Read the Bible and Go to Church

12 April 2026  Acts 2:42-47

Sunday of Divine Mercy

“They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life.” (Acts 2:42)

The earliest Christian Church lived a communal life in which they shared property and food in common, and listened intently to the witness of the apostles. It was like life in a typical kibbutz in Israel, or like what many Christians experience (for a week or so, anyway) on mission trips.

But that didn’t last. By the time of the missionary journeys of St. Paul there is scarcely a remnant of that earliest Church structure. That’s because three things happened.

The First Apology of St. Justin Martyr (A.D. 155) is a defense of Christian teaching, and contains the earliest description of what is today the Catholic Mass. The Mass that 1.4 billion Catholics will attend today is the very one described by Justin Martyr in the second century A.D.

The first was that the Church got too big. The book of Acts documents how thousands of people were drawn to the Church’s proclamation and mighty acts (see Acts 2:41, 4:4), and that made the kind of intimate community the apostles had embarked on at first a practical impossibility.

More concerning was that the earliest Church did not have the instructional resources to teach all these new Christians the basics of the faith, and so people could join who had questionable motivations – like Ananias and Sapphira who seemed to be driven mostly by love of money (Acts 5:1-11), and like Simon Magus who was driven mostly by the desire for power (Acts 8:9-24). A large and growing Church needs serious catechetical resources, and the earliest Church simply didn’t have them.

A second thing that happened was conflict between different groups in the Church. Some were Jews whose native language was Aramaic, and they were from Judea and Galilee. Other Jewish Christians spoke Greek, and they were from outside the Holy Land. A dispute broke out among them that one group was being favored over the other (Acts 6:1-7), putting further strain on communal living.

A third, and most significant development was persecution (see Acts 7-8). After the stoning of St. Stephen, Christians fled Jerusalem, and went as far as Antioch, where their preaching was overheard by Greek-speaking Gentiles who decided to follow Jesus. Nobody saw this coming, and it led to the most dramatic shift in the Church’s makeup in all of antiquity. Mission came to mean mission to Gentiles, and the primary language of Christianity shifted from Aramaic to Greek. In the fourth century the Church added Latin to its list of primary languages, and since then pretty much every other language of the world.

That, of course, meant that serious instructional resources would have to be developed, and they were. The first resources were letters, most significantly the letters of St. Paul to the various Churches he founded. Then there was a brand new literary form, the Gospel, which began to appear around the same time as the letters of Paul. And the vehicle for reflection on these new resources was the liturgy. Several of the earliest Christian documents (e.g. the Didache, the first letter of Clement) are instructions on how to conduct the liturgy. The First Apology of St. Justin Martyr (A.D. 155) is a defense of Christian teaching, and contains the earliest description of what is today the Catholic Mass. The Mass that 1.4 billion Catholics will attend today is the very one described by Justin Martyr in the second century A.D.

The Church was not able to hold on to its first organizational structure in large degree because it didn’t have the instructional resources to manage a Church that size. But now we have the Bible, and twenty centuries of truly excellent reflection on it by some of the greatest minds in human history, all of it embedded in the Mass that is celebrated millions of times a day all over the world.

Want to know more about Jesus? Better still, want to follow Him? Read the Bible and go to Church is still good advice.