Thoughts about the Early Christians

I haven't read Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth, but some of the points raised by Michael S's  post on it have been on my mind lately.  I'm in the extremely fortunate position of being able to spend much of my time over the next year as a student, working on a Master's Degree in Catholic Studies here at St. Thomas.  I'm taking two courses this summer, one an introductory survey, "Catholic Thought & Culture I" (covering the first 13 centuries of Christianity in one semester....), the other "The Church and the Biomedical Revolution."  In both classes, we started off with some reading and discussion of the beginnings of Christianity.  My imagination has been utterly captured by the struggle of the early Christians to define and explain this revolutionary new religion, both for themselves and for the rest of the world, the pagan world they were trying to live in and make peace with.

For the Catholic Thought & Culture class, we read an excerpt from Robert Wilken's The Spirit of Early Christian Thought.  The very first chapter talks about the efforts of Justin Martyr and Origen to respond to the pagan philosophers challenging this new religion.  Wilken makes the point that, despite the brilliance of the arguments these early Christians formulated to engage the philosophers on their own terms, they never lost their awareness that the truly revolutionary thing about this religion was that it was centered on the life of Jesus.  He writes:

What had been handed on in the church's worship and practice, in prayers and catechetical instruction, in the words and images and stories of the Bible was set on a firm intellectual foundation.  Yet, and this is the central point, the biblical narrative was not reduced to a set of ideas or a body of principles;  no conceptual scheme was allowed to displace the evangelical history.  Christianity, wrote Leo the Great, bishop of Rome in the fifth century, is a "religion founded on the mystery of the Cross of Christ."  Christian thinking did not spring from an original idea, and it was not nourished by a seminal spiritual insight.  It had its beginnings in the history of Israel and the life of a human being named Jesus of Nazareth, who was born of Mary, lived in Judea, suffered and died in Jerusalem, and was raised by God to new life.

It just stuck me, reading that, how easy it would have been for all of these brilliant Church fathers to take the "sayings" of this historical person, Jesus, and take on the pagan world intellectually by reducing the words to a "set of ideas or a body of principles" or a "conceptual scheme."  But that's not what happened.  It's really a rather extraordinary thing, when you think about it on the human level of very smart people (not unlike, say, law professors) trying to explain themselves and their revolutionary faith to a secular world.

In my other class, "The Church and the Biomedical Revolution", I learned another fascinating thing about the early Christians, perhaps not really related to Michael's point, but something that has similarly seized my imagination.  We read a chapter from a book by Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity:  A Sociologist Reconsiders History.  In a chapter called "Epidemics, Networks, and Conversion", Stark suggests that contributing to the rapid rise of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire were two epidemics, one in 165 (probably smallpox) and another in 251 (probably measles).  One of many interesting points that Stark makes is that far greater numbers of Christians survived those epidemics than pagans, for the simple reason that they were living basic Christian values of love and charity.  The simple act of not abandoning the sick -- as their pagan neighbors generally did -- but instead sticking around and providing for their elemental needs for food and water, greatly reduced mortality.  (He writes "Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by two-thirds or even more.")  In addition to the higher survival rates of the Christians, the fact that the Christian ethic led them to care for pagans as well, and the power of the seemingly "miraculous" survival of so many Christians, affected the subsequent conversion of surviving pagans.  I'm not sure what that has to do with CLT, and I'm not sure why it has so seized my imagination, but isn't it fascinating?

And next week, we get to Augustine, organ transplantation, and the theological foundations of medical research ethics.  Am I not just the luckiest girl around?