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Preface

The history of the catholic Church is naturally of interest to a catholic reader; but it should be of interest to any educated person for the simple reason that it is part and parcel of the history of mankind over the last two thousand years: our civilization has largely been shaped over that period, which has earned the title of ‘the Christian era.’ I have written this book for both Christians and non-Christians, and I have quite properly called it a ‘short’ history. But the fact that it is short does not mean that it leaves out important things or that it only skims the surface. I have made it short in order to make it accessible to a wide readership, to people who might not be inclined to read a more elaborate book. Therefore, I have tried to combine simplicity and depth, leaving numerous questions to one side in an attempt to follow what I consider to be the main thread of Christian history.

The book is divided into thirty-five chapters, each headed with a short summary indicating the main subjects dealt with. This Short history of the catholic Church is primarily a book of religious history, but I have tried always to bear in mind the political, cultural and social features of the times in which Christians were living. The chronological table at the end of the book may help readers to position Christian events in their historical context.

Every book is written with a particular purpose; what I have tried to do here is quite simple, but that is not to say it is not ambitious: I would hope that the man in the street, after reading this book, would have a fairly good grasp of what happened over the first twenty centuries of the history of Christianity.

JOSE ORLANDIS

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                                                        The Origins of Christianity

Christianity is the religion founded by Jesus Christ, the Son of God become man. People became Christians — disciples of Christ — through baptism, thereby entering the visible community of salvation which is called the Church.

1. By Christianity we mean the religion founded by Jesus Christ, the Son of God become man. Jesus himself and his teachings are the bases on which the Christian religion rests. Christians look to Jesus Christ as their redeemer and teacher: they recognize him as their God and lord and they hold to his teaching.

2. At a precise moment in history and in a particular place on earth, the Son of God became man and made his appearance in human history. Jesus’ place of birth was Bethlehem, in Judea; he was born when Herod the Great was king of Judea and Quirinius was governor of Syria, in the reign of Caesar Augustus, emperor of Rome (cf. Mt 2:1; Lk 2:1-2). Christ lived on earth until another documented moment in time: his passion, death and resurrection took place in Jerusalem, starting on the fourteenth day of Nisan in the year 30. At that time Caiaphas held the position of high priest, the procurator Pontius Pilate ruled Judea and Tiberius was emperor of Rome.

3. Jesus put himself forward as the Christ, the messiah foretold by the prophets and eagerly expected by the people of Israel. In Caesarea Philippi, against the background of various opinions as to who he was, Jesus asked his Apostles: ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter replied very emphatically: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ Jesus accepted this description of himself and confirmed it quite unequivocally: ... . [for] flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven’ (cf. Mt 16:13-17). On the night of his passion, before the chief priests and all the Sanhedrin, he openly declared that he was the Son of God, the messiah. In response to the solemn question put to him by the chief priest, the supreme religious authority in Israel, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’, Jesus said ‘I am’ (Mk 14:61-62).

4. ‘He came to his own home, and his own people received him not’ (Jn 1: 11). These words of the first chapter of St John’s Gospel report the drama of the rejection of the Savior by the chosen people. At this time most Jews had a political-nationalistic idea of what the messiah would be like: they expected him to be a kind of earthly leader who would free their nation from the oppressive yoke of the Romans and restore the kingdom of Israel in all its splendor. Jesus did not fit this image, for his kingdom was not of this world (cf. Jn 18:36). Therefore, they failed to recognize him; instead, he was rejected by the leaders of the people and condemned to death by crucifixion.

5. The miracles Jesus performed during his public life were the proof he offered of his messiahship and his way of demonstrating the truth of his teachings. His miracles and teachings, combined with Jesus’ unique personality, were what caused people to become his disciples, the first of whom were the twelve Apostles. Initially, their commitment was defective: for they shared many of their contemporaries’ prejudices; they found it difficult to grasp exactly what Jesus’ redemptive mission was — which explains how terribly disconcerted they were by his passion and death.

6. The resurrection of Jesus is the central dogma of Christianity and is the decisive proof of the truth of his teaching. ‘If Christ has not been raised,’ St Paul wrote, ‘then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain’ (1 Cor 15:14). The fact of the resurrection (nothing was further from the thoughts of the Apostles and disciples) was thrust on them by the sheer force of evidence: ‘But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep’ (1 Cor 15:20; cf. Lk 24:27-44; Jn 20:24-28). From then on, the Apostles put themselves forward as ‘witnesses’ of the risen Jesus (cf. Acts 2:22; 3:15), reporting his resurrection to the whole world and sealing their testimony with their own blood. The disciples of Jesus Christ recognized his divinity; they believed that his death was responsible for their redemption and that they had received the fullness of revelation, transmitted to them by the Master and gathered up in the form of scripture and tradition.

7. But Jesus Christ not only founded a religion — Christianity; he established a Church. The Church — the new people of God — was established in the form of a visible community of salvation which people join through baptism. The Church was grounded on the Apostle Peter, to whom Christ promised the primacy — ‘and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Mt 16:18); Christ confirmed this after his resurrection and conferred this responsibility on Peter: ‘Feed my lambs,’ ‘Tend my sheep’ (cf. Jn 21:15-17). The Church of Jesus Christ will last until the end of time, as long as the world lasts and there are men on earth: ‘and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ (Mt 16:18) The final stage in the establishment of the Church occurred on the day of Pentecost, which is when its history begins.

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                                                     The Synagogue and the Church

Persecuted by the Sanhedrin, the Christians very soon parted company with the Synagogue. From the very beginning, Christianity was universal, that is, open to the Gentiles, to whom the rules of the Mosaic law did not apply.

1. ‘A disciple is not above his teacher’ (Mt 10:24), Jesus told his disciples. The Sanhedrin declared Jesus a criminal to be punished by death for claiming to be the messiah, the Son of God. It was only logical for the Jewish authorities to be hostile to his Apostles, when they proclaimed that Jesus was risen and confirmed their preaching by various public miracles. The Sanhedrin tried to silence them, but Peter replied to the high priest, ‘we must obey God rather than man’ (Acts 5:29). The Apostles were put under the lash, but neither threats nor violence could silence them, and they left rejoicing ‘that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor’ for the name of Jesus. The death by stoning of St Stephen the deacon marked the beginning of severe persecution of Jesus’ disciples. The cleavage between Christianity and Judaism grew steadily deeper and more overt.

2. In contrast with the national character of the Jewish religion, the universalism of Christianity soon expressed itself. Disciples of Jesus, in flight from Jerusalem, reached Antioch in Syria, one of the great cities of the east. Some of them were Hellenists, with an outlook more open than that of Palestinian Jews, and they began to proclaim the gospel to the Gentiles. In cosmopolitan Antioch, the universalism of the Church became patent; and it was there, for the first time, that Christ’s followers were called Christians.

3. The universality of the redemption and of the Church of Jesus Christ was formally confirmed by a miraculous event in which the Apostle Peter was the protagonist. The extraordinary signs surrounding the conversion of Cornelius, a centurion at Caesarea, and his family, cleared up any doubts Peter had on this subject; as he put it, ‘Truly I perceive that God shows no particularity, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him’ (Acts 10:34-35). The news that Peter had given baptism to uncircumcized Gentiles caused consternation in Jerusalem. Peter had to repeat his experience in great detail before the Jewish Christians in this holy city changed their minds and shed their deeply rooted prejudices. They began to realize that the redemption brought by Christ was universal: the Church was open to everyone: ‘When they heard this they were silenced. And they glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life” ‘ (Acts

11:18).

4. But one last obstacle remained before Christian universalism won the day. It was difficult for many Jewish Christians, attached as they were to their old traditions, to understand how Gentiles could be members of the Church. They felt that for Gentile converts to have access to salvation they needed at the very least to be circumcised and to keep the regulations of the law of Moses. This naturally disturbed Christians of Gentile background, so the Church was forced to examine the whole question of the relationship between the old law and the new law, and to affirm unequivocally the Church’s independence of the Synagogue.

5. To discuss these fundamental problems the so-called ‘council’ of Jerusalem met in the year 49. At this assembly Paul and Barnabas spoke on behalf of the churches of Gentile background and bore witness to the wonders God had worked among them. Peter once again spoke with authority in favor of Christians’ freedom vis-à-vis Jewish legal observances. On the proposal of James, bishop of Jerusalem, the council agreed not to lay any unnecessary burdens on Gentile converts: they should only have to obey a few simple rules: keep away from fornication and, as regard the old law, abstain from meat which was strangled or had been sacrificed to idols (Acts 15:1-33), thus definitively solving the problem of the relationships between Christianity and Judaism. Jewish Christians in Palestine still followed their own style for a while, but they were a minority within a Christian Church ever more widespread throughout the Gentile world.

6. The great promoters of the spread of Christianity were the Apostles, acting in obedience to Christ’s commandment to proclaim the gospel to all the nations. Due to lack of historical documents it is difficult to find out much about the missionary activity of most of the Apostles. We do know that the Apostle Peter, on leaving Palestine, made Antioch his base (there was an important Christian community there already). It is possible that he also lived for a time in Corinth, but his final base was Rome, the capital of the empire; he was the first bishop of the Roman church. In Rome he underwent martyrdom in the persecution unleashed by Emperor Nero (c. 64). John the Apostle, after staying a long time in Palestine, moved to Ephesus, where he lived for very many years, so much so that the churches of Asia regarded him as their own Apostle. Very early traditions speak of apostolic activities of James the Greater in Spain, of Thomas in India, of Mark the Evangelist in Alexandria, etc.

7. Information about the apostolic activity of St Paul is by far the most extensive, thanks to the accounts in the Acts of the Apostles and the important corpus of Pauline letters. St Paul was the Apostle of the Gentiles, par excellence, and his missionary journeys brought the gospel to Asia Minor and Greece, where he founded and directed many churches. Taken prisoner in Jerusalem, his long captivity gave him an opportunity to bear witness to Christ before the Sanhedrin, the Roman governors of Judea and King Agrippa II. After being brought to Rome he was set free by Caesar’s courts and probably during this period made a missionary journey to Spain, which he had been planning for some time. Imprisoned for a second time, he was tried again and found guilty and died a martyr in the imperial city.

8. The work of the Apostles does not complete the picture of the spread of Christianity in the ancient world. For the most part, the bearers of the first tidings of the gospel must have been ordinary, humble people — civil servants, businessmen, soldiers and slaves. As a generalization, it may be said that during these early centuries Christianity was to be found more in the cities than among the rural communities. By the time the Church obtained its freedom, in the fourth century, Christianity was deeply rooted in many parts of the near east, such as Syria, Asia Minor and Armenia; and in the west, in Rome and its surrounding area and in Latin Africa. The gospel also had a considerable presence in the Nile valley and in various parts of Italy, Spain and Gaul.

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                                                  Christianity and the Pagan Empire

Christianity began and developed within the political and cultural framework of the Roman empire. For three centuries, the pagan empire persecuted the Christians because their religion represented a ‘rival’form of universalism and forbade its adherents to offer religious worship to the emperor.

1. The birth and early development of Christianity took place with the political and cultural framework of the Roman empire. It is true that pagan Rome persecuted the Christians for three centuries; but it would be wrong to see the empire as only a negative factor in the spread of the gospel. The fact that Rome had imposed unity on the Greco-Latin world meant that over a huge area, under a single supreme authority, peace and order reigned. This situation lasted until well into the third century and good communications among the various parts of the empire made it easy for ideas to circulate. The Roman roads and the sea-routes of the Mediterranean provided channels for the good news of Christianity to spread over the whole Mediterranean area.

2. A common language — based on Greek, at first, and on Greek and Latin, later — made it easier for people to communicate and understand one another. Paganism was in crisis, very many spiritually sensitive people were searching for religious truth and were predisposed to the gospel. These factors, undoubtedly favored the spread of Christianity.

3. But there were also very serious obstacles in the way of people embracing the Christian faith. For Christians of Jewish background it meant breaking with their community of origin — which now regarded them as deserters and traitors. Gentile converts, especially those belonging to the upper classes, encountered similar difficulties: their faith did not allow them take part in a series of traditional pagan-religious practices involving worship of Rome and the emperor, yet these practices were part and parcel of a citizen’s everyday life and they were a conventional sign of loyalty to the empire. Hence the accusation so often leveled against the Christians that they were ‘atheists.’ This was a reason why they were threatened with persecution and martyrdom — a threat which hung over them for centuries and meant that to become a Christian involved taking risks; and demanded a high degree of moral courage.

4. What caused the great confrontation between the pagan empire and Christianity? The Christian religion encouraged people to respect and obey lawful authority. ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (cf. Mt 22:15-21) was the principle given by Christ himself. The Apostles developed this teaching: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except God’ (Rom 13:1), wrote St Paul to the faithful at Rome; and St Peter exhorted the disciples to ‘Fear God. Honor the emperor’ (1 Pet 2:17). The empire, for its part, was liberal in religious matters and easily tolerated new forms of worship and foreign divinities. The collision and the break occurred because Rome tried to get its Christian subjects to do something they could not do — render it the religious homage of adoration which may be given lawfully to God alone.

5. The circumstances surrounding the first persecution —Nero’s— had enormous effects, despite the fact that this persecution does not seem to have extended further than the city of Rome. The Christians were officially accused of a heinous crime — the burning of the city — and this created a widespread public opinion hostile to the new religion. The historian Tacitus regarded Christianity as ‘a pernicious superstition’; Seutonius described it as ‘novel and mischievous’; Pliny the Younger as ‘depraved and extravagant. Tacitus went as far as calling the Christians enemies of mankind. Therefore it is not surprising that ordinary people attributed to Christians all sorts of monstrosities such as infanticide and cannibalism, etc. According to Tertullian ‘Christians to the lions’ became the obligatory catch-cry of every riot.

6. From the first century on, Christianity was regarded as an ‘unlawful superstition’, which meant that the mere profession of Christian belief— ‘bearing the name of Christ’ — was a crime. This explains why many anti-Christian acts of violence in the second century originated not so much in actions of emperors or magistrates as in popular agitation and denunciation. Consequently, persecution during this period was not a general or continuous phenomenon; the Christians sometimes enjoyed long periods of peace, without this meaning that they felt any real security under the law: at any moment they could find themselves victims of violence. The ambiguous attitude of certain second-century emperors is reflected in Trajan’s famous reply when Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, consulted him on what policy he should adopt towards Christians. Trajan replied that the authorities should not take the initiative in seeking out Christians or pay any attention to anonymous informers, but that they should act whenever they received denunciations in the proper form and should condemn and execute those Christians who did not recant and who refused to sacrifice to the gods. Tertullian — a Christian apologist and a skilled lawyer — exposed the absurdity of Trajan’s reply: ‘If they are criminals,’ he says referring to the Christians, ‘why not hunt them down?; and if they are innocent, why punish them?’

7. In the third century, persecution took a different form. In the attempt to re-establish the empire after the period of ‘military anarchy’ — a period of serious political upheaval — part of the official policy was to restore the cult of the gods and of the emperor as a test of subjects’ loyalty to Rome and its sovereign. The Christian Church came to be seen as a powerful enemy because the faithful were forbidden to engage in this form of worship. This gave rise to a new wave of persecution, this time originated by the authorities — a much more systematic persecution than theretofore.

8. The first of these great persecutions stemmed from an edict of Decius (c. 250) ordering all inhabitants of the empire to offer public, officially supervised sacrifice in honor of their national gods. Decius’ edict took the Christians completely by surprise (Christians were now quite numerous and had become somewhat easygoing after a long period of peace). The result was that, although there were many martyrs, many not very committed Christians did offer public sacrifice or at least obtained the libellus stating that they had offered sacrifice; their re-integration into the Christian community later gave rise to controversies within the Church. However, the experience they underwent helped to stiffen their resolve and when, a few years later, Emperor Valerian (253-60) launched another persecution, Christian resistance was much firmer: there were many martyrs and very few Christians who proved unfaithful (these were called the lapsi).

9. The severest persecution was the last one, which took place at the beginning of the fourth century, in the context of the great reform of Roman institutions carried out by Emperor Diocletian. The new system of government established by the founder of the later empire was a tetrarchy — government by an ‘imperial college’ of four, among whom was divided the administration of the vast Roman territories. Under the tetrarchy, traditional religion was given a very important role in the regeneration of the empire, yet despite this Diocletian did not persecute the Christians during the first eighteen years of his reign. A number of factors, not least the influence of Caesar Galerius, played a part in setting off this last and worst persecution. Four edicts against Christians were promulgated between February 303 and March 304, aimed at wiping out Christianity and the Church once and for all. The persecution was violent in the extreme and made many martyrs in most provinces of the empire. Only Gaul and Britain — governed by Caesar Constantius Chlorus, who was sympathetic towards Christians and the father of the future emperor Constantine — remained practically untouched. At the end of the day the result was absolute failure. After his abdication Diocletian lived long enough to witness, from his retreat at Salonae in his native Dalmatia, the epilogue of the persecution era and the beginning of an epoch of freedom for the Church and for Christians.

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                                                    The Life of the Early Christians

Christians formed local communities — churches — under the pastoral authority of a bishop. The bishop of Rome — the successor of the Apostle Peter — exercised a primacy over all the churches. The Eucharist was the center of Christian life. The rejection of Gnosticism was the major doctrinal achievement of the early Church.

1. In its expansion in the ancient world Christianity adapted itself to the institutions and lifestyle of Roman society. We have already seen how the principle of Christian universalism became more and more patent; we have also looked at the relationships between the Church and the pagan empire. Now we will study the main features of life inside the Christian communities: their hierarchical and social make-up, pastoral government, discipline, liturgy, etc.

Wherever it went, classical Rome, by policy, promoted city life: municipalities and colonies developed over all the provinces of an empire in which urbanization meant Romanization. Christianity was born in this historical context, and it was in the cities that the first Christian communities established themselves, as local churches. Their surroundings were pagan and hostile — which had the effect of giving them greater internal cohesion and made for solidarity among their members. Yet these churches were not isolated nuclei: there was a real communion and communication among the churches and they all had a keen sense of being components of one and the same world-wide Church, the one and only Church founded by Jesus Christ.

2. Many of the churches of the first century were founded by Apostles, and as long as these Apostles lived they remained under their authority, being managed by a ‘college’ of priests who were in charge of their liturgical life and their good order. This system of government can be seen especially in the Pauline churches founded by the Apostle of the Gentiles. But as the Apostles died monarchical local episcopacy — which had been introduced from the very beginning in some churches — became the general system. The bishop was the head of the church, the shepherd of the faithful, and, as successor of the Apostles, he had the fullness of the priesthood and the authority necessary for governing the community.

3. The key to the unity of the churches scattered throughout the world, which together made up one, universal Church, was the institution of the Roman primacy. Christ, the founder of the Church —as was pointed out elsewhere — chose the Apostle Peter as the firm rock on which to base his Church. But the primacy conferred by Christ on Peter was in no way a temporary, circumstantial affair, fated to disappear when Peter died. It was a permanent institution, an earnest of the permanence of the Church, something that would be valid for all times. Peter was the first bishop of Rome, and his successor in the see of Rome also succeeded to the prerogative of the primacy, which conferred on the Church the monarchical constitution which Jesus Christ wished it to have always. The Roman church was therefore — and for all times — the center of unity of the universal Church.

4.The way in which this primacy is exercised has naturally been conditioned, over the centuries, by historical circumstances. In periods of persecution or when communication was difficult, the exercise of the primacy was less easy, less intense, than when times were better. But history allows us to document, from the very beginning, both the local churches’ recognition of the pre-eminence of the Roman church and also the consciousness the bishops of Rome had of their primacy over the universal Church.

At the beginning of the second century, St Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote that the Roman church was the church ‘placed at the head of charity’, thereby attributing to it a right of supremacy over the whole Church. For St Irenaeus of Lyons in his treatise Against Heresies (c. 185), the church of Rome enjoyed a singular pre-eminence and was the touchstone for judging what the true teaching of the faith was. In the first century we can find an outstanding indication of how aware bishops were of their primacy. In connection with a serious internal problem in the church of Corinth, Pope Clement I intervened with authority: his letter, laying down the procedure to be followed and requiring obedience of his instructions, is a clear proof of how aware he was of his primatial authority; no less significant is the respectful and docile acceptance given to the pope’s intervention by the church of Corinth.

5.‘Christians are not born, they are made,’ wrote Tertullian towards the end of the second century. These words may mean, among other things, that at that time the great majority of the faithful were not — as would be the case from the fourth century onwards — children of Christian parents, but rather people who had been Gentiles originally and had come to the Church by being converted to the faith of Jesus Christ. Baptism — the sacrament of incorporation into the Church — was at that time the last stage in a slow process of Christian initiation. This process, beginning with conversion, developed through a long ‘catechumenate’, a testing-tune and a period of catechetical instruction, which was the established procedure from the end of the second century. The liturgical life of Christians centered on the eucharistic sacrifice, which was offered at least every Lord’s day, whether in a Christian household — the seat of some ‘domestic church’ — or in places set aside for worship, which began to exist from the third century.

6.The early Christian communities were made up of all sorts of people, without any class or other kind of distinction. From Apostolic times, the Church was open to Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, free men and slaves. Nevertheless it is true that most Christians were people of humble condition. Celsus, a pagan intellectual hostile to Christianity, mocked at the weavers, shoemakers, washermen and other uneducated types who were spreading the gospel in every sector of society. But it is an undoubted fact that even early on some members of the Roman aristocracy embraced Christianity: so much so, that one of Emperor Valerian’s persecution edicts was specially directed against the senators, gentlemen and imperial officials who were Christians.

                                                          Early Christian Writings

Christian literature began with the ‘Apostolic Fathers,’ whose writings reflect the way of life of the early Christians. The ‘Apologists’ wrote in defense of the faith and the third century saw the beginnings of theological writing in the strict sense.

1. The New Testament consists of twenty-seven books, all of them written in the second half of the first century. Four gospels cover the life and teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ; the Acts of the Apostles

— written by St Luke — are also an historical record, dealing with the life of the early church of Jerusalem and going on to describe the activities of St Paul the Apostle up to his arrival at Rome to appear before the judgment seat of Caesar. A second group of books — didactic in character — consists of fourteen letters of St Paul and seven ‘catholic’ epistles — two by St Peter, three by John, one by James and one by Jude. A prophetic book — the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of St John — concludes the series of inspired books which contain the divine revelation of the New Testament. This inspired scripture is followed by early Christian literature.

2. Early Christian writing reflects the way of life of the early Church. As time went by, the growing Church had to face difficulties from within and without, and once it achieved a certain maturity it felt the need to develop a systematic exposition of the content of the faith. All this development occurred during the first three centuries of our era, before Emperor Constantine granted freedom of religion. The literary texts which have come down to us allow us to plot the various stages of this historical development.

3. The oldest of these writings came from a number of Greek writers, of the first and second centuries, known by the name of the ‘Apostolic Fathers.’ This title describes their special characteristics: their antiquity (some of these works were, probably, written before St John’s Gospel) and the close links between these writers and the Apostles (they may be considered disciples of the Apostles). The writings of the Apostolic Fathers are pastoral in character and are addressed to a Christian readership. The most outstanding texts in this first group of Christian writings are the Didache (the oldest known account of church discipline), the letter of St Clement to the Corinthians, which we have already mentioned; the seven letters of St Ignatius of Antioch to other churches, written on his journey to Rome, where he would suffer martyrdom; and another letter, by St Polycarp of Smyrna. The Shepherd of Hermas, which has importance for tracing the history of penitential practice, also belongs to this group.

4. The early Church was the Church of the martyrs. The faithful were keen to have accounts of the heroism of those who had given their lives for the Christian faith. Undoubtedly their curiosity led to the concocting of legendary accounts, which have little value as history; but there are quite a number of documents about martyrs which carry every guarantee of being accurate. In many cases martyrdom was preceded by a judicial process in which notaries recorded magistrates’ questions, the martyrs’ replies and the sentence condemning them to death. Sometimes the Christians managed to obtain transcripts of these court documents: for example, this happened in the cases of St Justin, who was tried in Rome (c. 165), and of St Cyprian of Carthage (c. 258). Accounts of martyrdoms written by Christian eye-witnesses have the same sort of documentary value as these court acta; they consisted of a few touching pages which used to be read out in the churches on the anniversary of the martyr’s death.

5. In the second century a new kind of literature grew up which shows the struggles of Christians against enemies from inside and outside the Church. The defense of the faith against heresy gave rise to a good number of anti-heretical writings. The most outstanding is St Irenaeus of Lyons’ treatise Against Heresies, which we have already referred to and which is a refutation of gnostic teachings. Irenaeus placed key emphasis on the tradition conserved by the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, and especially the tradition of the Roman church, the teacher of the faith adorned with a special primacy over all the other churches.

6. The main objective of the ‘Apologists’ was to indicate Christian truth, and their writings were directed at readers outside the Church. Some of these apologetic works, addressed to Jews, refuted Jewish criticism of Christianity, arguing from the Old Testament to show that Jesus was the messiah foretold by the prophets, that the Church was the new Israel and that Christianity was the fullness of the law. A notable example of this type is the Dialogue with Trypho, written by St Justin Martyr around the year 150. But generally these writings were addressed to the typical pagan hostile to Christianity.