The Lost Gospel of the First Christians

If you are ready for some mental weight lifting, I want to lead you on a journey of discovery. I want to excite you with the gospel as it was originally taught by the first-generation of Christians. I want you to witness its raw power as it was originally understood in the first twenty or thirty years of its proclamation. May you come to know it as those Hebrew-oriented first believers understood it, without add-ons or distortions—even without later first-century developments. It matters what the early church preached. The content of this little book may surprise you. What developed later, what the church came to believe after the first century, merits our close attention and scrutiny as believers. But that is not our concern here. The church passed through controversies that shaped its proclamation and its teaching. Some of those controversies lasted for hundreds of years. Don’t be misled by what is not stated here. There is a place for sound doctrinal instruction that carefully divides between right and wrong thinking. But the purpose here is not to aim you perfectly so that you could never err to the right or the left. So lofty a goal is beyond any book this size, anyway. No, this writing has just one purpose. I want to take you into the first century to grasp the full gospel message preached by Peter and Paul and the other disciples of the Lord Jesus mostly prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. We will leave it to others to keep you from error that might come from overemphasizing any of the points of truth presented here or from neglecting doctrinal developments of succeeding centuries. The complete message preached by the early church was somewhat like a series of interlocking propositions, and that is how I have chosen to break down the message. These propositions naturally tend to build from one statement to the next, leading to a climax. I list the complete set of points at the end of the book, but I develop these propositions from the beginning of the book two at a time in the chapters below, indicating them as though they were “dominoes.” (The first domino knocks over the second, the second the third, and so on.) These propositions bring structure, order, and simplicity to the coherent thought of the gospel preached by the apostles of the first century. From the start, the reader needs to be aware of two caveats. First, as I set forth the gospel of the first-generation of Christians, I am not proving a complete historically-verifiable reconstruction of exactly how things developed. That is a task which no one can do because we don’t have enough actual historical information available. But we do have sufficient data to put enough pieces together to set forth some general observations with confidence. Second, some of the propositions in the chapters below may have been expounded by Paul or his disciples, but not in the same way or to the same degree by Peter or the other apostles. That is okay. From the book of Acts we learn that although Peter and Paul—two very different people—preached to different audiences with different issues, the two had exactly the same foundation. I am bringing you that foundation in this small book—the very foundation of truth that will last for all eternity. ORIENTATION The faith which Jesus and his apostles delivered once and for all was “first to the Jew, then to the Greek.” Whatever that means, it certainly means that the good news, properly understood in our day, should be something which was intelligible and meaningful to the first-century Jew. The point here is that in some ways the gospel that went forth in the first century doesn’t look like what we teach today, and we need to rediscover how it looked then. To begin with, the early disciples knew that everything they claimed was true about their good news, the kingdom of God, and Jesus had to be substantiated by the Old Testament Scripture. They did not see themselves at the beginning of a new way of thinking to be developed over the centuries. They saw themselves at the end of time, in the time of the fulfillment of the promises that God had made to his people. Unless we begin our investigation of the Scripture from this standpoint, we may never really understand how things unfolded. The original gospel was a seamless revelation from start to finish. Every part of it related to every other part. If anything we believe about any part of it can be altered without changing everything else, then we may not understand what we are talking about. When we try to pigeonhole certain doctrines without looking carefully at the entire schema we miss the subtle connections that tie everything together. For that reason my set of interlocking propositions may be linked to one another in more than one way, once we develop our true beginning point, the resurrection of Jesus. 1ST POINT OF TRUTH: The Resurrection of Jesus A. Jesus of Nazareth, crucified on a cross, has been raised bodily from the dead into glorified, everlasting life. B. It was God who raised Jesus from the dead—the God of the Jews-- thus declaring Jesus to be God’s special agent to accomplish His will and purpose. The gospel begins with an astounding claim, that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is to make the starting point of faith a question of fact, not theory or theology. To say it another way, the gospel stands or falls on the objective reality of Jesus’ resurrection. If this seems obvious, it isn’t. Modern theologians today often argue that the Easter faith transcends reason and is confirmed—not by the facts of history—but by subjective experience. Bible-believing Christians may sing, “You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart.” To the contrary, the resurrection faith of the earliest believers was founded on objective, historically verifiable evidence. The gospel faith is faith not because we take it on faith that Jesus is somehow alive in some subjective, a-historical, non-bodily, spiritual way. The gospel faith is faith because we claim something happened (A, above), and we make a claim concerning what it means (B, above). The gospel is rooted in an event of history and compelling evidence that confirms that event. That event demands an interpretation, and, in light of Jesus’ life and ministry, only one interpretation makes any sense: God Himself raised Jesus from the dead, and this means that God had chosen Jesus of Nazareth to be His special agent to reveal His will and purpose for humanity. It will come as a shock to most people to discover that when the Scriptures refer to the core content of the original faith, it is just this first item of truth above to which they unanimously point. They point not so much to the cross or the blood or the atonement or the death of Christ, but to his resurrection. The Scriptures which reveal the content of the faith fall into two categories. First, we have the passages that point to God's act of raising Jesus from the dead. Second, we have those that emphasize Jesus’ status as the Son of God. But the second category depends upon the first. Jesus was declared to be the Son of God with power by his resurrection from the dead. The preeminent title which we give to Jesus, “Son of God,” is based squarely upon the fact that God raised him from the dead. Let’s see how this works. Jesus' primary identity on earth, to those who knew him, was that of rabbi. He was the Master Teacher, interpreting the Torah and the will of God, instructing the disciples and the multitudes in the true way of life--the way which he himself followed. And His resurrection means that his character was vindicated. Now in the Jewish understanding, character includes all of one's actions and words. This means, in turn, that everything Jesus said was validated as truth.