Professor of Early Christian History here, ask me anything!

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billsherman said:
(i.e. second century Christians came to identify the anonymous gospel with a known figure of importance to Peter).
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I doubt the early church adopted a gospel (when it was first penned) without knowing where its authority came from. That would be very important. The church fathers are pretty unanimous that a man named Mark who was associated with Peter wrote a gospel. Just because the fathers make mention of it in the 100’s doesn’t mean the history of the gospels association with Mark began in the 100’s. Consider that there are no contemporary sources that mention Hannibal by name or his association with the Carthaginians. Are we going to apply the same standard and say the army was led anonymously?
billsherman said:
Second, the authenticity of the letter as being written by Peter remains uncertain.
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The first verse is signed by him.

1 Pet 1:1 • ’Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers dispersed through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, elect,’
 
irenaeuslyons said:
I doubt the early church adopted a gospel (when it was first penned) without knowing where its authority came from. That would be very important.
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Maybe, or maybe not. The evidence we have seems to indicate that it wasn’t important to them. All of the canonical gospels are anonymous, so it clearly wasn’t important to the writers (yes, I know John is attributed at the end, but I don’t know any historians who believe that was original to the gospel).
irenaeuslyons said:
The church fathers are pretty unanimous that a man named Mark who was associated with Peter wrote a gospel.
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It is the opinion of most historians that those fathers are either following Papias (the first one to mention Mark), or are reporting the same tradition that he was.

More significantly, historians have looked at the textual traditions within Mark and come to a variety of conclusions that make it unlikely to have been written by a known writer. The current consensus is that it was redacted from a number of now non-existent sources by an anonymous scribe who was relatively weak in Greek, and Mark was assigned as its author in order to further establish authority. That theory certainly fits the textual evidence better than the theory that it composed by a single author, based on a single source (Peter).

Naturally, some historians accept the tradition. We can be a fickle bunch.
irenaeuslyons said:
The first verse is signed by him.
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Indeed. Many pseudonymous works are “signed” by their supposed authors. It was a common way of gaining acceptance for a written work in the Greco-Roman world, and was not seen as deceitful, but rather a way of paying homage.
 
billsherman said:
History is a discipline based on using a methodology to try and better explain events and people from the past. It isn’t based on faith, tradition, belief, or creed.
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Historians have an ability even God lacks - the ability to change what has already happened
 
billsherman said:
I’ll answer everything that I can.
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Thank you for this thread! I’m enrolled in a class now and ambitiously making my way through MacCullough’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. I have no immediate questions but may pick your brain when they arise. 🙂
 
billsherman said:
Bones were in fact found under the Vatican (which was built on an ancient cemetery). We can’t unfortunately determine whose bones they are - though are frequently believed to be Peter’s. As far as I know, there aren’t any inscriptions that identify the owner of the bones - but I’m not an archaeologist so I haven’t explored the evidence there in any detail.
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Just FYI, there were markings. “By 1950, archeologists concluded they had found the grave of St. Peter. Greek graffiti on an adjacent wall to the tropaion marked the spot: Petros eni , or “Peter is within” (“eni” being a contraction for “eneoti”). Other graffiti asked St. Peter to pray to Christ for deceased people, and others were common Christian symbols, like the alpha and omega, or the chi and rho.”
 
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Do you think St. Paul and Jesus ever met in person during Jesus’ lifetime?
 
Another couple…the church’s involvement in the sacrament of marriage is relatively new. Priests first started witnessing marriages about 500-600 years ago. I’ve often wondered about the history of marriage in Christianity.
  1. How did early Christians see the sacrament of marriage? Is it commonly accepted that they even saw it as a sacrament among academics?
  2. How come the early church did not feel the need to be involved in witnessing marriages?
 
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There are some (Anglicans) who maintain that the Church of England can trace its roots to the early centuries when the church was first established there with the Roman Empire occupying that part of Europe. This conveniently bypasses and excludes the Roman Catholic Church which they claim to be a corrupted, heretical version of the real thing, even though Anglicanism has less in common with the early Church’s theology than the RCC does in so many ways, adopting much of the Reformed theology as it were. Any comments on this theory? I thought the Church of England itself claims to have begun in the 1500s for more practical and less glamorous reasons perhaps, being anti-Rome in any case.
 
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fhansen said:
Any comments on this theory?
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Not a professor myself, but I was formerly an Anglican and knew several theologians and historians so I might offer some perspectives.

Both the CoE and the Catholic Church in England claim to be the legitimate successors of the local church whose first bishop was Augustine of Canterbury in the 6th century. I don’t think any serious historian or theologian of Anglicanism denies the post-Reformation CoE’s relationship with the Catholic Church considering it was Pope Gregory who commissioned Augustine to evangelise the English.

The issue is more so that there are now two competing claims over jurisdiction (comparable to disputes between the Catholic Church and the EO Moscow Patriarchate). The Catholic Church to an extent recognises (but not does see as valid) this competing claim by the CoE as it has not re-established dioceses with competing ecclesial jurisdictions after the Catholic Emancipation. For example, the Catholic archdiocese is that of Westminster, not Canterbury.
 
Do you get any new ideas, motivations on further topics to study, or further understanding of your field by posting here on CAF?
 
Bithynian said:
Both the CoE and the Catholic Church in England claim to be the legitimate successors of the local church whose first bishop was Augustine of Canterbury in the 6th century.
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As far as the CofE is concerned, we should note that there were local bishops long before St Augustine’s mission in 597. Indeed part of Augustine’s instructions from Pope Gregory was to bring the local bishops under his control (a task at which he was unsuccessful, although the Roman mission did eventually win the argument against the Celtic Church at the Synod of Whitby in 664).

Augustine’s mission was of course highly significant, since it led to the conversion of the king of Kent, the establishment of the see at the Kentish capital, Canterbury, and the mission moving on to other English kingdoms. Fifty years later the Celtic Church’s mission arrived in Northern England (we are told via St Patrick’s 5th Century British mission to Ireland, then St Columba’s 6th Century mission from Ireland to Scotland, then St Aidan’s 7th Century mission from Scotland to England, establishing the monastery on Lindisfarne).

But Christianity in what is now England had older roots. The faith had certainly reached Britannia by the 3rd Century, when it was under Roman rule. The question has been how well that Church survived the Roman withdrawal and “Saxon Advent”. Survive it did, however, as the presence of the local bishops shows.
 
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Aquinas11 said:
Historians have an ability even God lacks - the ability to change what has already happened
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Exactly. There seems to be a lot of blind acceptance of the answers given in this thread.

The answers about the authorship and historicity of the Gospels given here are the typical secular skeptical views one would find in Bart Ehrman’s books. And these views don’t have the certainty that the secular or liberal academic establishment claims.

The claim that Fr. Raymond Brown’s books are “highly respected” may have been accurate 20 or 30 years ago, but the demographic of Catholic academics and clergy who hold this view are aging. Most of then went to university or seminary where such a secular historical-critical dissection of Scripture was all the rage. There is a much better group of orthodox Catholic Biblical scholars working today.
 
billsherman said:
As far as I know, there aren’t any inscriptions that identify the owner of the bones - but I’m not an archaeologist so I haven’t explored the evidence there in any detail.
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There is an inscription with these bones, as stated above. I would have to search some documentaries to find it, but Vatican allowed one group to film the tomb and there is a visual record of the tomb and the inscription. The history of why this tomb is sited where it is and thus why the Basilica is sited there, is quite interesting. The oral tradition is that St Peter the Apostle was martyred in the Circus, and his body buried outside the circus, in the area where bodies were buried that had been martyred or killed in the circus. Christians built a little memorial tomb over the grave to mark it and come and pray there. This area was built up over, down through the centuries and a Basilica was built over the site. Over the centuries, the Catacombs were then all but forgotten, then rediscovered. Several early Popes are buried in one section of the Catacombs.
 
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Bithynian said:
The Catholic Church to an extent recognises (but not does see as valid) this competing claim by the CoE as it has not re-established dioceses with competing ecclesial jurisdictions after the Catholic Emancipation. For example, the Catholic archdiocese is that of Westminster, not Canterbury
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Liverpool is the exception, although I don’t know why. I’d be interested to find out.

Correction: Quite wrong, it seems the Catholic archdiocese of Liverpool was founded before the Anglican diocese of Liverpool. A bit cheeky of the Anglicans really,
 
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I seem to remember reading that Jews made up about 1% of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus.

What size were other notable religions at this time, and do we know much about how they faded away in the following centuries? Were there specific persecutions against them as there were against Christians?
 
Is there historical evidence that Jesus rose fr the dead?

What was the structure of the Church and worship I’m the Church in the most early centuries
 
billsherman said:
I’m not terribly comfortable discussing my faith in public. It’s just too easy to be misunderstood or end up in a shouting match with someone
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This was an immediate red flag which was confirmed with the Christian . . . opposing . . . atheist book recommendations
 
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