Philip Schaff - The Nature of Church History

The central current and ultimate aim of universal history is the KINGDOM OF GOD ESTABLISHED BY JESUS CHRIST. This is the grandest and most comprehensive institution in the world, as vast as humanity and as enduring as eternity. All other institutions are made subservient to it, and in its interest the whole world is governed. It is no after-thought of God, no subsequent emendation of the plan of creation, but it is the eternal forethought, the controlling idea, the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his ways and works. The first Adam is a type of the second Adam; creation looks to redemption as the solution of its problems. Secular history, far from controlling sacred history, is controlled by it, must directly or indirectly subserve its ends, and can only be fully understood in the central light of Christian truth and the plan of salvation. The Father, who directs the history of the world, “draws to the Son,” who rules the history of the church, and the Son leads back to the Father, that “God may be all in all.” “All things,” says St. Paul, “were created through Christ and unto Christ: and He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the pre-eminence.” Col. 1:16–18. “The Gospel,” says John von Müller, summing up the final result of his lifelong studies in history, “is the fulfilment of all hopes, the perfection of all philosophy, the interpreter of all revolutions, the key of all seeming contradictions of the physical and moral worlds; it is life — it is immortality.”

Philip Schaff, Apostolic Christianity (History of the Christian Church 1; Accordance electronic ed. 8 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), n.p.

Mark 1

You are a Christian in the first century. Your Bible is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. You have heard many sermons from Isaiah and Malachi, especially those passages that speak of the coming Messiah - the man, the God, you know as your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. You know many stories about the works and teachings of Jesus, passed along from eyewitness accounts. Some of the stories are true, some false and many of them an interesting mix of fact and fiction.

Then one day a document arrives from one known as a faithful follower of Jesus. The elder of your church begins to read, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God . . . ."

This is the type of person who first heard the book we call The Gospel According to Mark. It is this person’s perspective we need to consider when we interpret the stories contained in the Gospels of the Greek Scriptures. Too often we interpret the gospels from the point of view of the participants in the stories. This is a mistake. The point of view of the participants in the narrative is only important when the author makes it so.

“He saw the heavens being torn open.” The improper approach would ask what did those around Jesus see and how did they react. Since Mark makes no comment on these questions, they are irrelevant to his point. Our first century Christian would have a very different reaction to these words. Because he knows that when Jesus died, the curtain in the temple was torn open as well. And that, is the good news!

Mathetes - The Manners of the Christians

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.

Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds., The Apostolic Fathers With Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (ANF I; Accordance electronic ed. 9 vols.; New York: Christian Literature Company, 1885), n.p.

St. Clement

May God, who seeth all things, and who is the Ruler of all spirits and the Lord of all flesh — who chose our Lord Jesus Christ and us through Him to be a peculiar people — grant to every soul that calleth upon His glorious and holy Name, faith, fear, peace, patience, long-suffering, self-control, purity, and sobriety, to the well-pleasing of His Name, through our High Priest and Protector, Jesus Christ, by whom be to Him glory, and majesty, and power, and honour, both now and for evermore. Amen.

Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds., The Apostolic Fathers With Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (ANF I; Accordance electronic ed. 9 vols.; New York: Christian Literature Company, 1885), n.p.