Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 66 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This lecture finishes the apostolic fathers: Ignatius writing letters on the road to his own execution, Papias preserving eyewitness memories of the apostles, and the anonymous documents, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Didache, that show the church's earliest life. It ends with a horizon widening survey of Christianity outside the empire, from Ethiopia to China.
Ignatius pastored the church Barnabas had founded and Paul had co-pastored, and tradition says Peter himself installed him there. A disciple of John and friend of Polycarp, he wrote at least seven letters, several of them while under guard on the road to Rome, where he was killed by wild beasts in the Colosseum, most likely around AD 117 under Trajan.
In the New Testament, and still in Clement of Rome, bishop and presbyter are two names for one office. Ignatius is the first to distinguish them, urging one bishop over each church's team of presbyters and deacons as a safeguard of unity: follow your bishop as Jesus Christ, let nothing be done apart from him. Busenitz reads Nick Needham's account: the bishop likely began as the senior presbyter, a first among equals presiding like a synagogue's ruling elder, and by about AD 180 the threefold pattern of bishop, presbyters, and deacons was universal. In modern terms: a lead pastor, an elder board, and deacons.
The early church never treated bishops as apostles. The fathers counted the apostles unique, quoting their writings as final authority; bishops could not claim infallibility, proclaim new doctrines, or write new Scripture, which cuts directly against the later Roman claim of a living apostolic office. Busenitz flags the pattern: an idea benign at its birth, one leader among the elders for unity's sake, will be inflated over centuries until a bishop of Rome calls himself the vicar of Christ.
Ignatius is among the first after the apostles to say plainly that Christians no longer observe the Sabbath but order their lives by the Lord's Day, the day our life rose by Christ's power. The early church was, so far as the record shows, unanimous in Sunday worship, part of its deliberate separation from Judaism; the idea of the Lord's Day as a Christian Sabbath belongs to the Puritans, many centuries later.
Ignatius warns against the bait of false doctrine and anchors the faith in facts: the birth, the passion, and the resurrection, which took place during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, real events established by Jesus Christ our hope. His farewell is Trinitarian, in the Son and the Father and the Spirit, and it names the threefold leadership of bishop, presbytery, and deacons. He writes from Smyrna, where Polycarp is at his side refreshing his spirit as he travels toward death.
Orthodox simply means straight, true doctrine; catholic simply means universal. The fathers used both words constantly of the one true church holding the true faith. Only later did Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism take those common adjectives as brand names, so when a father calls the church catholic he means the universal church, not Rome, a caveat worth remembering when such quotes are marshaled in debate.
Papias, a hearer of John and companion of Polycarp, wrote a five volume work on the sayings of the Lord that has been lost; we know it through quotations in Irenaeus and Eusebius. He preferred the living voice to books, asking every traveler what Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John, or Matthew had said. His testimony: Mark, the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately though not in order what Peter preached, omitting nothing and inventing nothing, so the second Gospel is Peter's eyewitness preaching; and Matthew first composed the Lord's oracles in the Hebrew tongue, though it is the Greek Matthew that God inspired and preserved.
Eusebius, the fourth century historian and a committed amillennialist, sneered that Papias was a man of small mental capacity because Papias taught a millennium after the resurrection, the personal reign of Christ on earth. Busenitz notes the trash talk cuts the other way: Papias sat under the apostle John, and every early father whose eschatology is on record was premillennial until Clement of Alexandria in the third century, with Justin Martyr's remark that not all share his opinion the only crack in the record. The burden of proof, he argues, sits on the other view.
Written in Rome in the mid second century, the Shepherd is apocalyptic allegory, best read the way we read Pilgrim's Progress. In the vision Busenitz reads, a hundred foot beast meets Hermas on the road and is muzzled by God because Hermas cast his care on the Lord; the woman who is the church interprets the beast as the great tribulation of persecution to come, escapable by wholehearted repentance and trust. To suffering churches it was courage in story form.
Written from Alexandria around 130, and not by the Barnabas of Acts, this letter brings two firsts into church history: a thoroughgoing allegorical method of interpretation, which Alexandria will make famous through Clement and Origen, and replacement theology, supersessionism, the claim that the church has taken Israel's place. Curiously its author is a premillennialist holding a doctrine that will later become a cornerstone of amillennialism.
The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, from Syria sometime between 80 and 160, opens with the two ways: a path of life and a path of death, and the difference is great. Its path of life is the Sermon on the Mount applied: bless those who curse you, turn the other cheek, go the second mile, give without grasping. Among its commands stands one worth hearing today: you shall not kill a child by abortion, nor slay it when it is born, the ancient church's answer to Rome's practice of abortion and infanticide, and proof that Christian conviction here is as old as the church, not a product of modern politics.
The Great Commission never said stop at the Roman border, and the church did not. Africa: Ethiopia received the gospel through the eunuch of Acts 8 and its rulers converted in the fourth century; North Africa gave the church Athanasius and Augustine, both native Africans; Egypt's Coptic church and Nubia's believers trace to these centuries. Asia: Armenia became the first officially Christian nation; hundreds of thousands of Christians lived under Zoroastrian Persia; Thomas carried the gospel to India; and the Assyrian church of Persia sent missionaries to the Mongols and on to China, where Christianity flourished under the Tang dynasty. Today's least reached window was, fifteen centuries ago, the Bible belt of the world, before Islam swept much of it away.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How did Ignatius die?
2. In the New Testament and in Clement of Rome, what is the relationship between bishop and presbyter?
3. How did the office of bishop most likely begin?
4. What could early bishops NOT do, in contrast with the apostles?
5. What did Ignatius say had replaced Sabbath observance for Christians?
6. Which historical anchor does Ignatius give for the passion and resurrection?
7. When a church father calls the church catholic, what does he mean?
8. According to Papias, what is the Gospel of Mark?
9. Why did Eusebius call Papias a man of small mental capacity?
10. What does the beast in the Shepherd of Hermas represent?
11. What two things did the Epistle of Barnabas introduce into church history?
12. Which command does the Didache make explicit?
13. Which was the first nation to convert to Christianity in an official sense?
14. What became of the regions east of Rome where the church once flourished?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 5 is complete.
Ignatius's single bishop idea was harmless when he proposed it and grew into something else over centuries. What small assumptions in church life today might carry that kind of long term risk?
The Didache applied the command against murder to the unborn eighteen centuries before our debates. How does it change a conversation to know the church's conviction here is ancient rather than political?
The gospel reached India and China while Europe was still half pagan, and much of that ground was later lost. What does that history teach us about how a church prays for, and sends to, the hardest places now?
Ignatius's anchor on the road to his death: the birth, the passion, and the resurrection are facts, real and established by Jesus Christ our hope.
The lecture's own commendations: Nick Needham's 2,000 Years of Christ's Power, volume one, on the early church's structure; William Varner's commentary on the Didache; and Gary Habermas's work documenting the early historical testimony to the resurrection.