The early church included believers from many different backgrounds (e.g., Hebrews, Hellenists, Gentiles, and Proselytes). How did this affect the development of early Christian beliefs and practices? 

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<p>The early church included believers from many different backgrounds (e.g., Hebrews, Hellenists, Gentiles, and Proselytes). How did this affect the development of early Christian beliefs and practices? </p>

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Acts and Early Christian Origins

Cedric Vine

01 The Genre and Plot of Acts

Well, good afternoon everyone, and it's my absolute privilege to have these sessions with you, and thank you Pastor Bryce for introducing me.

And I know you're all looking forward to the next session, but we're going to have 1 hour on Acts, if we may.

So yeah, it's my privilege to be with you and to share with you a series on Acts, and we are going to look at this for a number of reasons.

This isn't a sermon I'm going to share with you, it's a seminar.

And we're looking at Acts because whenever we read Scripture, we are blessed.

So we're just going to spend time focusing on 1 book and to dig a little deeper and see what we can get out of it.

There's a number of reasons I want to read Acts with you.

We need to know about Acts because it gives us a model of early Christianity.

It tells us what early Christianity was like as it grew and as it increased in its diversity.

And we as a global church, as we spread and grow, we are facing the same issues that the early church faced.

So there are a number of reasons I want us to go through Acts.

Ella White, Sister White, she says this in Gospel Workers, page 313.

She says, the subjects that Jesus regarded as essential are the subjects that we are to urge home today.

And simply she is stating that our goal as Adventists is to preach the same truths that Jesus preached.

Now, how do we know what those truths are when Jesus never wrote a book?

So how do we actually know what Jesus regarded as essential?

Well, the way we find out is by turning to our New Testament where we have His early followers and their accounts of what He said and what He did.

And so this is where I would suggest to you that we as an Adventist movement are a restorationist movement where we're going back to Jesus to rediscover and to recover some of the truths that He shared.

That is our goal as Adventists, to lift up Jesus and to lift up His deeds and His words.

Now, as you heard from my little biography there shared by Pastor Bryce, and as you figured, my accent is not from California, although I do know how to say the word whatever, but not quite so well.

So you've picked up that actually I'm not a citizen of the US, although we're actually going through our green card application and ISIL will be thrilled when that comes through.

But back in the UK, we are maybe a little further down the road than we are here in the States, the road to secular nirvana, although it's not turning out to be quite the nirvana that we had anticipated.

And back in the UK, and I think it's exactly the same here, we are facing a secular narrative which is deconstructing Christianity.

And this is 1 of the reasons why I want to share Acts with you this week, is to provide you an alternative to the secular narrative of Christianity.

Acts, I would suggest, is within the New Testament as we move into a secular age, and let's pray that the Lord can pull us back out of that, is maybe 1 of the most important texts in the New Testament for us to study.

And here is the rationale for this assertion that I've just shared with you.

So normally when we read the New Testament, we just open it up and we read it as a collection of books.

And we wonder, well, why have we got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

And then we've got Acts and Romans follow on.

And then that's how I was taught to remember them.

And then we've got a couple of those Pauline books, which we can never work out the order.

Galatians and Philippines and Colossians are always muddled up each time you look at them and it's always hard to work out which order they're in.

And then we've got things like 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy.

And the question is, is why have we got them in this order?

Why is 1 Corinthians before 2 Corinthians?

And maybe 1 answer is that the longer ones come first.

So 1 Corinthians is longer than 2 Corinthians.

1 Thessalonians is longer than 2 Thessalonians.

Matthew is longer than Mark, it comes before him.

Once the early church had got Matthew, well, we've got everything in Mark in there, we can just plow along with Matthew.

So we often just open a New Testament and give very little thought for how it has been put together.

I would suggest to you 1 way of reading it is to step back and to read it in terms of the sequence in which it was written.

Now, we can do this with Paul's letters maybe better than we can with the rest of the New Testament.

Paul gives us many, many indications as to when he was writing, for whom he was writing, and we can reconstruct the life of Paul almost better than anyone else in antiquity.

We have a huge amount of things that he both wrote and also testimonies about him from other people.

So we can do that with Paul's letters, written around about the 50s to the 60s, maybe mid-60s.

With the Gospels, the honest truth is that we guess when they were written.

Most scholars think they were written round about the 60s and 70s, but many of those assumptions behind that are actually sort of assumptions which we as Christians wouldn't hold.

So it's hard to date these, but then we've got other books like John and Revelation, Hebrews, where when we read these we find that the churches are very mature.

Ephesus in Revelation has lost its first love.

This is a mature church and we know that books like this are written later, maybe in the 70s, 80s.

And so we can reconstruct the order of the New Testament in how they were written.

And that helps us to see how we as Adventists believe in the idea of progressive revealed truth.

We can see that God was revealing through His Holy Spirit, He was revealing truths to the early Christian community, and this is what we have in our New Testament.

So it's a slightly different way of reading the New Testament.

Now what secular critics do, they come along and they say, your New Testament, you read it at face value, ah, but how naive.

There's actually another way, a back story that actually tells us what the New Testament, how it actually came into being.

And this is a deeply destructive narrative that's being pushed if you are a person of faith.

Well, we would read the Gospels and say, that gives you a good idea of who Jesus was.

The secular narrative would be something like this.

Jesus was either just a rabbi or a preacher, maybe a prophet who walked around the dusty roads of Judea preaching, maybe social liberalism, economic reform, and he was just a man, nothing else.

That would be the secular answer to the question, who was Jesus?

If we look at another question, well what caused his death?

We know our answer as believers, he gave his life for us.

If you're a secular person who doesn't believe that, the answer would be, well, maybe Jesus came along and annoyed the authorities in some way.

He was a threat to their power base, and as a result, they took him out.

He was a social campaigner of whatever hue you want to paint him.

What about the question about his resurrection?

Well we proclaim the great deeds of the Lord and 1 of Yahweh, and 1 of these is that he has raised Jesus his son.

The secular response would be, Jesus died and that was it.

And then 1 day His followers gathered together, maybe to share their photo albums and reminisce, and maybe they had eaten something that day that didn't quite agree with them, or they were smoking stuff which they shouldn't have been smoking, whatever it was, they were going through this process and suddenly they imagined that the Lord was with them, and they saw Him in vision.

That's the secular explanation of Christianity.

No physical resurrection of Jesus, rather it was all in the imagination of the early disciples.

Well then 1 final question, How did he become a god if he was just a prophet or a rabbi?

Well, the guilty person for that is Paul.

Paul, who is used to mixing with pagans, he's picked up some pagan ideas, and if you study Greek and Roman sources, you'll know that they believed that great men, usually men, sometimes women, when they died they would become gods.

Julius Caesar, when he died at his funeral, they saw a shooting star and they came to the conclusion that he had become a God.

Well, Paul, maybe he had been exposed himself a little too much to his Greek neighbors and his Roman neighbors.

He is the 1, naughty little boy Paul, who brings these outside ideas into Christianity and turns Jesus the prophet into Jesus the God.

That is the secular explanation of Christianity.

And they take that narrative that I've just explained and they read the whole of the rest of the New Testament.

You no longer take it at face value, but we have a secular back story that really gives us the true origins of Christianity.

That's the narrative that is out there in the world today, in our Western world, which is really the dominant narrative trying to deconstruct traditional Christian origins.

I would suggest to you this afternoon that we have an alternative, and that within the New Testament we have an alternative to that secular backstory of early Christianity.

Acts provides us with a backstory against which we can read the rest of the New Testament.

02 Diversity and Unity in the early Church

Thank you, Pastor Bryce, for that lovely introduction.

Well, good afternoon everyone, and I thank you for being with us today, and our purpose today is to carry on what we were doing yesterday.

You'll see that I've randomised my colleagues' lives by rearranging the furniture here.

And that's because I always like to be a little bit of a pain.

And this is simply so I can see my notes.

And I'm not the tallest gentleman around.

So it sort of gives me the illusion in my own psyche I've actually got a bit of height to myself Well, let's turn to our topic today.

We are looking at Acts in our seminars together and I'm essentially giving you an overview.

We're going to be moving today through Acts and looking at the different sections, so that by the end of it you will have a good understanding of sort of an overview of what Acts is about.

Yesterday we saw that Luke, he is writing with the conviction, the gospel, that we need a life of Jesus in order to have something to imitate, and compare what he writes with the Greco-Roman lives, and you will see how much better Jesus is as a template to model your lives upon.

And then we also saw how in the preface to Luke, how Luke starts with this very technical introduction, and that gives us insight as to what he views the purpose of his writings for.

This is literature to take you from being new Christians who've heard the Christian truths to being mature Christians who really understand well what the faith is that you have entered.

And then we looked at Passover, and maybe we spent a little too little time on that.

Passover is 50 days after, sorry, Pentecost is 50 days after Passover.

Passover is when the Hebrew slaves were liberated from Egypt.

50 days later Moses gave the law, and at the same time we had that apostasy.

We had the apostasy of Aaron with the golden calf, but Luke is telling us that there is a new story, and it's the story that Jesus died at Passover.

It raises the question, what kingdom is He liberating us from?

It's not from the Egyptians, but it's from another kingdom He is liberating us from.

50 days later, we have Pentecost, where the Jews were celebrating the giving of the law, but this time we have the giving of the Holy Spirit.

And just as God guided the Hebrews through the wilderness, through a pillar of fire, now we have these little pillars of fire over each head of those involved.

And instead of 3, 000 being killed at the apostasy, we have 3, 000 being baptized.

So this is really a replay of the Exodus story, and that's how Luke starts his gospel.

In Exodus we are going to 1 destination to Canaan, the promised land, but when we read Acts we are spreading out, and this is why we don't have just 1 pillar of cloud, But we have lots of pillars of cloud is that this is a movement out from Jerusalem And it is spreading the presence of God and Luke has all these statements about the Word of God increasing This is God acting even though we read so much about Peter and Paul and Stephen and Philip and all these characters, at the end of the day this is a narrative about God, and we always need to remember that.

Today I would like us to go through Acts in a little more detail, and as we go through I'm going to be paying a special interest to the types of Christians who enter the church, the diversity.

I want you to get an appreciation of how diverse early Christianity was.

Now, at the end of this seminar, we might just be overwhelmed, wow!

But I can tell you that's the nature of our church today, our Seventh-day Adventist church.

And it raises the question, as the church grew in acts, as we read Luke's story and it's growing not just numerically and geographically, but it's also growing in terms of its diversity, how do you keep that church together?

And tomorrow we will be edging into that discussion.

How is it, Luke, when you've got people who are so different in the church that you can keep them all under 1 umbrella?

But let's tell the story of the growth of the church in acts.

And it's a positive story I'm going to share with you this afternoon.

It's a story where as the church grows, the church encounters difficulties.

Nevertheless, we get positive growth, and this is a story for optimists.

It's a story for those who see the glass half full rather than half empty.

And I always like to turn to Luke and let him whisper in my ear to have faith and to have hope, and that God is in charge even when the church faces problems, He's in charge.

That's the narrative I'm sharing with you this afternoon.

So let's start by looking at Acts chapter 1 and I'm going to whiz through a selection of verses and then I will simply paraphrase the rest of the contents of the material around it, just so that you get an idea of what's going on.

Now I know that Pastor Bryce, he is a pastor and he's ordained and his Prayers count for a lot, but would you mind if I have a little prayer just for myself as I open God's Word?

Dear Heavenly Father, we long for direction, we long to experience the same things that we read about in Your Word.

And Lord, as we open Luke's account of early Christian origins, may it inspire us.

Give me the words to share, Lord, and may this be a blessing to your people, I pray in your name.

Okay, so we are looking at the diversity and growth of the church and the nature of this growth.

I'm going to give you an overview of Acts looking at the different socioeconomic groups, and in plain English that means the different types of people that were in the church, nothing too complex.

So the church starts off in chapter 1, if you've got Acts with me, turn to chapter 1 and there we have in verse 12, we have the description of the first members of what we might call the church, bearing in mind it wasn't called a church at the time.

These were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah.

They were Jews and they never stopped being Jews.

Verse 12 we read, then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey away.

When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying.

Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas son of James.

All of these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer together with certain women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.

And then you'll remember the story how Peter stands up and he deals with the first issue the church has to deal with, which is to replace Judas.

Judas had betrayed Jesus, and you will never find a time in Christian history when there was a perfect church.

And yet that's the first thing they do, they replace Judas with Matthias.

And the qualification for choosing Matthias we find in verse 21.

This was the key qualification, we need to choose 1 of the men who have accompanied us during all the time from that the Lord Jesus went in and out amongst us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when He was taken up from us, 1 of these must become a witness with us to His resurrection." So in short, what do we have?

We have a small group that's made up of the family of Jesus, Mary.

Now that's a wonderful story I don't have time to go into today, because we know from reading the John and from the other Gospels, especially John, that his own brothers rejected him.

And yet Jesus sought them out after his resurrection, he cared about his family, he went and met with them and now they are followers of him.

And we have people like James, the epistle of James is written by his brother.

We have the brothers of Jesus who change sides instead of being skeptical about Him, they turn and become His followers.

We have the 11 plus Matthias, and these are designated as witnesses.

They are Aramaic speaking Palestinian Jews.

So that simply means that their mother tongue is Aramaic.

When they go to church, they hear the Hebrew Old Testament read, but they may not understand it very well.

And so they then have a plain targum, as we call them, a plain Aramaic version would have been read, which was the Old Testament plus a bit of commentary.

And Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic as his mother tongue.

So these are Aramaic Palestinian Jews, and later in Acts they are given the title Hebrews.

And they are the 12 and the family, we find there's a hundred and 20 of them, and these are the ones who saw and heard Jesus in his ministry.

Now, we need to appreciate the importance of this group.

These are the ones in the early church who if you came up with theories about what Jesus said and did, they would come along and say, uh-uh, that's not the case.

It's very important that we take on board the important social function of these Hebrews.

These are the guarantors of the traditions that we have in the New Testament, that they actually relate to the historical Jesus.

I mean, just to give you an analogy, think about Sister White.

And if you had come along in the 20s and proclaimed that Ellen White said this, this, and this, and you made it up.

03 Keeping the two Big Beasts Together

Thank you very much, Pastor Bryce, for that nice introduction.

Good morning, everyone, or afternoon even.

I should just fill you in that at the moment.

I'm doing a full morning teaching every day at the seminary, so when I come here this is really my afternoon off.

So it's a pleasure to be with you all, and hello Michigan!

Well this afternoon we are carrying on our series in Acts.

And so far we have seen what the purpose of Acts is.

Luke gives us a biography of Jesus, a life to imitate, and when we come to Acts we find that there is a plan to the story, it's not just all random events.

We find that Jesus tells the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and then they are to take His name, guided by the Holy Spirit, from Jerusalem to Judea, Samaria, and then to the ends of the world.

And we've seen how that shapes the material of Acts.

It's a spreading movement out from Jerusalem.

We also saw in chapter 9 how Paul also had an agenda for his life.

Ananias was told through the Lord to tell him that Paul was going to take his testimony to the Gentiles, to the Jews, and then finally to the Kings.

And this is what we find is that when he does his missionary journeys, he usually goes into a town and first of all he hits the synagogue, and then after that he interfaces with the Gentiles and in the last third of Acts, nothing of the sort there he is before 1 ruler after another Felix, Festus, all these guys and then finally he's going to Rome where he's going to meet the head Honcho himself, the Emperor.

And this is the overview of Acts that we have looked at over the last 2 days.

Now, today I would like to take us 1 step further, and my title is, keeping the 2 big beasts together.

And please forgive me, I'm appalling at coming up with titles.

I can't come up with catchy titles to save my life.

But at least it gives you some idea of what we're going to look at today.

When we read the Gospel Acts, we find that overall there are 2 main characters.

And the topic we are looking at today is how we can keep these together in the same church.

It is so easy when we look at the church to look at differences and emphasize these.

We saw yesterday that the church is full of differences.

We have the Hebrews in Jerusalem, the Hellenist Jews, We have the proselytes, the God-fearers, the Samaritans, the Ethiopians, the Romans, we have the elite, we have lower members of society, we have members of the sect of the Pharisees, imagine that you can be a Pharisee and a follower of Jesus and still get onto the church board in Acts 15.

We have thousands zealous for the law in chapter 21 in Jerusalem.

It is a highly complex, highly diverse church.

And the question I have as I read Acts is this, and this is a question that we can apply to our own days.

What keeps such a diverse church together?

And this is the subject we're looking at.

If we can keep Peter and Paul together, maybe we can keep the rest of the church together.

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Acts and Early Christian Origins

02 Diversity and Unity in the early Church

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