Did you notice anything odd in the last Gem? In Gem 2216, I gave you the standard historical facts related to the passing of kingdoms and empires over time across the Roman Province of Asia as it related to the seven cities of Revelation. But for the historical record of the churches I used the Catholic records or the records of the Orthodox Churches. Did you notice anything about the two sets of data? I know that two readers did, as they queried the apparent contradiction between the two sets of data. Did you wonder how the two historical records could be harmonised? Are you aware of what the problem is? Did anything strike you as strange? According to Christian historical records, do we indeed have continuous lineages of bishops or other orthodox church leaders dating from the Apostolic Era to the present day? Is it even possible given the brevity of kingdoms in the region over time and the frequency with which kingdoms and empires changed? A couple of readers commented on “the likelihood of a series of successive bishops in any or all of these cities when the Christian cities were invaded by regimes hostile to Christianity. How is that possible Ian?” That same discrepancy struck me in my attempt to investigate the long term tenure of the Christian churches in these cities. As one reader asked, “How is it possible for Ephesus to have a continuous line of bishops until the 9th Century when Arabs sacked the city 654–655 AD and in 700 AD and again 716 AD?” Now that is very good question.
How believable are the lists of bishops and bishoprics in the Roman Catholic statistics? Where does the concept of a continuous line of bishops from the Apostolic Era to the present day come from? It fits with the notion of a continuous line of popes from Peter to the present day. How tenable is such thinking? The idea stems from the fact that Constantine, the Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 converted to Christianity and then declared the offical religion of Rome to be Christianity. This was a boost to Christianity and enabled the rapid adoption and spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire. But the big question is: Did Constantine do Christianity a favour or cause a major problem?
Allow me to explain it in this way. A commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ was always meant to be on an individual basis. It is not up to a Roman Emperor to determine that everyone in his kingdom become Christian, a follower of The Way. When does the Kingdom of God come? When an individual bows in submission to the truth of Jesus Christ who said,
I am the way, the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.
John 14:6
When does the Kingdom of God come over a nation, a country or a kingdom? When all believers bow in submission to their LORD Jesus. Not symbolically but actually in the context of their daily lives. That is the impact that following Christ had on the Roman Empire. The citizens of the Roman Empire saw for themselves the willingness of the Christians to be martyred rather than to bow the knee to Caesar and say that he was Lord. Eusebius himself declared that he had seen wild beasts leave unharmed Christians among whom they had been turned loose only to turn upon those who were goading the beasts to attack the Christians. (Eusebius Eccles. Hist. Book VIII, Chapt 7.) It was the combination of personal testimony and the willingness of Christians to submit to the point of martyrdom that captured the attention of other Roman citizens.
The best modern day counter example I can think which exemplifies this principle is that of Indonesia following the 1965 attempted Communist Coup. The government’s response following the failed coup was to require all Indonesian citizens to choose a religion from the six religions accepted by the State: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. To ensure against the threat of atheistic communism was countered, the people were required to choose a religion to go on their resident’s card (Kartu Tanda Penduduk [KTP]). I asked one young woman we know how she became a Christian? She responded by saying she was born a Christian. I told her, “It doesn’t work like that. You have to make a choice to become a follower of Jesus and get baptised.” She said, “Her father chose Christian Protestant for them all so they would not have to pray five times a day and they could eat pork.” That is not a good reason to become a Christian. Indonesian Christians call such people KTP Christians – kristen tanpa percaya which means “Christian without belief or faith”.
Emperor Constantine’s declaration stating the religion of the Roman Empire to be Christianity actually proved to be a retrograde step. The Emperor’s decree removed the true basis for Christianity and replaced it with an aberration. All countries which have introduced Christianity as a state religion have introduced pseudo-Christianity. For example the Russian Orthodox Church in Communist USSR, the Chinese Three-Self Church, under the Sasanian Empire (proto-Iran) Zoroastrianism was the adopted religion. The other examples are of course Roman Catholicism and the Anglicanism of the Church of England introduced by Henry VIII in the 1530’s which was effectively based on Roman Catholicism.
Prof William Ramsay suspects Constantine was impressed by the letters written and sent by the Church leaders by the 3rd Century AD. The letter writing and the delivery of the Church Fathers was impressive. Ramsay posits the possibility that Constantine realised the way the Early Church Fathers communicated with each other in order to keep the Christian faith unified and protected from heresy and error. Did Constantine realise that and desire the same for the Roman Empire? There were Imperial messengers for the business of the Empire but it was not organised as well as the communication of the early Christian Church. The letters written and the letters read among the Christians were of a much higher order. These were used by the Church Fathers not only to teach, the Didache, but also to maintain the purity of Christian theology and to counter heresies. These letters and the written Word of God, hand copied as they were, became an essential reason why Christianity spread so quickly and so comprehensively according to Ramsay.
If you have read the Gems I have been writing on Revelation, you have already gained a sense of the difficulty the Christians faced under life in the Roman Empire. Emperor worship, idolatry of pagan gods, the debauched practices of the trade guilds and sexual depravity established a sharp line of distinction between pagan Rome and Christian practices. It was extremely hard to be a Christian under the Roman Empire and not attract unwanted attention. As a result, persecution grew under the harshest emperors. Christians were often falsely blamed for disasters that happened in the Empire because it was expedient to blame a particular group of people who were seen as a perceived threat. As the Empire crumbled from the third to the fifth century, Diocletian blamed the Christians for the decline of the Roman Empire. From there on it was all downhill.
Rome was now vulnerable and other empires and kingdoms were emboldened to attack. Hence the increasing threat of foreign invasion. This lead to a period of time which Kenneth Scott Latourette calls the Thousand Years of Uncertainty in Volume 2 of his History of the Expansion of Christianity. Others call this period of time the Dark Ages (500 to 1500 AD) when Christianity and Europe lost its way and its moral compass. There was another factor which caused more problems for the spread of Christendom – that of language. Where Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic were the languages of the Bible, Greek and Latin were the languages of scholarship, education as well as religion. In the Dark Ages the majority of the bishops and priests of Catholicism didn’t know Greek and Hebrew but only read Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The darkness of the Dark Ages was made darker still by the hurdle of communication of faith and Christianity to the common people (the laity). The longer the Dark Ages regressed, the more the problem increased.
The common people were prevented from knowing the truth as it ought to have been preached in order for the priesthood to preserve their privilege, power and wealth. In the Dark Ages, Middle Ages and Medieval Europe the chances of hearing the true Gospel were slim. The priest and bishops sold indulgences, introduced the idea of prayers for the dead and told mythical stories about fireflies being the souls of departed saints who had died without Christ. You could buy absolution for yourself and for departed family members for a price. Actually these men of the cloth knew nothing of the True Gospel because they could not even read the Latin Vulgate. All through this Dark Time, the common people were kept from knowing the truth of the Gospel of Christ. Anyone who dared to challenge the status quo was burned or beheaded as a heretic for daring to question the priests and bishops. The light of the Gospel was shrouded in darkness. That is why the willingness of martyrs to die for what they believed shone even brighter in the Roman period of persecution and later through the dark ages when those who could read Greek and Hebrew found the truth and dared to speak out against the established church.
I believe that God always preserved His Word and true faith in an underground church, similar to that which exists in Russia and China these days. There have always been people like the Venerable Bede (672-735) and John Wycliffe who in 1384 translated the Bible into the common language of English so the poor people of England in the Dark Ages could know what the Scriptures really said. The Church leaders hated John Wycliffe for his efforts and his bones were dug up as a protest. Many think Wycliffe was martyred but the truth is the Church leaders so hated him for daring to translate a version of the Bible for the Commoners, that they dug up his body and burned his bones to ashes which they threw in the River Swift so no one could say “Here lies John Wycliffe, that hero of the faith.” Rather they sought to obliterate his memory from the earth. A poet said at the time, “As the River Swift will bear the ashes into the River Avon and as the River Avon will bear the ashes into the River Severn and as the River Severn will bear the ashes into the channels around our shores and as those channels will bear the ashes into the oceans. So will the teachings of John Wycliffe spread throughout the world.” Not many people could read in those days but the Lollards took the Scriptures translated by John Wycliffe and sang them to the people on the village commons and in the countryside of England.
On April 4th 1519 a woman was burned at the stake in Little Park in Coventry, England as a heretic for daring to teach her children The Lord’s Prayer and The Ten Commandments. The essence of her crime was that she taught her own children in English! A commoner had no right to do that in those days. It was the right and privilege of the clergy to tell the people what the Word of God said and what it meant. This socio-political situation across Western Europe to the East prevailed until the reformers like William Tyndale translated the Bible in English so all could read what the Scripture actually said and interpret for themselves. I included Tyndale’s quote in Gem 2198.
“I will one day make the boy that rides the plough in England to know more of the Scripture than the Pope does.” William Tyndale
Cuthbert Tunstall was the Archbishop of London at the time and he absolutely despised Tyndale for what he was doing. He tried everything to find out how Tyndale’s Bibles were getting into England. Tyndale’s Bibles were being printed in Europe and smuggled into England in sacks of flour so English speakers could have God’s Word in their own language. William Tyndale was captured and burned at the stake as a heretic in October 1536 and as he died he cried out, “Lord, open the eyes of the King of England” after which the King James Bible was published in 1611.
I have only selected two reformers to illustrate the process which ended the Dark Ages and ushered in the Reformation. This is the reason why I look at details like those I gave you in the last Gem and am forced to harmonise the facts with what I know to be the background to the spread of Christianity in the first 500 years and what happened in the subsequent one thousand years. We have to be prepared to read between the lines in order to determine the truth of what happened in the story behind the spread of Christianity. My suggestion to you is to go back and take another look at Gem 2216 to determine for yourself what happened to the church in each of the seven cities of Revelation now that you know the above background.
In the following Gem I will add one more church; can you guess which one? Then I will take another look at Thyatira and tell you what I think is behind the way its introduction has been written. In the interim I have been “side-tracked”, well it’s not actually being side-tracked. Rather it is a case of addressing the issues, questions and comments which arise in the context of writing these Gems live.
Sometimes the only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn the lessons that history should teach us.
Ian
The fact that Christianity grew so rapidly in the first three centuries was more likely a case of the adherents being from all races and classes, coupled with the disintegration of Roman society and the willingness of Christians to be put to death for their faith.
Kenneth Scott Latourette
Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches (and to you).
Jesus – 7 times
I know all the things you do, and I have opened a door for you that no one can close. You have little strength, yet you obeyed my word and did not deny me. . . All who are victorious will become pillars in the Temple of my God, and they will never have to leave it. And I will write on them the name of my God, and they will be citizens in the city of my God.
Revelation 3:8, 12
You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it.
Matthew 7:13-14