Today we begin to look at the second century. We’ll start by considering Jewish Christian movements, including the Nazarenes and the Ebionites. Next we’ll shift gears and explore the cultural pressure of asceticism and how it began infiltrating Christianity. We’ll briefly survey the influence of Marcion and his followers before sketching out the various christologies of second century. This episode is a hodgepodge of unrelated topics that overlap in the same time period. This will serve as a good introduction before we get into other topics in the second century.
Patricia Crone: “Originally, the bastion of law-observing Christianity was the Jerusalem church, the undisputed center of Christianity until the first Jewish war with Rome (AD 66–70). When this war broke out, the Jerusalem Christians reportedly fled to Pella (Ar. Fiḥl) in the Decapolis in Transjordan, and though some returned to the devastated city in 70, they were expelled again after the suppression of Bar Kokhba’s revolt in 135, when Hadrian forbade Jews to reside in Jerusalem. Thereafter, Jewish Christians were concentrated in the Aleppo region in northern Syria, in the Decapolis around Pella…and in the Dead Sea region, as we know from Epiphanius (d. 403) and Jerome (d. 420). They would seem also to have been present in the Golan, where excavators of an abandoned village have found lintels decorated with a combination of crosses, menorahs, and other mixed Jewish and Christian symbols, probably indicating that the building was a Jewish Christian synagogue. After Epiphanius and Jerome, however, we have no certain evidence for the existence of Jewish Christians in Greek, Latin, or Syriac sources written before the rise of Islam.”[1]
For Nazarenes see Epiphanius, Panarion 29.7.1-6; 29.9.2-4
For Ebionites see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.27.1-6
Asceticism
ἄσκησις, askesis = exercise, training
asceticism is the rigorous pursuit of discipline in avoiding bodily pleasures
Examples
Acts of Paul and Thecla
Proto-Gospel of James
Acts of John
Marcion of Sinope
Lived from 85 to 164
Founded his own churches
God of the OT is not the God of the NT
Docetism: Jesus only appeared human
Canon: list of books in the Bible
Gnostics
believed in pre-creation myth
they were Platonists who accepted his creation account, called Timaeus
Valentinus
streamlined Gnostic religion and brought Jesus to a more central role
followers attended mainstream churches on Sunday, but then studied “deeper truths” during the week
