity in the early Church

You won’t find many critics who deny the Father is God, so we can skip over point number one. (See the sidebar below for a defense of point three). But you’ll find plenty of religious and nonreligious critics who claim the first Christians did not think Jesus was God.

In The Da Vinci Code, the novel’s antagonist, a historian named Leigh Teabing, claims, “[T]he early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity” (p. 253, emphasis and capitalizations in the original). But the most prominent heresy in the first century wasn’t the claim that Jesus wasn’t fully divine but that he wasn’t fully human.

This came in the form of the Docetists, who claimed Jesus’ humanity was just a form or “costume” he put on for our benefit. In his Letter to the Smyrneans, St. Ignatius of Antioch curtly rebuffed the Docetists, saying of Jesus, “He suffered truly, even as also he truly raised up himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that he only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be [Christians].”

The first Christians rejected these heresies and affirmed that Jesus Christ was both fully God and fully man. In A.D. 110, Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Ephesians, “For our God, Jesus Christ, was, according to the appointment of God, conceived in the womb by Mary, of the seed of David, but by the Holy Ghost.” Thirty years later, the Christian writer Aristedes wrote, “God came down from heaven, and from a Hebrew virgin assumed and clothed himself with flesh.”

The first Christians also left evidence of their belief in the divinity of Christ through their interactions with non-Christians.

Pliny the Younger, the second-century governor of the Roman province of Bythinia, interrogated Christians who refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods. In a letter to Emperor Trajan, he observed that Christians “were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves to a solemn oath.”

Lucian of Samosata was a second-century playwright who thought Christians were gullible and ignorant fools. In his work The Passing of Peregrinnus, he says that Christians “have sinned by denying the Greek gods, and by worshiping that crucified sophist himself and living according to his laws.” Finally, a third-century drawing called the Alexamanos graffito shows a Roman soldier worshiping a crucified man with a donkey head. The drawing’s caption reads, “Alexamanos worships [his] God.”

Is Christ a lesser being?

In their booklet “Should you believe in the Trinity?”, Jehovah’s Witnesses claim that the early Church Fathers did not believe that Jesus was God. Even though the booklet is out of print, Witnesses occasionally cite these quotations, so let’s examine the three Church Fathers they most commonly cite.

Not according to Justin Martyr

The first is Justin Martyr (died A.D. 165), of whom the Witnesses say, “Justin calls the prehuman Jesus a created angel who is ‘other than the God who made all things.’—He said that Jesus was inferior to God and ‘never did anything except what the Creator . . . willed him to do and say.’”

But here is what Justin actually says in his Dialogue with Trypho:

I shall attempt to persuade you, since you have understood the Scriptures, [of the truth] of what I say, that there is, and that there is said to be, another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an angel, because he announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things—above whom there is no other God—wishes to announce to them (56).

As we will see with the other Fathers, Justin did not have the same trinitarian vocabulary that later Christians possessed, so we can expect his theological formulations to be imprecise. But there is still within those formulations a core set of beliefs that is incompatible with what the Witnesses teach.

For example, notice that Justin calls Jesus “God” even though earlier in the dialogue he says, “There will be no other God, O Trypho, nor was there from eternity any other existing, but he who made and disposed all this universe.”

Justin acknowledges that Jesus is God but without saying there are two Gods (one being “almighty” and the other being merely “mighty,” as Jehovah’s Witnesses claim about the Father and Jesus). Justin says Christ is an angel only because he functions like an angel in announcing good news. In fact, the word Greek word angelos can be translated either “angel” or “messenger.”

Finally, just because Jesus does only the Father’s will does not mean he isn’t God. It’s means only that he is the obedient Son of God who himself is “God.”

Not according to Clement

When it comes to Clement of Alexandria (died A.D. 215), the Witnesses say, “Clement of Alexandria called Jesus in his pre-human existence ‘a creature’ but called God ‘the uncreated and imperishable and only true God.’ He said that the Son ‘is next to the only omnipotent Father’ but not equal to him.”

The phrase “but not equal to him” is a comment by the pamphlet’s anonymous author; it is not in Clement’s writings. In fact, Clement says just the opposite: “He that is truly most manifest deity, he that is made equal to the Lord of the universe; because he was his Son, and the Word was in God” (Exhortation to the Heathen, 10).

Not according to Tertullian

Finally, the Witnesses quote Tertullian (died A.D. 220) as saying, “There was a time when the Son was not. . . . Before all things, God was alone.’”

What Tertullian means in this passage is that even though the Person we now call “the Son” is eternal, he did not always have the title of “Son” but became that when the Father sent him to create the world. Of course, Catholics now recognize this as a heresy, but we can acknowledge that Tertullian was correct when he said that the Son is God and not merely “a god.” He writes:

That there are two gods and two Lords, however, is a statement which we will never allow to issue from our mouth; not as if the Father and the Son were not God, nor the Spirit God, and each of them God; but formerly two were spoken of as gods and two as Lords, so that when Christ would come, he might both be acknowledged as God and be called Lord, because he is the Son of him who is both God and Lord” (Against Praxeas 13, emphasis added).

Monotheism in the early Church

Even people such as Muslims and Jews who deny the Trinity would wholeheartedly affirm point number four: there is only one God. The critics of the Trinity who are most likely to deny this point are Mormons, who believe in the existence of an infinite number of gods. They instead believe in a doctrine called eternal progression, which says the universe is eternal and there is a never-ending cycle of men becoming gods of their own worlds who then create men who become gods of their own worlds—and so on and so on (as the ’80s TV shampoo commercial went).

Joseph Smith, the self-proclaimed prophet and founder of Mormonism, said in his King Follett sermon, “God himself was once as we are now and is an exalted man and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! . . . You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you.”

But the first Christians denied categorically the existence of other gods as well as the idea that men could become gods.

St. Ignatius wrote in the early second century that the early Christians were persecuted because they “convince[d] the disobedient that there is one God, who manifested himself through his Son, Jesus Christ” (Letter to the Magnesians 8:1). The Shepherd of Hermas, written around the year A.D. 80, says, “Believe first of all that God is one, that he created all things and set them in order and brought out of nonexistence into existence everything that is, and that he contains all things while he himself is uncontained.”

Although the early Christians did not have to contend with Mormon missionaries at their doors, they did engage in debates with gnostic heretics who claimed that salvation was found in secret knowledge (Greek, gnosis) of God. They claimed matter was evil, the product of the evil and inferior god of the Old Testament and it should be avoided in favor of that which is spiritual and created by the true God of the New Testament.

But Christians rebuffed the idea there were two gods, one good and the other evil, as can be seen in the writings of St. Irenaus, who said of God, “By his own power he made all things and arranged and perfected them; and his will is the substance of all things. He alone, then, is found to be God; he alone is omnipotent, who made all things” (Against Heresies, 2.30.9).

Finally, renowned historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan says that the doctrine that men could become like God in holiness (what is called divinization in the West and theosis in the East) was, among people like Athanasius, “not to be viewed as analogous to classical Greek theories about the promotion of human beings to divine rank, and in that sense not to be defined by natural theology at all; on such errors they pronounced their ‘Anathema!’” (Christianity and Classical Culture, 318).

Trinitarianism in the early Church

Once on the Catholic Answers Live radio show I took a call for an episode called “Why Aren’t You a Christian?” Usually we speak to atheists, Jews, Muslims, and people who reject the divinity of Christ, but this caller affirmed that there is but one God and that Jesus is God: “For me, Jesus is everything; he’s the Lord, he’s God, and I’m a Christian, even if a lot of people say I’m not.”

Sounds Christian, right?

But he then talked about how Christians should baptize in the name of the Jesus and not in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

“Are you part of the Jesus-only movement?” I asked.

He replied, “I like to think I’m part of the Jesus-everything movement.”

This man sounded like a Christian, but he wasn’t. He was a member of the Oneness Pentecostal movement, which holds that there is only one God and that Jesus is God but which denies the Trinity.

Jesus told the apostles to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19), but Oneness Pentecostals believe that the “name” of God is Jesus. According to them, the terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not refer to three distinct Persons but to three roles God plays in our salvation.

Oneness Pentecostals like to say that their beliefs are apostolic and that trinitarian doctrine was a later corruption in the Church’s history. But even by the early second century, Justin Martyr was teaching that the Son and Father are distinct Persons. He cites Genesis 1:26 (“Let us make man in our image”) to show that “we can indisputably learn that [God] conversed with some one who was numerically distinct from himself, and also a rational being” (Dialogue with Trypho, 62).

Justin also declares, “He who is said to have appeared to Abraham, and to Jacob, and to Moses, and who is called God, is distinct from him who made all things—numerically, I mean, not [distinct] in will.”

Not only did the first Christians believe in the Trinity and not espouse Oneness theology, they explicitly rejected this kind of heresy.

In the third century, heretics such as Praxeas and Sabellius advocated a version of Oneness theology called modalism (though Praxeas later recanted of this heresy). Pope Dionysius and several regional councils condemned these men’s errors, and early Christian writers refuted their arguments. In the early fifth century, St. Augustine said that “he who is the Son is not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son” (Sermon, 2, 2).

You can’t make this up—but Dan Brown does

Those who claim the early Church was not Christian need a refresher (or an extended) course in history. In fact, one of my favorite whoppers in The Da Vinci Code occurs when Teabing claims, “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.” Another character responds, “Hold on. You’re saying that Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?” “A relatively close one at that,” Teabing replies (p. 306).

But according to Bart Ehrman, a former Christian and acknowledged expert on the New Testament, “There certainly was no vote to determine Jesus’ divinity: this was already a matter of common knowledge among Christians and had been from the early years of the religion” (Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, 15).

At Nicaea, the bishops were voting on how Jesus’ divinity should be understood and expressed, not on whether he was divine at all. They asked, “Was Jesus equal in divinity with the Father or just similar in divinity to the Father?” The result of the final vote yielded 316 bishops in favor of the view that Jesus is equal in divinity with the Father and none in favor with the view that he is similar, and two abstained from voting.

So, the vote at Nicaea was indeed “relatively close”—close to being a unanimous affirmation of the orthodox Catholic faith.

Sidebar: Is the Holy Spirit God?

Many people think the Holy Spirit is just some kind of force, but the Bible describes the Spirit speaking in sentences to people, proving he is a person (Acts 13:2). The apostle Peter shows us that the Holy Spirit is God when he asks Ananias, who lied and held back money due to the apostles, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? . . . You have not lied to men but to God” (Acts 5:3-4).

The first Christians also affirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit, as is evident in St. Clement of Alexandria’s teaching about “the light of the Divine Spirit . . . by which alone we contemplate the Divine, the Holy Spirit flowing down to us from above” (The Paedagogus, 1.6). Tertullian likewise said, “From that perfect knowledge which assures us that the title of God and Lord is suitable both to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost” (Against Praxeas, 8).

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