Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity

by Kirsopp Lake

Nothing illustrates this so well as the history of Christianity, for no religion is so well-known. The facts are plainly visible, and would be plainly seen by all, were it not for the general tendency of ecclesiastical scholarship to consult the records of the past only to find the reflection of its own features. The general condition of religion in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era was one of far advanced disintegration and rapid synthesis. In every district there could be found the remains of old local religions, which retained the loyalty of the conservative, but no longer aroused any vital response in the emotions of the multitudes or in the interest of the educated. At that time, and for many generations afterward, the Roman landowners, to take one example, maintained the ceremonies and customs of an agricultural animism which for their ancestors had been a living religion, but for them had become aesthetic, conventional, and superstitious, -an appendage to life, not its driving force. Those who wish can read a description of it, written with a sympathy possible only for one who felt the analogy of his own experience, in the pages of Marius the Epicurean, in which Walter Pater, by a wonderful tour de force, wove an exact and scholarly knowledge of the original documents into such a web of artistic English that the deep learning of the book cannot be appreciated except by those who have some small share in it themselves. Over these local religions had been thrown throughout the Empire the covering fabric of Greek mythology. It had lost much of its power; it was no longer sincerely believed; it was in every respect decadent; but it still played its part in unifying, and to some extent civilising, the diverse races of the Empire. But more important than the Greek mythology was the Greek philosophy, which was indeed in many ways its antidote. If the mythology of Greece appeared to sanction an infinite number of gods and goddesses, her philosophers taught with equal persuasiveness that the divine reality is one, though its forms be many. A remarkable synthesis was thus gradually accomplished, though it will always be a question whether the stronger tendency was to philosophise mythology or to mythologise philosophy.

Genres: Christianity

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

Kirsopp Lake (7 April 1872 – 10 November 1946) was a New Testament scholar and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School. He had an uncommon breadth of interests, publishing definitive monographs in New Testament textual criticism, Greek palaeography, theology, and archaeology. He is probably best known for the massive five-volume work The Beginnings of Christianity—an edition, translation, commentary, and study of the Acts of Apostles—that he conceived and edited with F. J. Foakes-Jackson.

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book based on a series of lectures tells the story of the early Christians in five cities--Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome. Most of the book is about the development of Christology in the early church. Lake falls in line with a number of more secular-type scholars (not that he was a secularist) in pushing forward the theory that Jesus himself never identified himself as the son of God or the Messiah. This was, according to Kirsopp, a later development. Instead, Jesus was mostly a preacher in the tradition of John the Baptist, one who preached repentance and most important about the soon-coming Kingdom of God. The church then made his message about himself.

Lake believes this largely happened as Jewish Christianity came into contact with the Hellenist project. The hellenization of Christianity, in other words, turned Jesus divine. It did this through the intermixture of the faith with the mystery religions of ancient Greece. Many scholars believe such religions weren't really a thing until the late first or early second century, but Lake thinks of them as quite well developed with their man becoming a God and their promise of immortal life via one's soul wafting off after death. I'm inclined, after reading a few other books about the Artemis cult, to think that mystery religions were already a thing by the first century and well before that, though they did change with time. In this sense, the parallels that Lake draws up are intriguing.

In his final chapter, he turns to Ephesus and Rome. The former he sees as taking an adoptionist view of Jesus's divinity, one backed up by a reading of the Shepherd of Hermas. By contrast, Ephesus had a high view of Jesus's divinity, as a preexistent being, as seen in the Fourth Gospel. These two views, he contends, merged to forge the trinity a couple centuries later, largely through the efforts of Origen of Alexandria.

He makes some good arguments, though the simplicity and lack of depth with which he takes such big stands--he does after all accomplish all this in just one hundred pages--belies the fact that many of the ideas are actually not as sound as they sound.

[Richard Worden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heard about this author many years ago and reading this book was a pleasure. It adds to my awareness of Early Christian history.