However, since the earliest Christian writers, perhaps even those writing in the first half of the 2nd Century, appear to cite these letters, we know that they could not have been composed much later than that.
This presents a puzzle. Part of the reason these critical scholars have questioned the dating and authorship of these works is linguistic, and quite technical. But a large part of it is based on their content.
For example, at 1 Timothy 3:1-13, the moral qualifications for such Church officers as “bishops” or “overseers” and “deacons” are laid out. Paul’s own lifetime (which is believed to have ended in the 60s) seems to be far too early for such top-down organizational developments to be happening for a presumably “grass-roots” movement. (If our hypothesis is right and it is an imperial Roman program, however, this presents no problem, and these sophisticated administerial arrangements make perfect sense even at the outset of Christian history.)
The authorship of the first letter attributed to Peter in the New Testament is also considered fraudulent by most scholars, and one of the most important reasons is that the letter is addressed to “Peter’s” fellow “elders.” How could the Church be so officially constituted so early?
Even more noteworthy, in the Book of Titus 1:5-7, the attributed author, Paul, orders the appointment of elders in every town and again discusses their moral qualifications. “The reason I left you in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you.”
Many biblical scholars don’t believe it is possible that Christians were so numerous as to maintain (much less require) leaders in every town on the island of Crete during Paul’s lifetime.
Even if these surviving letters were composed as late as the 2nd Century, however, these passages are striking in their implications. The so-called Apostolic Fathers of the 2nd Century not only made use of these letters themselves, they also exhibit precisely the same very early concern for organizational questions that the first Church fathers were apparently considering.
Writing in the first decades of the 2nd Century, for example, St. Ignatius of Antioch commands his flocks:
Let nothing be done without the bishop.
See that you follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid.” (19)
If there seems to have been a "top-down" organization to Christianity as early as the end of the 1st Century or the start of the 2nd Century, the Book of Acts preserves an even earlier tradition that a group called the "church elders" existed in Ephesus in Asia Minor when Paul visited there. (20) Of course, these may have been Jewish-Christian leaders that Paul was referring to, like those associated with James.
As we have already seen in his letter to the Galatians, Paul was opposing an existing “church” authoritatively led and organized by “Jewish Christians” such as James—against whom Paul appeared to be establishing an alternate leadership—even at this primitive stage.
It is also hard not to see an acute concern for Church hierarchy even in the Gospels themselves in passages like this famous prediction by Jesus:
And I tell you that you are Peter [literally “rock”], and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. (21)
At their inception the Gospels seem to exhibit a well-developed organizational attention to hierarchical authority, and these early letters, some of them quite possibly from the late 1st Century, suggest an orderly, well-funded and authoritarian organization focused on establishing itself simultaneously across wide-ranging parts of the Roman Empire. (And notice how the leadership role of James, the martyred “Brother of Christ” and Paul’s greatest adversary, has completely disappeared in the Gospels.)
Had the Roman authorities been aware of these large-scale activities, they would certainly have been alarmed and prosecuted such efforts as seditious, especially in the immediate wake of the Jewish War—just as they prosecuted rebel and Jewish-Christian leaders—unless these activities were authorized by the Roman government in the first place. Such sponsorship would explain the Church’s rapid, well-funded, highly organized and empire-wide launch (as well as explaining Christianity’s mild treatment at the hands of most of the emperors who followed the Flavians, such as Trajan.)
The existence of Christians in the imperial family gives us reason to re-examine the relationships Flavian emperors (especially Titus) had with the many traditionally identified “Jews” populating their inner circle of friends and associates. (22)
Let us turn our focus now to this extraordinary group of historical figures.
As we have seen in Part I, the ancient historians Tacitus and Suetonius, pagan Romans of the 2nd Century, sometimes called rebellious 1st Century messianic Jews “Christians” or followers of “Chrestus.” Paul himself refers to a very similar group of Jews as “apostles” of Christ. These historically troublesome Jews, like Paul’s adversaries, fundamentally differ from the followers of the New Testament who are today identified as Christians.
Any “Christians” causing trouble in Rome or elsewhere at those early dates must have advocated the strictly observant form of messianic Judaism that sparked their rebellion against Rome and their conflict with Paul in the New Testament.
These militants were still awaiting the arrival of their messiah, albeit in the form of a warrior who would deliver them from foreign bondage. And of course they expected a thoroughly human messiah, as predicted in ancient Hebrew scripture—and certainly not a sacrificial divine human who modeled obedience to Rome. Their “Christianity,” therefore, despite its other similarities, included none of these things now considered essential to “Christianity” as we know it today.
Among pagan observers at the time, like Tacitus, merely professing a belief in the imminent arrival of the prophesied Jewish messiah may have been sufficient to earn the name “Christian”—and even somehow associated with Jesus. Even in the New Testament, the strict Torah practitioners who follow James and Peter and defy Paul are considered “apostles of Christ,” although exactly what that meant to them is unclear.
It seems only later, after the near annihilation of the Jewish rebels by the Romans, that the name “Christian” would become exclusively associated with the peace-loving adherents of the New Testament. Indeed, by the middle of the 2nd Century the Romans had ruthlessly exterminated or driven out of the Empire all of the militant variety of messianic Jews.
The only forms of Judaism to survive the two Jewish wars against Rome and their aftermath within the Empire were the rabbinic Jews, who de-emphasized the idea of “messiah” for the sake of their own survival, and the cheek-turning, peace-loving Pauline believers of the “New Testament,” who inherited the title of Christians from that point forward. Any Zealot groups that survived at all after the bloody wars with Rome were driven underground or outside the eastern fringes of the Empire, some known as “Ebionites,” and some forever scornful of their fellow Jews and carrying forward many traits in common with a religion that later emerged in the same geographic region centuries later—Islam.