Early Church Quotes

“The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money.”
― Timothy Keller

“No one can have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”
― Saint Cyprian of Carthage, The Complete Works of Saint Cyprian of Carthage

“No wild beasts are so deadly to humans as most Christians are to each other.”
― Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire

“Then it kissed me—not as a man would kiss a lover, not with tenderness or even passion. This was a kiss that stole the soul of men. Revulsion at this creature’s kiss was instantly replaced by the warmth stealing through my veins, as if my missing blood were being replenished and contrived to heal me. I craved to keep kissing the beast. My entire being awakened to that kiss feeding me ecstasy, feeding me life.”
― Barbara T. Cerny, The Tiefling: Angel Kissed, Devil Touched

“The black of the ocean waves was the color of the sorrow in my breast, a sorrow that was never far away and always visible.”
― Barbara T. Cerny

“I was once a man, not a great man, not a saintly man, but a good man, and a man nonetheless.”
― Barbara T. Cerny, The Tiefling: Angel Kissed, Devil Touched

“My life was going exactly where I wanted it to until the Devil showed up.”
― Barbara T. Cerny, The Tiefling: Angel Kissed, Devil Touched

“Iona stared at me for a long time. “You are going to leave me a widow before I have a chance to become a bride.”
― Barbara T. Cerny, The Tiefling: Angel Kissed, Devil Touched

“God himself had sent me away. I was truly now among the damned.”
― Barbara T. Cerny, The Tiefling: Angel Kissed, Devil Touched

“One of the things that happened when the church moved from meetings in homes to having purpose-built buildings beginning before, but accelerated during, the Constantinian era, is that while the church itself was becoming less Jewish in character, it began to apply a more and more Old Testament hermeneutic to its discussions about church, ministry, and sacraments. The church began to be seen as a temple or basilica, the Lord’s Supper began to be seen as a sacrifice, and naturally enough the ones offering the sacrifices, just as in Leviticus, were seen to be priests. There was the further move in this direction when Sunday began to be seen as the Sabbath, another example of this same sort of hermeneutic. There were considerable problems with this whole hermeneutic from the start, since nowhere in the New Testament is there set up a class of priests or clerics to administer any sacraments. Indeed, nowhere was there a clear separation between life in the home and life in church. What has often been missed in the discussions of the effects of all this is that it ruled women out of ministry in the larger church and indeed ruled them out of celebrating the Lord’s Supper as well, since in the Old Testament only males were priests and only priests could offer sacrifices.”
― Ben Witherington III, Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper

“I did not choose to be a monster—a shell of a man—half-human, half-fiend. I am a tiefling. I am what I am.”
― Barbara T. Cerny, The Tiefling: Angel Kissed, Devil Touched

“The early Church was birthed and sustained in almost constant persecution and pressures”
― Greg Gordon

“There is a content {to Christianity}, and the Early Church had that content.”
― Larry D. Harper, The Way, The Truth, The Life

“Sometimes silences are pregnant and sometimes not. It is hard to know what to make of the silence of much of the New Testament about the Lord’s Supper. Perhaps it is simply an accident of time and circumstance. There was not a felt need to address the matter. What we should not likely conclude is that it was not seen as an important matter in the latter part of the first century A.D. What we can observe is that the Lord’s Supper continued to be an in-home ceremony taken in the context of a fellowship meal. We also now know it was important in both Gentile and Jewish contexts in the church in the second half of the first century, and beyond. We see no evidence anywhere in this material that clerics of any kind are in charge of the meal and its distribution. Even in the Didache, prophets, who were mouthpieces for God, are only allowed to say the thanksgiving prayer as often as they like. The low ecclesiology, coupled with the ever-present eschatology, suggest that the Didache does indeed go back to the end of the first century A.D. But one precedent in the Didache does stand out: the Lord’s Supper is for baptized Christians, and in particular for those who repent of their sins. We are on the way to the church of the Middle Ages in some respects, but we have not begun to localize or confine grace to the elements of the Lord’s Supper itself and then have it controlled by clerics.”
― Ben Witherington III, Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper

“Nowhere among the early Christians do we find the cold
light of intellectual understanding that constantly analyzes and
differentiates. Instead, there was the Spirit that burned within
their hearts and made their souls alive. (Col. 2:8–10)”
― Eberhard Arnold

“But the work which most richly embroidered the gospel narratives and was destined to exert a tremendous influence on later Mariology was the Protoevangelium of James. Written for Mary's glorification, this described her divinely ordered birth when her parents, Joachim and Anna, were advanced in years, her miraculous infancy and childhood, and her dedication to the Temple, where her parents had prayed that God would give her 'a name renowned for ever among all generations'. It made the point that when she was engaged to Joseph he was already an elderly widower with sons of his own; and it accumulated evidence both that she had conceived Jesus without sexual intercourse and that her physical nature had remained intact when she bore Him.

These ideas were far from being immediately accepted in the Church at large. Iranaeus, it is true, held that Mary's childbearing was exempt from physical travail, as did Clement of Alexandria (appealing to the Protoevangelium of James). Tertullian, however, repudiated the suggestion, finding the opening of her womb prophesied in Exodus 13, 2, and Origen followed him and argued that she had needed the purification prescribed by the Law. On the other hand, while Tertullian assumed that she had had normal conjugal relations with Joseph after Jesus's birth, the 'brethren of the Lord' being his true brothers, Origen maintained that she had remained a virgin for the rest of her life('virginity post partum') and that Jesus's so-called brothers were sons of Joseph but not by her...In contrast to the later belief in her moral and spiritual perfection, none of these theologians had the least scruple about attributing faults to her. Irenaeus and Tertullian recalled occasions on which, as they read the gospel stories, she had earned her Son's rebuke, and Origen insisted that, like all human beings, she needed redemption from her sins; ...”
― J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines

“The early church didn't experience explosive growth in the face of relentless persecution for believing the resurrection was a metaphor.”
― David D. Flowers

“The church the Bible described is exciting and adventurous and wrought with sacrifice. It cost believers everything, and they still came.”
― Jen Hatmaker, 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

“In Acts, every believer was living in a direct relationship with Him (Christ) and each one functioned normally as a member of His body in oneness with all believers.”
― Henry Hon, ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House

“What if there was something so controversial about the life of Jesus that the early Roman Catholic Church would not want to make this information available to the public?”
― Laurence Galian, Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!

“The early church had much more than a collection of social practices upon which they did not reflect carefully. The early church ethics were formed in the context of a Judaism that had thought long and hard about its ethic based on Mosaic law, over against the practices of surrounding cultures. The early church's ethics were a further reflection on how that long history of Jewish ethics had to be rethought in light of Jesus Christ. Rethinking the faith involved an interpretation of authoritative Scripture and a continued use of the Law in ethical matters.”
― Rollin G. Grams & S. Donald Fortson III