This chapter explores the rich tapestry of sources—canonical, post-apostolic, apocryphal, Jewish, and pagan—that illuminate the Apostolic Age. It surveys the foundational documents of Christianity, alongside the earliest interpretations, fabrications, and critiques, as preserved by the hands of theologians, historians, skeptics, and saints. Here the reader encounters both the inner pulse and outer frame of the earliest church, as documented and contested in the texts that have survived across centuries.
Canonical Foundations: The Witness of the New Testament
The twenty-seven books of the New Testament constitute the most securely attested corpus of antiquity. Their authenticity is undergirded by a continuous chain of external attestation reaching back to the apostolic era itself, and by an internal power and unction that far transcend any literary achievement of the second century. The Church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognized and preserved this canon—not through arbitrary decree but through spiritual discernment and apostolic legacy. Yet this spiritual authority does not nullify the call for rigorous textual criticism, especially in the case of the seven so-called Antilegomena, which early Christians regarded with cautious reservation.
The radical skepticism of the Tübingen and Leyden schools initially reduced the canon to merely five documents: Paul’s letters to the Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and the Apocalypse of John. But scholarly rigor has softened such stances. Liberal critics like Hilgenfeld and Lipsius now admit seven Pauline Epistles as genuine, while Renan extends the count to nine. Even the most critical historians concede that these core documents sufficiently secure the historical and doctrinal contours of apostolic Christianity.
The Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles offer twin portraits of the primitive Church: Acts delineates its external expansion, while the Epistles unveil its inner spiritual life. These works, composed independently and contemporaneously, form a literary symphony whose harmonies emerge in subtle and uncontrived parallels. Their divergences, too, speak to authenticity, as post-apostolic fabricators would not have risked the minor incongruities and narrative silences that are the hallmark of honest reportage.
Luke’s authorship of Acts, widely affirmed even by critics such as Ewald, lends considerable credence to the work. Renan, in St. Paul, praises the book as a second Christian idyll—a narrative imbued with vitality, poetic cadence, and an almost Homeric sense of adventure. He describes it as a “book of joy, of serene ardor,” suffused with “a breeze of morning” and “an odor of the sea,” a literary companion for voyagers tracing the early paths of faith across the Mediterranean world.
Echoes of the Apostles: Patristic and Post-Apostolic Writings
The writings of the Apostolic Fathers and later patristic authors overflow with quotations, allusions, and theological reflections rooted in the New Testament. These works are as inseparably bound to the apostolic writings as rivers are to their springs. The transmission of tradition and theology through the early Church is not merely linear but organic, an unbroken chain of faith mediated through time.
The Apocryphal and Heretical Landscape
Beside the canonical stream flows a broader, more turbulent current: the vast literature of Apocryphal Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses. Driven by curiosity, doctrinal agenda, or imaginative zeal, these writings seek to fill the narrative gaps left by the canonical texts. They possess little historical value but offer insights into the devotional and theological speculations of various early sects. More distinctly than the apocryphal Gospels, these texts reflect pronounced heretical tendencies.
Lipsius, in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, classifies the Apocryphal Acts into four categories: Ebionitic, Gnostic, originally Catholic, and Catholic redactions of heretical sources. Though many of these documents date no earlier than the fifth century, they often rest on second- or third-century substrates.
(a) Apocryphal Acts
These include works such as the Acta Petri et Pauli, the Acta Pauli et Theclae, Acta Thomae, and The Doctrine of Addai, the latter preserved in Syriac and English by G. Phillips. Their theological stances range from Ebionitic to Gnostic, sometimes cloaked in Catholic revisionism.
(b) Apocryphal Epistles
This category includes the correspondence between Paul and Seneca, the third Epistle to the Corinthians, and letters attributed to Mary and Peter. These writings often strive to reinforce or reinterpret apostolic doctrine through imagined correspondence.
(c) Apocryphal Apocalypses
Chief among these are the Apocalypses of John, Peter, and Paul—the last inspired by Paul’s rapture into Paradise (2 Cor. 12:2–4). Others include apocalyptic visions ascribed to Thomas, Stephen, Mary, Moses, and Ezra, reflecting varied eschatological hopes and fears.
Critical Editions and Collections
Prominent collections include Fabricius’ Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti, Tischendorf’s editions of apocryphal Acts and Apocalypses, and Lipsius’ extensive studies on apostolic legends. These works serve as essential tools for tracing the evolution of early Christian imagination and doctrinal development.
Jewish Backgrounds and Parallels
The Jewish world, particularly through the writings of Philo and Josephus, offers indispensable context. Josephus remains the foremost authority on the Jewish War and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70—an event that marks the final rupture between Christianity and the Jewish temple. Rabbinic literature, though often polemical, sheds light on the educational and liturgical environment of the Apostles. Scholars such as Lightfoot, Delitzsch, and Schürer have rendered these sources accessible for Christian exegesis and historical analysis.
The Pagan Witness
From Tacitus and Pliny to Lucian and Julian, heathen authors offer fragmentary, often hostile, glimpses into early Christianity. Their testimonies, while distorted, carry apologetic weight by affirming the existence, persecution, and peculiar ethos of the Christian movement. Nathanael Lardner’s monumental collection remains the classic compendium of such pagan and Jewish testimonies.
Historical Reconstructions of the Apostolic Age
The quest to understand the Apostolic Age has given rise to a monumental body of historical literature. Anglican writers like William Cave, Lutheran scholars such as Buddeus and Planck, and Reformed giants like Neander have each contributed volumes that chronicle the labors of the apostles. Meanwhile, the Tübingen School, led by Baur and Schwegler, offered a radical reconfiguration of apostolic chronology and authorship, which sparked intense theological debates across Europe and America.
Among the most significant contributions are:
- Neander’s Planting and Training of the Christian Church, a landmark synthesis of theological insight and historical narrative.
- Baur’s Christianity and the Church in the First Three Centuries, an erudite but polemical reconstruction challenging traditional timelines.
- Lightfoot’s incisive rebuttals to Supernatural Religion, which became a bulwark against radical skepticism in English theological circles.
- Ritschl’s Origin of the Old Catholic Church, which marked a methodological departure from Tübingen dogmatism toward a more constructive theology.
These and other works by Lange, Lechler, Pressensé, Döllinger, and Weizsäcker chart the rise of early Christianity with varying degrees of faith, philosophy, and critical rigor. Even Renan, whose Origins of Christianity veers toward the romantic and skeptical, offers rich literary texture and a provocative counterpoint to ecclesiastical orthodoxy.
Chronological Frameworks
The chronology of the Apostolic Age, spanning roughly A.D. 30 to 100, has elicited specialized treatments from scholars such as Rudolph Anger, Karl Wieseler, and Henry Browne. Their works provide the scaffolding for placing the events of Acts and the Epistles in historical sequence. Modern synoptic charts, such as those in Lechler’s edition of Lange’s commentary, furnish valuable aids to reconstructing the flow of apostolic history amid its overlapping timelines and lacunae.
This literary and historical treasury, vast and varied, is the scaffolding upon which the memory of the Apostolic Church is built. Within these pages, critics and confessors alike grapple with the mystery of beginnings—a time when divine revelation entered the theater of human history and left footprints discernible in both sacred canon and secular record.
