Who were the first Christians, and how did they live?

Before there were church buildings, before there was a New Testament bound into one book, before any emperor was a Christian, there were ordinary people in ordinary houses who believed that Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead.

Who were they? What did they actually do on a Sunday? How did they treat each other, and their neighbours? We know more than you might expect — partly from the New Testament, partly from their own early writings, and partly from Roman outsiders who did not like them at all.

How the movement spread across the empire is told in How Christianity spread across the Roman Empire. This article is about something more personal: what it was like to be one of them.

They began as Jews

The first Christians were Jews. Jesus was a Jew, the apostles were Jews, and the three thousand baptised at Pentecost were Jews and converts to Judaism gathered in Jerusalem for the feast.

They did not think they had joined a new religion. They believed that the God of Abraham had kept his promise and sent the Messiah. So they kept going to the temple: "day by day, attending the temple together" (Acts 2:46). Peter and John went up "at the hour of prayer" (Acts 3:1). Their Bible was what we call the Old Testament, and they read it as pointing to Jesus.

Within a few decades large numbers of non-Jews — Gentiles — had joined, and the church had to work out whether they needed to become Jews first. The council in Jerusalem in Acts 15 decided they did not. But the Jewish roots never disappeared: the Psalms, the Scriptures, prayer at set times, a weekly rhythm, and the belief in one God who made heaven and earth.

The pattern of Acts 2

Luke gives a short picture of the first church that became a model for every church afterwards:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers... And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.— Acts 2:42, 44-45

Notice the four things: teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer. And notice that the fellowship was practical. It reached people's wallets.

They met in houses

For almost three hundred years Christians did not have special buildings. They met in homes.

Paul greets "the church in their house" belonging to Priscilla and Aquila (Romans 16:5), the church in the house of Nympha (Colossians 4:15), and the church in Philemon's house (Philemon 1:2). The word church — in Greek, ekklesia — meant the gathering of people, not a building.

A larger Roman house might hold perhaps thirty to fifty people. So a city's Christians were usually spread across several house churches. The oldest known building adapted for Christian worship, at Dura-Europos in modern Syria, is simply a house with a wall knocked through and a room set aside for baptism. It dates from the AD 230s–240s.

If you have ever been part of a house fellowship or a campus prayer cell, you have something in common with the first Christians.

They worshipped on the first day of the week

Jews kept the Sabbath on Saturday. Christians began to gather on the next day, Sunday, because that was the day Jesus rose. Luke mentions a gathering "on the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread" (Acts 20:7). Paul asks the Corinthians to set money aside "on the first day of every week" (1 Corinthians 16:2). John calls it "the Lord's day" (Revelation 1:10).

Around AD 155 a Christian teacher called Justin Martyr wrote a defence of the faith addressed to the emperor, and in it he described a Sunday service step by step. Christians from town and country gathered in one place. The writings of the apostles or the prophets were read for as long as time allowed. The leader then taught and urged them to imitate what they had heard. They all stood and prayed. Bread and wine mixed with water were brought; the leader gave thanks and the people answered "Amen". The bread and wine were shared, and deacons carried some to those who were absent. Those who could afford to gave money, which was used to help orphans and widows, the sick, prisoners and strangers.

Read that list again. Nearly two thousand years later, most churches still do the same things.

The governor Pliny, writing around AD 112, reported something similar from the outside. Christians, he wrote to the emperor Trajan, met on a fixed day before dawn and sang a hymn "to Christ as to a god". They bound themselves by an oath — not to commit crimes, but to avoid theft, robbery and adultery, never to break their word, and never to refuse to return money left with them. Then they went away and met again later to eat an ordinary, harmless meal. Before dawn, because most of them had to work: Sunday was not a day off in the Roman world.

Baptism and the shared meal

Baptism

Becoming a Christian was marked by baptism. An early church manual called the Didache — "the Teaching" — gives practical instructions. Baptise in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in running water if possible. If there is no running water, use other water; if cold water is not available, warm. If there is not enough for that, pour water three times on the head. The person being baptised, and whoever baptises them, should fast for a day or two beforehand.

The Didache is probably from the late first or early second century, though its exact date is debated. It was lost for centuries and rediscovered in a library in Constantinople in 1873.

By the late second and third centuries, many churches prepared new believers for baptism for a long time — sometimes up to three years. These learners were called catechumens. In some churches, before baptism, they were asked not only what they believed but how they had lived: had they honoured widows, visited the sick, done good works?

The Lord's Supper and the love feast

At first the Lord's Supper was part of a full shared meal, sometimes called the "love feast" (Jude 1:12). That is why Paul is so angry at Corinth: the rich were eating their own food before the poor arrived, so that "one goes hungry, another gets drunk" (1 Corinthians 11:21). A meal meant to show they were one family was being used to show who was more important.

Over time the bread and cup were separated from the full meal. But the meaning stayed: one loaf, one body, one family around one table.

They cared for the needy

If outsiders noticed one thing about Christians, it was this.

Widows and orphans

Widows in the ancient world were often left with nothing. From the very beginning the church fed them daily (Acts 6:1), and Paul gives instructions for supporting widows who had no family (1 Timothy 5:3-16). James defines true religion as "to visit orphans and widows in their affliction" (James 1:27).

Tertullian of Carthage, writing in North Africa around AD 197, explained that Christians gave to a common fund once a month, as they were able, with no one forced. The money was not spent on feasts but on feeding and burying the poor, supporting orphans and the elderly, the shipwrecked, and Christians condemned to the mines or prisons. He adds that pagans looked at this and said, "See how they love one another."

Abandoned babies

In the Roman world it was legal and common to "expose" an unwanted newborn — to leave it outside to die or be taken by a stranger, often to be raised as a slave. Girls were especially at risk. A surviving letter from Egypt, written in 1 BC by a man named Hilarion to his wife, tells her that if the baby is a boy she should keep it, and if a girl, cast it out.

Christians refused. The Didache forbids both abortion and the killing of a newborn. The Epistle to Diognetus says Christians "beget children, but they do not destroy their offspring". Some Christians took in abandoned infants and raised them, though our evidence for how organised this was is limited.

The sick, in time of plague

In the AD 250s a terrible epidemic swept the empire. In Carthage, Bishop Cyprian urged his church to care not only for fellow believers but for their pagan neighbours as well. In Alexandria, Bishop Dionysius described Christians who nursed the sick and buried the dead at the cost of their own lives, while many pagans pushed sick relatives away and fled.

A century later, the emperor Julian — who had abandoned Christianity and was trying to revive the old gods — complained in a letter to a pagan priest that the Christians supported not only their own poor but the pagan poor as well. He told his priests to copy them. They could not.

Slaves and masters at one table

Roman society was a ladder. Everyone knew their rung, and you did not eat with people far above or below you.

The church broke the ladder. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Paul sends the runaway slave Onesimus back to his master Philemon "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 1:16).

Pliny reported Christians "of every age, every rank, and of both sexes". He tortured two slave women whom the Christians called ministrae — "servants" or deaconesses — to find out the truth about them. In AD 203 at Carthage, Perpetua, a young noblewoman, and Felicity, a slave woman, died together in the arena. In the third century a former slave named Callistus became bishop of Rome.

Women were prominent from the start: they funded Jesus' ministry, were first at the empty tomb, hosted churches and served as co-workers with Paul. That story is told in The women of the early church.

Why the Romans called them atheists

The Romans had many gods and were usually tolerant of new ones. You could worship Isis or Mithras as long as you also honoured the gods of the city and the emperor.

Christians would not. They said there was one God, and that the gods of Rome were not gods at all. To a Roman, that was atheism — refusing the gods who kept the city safe. When disaster came, Christians were blamed. Tertullian wrote that if the Tiber flooded or the Nile failed to rise, the cry went up at once: "The Christians to the lion!"

Rumours made it worse. Christians met privately, called each other "brother" and "sister", and spoke of eating the body and blood of Christ. Outsiders twisted this into accusations of incest and cannibalism. The Christian writer Athenagoras, around AD 177, named the three charges directly: atheism, cannibal feasts and incest.

When the old bishop Polycarp was arrested in Smyrna around AD 155, the governor told him to swear by the emperor and say, "Away with the atheists!" — meaning the Christians. Polycarp looked at the crowd in the stadium, waved his hand towards them and said, "Away with the atheists." Told to curse Christ, he answered:

Eighty and six years have I served him, and he never did me any injury. How then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?— Polycarp, The Martyrdom of Polycarp

Notice what the Roman authorities did not find. Pliny investigated carefully, even using torture, and concluded he had discovered nothing but "a depraved and excessive superstition". The emperor Trajan replied that Christians should not be hunted down, and anonymous accusations should be ignored — but if someone was accused and refused to worship the gods, they were to be punished. Their crime was the name of Christ.

"Strangers in their own country"

Sometime in the second century, an unknown Christian wrote a letter to an enquirer named Diognetus explaining what Christians were like. It is one of the most beautiful descriptions of the Christian life ever written:

They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners... 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; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed.— The Epistle to Diognetus, 5

The writer goes on: they obey the laws, and in their lives they go beyond the laws. They love all people, and are persecuted by all.

That is the picture. Not a separate tribe living apart, and not people who blended in completely. Ordinary citizens who spoke the local language, wore local clothes and worked local jobs — but whose loyalty, love and hope belonged somewhere else. Peter calls them "sojourners and exiles" (1 Peter 2:11).

What this means for us

The first Christians did not change the world through programmes or power. They met in homes, read the Scriptures, prayed, broke bread, gave money to whoever needed it, refused to abandon babies or the sick, and ate with people their society said were beneath them. When they were told to deny Christ, many would not.

None of that requires a building, a budget or a big name. It requires what Acts 2:42 describes: devotion to the apostles' teaching, real fellowship, the Lord's Supper and prayer — and a love practical enough that outsiders notice.