Abstract
Already as early as the apostolic age, a couple of decades after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus Movement—then still largely a sect within Judaism—felt the need to express its basic beliefs, which eventually marked its distinction and, much later, in the fourth century, separation from other Jewish competing groups, and its emergence as a legal “religion” within the Roman Empire.1 The thrust of these early professions of faith is Christological, expressed in pithy formulas such as “Jesus is the Christ” (Acts 2:36; 10:36; Col. 2:6), “Jesus is the Lord” (1 Cor. 12:3; Rom. 10:9; Phil. 2:11), or “Jesus is the Son of God” (Rom. 1:4; Acts 9:20; 13:33; Heb. 4:14). Later this Christological profession of faith is expanded into a Trinitarian structure, the clearest examples of which are: Matthew 28:19–20 (“baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”) and 2 Corinthians 13:13 (“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you”).
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Notes
For studies on the relations between Judaism and the nascent Jesus Movement, see a vast number of works: Heshel Shanks, ed., Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: A Parallel History of Their Origins and Early Development (Washington, DC: Biblical Archeological Society, 1992); and
Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).
This does not mean of course that the two “religions” have “parted ways” and ceased to interact with each other. See Becker and Reed. A brief but illuminating essay on this topic is Judith Lieu, “Self-Definition vis- à -vis the Jewish Matrix,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine, ed. Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young, 214–229 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
The focus of this essay is Christianity as a migrant institution. Of course, other religions have also been shaped by migration. On Judaism and Islam, see the volume Theology of Migration in the Abrahamic Religions of this series, ed. Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. The quotation from Wallenstein is taken from his The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origin of European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 15. See also
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Culture, Society and the World, 1400 to the Present (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
For a survey of recent migration in the United States of America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, see Leonore Loeb Adler and Uwe P. Giellen, eds., Migration: Immigration and Emigration in International Perspective (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
For helpful studies on migration in general, see Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas, and Mark J. Miller, eds., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York: The Guilford Press, 2014);
Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, and Eveline Reisenauer, Transnational Migration (Madden, MA: Polity, 2013);
Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds., Migration Theory: Thinking across Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 2008);
Alejandro Portes and Josh DeWind, eds., Rethinking Migration: New Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007);
Paul Collier, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013);
David G. Gutiérrez and Pierette Hondagnew-Sotelo, eds., Nation and Migration: Past and Future (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009);
Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and
Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Beside the older works on church history such as Kenneth Scott Latourette’s seven-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1937–1945); and A History of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1953), the most important contemporary work on the history of Christianity is the monumental nine-volume The Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Indispensable tools for the study of World Christianity are: Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity 1910–2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009);
and Patrick Johnstone, The Future of the Global Church: History, Trends and Possibilities (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2011). Helpful general surveys of Christianity as a world religion include
Douglas Jacobsen, The World’s Christians: Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They Got There (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011);
Sebastian Kim and Kirsteen Kim, Christianity as a World Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2008);
Noel Davies and Martin Conway, World Christianity in the 20th Century (London: SCM Press, 2008);
Dyron B. Daughrity, The Changing World of Christianity: The Global History of a Borderless Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 2010);
Charles Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Helpful works on the Diaspora during the Greco-Roman time include: Menahem Stern, “The Jewish Diaspora,” in The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions, ed. Shemuel Safrai and Menahem Stern, 117–183 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974–1976);
Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135), trans. A. Burkill, rev. and ed. Geza Vermes and Fergus Miller (Edinburgh: Clark, 1973–1987), 1–176;
Tessa Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction (Leiden: Brill, 2001); and
Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
See Arnold Ages, Th Diaspora Dimension (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 3–7.
Histories of the early church are of course legion. However, studies on migration as a social phenomenon during the patristic era are scarce. The most useful single-volume histories of the early church include: Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (London: Penguin Books, 1967); The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); and
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Multivolume histories include:
Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, rev. ed. (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1937–1945);
Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, eds., History of the Church (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965–1981);
JeanMarie Mayeur, Charles et Luce Pietri, André Vauchez, and Marc Venard, Histoire du Christianisme des origines à nos jours (Paris: Desclée, 1995). A helpful introduction to the various backgrounds of early Christianity is
Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987). One work that is highly useful for understanding Christianity as a world movement, with emphasis on the Christian expansion into Asia, is
Dale Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement: Volume I: Earliest Christianity to 1453 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). For what follows, see this book, pp. 57–97. For a history of Asian Christianity, see
Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia: Volume I: Beginnings to 1500 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998).
See Walter A. Goffart, Barbarians and Romans. A.D. 418–584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980);
E. A. Thompson, Romans and Barbarians: The Decline of the Western Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982);
Thomas S. Burns, A History of the Ostrogoths (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
On these churches, see David Bundy, “Early Asian and East African Christianities,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Constantine to c. 600, ed. Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris, 118–148 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See Anthony O’Mahony, “Syriac Christianity in the Modern Middle East,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Eastern Christianity, ed. Michael Angold, 511–535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
On this Arab Christianity, see Françoise Micheau, “Eastern Christianities (Eleventh to Fourteenth Century): Copts, Melkites, Nestorians and Jacobites,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Eastern Christianity, ed. Angold, 373–403; and Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
For a historical overview of the “Byzantine Commonwealth,” see Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971); Jonathan Shepard, “The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1000–1550,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Eastern Christianity, ed. Angold, 1–52.
For the English text of this letter, see C. Richardson, ed., Early Christian Fathers (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 213–222.
On Jesus as a border-crosser and migrant spirituality, see Peter C. Phan, In Our Tongues: Perspectives from Asia on Mission and Inculturation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 13–50.
On this, see the following works: L. William Countryman, The Rich Christian in the Church of the Early Empire: Contradictions and Accommodations (Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1980);
Justo L. González, Faith &; Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money (San Francisco: Harper &; Row, 1990);
Martin Hengel, Property and Riches in the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974);
Redmond Mullin, The Wealth of Christians (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984). For primary sources, see
Peter C. Phan, Social Thought: Message of the Fathers of the Church (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1984); and
R. Sierra Bravo, Doctrina social y economica de los padres de la Iglesia (Madrid: COMPI, 1976).
See John Koenig, New Testament Hospitality: Partnership with Strangers as Promise and Mission (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).
See E. Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 67.
See Charles J. Dollen, James K. McGowan, and James J. Megivern, eds., The Catholic Tradition: Social Thought, vol. 1 (Wilmington, NC: McGrath Publishing Co., 1979), 85–86.
See George W. S. Friedrichsen, The Gothic Version of the Gospels: A Study of Its Style and Textual History (London: Oxford University Press, 1926) and the 1939 edition; and
E. A. Thompson, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966).
See Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: Holt and Co., 1998); and
Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, ed., Christianity and Paganism: The Conversion of Western Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).
The bibliography on Judaism and early Christianity is vast. The following deserve mentioning: A. Lukyn Williams, Adversus Judaeos: A Bird’s-Eye View of Christian Apologiae Until the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935);
Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Chris tianit y in the Age of Constantine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
Peter Richardson, ed., Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity 2: Separation and Polemic (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1986);
James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study of the Origins of Antisemitism (New York: Athenaeum, 1974);
H. Schrenberg, Die christliche Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (1–11Jh) (Frankfurt and Berne: Lang. 1982);
Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
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Phan, P.C. (2016). Christianity as an Institutional Migrant: Historical, Theological, and Ethical Perspectives. In: Padilla, E., Phan, P.C. (eds) Christianities in Migration. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031648_2
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