Mapping Early Christianity

Mapping Early Christianity

Acts and the Shape of Early ChurchHistory

LOVEDAY ALEXANDER

Professor in Biblical Studies

University of Sheffield

The perception that we need a map to understand Luke’s history of the church is hardly new. Every Sunday School Bible has its map of the “Missionary Journeys of Saint Paul.” But recent developments in the field of cognitive geography have drawn the attention of scholars to the importance of the “mental maps” that we construct to help us make sense of the complex mass of data that makes up our physical and social environment.

Human beings appear to have a fundamental need to project order onto the space in which they live and move: they process spatial data received through the senses, relating one element to another and abstracting a mental map which functions as a constant frame of reference for all their activities[i].

I have explored some of the mental maps underlying Luke’s work in previous essays[ii]. Here I want to return to the concept, because I believe it is a valuable tool for understanding some of the larger patterns and conceptual structures implicit in Luke’s work, and the ways they in turn have shaped our own approach to Christian origins. It is no coincidence that the church in Luke’s narrative bore the nickname “The Way.” The Evangelist’s “mental map” of the early church’s development is more fluid and open than the hierarchical model of later centuries.

“AND SO WE CAME TO ROME”

The narrative of Acts ends in a different place from where it begins. Geographically, this is obvious: it begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome. But it is also true in other ways. It begins with Peter and ends with Paul. It begins with a wide-angle lens: twelve apostles, seven deacons, thousands of believers. It ends with a narrow focus on one man, under Roman guard and explaining his position rather carefully to the leaders of the Jewish community in Rome. The opening scene is a “mountain-top” experience, a place of clear vision where apostles and angels speak face to face. By the end of the book, we are in the much more mundane and ambiguous surroundings of a back-street lodging in Rome, listening to an inconclusive debate about the credentials of a “sect” that is “everywhere spoken against” (Acts 28:22).

The beginning of Luke’s story probably seemed almost as remote and romantic to Luke’s first readers as it does to us. Both chronologically and geographically, they live in a world much closer to Rome than to the Mount of Olives:

The final chapters of the book . . . combine a strong outward movement [from Jerusalem] withan odd sense of homecoming: outward, towards the periphery of the narrative map, crossing theuncharted and storm-tossed Ionian Sea to landfall on a barbarian island; and homecoming, backto familiar territory, as the party pick up the regular shipping lanes again and make their way upthe Appian Way to be greeted by “brothers” in Rome.[iii]

This sense of “homecoming”may hold a vital clue to the actual social and rhetorical locationof the author and his first readers. Paul has travelled to Rome under military escort, tostand trial before Caesar. But his final scene (as so often in Acts) is a rhetorical confrontationwith the leaders of the local Jewish community. The question they ask Paul is simple:“Tell us about this sect” (28:22). And this question, I would suggest, is the very question towhich Acts provides the answer. The book itself is probably to be dated some years later,after 70 C.E., but the closest we get to its rhetorical situation is that dramatic debate withinthe Jewish community in Rome, with Paul making the case for “this Way that people call asect” (24:14) as the fulfillment of Israel’s profoundest hopes and dreams (28:20)[iv].

In considering Luke’s narrative geography, then, we have to consider not only its twodimensionalshape—the cartographic projections that shape his conception of the world—but also the added dimension of time. In cartography, as in history, the standpoint of theobserver has a profound effect on his or her worldview, the way he or she puts together thescattered data at his or her command. And the place where the observer stands is always aplace in time as well as in space, not only the center of the world but the end of a journey.In a sense, each of us stands at a point to which the whole of history has been pointing. It isthis purposiveness, this sense of a teleological direction in history, that gives shape to ourmental maps.We should not be surprised, then, to find that Luke’s map of the world is “amonocentric and providential map, one in which the historian stands at the apex and looksback at history as somehow culminating in the present—and specifically in the historian’spresent.”[v]

CENTER AND PERIPHERY

It is important to keep in mind that we are not the first readers of Acts, and our ownmental maps are shaped by centuries of reading and interpreting Christian origins. One ofthe earliest and most influential of Luke’s interpreters was the patristic church historianEusebius, whose own ideological map has dominated the study of Christian origins sincethe fourth century. Eusebius’s mental map, like Luke’s, was governed by the end-point of hisnarrative, the moment when the victorious Constantine and his son restored the RomanEmpire to its ancient glory “as a single whole, bringing it all under their peaceful sway, in awide circle embracing north and south alike from the east to the farthest west.”[vi]Eusebius’spictorial language reveals an imperial mental map, dating from the days of Augustus, of theempire as a wide circle, embracing the whole world and centered around the imperial cityand the person of the emperor himself: “Within the Roman imperial space the concepts ofcenter and periphery are extremely clear. There was a caput [head] to the immense ‘body’that was the empire: it was both the city of Rome and the emperor.”[vii]

It is hardly surprising, then, that Eusebius chooses an equally centrist principle of organizationfor his history of the church: “I have purposed to record in writing the successionsof the sacred apostles, covering the period stretching from our Saviour to ourselves” (Hist.Eccl. 1.1.1,4). “Successions” (diadochai) is a concept derived ultimately from the philosophicalschools, designed to ensure clear lines of transmission from the founding teacher to thevariegated sects that promulgate his teaching in the wider world.[viii] For Eusebius, the centralfocus in the history of the church is the twelve apostles, a group whose unity is constantlystressed.When Peter speaks, he speaks as spokesman for all (Hist. Eccl. 2.14.6). The relationshipbetween the apostles and the rest of Christendom is conceived in a strictly hierarchicalfashion: Jesus taught the Twelve, and they taught the Seventy, and the Seventy in turntaught the rest of the disciples (Hist. Eccl. 2.1.4). The seven “deacons” were “ordained” bythe apostles—a fact that is stressed when Philip and Stephen appear to act on their ownauthority (Hist. Eccl. 2.1.1,9). Paul, who does not quite fit this pattern, is specially ordained“by the will of God” (Hist. Eccl. 2.1.14). The growing church radiates out from the apostoliccircle; all other churches are founded by direct links with the Twelve and Paul[ix].

The net result of all this is a mental map focused on Jerusalem as the geographical centerof the Christian world, the hub to which all future Christian expansion must be seen tobe linked. This centrist perspective is linked directly to a global horizon in which the apostlesare frequently described as preaching “to the whole world”:

Thus by the power and assistance of Heaven the saving word began to flood the whole worldwith light like the rays of the sun. At once, in accordance with the divine Scriptures, the voice ofits inspired evangelists and Apostles “went forth to the whole earth and their word to the end ofthe world.”[x]

This global perspective is mirrored in the workings of the imperial bureaucracy.Eusebius quotes a wonderful (and fictitious) letter from Pilate to the emperor Tiberius,which issues in an imperial rescript ensuring “that the word of the Gospel might have anunimpeded beginning, and traverse the earth in all directions” (Hist. Eccl. 2.2.1–6). Implicitis the realization that, in the world of the first Christians, the real center of power was notJerusalem but Rome (cf. Hist. Eccl. 2.13.1). Hence, Eusebius attaches special importance tothe moment that brings the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, the moment when the centerof the biblical world–map is displaced in favor of the center of imperial power[xi]:

Like a noble captain of God, clad in divine armour, [Peter] brought the costly merchandise ofthe spiritual light from the east to the dwellers in the west, preaching the Gospel of the light itselfand the word which saves souls, the proclamation of the Kingdom of heaven[xii].

The New Testament data are being organized here in a way that makes it possible tospeak of “the whole church” as a unified organization centered around the apostles; and thisprocess had begun long before Eusebius (cf. 1 Clem. 42).Within the New Testament, Lukein particular combines the global vision of the church’s mission with the much older idea ofJerusalem as the center from which knowledge of God’s Torah will shine out across thewhole world[xiii]. It is Luke who has the risen Jesus issue his mission command in Jerusalem(not in Galilee: cf.Matt 28:19; Mark 16:15), so that the whole mission can be conceived asworking outward in concentric circles from the Mount of Olives (Acts 1:8). It is Luke whosites the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit in Jerusalem, in the presence of Jewish pilgrims from every quarter of the known world (Acts 2:9–11)[xiv]. And it is Luke who stressesthe unity of the Apostles and their foundational role in the Jerusalem church (e.g., Acts1:14; 4:32–37).

This particular mental map is so familiar that it is hard to remember that it is (like allmental maps) a construct arising out of a particular social and rhetorical situation. Like allconstructs, it must be open to question. Indeed, it is being subjected to some searchingexamination in contemporary studyof Christian origins[xv]. And this isnot simply a matter of historicalskepticism; the centrist-global mapof the church is attracting theologicalcritique as well. Voices from allsides are urging us to replace the traditional“top-down” model ofchurch history with a “bottom-up”perspective, more inclusive of thosebanished to the margins by the centrist map[xvi]. The teleology implicit in this global mapensures that the place where the historian stands in the present always remains the endpointto which history is pointing. For Western historians, Europe and then North Americabecame the new “center,” and beyond that center “everything else was periphery, valid onlyto the degree to which it reflected the values and understandings of the center.”[xvii]

Luke’s picture of Christian origins proved admirably well adapted to the needs ofemergent orthodoxy in the second and third centuries.[xviii] But this is not the whole story.Function is not the same as origin, and we need to ask how Luke’s mental map reflects hisown rhetorical and social location. If Luke–Acts is an apologetic narrative addressed to theJewish community in Rome, the essential features of Luke’s mental map begin to fall intoplace. For such diaspora communities, the centrality and authority of Jerusalem was a basictheological assumption; and the palpable sense of “homecoming” in the final chapters hasnothing to do with the founding of the Roman church. Luke’s hero is Paul, not Peter, andthe church is already established when Paul arrives (Acts 28:15). Placing Acts in a Jewishdiaspora framework also gives an unexpected significance to the role of the apostles inLuke’s narrative. The Hebrew equivalent of apostolos is šalîah, a rabbinic term for the envoysused by the central authorities in Palestine to keep in touch with the diaspora[xix]. In thepower vacuum left within Judaism by the failed rebellion of 66–70 C.E., Luke’s apostoloi—backed by learned and detailed exposition of scripture—could serve a vital rhetorical rolein a competitive bid for the heart and soul of the diaspora communities. Bearing “letters”(Acts 28:21) was part of the role of the šalîah, and in the confusing circumstances of thepost-war period, that is exactly what Luke sets out to provide in Acts. That, I would suggest,is one reason why the vision of an apostolic mission emanating from Jerusalem is importantto Luke’s rhetorical purpose.

But the comparison also highlights important differences. The model of the šalîahmight lead us to expect that Luke’s apostoloi would be acting as emissaries or delegates forthe Jerusalem church, subordinate to James and the “elders.” But that is not how Luke presentsthe relationship. In one instance, the apostles act in concert with the elders, meetingin solemn council to issue a decree and appointing their own šelîhîm to disseminate it tothe churches (Acts 15:6–31). There may be hints elsewhere of a desire by the Jerusalemchurch to exercise some kind of control over the missionary activities of Peter and Paul(11:1–3; 21:18). It is abundantly clear, however, that Luke’s apostles are in no way subordinateto the elders. Rather, he stresses repeatedly that the Twelve (and Paul) received theircommission directly from the Lord (1:2–8; 9:15).

This fact in itself should alert us to the possibility that Eusebius’s centrist model,though it draws on Acts, fails to do justice to the nuances of Luke’s presentation. The detailsof church administration are not his concern; his heroes distance themselves from “servingtables” (6:2), and Stephen and Philip are only interesting when they abandon administrativeduties to preach the Word. In fact, this lack of interest in internal church affairs frustratesthe modern historian; much of the information we would like to find in Acts is simply notthere. Mission, too, is a much more anarchic and disorganized business in Acts thanEusebius’s neat presentation suggests. Many of the most significant moves are made not bythe apostles, but by unknown disciples acting under force of circumstances (8:1–3;11:19–20). It is the Antioch church, not Jerusalem, that launches the mission in Asia (chs.13–14), and there is no direct apostolic involvement in the foundation of the churches inEphesus, Puteoli, and Rome (18:19–19:1; 28:14–15). Even within Acts, Eusebius’s Jerusalemcenteredmodel is inadequate as a way of mapping the development of the early church.

THE LOCAL AND REGIONAL MAP

Curiously enough, once we get beyond the apostolic age, Eusebius’s conception ofecclesial space is more regional than global. His mental map resembles the Roman provincialmaps, which divided up the Empire into a patchwork of provinces each groupedaround its administrative center at provincial headquarters[xx]. There are attempts to imposeuniformity of practice and belief on the worldwide church, but these simply reveal thestrength of regional diversity. Significantly, in a dispute over the date of Easter, Eusebiusquotes approvingly Irenaeus’s exhortation “not to excommunicate whole churches of Godfor following a tradition of ancient custom” (Hist. Eccl. 5.24.11). For Eusebius, the church isa confederation of autonomous sees and dioceses, each with its own regional traditions.The apostolic link provides a symbolic unity of origin, but (as with the Eastern Orthodoxchurches today) there is no overarching hierarchy capable of imposing uniformity.Intractable differences of theology and practice have to be resolved by negotiation.

This regional model was used to great effect for the patristic period by Adolf vonHarnack in his Mission and Expansion of Christianity,[xxi] and it has many potential advantages.In theory, a regional map makes it possible to highlight local diversity. Systematicinclusion of archaeological evidence forces us to take account of the varieties of “syncretistic”and “popular” religions because it brings us into direct contact with concrete problemsof definition on the ground. But Eusebius’s regional map is still very much a top–downmodel, built around the monarchicalepiscopate, with the bishop as thespiritual and administrative head ofhis diocese. Like its Roman counterpart,it is a territorial model inwhich “geographical space . . . is alsoand perhaps above all an administrativespace.”[xxii] This territorialmodel of church organization hasexerted a strong influence on ourunderstanding of New Testamenthistory. The anachronistic process of reading the New Testament in the light of second-centuryconceptions of ecclesial space can be seen already in Hist. Eccl. 3.23.1, where theApostle John is treated as exercising a kind of episcopate over the whole province of Asiafrom his seat in Ephesus. Irenaeus makes a similar move in his analysis of Paul’s Miletusspeech[xxiii]. Even the Epistle of Clement, written at the end of the first century, gives the apostlesan administrative role in the appointment and regulation of local episkopoi (“overseers”)and deacons (1 Clem. 42, 44).

A closer look at Acts, however, presents a rather more complicated and much less centralizedpicture. Luke’s narrative implies a vigorous network of autonomous local churches,managing their own affairs and initiating and maintaining their own links with otherchurches. The clearest and best-documented example is the church in Antioch, founded byrefugees from persecution (11:19). It was the first church to include Gentiles and attract thenickname “Christians” (11:20–26). And it was this church that commissioned Paul andBarnabas for their first missionary journey (chs. 13–14). Paul appointed local “elders” in thechurches he founded on this trip (14:23), and Luke may have expected his readers toassume that this pattern of local governance was the norm elsewhere, as it was in the diasporasynagogue[xxiv]. Acts 20:17 assumes the existence of a body of “elders” in the church inEphesus.What is striking here is the sublime confidence with which Paul gives these localchurch leaders pastoral responsibility for their own flock (20:28). There is no sense of overarchingecclesiastical supervision beyond the memory of the apostolic presence, which theMiletus speech is designed to formalize and enhance (20:18, 25–27, 29).