As long as the apostles were alive, they were the ultimate authorities in the church, primarily because they had been disciples of Jesus, or in the case of Paul, they could at least claim to have been commissioned and sent by Jesus himself (Gal 1:1; cf. Acts 9:1-19). The apostles, along with their own disciples, were the world’s leading experts on who Jesus was because they had known him personally or because they were there in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit proceeded to the church on Pentecost. And when they wrote the documents that became the New Testament, they were (and still are) believed to have been inspired by God. According to tradition, John lived the longest, living into the early second century. But by the late first century, any apostles still alive functioned like bishops with itinerant ministries of oversight and regional authority. This means that the beginning of the “postapostolic age” (the age right after the apostles) began at different times in different places.1 In Rome it had begun after the deaths of Peter and Paul in the mid-60s of the first century. In Asia Minor it did not begin until the death of John.
Therefore, while admitting that there is no clear or uniform beginning to the postapostolic age, we can still define it as the earliest time in the church’s history when there were no living apostles to give a definitive answer to the question that Jesus had asked: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mt 16:13-18). Human nature being what it is, the emergence of the postapostolic age meant that it was probably inevitable that there would be disagreements among the remaining Christians over even the most important aspects of Christian belief.
Although they had the New Testament writings, the church was still coming to a consensus on which of the early documents would be included in the canon.2 This means that certain teachers or factions within the church could gain followers by ignoring or excluding those books of our Bible with which they did not agree. Some even edited the documents, cutting whole sections out of individual documents, including the Gospels. And even when there was agreement on the acceptance and authority of a particular text, there was often disagreement on the interpretation of that text—a phenomenon that continues to this day, as anyone who has ever had an argument over theology knows. In other words, two people can be reading the same passage of Scripture and understand its message differently. For example, what did Paul mean when he wrote to the Christians in Colossae that Christ was “the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15)?3 Did he mean that Christ was the first created being? Or that Christ was the agent of creation, as we read in the first chapter of John’s Gospel? Questions like these led to disagreements about the person of Christ in the early church. These disagreements can be categorized as five distinct views of who Jesus Christ was and is.
“Christology” is the name we give to what we believe about Christ. It includes beliefs about his personhood, his nature (divine? human? both?) and in what way he is a Savior or mediator between humanity and the divine. In an apocryphal document known as theApocalypse of Adam, there is a description of thirteen kingdoms, which are allegories for thirteen different theories of who the Savior is—thirteen christologies.4 The point that the author
