The Beginnings of the Church

The object of this book is "to investigate the aims and beliefs of the Christian community in the time preceding the advent of Paul." Believing that the influence of Hellenistic beliefs and practices upon the earliest Christians has been exaggerated, and that the essential connections between the phases of early Christian developments have not been duly recognized, the author reviews the period between the death of Jesus and the beginnings of the gentile mission in which the church grew up in its native Jewish soil, and seeks to show the connection with what went before and what came after. In his attempt to interpret the ideas of the budding church, he sets out from the hypothesis that Jesus imparted his message in the terms of Jewish apocalyptic, and that these conceptions were normative also for his disciples, and found their natural outcome in the building up of the first Christian communities.
Tracing first the steps by which the disciples (who even before the death of Jesus formed a "brotherhood") passed from the despair caused by the death of the Lord to the triumph of their faith in his messiahship, wrought by the resurrection, the author describes in consecutive chapters the development of the primitive brotherhood into the church, the gift of the Holy Spirit and the assurance of the continued presence of Jesus as the Lord, the relation of the primitive church to Judaism, the life of the first Christian community, the meaning of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and the significance of Stephen in the transition from the earlier to the later development of the church.
With all its obscurity, there is no period in the history of our religion which is quite so momentous as that which intervened between the death of Jesus and the advent of Paul; and no discerning student of the New Testament will fail to appreciate the valuable contribution made to its better understanding by this book. The work is based on a keen and penetrating study of a source material which tests the ability of the best of scholars. The conclusions arrived at are suggestive and noteworthy.
-"The American Journal of Theology," Volume 20 [1916]