Was the Early Church Really Orthodox? Continuity and Development

Orthodox Christians often describe their Church as the Church of the apostles, continuing without a break from Pentecost to the present. Visitors to an Orthodox parish usually notice the same thing: the incense, the standing congregation, the long prayers and the icons feel old. The claim is attractive, and it is also testable. The first eight centuries left a large body of writings, canons and archaeological remains, and anyone can compare them with what Orthodox Christians believe and do today.

This article makes that comparison, area by area: bishops, the Eucharist, worship, the saints, Scripture, theosis, monasticism and icons. It then asks whether Orthodoxy can still claim to be the early Church where things plainly changed, and whether its theology allows for development at all. Protestants, Catholics and skeptical historians answer differently, and each deserves a fair hearing. The goal is honesty rather than victory.

In brief

On the central questions the evidence is strong. By the early second century Ignatius of Antioch treats the bishop as the center of the local Church; around 150 Justin Martyr describes a Sunday Eucharist with readings, a sermon, prayers and Communion received "not as common bread." Honor for martyrs is attested in the second century, and the language of deification goes back to Irenaeus and Athanasius. In these areas today's Orthodox Church is recognizably the same body. Other things really changed: the single bishop in each city emerged over time; the liturgy grew and varied; Old Testament lists differed; some fourth-century bishops opposed images in churches before icons were defined at Nicaea in 787; monasticism arose in the late third and fourth centuries; and some disciplines, such as married bishops, were reversed. Orthodox theology allows growth in expression while denying change in the faith, and it relies on councils and their reception, not a single office, to tell the two apart. Protestant and Catholic critics each make some fair points.

Thesis: The evidence supports a real continuity of faith, worship and order between the early Church and Orthodoxy today, together with genuine development and some changes of discipline, so the honest claim is identity through growth, not an unchanged copy of the first century.

What would "the same Church" have to mean?

No living community stays unchanged for two thousand years, and the Orthodox do not claim that theirs has. Kallistos Ware, in the best-known English-language introduction to Orthodoxy, admits that the first impression of Orthodoxy is "its air of antiquity, its apparent changelessness," but he goes on to say that "not everything received from the past is of equal value, nor is everything received from the past necessarily true."¹ He distinguishes the one Tradition, the faith handed on from the apostles, from many human traditions that may be pious, accidental or mistaken.

The early Church itself framed the test this way. Writing in 434, Vincent of Lérins said Christians should hold "that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all." In the same work he asked whether there could be progress in the Church and answered: "Certainly; all possible progress," provided it is "real progress, not alteration of the faith."² His image was a child growing into an adult: the body gets larger, but it does not become a different body.

So the fair question is whether today's Orthodox Church is the same body grown up, or a different body in borrowed clothes.

The evidence, area by area

Bishops and the visible Church

Ignatius of Antioch wrote seven letters on his way to martyrdom in Rome, traditionally dated around 110. To the Christians of Smyrna he wrote: "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." He adds that it is not lawful "without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast."³ This, the earliest surviving use of the phrase "Catholic Church," already ties the Church to a bishop and his people.

About seventy years later, Irenaeus of Lyons answered the Gnostics by pointing to public lists of bishops: "In this order, and by this succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us."⁴ The Orthodox appeal to apostolic succession, set out more fully in our article Did the Early Church Believe in Apostolic Succession?, is Irenaeus's argument.

The development here is real, though. In the New Testament the words "bishop" and "presbyter" overlap, and the Jesuit theologian Francis Sullivan, a Catholic, concluded that the single bishop presiding over a city's churches emerged during the second century, earlier in Antioch and western Asia Minor than elsewhere; a review of his book summarizes his view that "there was no single bishop in the church of Rome in the first century."⁵ Not every scholar accepts every detail of his reconstruction. {{strong: By the second half of the second century, the churches of the major cities were led by a single bishop with presbyters and deacons, and appealed to succession from the apostles.}} The form stabilized after the apostles; the principle of an ordered ministry is there from the start.

The Eucharist and the Lord's Day

Ignatius complains that certain heretics "abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ."⁶ Around 150 Justin Martyr, explaining Christian worship to the emperor, wrote: "For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these," but as "the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh."⁷

Justin also gives the earliest outline of a Sunday service: "on the day called Sunday," Christians gather; "the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read"; the president "verbally instructs, and exhorts"; all rise and pray; "bread and wine and water are brought"; the president offers prayers and thanksgivings, "and the people assent, saying Amen"; the deacons take portions to the absent.⁸ An Orthodox Christian reading this recognizes the skeleton of the Divine Liturgy (see our beginner's guide to the Divine Liturgy). {{very-strong: Second-century Christians met every Sunday for a Eucharist they regarded as more than ordinary bread and wine.}} Our article What Did the Early Christians Believe About the Eucharist? treats the evidence in more detail.

What Justin does not show is the later text. He says the president prays "according to his ability," which is usually taken to mean the prayers were not yet fixed. The liturgical historian Paul Bradshaw argues that what we know of the earliest worship points toward considerable variety rather than rigid uniformity, and that the more common shape of fourth-century liturgy owed much to churches drawing their traditions together, not to one original pattern surviving intact.⁹ The fixed texts now used under the names of St John Chrysostom and St Basil belong to a later stage of this growth. Even small gestures changed. A fourth-century Jerusalem catechesis, usually attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem though some scholars assign it to his successor John, told the newly baptized to "make your left hand a throne for the right" and receive the Body in the hand.¹⁰ Orthodox lay people today receive both elements together from a spoon. The faith about the Eucharist held steady; the ceremonial did not.

Unwritten tradition

Around 375 Basil the Great wrote that some of the Church's beliefs and practices come "from written teaching," while "others we have received delivered to us in a mystery by the tradition of the apostles." His examples are ordinary: signing with the cross, turning "to the East at the prayer," the words of the eucharistic invocation, blessing the baptismal water and the chrism, and "the custom of baptizing thrice."¹¹ Every one of these is still Orthodox practice. Basil's claim that each reaches back to the apostles cannot be checked, but he plainly regarded them as old by the 370s, and the Church has kept them since. Paul himself told the Thessalonians to "hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15, NKJV), the text Orthodox writers usually cite for the idea.

Martyrs and saints

When Polycarp of Smyrna was martyred around the middle of the second century, his church gathered his bones, "more precious than the most exquisite jewels," laid them "in a fitting place," and planned to "celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom" there each year.¹² Relics and a yearly commemoration at the tomb appear in a text usually dated soon after the event, though a few scholars place it later. Asking the saints for their prayers is attested a little later, in inscriptions and fourth-century preaching, as our infographic on the intercession of the saints in the ancient Church sets out. The developed calendar of saints and the formal process for recognizing them came much later; the instinct behind them did not.

The canon of Scripture

The Orthodox Church reads the Old Testament in the Septuagint, including books that Protestants call the Apocrypha and Orthodox call the anagignoskomena, the books "to be read." Here the early evidence is mixed. In his Festal Letter of 367, Athanasius of Alexandria listed the canonical books, including "Jeremiah with Baruch, Lamentations, and the epistle." He then named other books "not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read": "The Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, and Esther, and Judith, and Tobit," along with the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas.¹³

This supports the Orthodox habit of reading the wider Septuagint collection in church. It also shows that a leading fourth-century Father drew the line of the canon differently from the Orthodox Church today, and even left Esther outside it. The Orthodox canon still has soft edges at a few points. Continuity here means a shared Scripture read in worship, not a fixed list from the first century.

Theosis

The Orthodox teaching that salvation is a sharing by grace in the divine life is sometimes called a Byzantine novelty, but the vocabulary is early. Irenaeus, around 180, spoke of Christ, "who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself."¹⁴ Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, put it more sharply: "He was made man that we might be made God."¹⁵ Both build on 2 Peter 1:4, "that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature" (NKJV). The technical terms and the later distinction between God's essence and energies took centuries to develop, but the idea is not a late arrival.

Monasticism

Ascetic virgins and widows appear early, but organized monasticism, with Antony in the Egyptian desert and Pachomius's communities, belongs to the late third and fourth centuries (see Where Did Christian Monasticism Come From?). It became so central to Orthodox life that bishops are normally chosen from monastics. That is a large development. Orthodox Christians read it as a settled form of a call already present in the Gospels, but first-century churches had no monasteries.

Icons: the hardest case

Here the change is clearest. Christians were painting biblical scenes on church walls by the middle of the third century, as the house church at Dura-Europos in Syria shows (our article Icons and the Early Church covers the archaeology). But resistance to images in churches is also early. A synod at Elvira in Spain, usually dated to the first years of the fourth century, ruled in its 36th canon, in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica's rendering, that "pictures ought not to be in a church, lest that which is worshipped and adored be painted on walls."¹⁶ Scholars disagree on why: a ban on images as such, or a precaution against desecration of wall paintings.

Around 394 Epiphanius of Salamis, a bishop honored as a saint by the Orthodox Church, wrote that he found in a village church a curtain bearing "an image either of Christ or of one of the saints," and that, "being loth that an image of a man should be hung up in Christ's church contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures, I tore it asunder."¹⁷ The letter survives in Jerome's Latin translation. The other anti-image writings attributed to Epiphanius survive only in sources from the eighth-century iconoclast controversy, and whether they are genuine is still debated; this letter has a firmer claim because Jerome's Latin version preserves it.

So the Orthodox use of icons was not universal practice in the fourth century, and some respected churchmen opposed it. It spread, was attacked by the iconoclast emperors, and was defined at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which taught that images receive "due salutation and honourable reverence," not the "true worship of faith which pertains alone to the divine nature," because "the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents."¹⁸ {{debated: The Orthodox claim that the veneration of icons expresses apostolic faith rests on the Incarnation and the council's reasoning, not on evidence that the earliest churches used icons in worship.}} The honest Orthodox case is theological: because the Word became flesh, Christ can be depicted, and Nicaea II judged that the Church's growing practice was faithful to that truth. The reception of the council by the whole Church is how Orthodoxy claims to know it judged rightly.

Discipline that changed outright

Some changes were reversals. Paul wrote that a bishop must be "the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2, NKJV), and married bishops were not unusual in the early centuries. The Council in Trullo (692), whose canons the Orthodox Church receives, noted that bishops in "Africa and Libya and in other places" still lived with their wives "even after consecration" and ruled that "henceforth nothing of the kind shall in any way occur," while insisting it did not intend "to abolish and overthrow what things were established of old by Apostolic authority."¹⁹ Orthodoxy treats this as a change of discipline, not of faith, and kept married priests.

Does Orthodoxy allow for development?

Orthodox writers are often wary of the word "development," which is tied to John Henry Newman's Catholic theory, but they do not deny growth. Ware writes that Tradition, "while inwardly changeless (for God does not change), is constantly assuming new forms, which supplement the old without superseding them."²⁰ He calls for "a creative fidelity" and rejects a barren "theology of repetition." He also quotes Georges Florovsky: "Tradition is not only a protective, conservative principle; it is, primarily, the principle of growth and regeneration."²¹

The Orthodox model, then, is that the faith itself was given once, as Jude 3 says, but the Church comes to express it more fully as it meets new questions. The test of whether a new expression is faithful is not a single office but the whole Church: councils, their reception by the faithful, and the agreement of the Fathers. Critics find this less tidy than a single court of appeal; its defenders reply that this is how the early Church settled the Arian and Christological disputes.

Objections, stated fairly

The Protestant objection: the early Church is on our side

The Reformers did not reject the Fathers. Calvin told the King of France: "It is a calumny to represent us as opposed to the Fathers (I mean the ancient writers of a purer age)... Were the contest to be decided by such authority (to speak in the most moderate terms), the better part of the victory would be ours."²² The Protestant argument is that Scripture alone is the final norm, that later practices such as icons, relic cults and monasticism were additions, and that Epiphanius, Elvira and Athanasius's canon show the earlier Church was closer to Protestant convictions than to later Byzantine ones.

Part of this is correct, and this article has conceded it: icons were contested, the canon varied, monasticism came later. The Orthodox reply is that the same early sources that Protestants cite on these points also show bishops in succession, a Eucharist that is Christ's flesh, baptism by threefold immersion, honor at the martyrs' tombs, and a reliance on unwritten tradition. Appealing to the Fathers on icons but not on the Eucharist or bishops is hard to sustain.

The Catholic objection: Orthodoxy stopped developing

Catholics agree that the early Church was sacramental, episcopal and liturgical. Their objection is different. The Second Vatican Council teaches that "This tradition which comes from the Apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit."²³ Newman argued that a living idea "changes with them in order to remain the same," and wrote that "here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."²⁴ On this view, Orthodoxy accepts development up to 787 and then, without a principle for stopping, refuses later developments such as papal primacy as Rome understands it. Catholics also ask how a Church without a universal head can define anything new.

The Orthodox reply is that the question is not whether doctrine develops but whether a given development is faithful, and that the first-millennium Church tested claims by conciliar reception, which is the Orthodox method still. Orthodoxy has not declared that councils have ended; Ware even suggests new ones may "meet." The disagreement over the papacy turns on whether that particular development passes the Vincentian test, which our article Development of Doctrine: Can Later Catholic Dogmas Still Be Apostolic? discusses. The Catholic question about how Orthodoxy settles disputes today is fair, and still open.

The skeptical objection: there was no single early Church

In 1934 Walter Bauer argued that the second-century Church was far more diverse than later historians admitted. As the foreword to his second edition summarizes the thesis, "in many regions heresy is the original manifestation of Christianity," and what later counted as orthodoxy was one form among several that eventually prevailed.²⁵ If so, talk of continuity with "the" early Church projects a later winner backward.

Bauer's work has been heavily criticized, especially his reading of regions such as Edessa, where much depends on silence in the sources. Second-century diversity is real, as noted above. But Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus and Polycarp's church were writing from Syria, Rome, Gaul and Asia Minor, not one city, and they recognized one another as the same communion with the same faith in the Incarnation and the Eucharist. Diversity at the edges does not erase a recognizable center.

What we can say confidently

• By about 150, Christians in widely separated cities held a Sunday Eucharist that they regarded as the flesh and blood of Christ, in a pattern that the Divine Liturgy still follows.
• Bishops in succession from the apostles were the recognized leaders of local churches by the second half of the second century.
• Honor for martyrs and their relics, the sign of the cross, facing east, threefold baptism and the language of deification are all attested by the fourth century or earlier, and remain Orthodox practice.
• Organized monasticism, fixed liturgical texts and much of the calendar of saints are later developments.
• Icons in worship were not universal in the fourth century, met opposition from respected bishops, and were defined only in 787.
• Some disciplines, such as married bishops, changed, and the Church acknowledged the change.

What remains disputed

• How quickly and how uniformly the single-bishop pattern spread, and when Rome had one.
• Some Protestants dispute the veneration of icons. For Orthodoxy, the Seventh Ecumenical Council settles its legitimacy: honor offered to an icon passes to its prototype, while divine worship belongs to God alone. Historical questions about the development of icon use do not make the council’s teaching optional.
• How to tell faithful development from corruption after the seventh council, which Orthodox and Catholics answer differently.
• The exact edges of the Old Testament canon, on which Orthodox churches are not fully uniform.
• How much of Bauer's picture of early diversity should be kept.

Conclusion

Was the early Church Orthodox? If the question means that a Christian of the year 150 would find in a modern Orthodox parish exactly what he knew, the answer is no. He would probably find icons his church did not have, monks he had never met, longer fixed prayers and a spoon at Communion. Would he recognize the faith and the assembly? The evidence says yes: the bishop and his clergy, the Sunday Eucharist received as Christ's body and blood, the Scriptures read and preached, the honor paid to those who died for Christ, and the hope of being made partakers of the divine nature.

The Orthodox Church does not need its history to be frozen in order to be faithful. Christ promised that the Spirit would "guide you into all truth" (John 16:13, NKJV), and guidance implies a road. The honest Orthodox claim is the one Vincent made: the same body, grown. That claim is better served by admitting where the road turned than by pretending it ran straight. To read the early writers yourself, start with our Church Fathers explorer.

Notes

1. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, chapter "The inner meaning of tradition" (Penguin; online text at IntraText).
2. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2.6 and 23.54, trans. C. A. Heurtley, NPNF2 vol. 11.
3. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 8, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ANF vol. 1. The bracketed words are the translators'.
4. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.3, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF vol. 1.
5. Francis A. Sullivan, From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (New York: Newman Press, 2001); summary and quotation from David A. Fiensy's review in Catholic Books Review (2002).
6. Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 7, ANF vol. 1.
7. Justin Martyr, First Apology 66, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, ANF vol. 1.
8. Justin Martyr, First Apology 67, ANF vol. 1.
9. Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2002), preface (p. ix) and ch. 10, "The Effects of the Coming of Christendom in the Fourth Century"; summarized, not quoted.
10. Cyril of Jerusalem (attributed), Mystagogical Catechesis 5.21, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford, NPNF2 vol. 7.
11. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 27.66, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8.
12. Martyrdom of Polycarp 18, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ANF vol. 1.
13. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.4 and 39.7, trans. R. Payne-Smith, NPNF2 vol. 4.
14. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5, preface, ANF vol. 1.
15. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54, trans. Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 vol. 4.
16. Synod of Elvira, canon 36 (Latin: Placuit picturas in ecclesia esse non debere, ne quod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur), as quoted and translated in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), "Iconoclasts." The synod's exact date is uncertain.
17. Epiphanius of Salamis, letter to John of Jerusalem, in Jerome, Letter 51.9, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley, NPNF2 vol. 6. On the authenticity debate over the anti-image writings attributed to Epiphanius, see Chiara Bordino, "Epiphanius of Salamis and the cult of images" (conference paper, Masaryk University, 2019; published abstract).
18. Second Council of Nicaea (787), Decree of the Holy, Great, Ecumenical Synod, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14. The translator's Greek glosses inside the quoted phrases are omitted.
19. Council in Trullo (692), canon 12, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14.
20. Ware, The Orthodox Church, "The inner meaning of tradition."
21. Georges Florovsky, "Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church," in E. L. Mascall, ed., The Church of God, pp. 64-65, as quoted by Ware, The Orthodox Church, "The inner meaning of tradition." Florovsky's essay itself was not opened.
22. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Prefatory Address to Francis I, trans. Henry Beveridge (CCEL).
23. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 8 (1965), Vatican English text.
24. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ch. 1, sect. 1 (Newman Reader text of the 1878 edition).
25. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, trans. Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), Foreword to the second German edition (by Georg Strecker); electronic edition maintained by Robert Kraft.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Athanasius. Festal Letter 39. Trans. R. Payne-Smith. NPNF2 vol. 4. Buffalo, 1892.
• Athanasius. On the Incarnation. Trans. Archibald Robertson. NPNF2 vol. 4. Buffalo, 1892.
• Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit. Trans. Blomfield Jackson. NPNF2 vol. 8. Buffalo, 1895.
• Cyril of Jerusalem (attributed). Mystagogical Catecheses. Trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford. NPNF2 vol. 7. Buffalo, 1894.
• Elvira, Synod of. Canon 36. Latin text and translation as given in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), "Iconoclasts."
• Epiphanius of Salamis. Letter to John of Jerusalem, in Jerome, Letter 51. Trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley. NPNF2 vol. 6. Buffalo, 1893.
• Ignatius of Antioch. To the Smyrnaeans. Trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. ANF vol. 1. Buffalo, 1885.
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. ANF vol. 1. Buffalo, 1885.
• Justin Martyr. First Apology. Trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith. ANF vol. 1. Buffalo, 1885.
• Martyrdom of Polycarp. Trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. ANF vol. 1. Buffalo, 1885.
• Nicaea II (787). Decree. Trans. Henry Percival. NPNF2 vol. 14. Buffalo, 1900.
• Trullo, Council in (692). Canons. Trans. Henry Percival. NPNF2 vol. 14. Buffalo, 1900.
• Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium. Trans. C. A. Heurtley. NPNF2 vol. 11. Buffalo, 1894.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin. Chapter "The inner meaning of tradition" (online text, IntraText), which quotes Georges Florovsky, "Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church," in E. L. Mascall, ed., The Church of God.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Bauer, Walter. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971 (German original 1934; 2nd ed. ed. Georg Strecker, 1964).
• Bordino, Chiara. "Epiphanius of Salamis and the cult of images." Conference paper, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, 2019 (abstract).
• Bradshaw, Paul F. The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Sullivan, Francis A. From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church. New York: Newman Press, 2001.

Sources from the traditions being discussed

• Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Henry Beveridge. Prefatory Address to Francis I.
• Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. 1845; rev. ed. 1878.
• Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. 1965.