Apostolic Times: Discipleship and Fellowship

Abstract

When seen not from the perspective of the later developments in the church but from within itself, the New Testament does not present a single and comprehensive picture of the church. A historian of the church and a careful student of the Scriptural texts cannot claim that the historical forms of the church as they developed in the later centuries were predestined in the Bible. Rather, the church had many options for developing its institutions, including hierarchical ones. Why it chose one or another option was to a great extent because of historical circumstances and not necessarily because the Bible said so. What the Bible said and implied was a multiplicity of options for the development of the church. The Scripture does not offer a systematic teaching about the church. It contains a couple of sayings of Jesus, some episodic instructions by the apostles to their contemporaries, a number of images that can be interpreted as related to the church, and a few sporadic snapshots of the life of the early Christian community. These do not, however, allow us to reconstruct a single biblical picture of the church. We can get only some pieces of the variegated and often inconsistent mosaic of how the early Christian community understood itself.