One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church?

A key feature of medieval culture and civilization was the presence of the Catholic Church. You might wonder where precisely the Catholic Church comes from, or indeed, where we get our Bible from in the first place. In this episode, I'll largely be discussing the origins of the Christian religion and how catholic Christianity ties in with that. I'll also discuss the views of modern scholars who don't always agree with the traditional accounts of Christianity's origins.

Further Reading

Evans, G.R. A Short History of Medieval Christianity. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017.

The first chapter of Evans's very approachable little book lays out the history of the early Christian church in a way that's accessible to the general reader.

Mitchell, Margaret M. and Frances M. Young, eds. The Cambridge History of Christianity. Volume 1: Origins to Constantine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

This provides a more scholarly approach to the early Christian religion. The authors of this volume take a more modern scholarly approach, preferring to talk about different Christianities rather than a single, unified Church.

Primary Sources

Irenaeus, Against Heresies.

I've linked to the free online text of Irenaeus found on the New Advent website. Irenaeus was a tireless proponent of the authority of the catholic church against various heretical sects, and he devoted a great deal of time to arguing against the beliefs that we now call Gnosticism. Indeed, his arguments against Gnosticism were our only source on Gnostic teachings until a cache of Gnostic texts was recovered in the Egyptian desert in the twentieth century at Nag Hammadi.

Eusebius. The History of the Church. Edited by Andrew Louth. Translated by G.A. Williamson. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Eusebius was Constantine's fourth-century biographer and he presents the classical view of apostolic succession. He often writes of heresies in terms of their leaders rather than what they believed, and he is very keen to show that the church favored by Constantine was the Church of the apostles that passed its traditions down over more than two centuries.

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