Antioch & Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity

My pastor recommended this, 'cause we are studying St. Paul. I'm 74, and I've never felt so informed about 1st Century Christianity, as I am with this read. The information makes reading the Bible more inviting and important.

I can not but agree with and amplify the comments of the previous reviewer regarding this book. It is now twenty odd years since this book was first published, and it went out of print after only one edition. Yet, this work represents a major interpretation of early Church development that is as fresh today as when it was proposed. Dealing with the Christian communities in Antioch and Rome in the first three generation after Jesus, Brown proposes in the book's introduction four different positions in the early Church on the matter of the observance of Jewish law and its application to gentile believers. The most conservative position advocated strict law observance including circumcision. One must become an adherent of Judaism to enter the Church. A conservative position advocated by James, the relative of Jesus, that required gentile converts to observe some Jewish law and practice but not circumcision. It is probably fair to say that this was the position of the Jerusalem apostles. A moderate position advocated by Paul especially in his later epistle to the Romans, and finally, a more radical law free mission advocated by the Hellenists as seen in Stephan's speech and the epistle to the Hebrews. Reading this, one can not but immediately notice that the interpretation of the relationship between Paul and the early Church at Jerusalem as uniformly hostile is absent. Meier and Brown propose a nuanced and evolutionary relationship between Paul and his adherents and the Jerusalem center. Furthermore, these four identifications are not fixed positions but points on a continuum with fluidity in the middle and greater rigidity at the extremes. And, in the center of all this was the apostle Peter. Not present here is the all too common contemporary fixation with a Jamesian party including Peter locked in a death struggle for the soul of the early Church with a radical Pauline faction. Ultimately, for Meier and Brown, it is not a triumphant Paulinism that defines the early Church. For these scholars, the early Church is defined by a subtle and complex interaction between the two central positions in this dialogue. The early Church in the diaspora is seen as largely populated by Jewish Christian converts. Therefore, the paramount issue in the self identification of the early Church is how Jewish will it be. While conforming nicely to the available evidence, this is a minority opinion in the overheated scholarly discussion of Christian origins in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The authors' evidence is adduced from the New Testament and the early Church fathers. Meir and Brown well cover the interaction of the Churches at Antioch and Rome with the Jerusalem center during the first Christian generation. A preliminary point of importance stressed by the authors is that there were significant Jewish Christian communities outside of Roman Palestine prior to Paul's mission work. Meier's work covering Antiochene Church