Introduction

1845 was the year John Henry Newman was received into the Catholic Church, following a long process of conversion. Having served for twenty years as a clergyman in the Anglican Church, he had maintained, in keeping with Protestant tradition, that the Catholic Church was a perversion of the Church of Christ — one that had departed from the Gospel by adding purely human doctrines to those revealed by God. As a prominent member of the Oxford Movement, the High Church Anglican affiliation that sought to recover its most ancient traditions, he undertook a deep study of the primitive Church and the Church Fathers, which led him to question those conclusions, and ultimately to admit that Anglicanism found itself in the same position as the heresies of the early centuries: in opposition to the Church of Christ.

The year 2000 was when Alex Jones was received into the Catholic Church, along with part of the congregation he had led as a Pentecostal pastor. Throughout his influential forty-year ministry as a pastor, he could not have been further from Catholicism. Like many of his evangelical contemporaries, he taught that the Catholic Church was the “Whore of Babylon” and the Pope the “Antichrist.” Yet in an attempt to innovate, he proposed to his congregation that they experience a worship service as the first Christian communities had celebrated in the first century. To that end, he began studying the primitive Church directly from primary sources: the patristic texts themselves. As his research progressed, he incorporated doctrines and practices that could only be described as Catholic — something that alarmed certain members of his congregation, who accused him of having been contaminated by “Catholicism.” Though he initially attempted to defend himself by arguing that his intention was merely to incorporate doctrines and practices present in earliest Christianity, he eventually came to understand that his studies had led him toward the Catholic Church, and concluded that Catholicism contained within itself the fullness of Christianity.

These two conversions, separated by nearly two centuries, were by no means exceptional. J. H. Newman was not the only member of the Oxford Movement to end up embracing the Catholic faith. Among other notable converts of that era one may mention Robert Hugh Benson (son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Anglican priest, who after his conversion was ordained a Catholic priest), Henry Edward Manning (who, like J. H. Newman, became a Cardinal of the Catholic Church), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Jesuit priest and renowned poet), John Chapman OSB (Benedictine Catholic priest), Thomas William Allies (Church historian), Augusta Theodosia Drane (Dominican religious), Frederick William Faber (Catholic priest), Lady Georgiana Fullerton (English novelist), Robert Stephen Hawker (deathbed convert to Catholicism), James Hope-Scott (English lawyer), George Jackson Mivart (English biologist), Henry Nutcombe Oxenham (Catholic historian), Augustus Pugin (English architect), Edward Caswall (religious composer), and William George Ward (English theologian and mathematician).

Likewise, in more recent times alongside Pastor Alex Jones, there have been countless celebrated conversions to Catholicism. Well known are the cases of Graham Leonard (Anglican bishop), Michel Viot (French Lutheran bishop), Scott Hahn (evangelical pastor), Jimmy Akin (evangelical pastor), Marcus Grodi (evangelical pastor), Ulf Ekman (who was the most influential Lutheran pastor in Sweden), and Dave Armstrong (now a recognized apologist). Here in Latin America, the case of evangelical pastor Fernando Casanova is well known.

In many of these cases, a key factor in their conversion was the discovery, through the study of the primitive Church, of how the Catholic faith had contained throughout history the fullness of the Christian faith.

But — what is it in the primitive Christian texts that, upon being discovered by so many Christian brethren from other denominations, leads them to the Catholic faith?

In the present book, titled “Early Christianity,” I will attempt to make the same journey as all these notable converts, beginning with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers — those who had direct contact with the Apostles — and continuing through to the Church Fathers of the early centuries. Special attention will be given to those texts that describe controversial doctrines which modern Protestants today reject in the Catholic Church, so as to discern whether they represent a genuine development of Christian doctrine.