Early Christianity – Introduction

Introduction – The Didache – Saint Clement of Rome – Saint Ignatius of Antioch – Saint Polycarp of Smyrna – The Epistle of Barnabas – Fragments of Papias – The Shepherd of Hermas – The Epistle to Diognetus – Saint Justin Martyr – Saint Irenaeus of Lyon – Tertullian – Saint Cyprian of Carthage

In 1845 John Henry Newman was received into the Catholic Church after a long process of conversion. Having been an Anglican priest for twenty years, he held, in accordance with Protestant theology, that the Catholic Church was a perversion of Christ’s Church, which had departed from the Gospel by adding merely human doctrines to those revealed by God. As a leading member of the Oxford Movement, a High Church Anglican movement that sought to recover its most ancient traditions, he began an in-depth study of the early Church and the Church Fathers. It led him to conclude that Anglicanism was in fact in the same position as the heresies of the first centuries, opposing the Church of Christ.

In the year 2000 Alex Jones was received into the Catholic Church along with part of the congregation he had led as a Pentecostal pastor. During his influential forty-year ministry as a pastor, he could hardly have been further from Catholicism. Like many contemporary evangelicals, he taught that the Catholic Church was a sect, the “whore of Babylon,” and that the Pope was the “Antichrist.” Yet, seeking to innovate, he proposed that his congregation experience a first-century religious service; to do so, he began to study the early Church directly from the primary sources: the patristic texts themselves. As his research progressed, he incorporated doctrines and practices that could only be described as Catholic. This alarmed members of his congregation, who accused him of being contaminated by “Catholicism.” Although he replied that he intended only to incorporate doctrines and practices present in early Christianity, he eventually accepted his movement toward the Catholic Church and concluded that Catholicism contained the fullness of Christianity.

These two conversions, separated by almost two centuries, are far from exceptional. J. H. Newman was not the only member of the Oxford Movement to embrace the Catholic faith. Other notable converts of the period include Robert Hugh Benson, Henry Edward Manning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Chapman OSB, Thomas William Allies, Augusta Theodosia Drane, Frederick William Faber, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Robert Stephen Hawker, James Hope-Scott, George Jackson Mivart, Henry Nutcombe Oxenham, Augustus Pugin, Edward Caswall and William George Ward.

Likewise, in our own day, alongside Pastor Alex Jones, there have been many celebrated conversions to Catholicism: Graham Leonard, Michel Viot, Scott Hahn, Jimmy Akin, Marcus Grodi, Ulf Ekman, Fernando Casanova and Dave Armstrong, among others.

In all these cases, a key factor in conversion was discovering through the study of the early Church that the Catholic faith contains the fullness of Christian faith and that, rather than being a transforming evolution of the doctrines of the Gospel, it is their homogeneous development: just as a seed becomes a tree while remaining the same thing.

But what can there be in the earliest Christian texts that, when discovered by so many Christians of other denominations, leads them to the Catholic faith?

If the Catholic Church were truly the result of a corruption that began in the fourth century, when Catholic religion became the official religion of the Roman Empire — the hypothesis accepted in Protestantism — what might be found in the texts of the first centuries that identifies early Christianity with Catholicism today?

This series of articles, entitled Early Catholicism, will follow the same path as these notable converts, beginning with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, those who had direct contact with the Apostles, and continuing to the Church Fathers of the first centuries. Special attention will be given to texts describing controversial doctrines that modern Protestants reject in the Catholic Church, in order to determine whether they represent a genuine development of Christian doctrine.