Why Early Christian History Is Such A Pain To Study

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I want to explain like the pain of trying to learn about early Christian history or honestly any history before the year 500 because the picture gets so muddled and the pain you feel for the lack of contemporary sources that actually exist is just it cuts so deep.

[00:00:21]So let's have like a little example.

[00:00:23]Let's assume that this circle represents every single Christian document that was written between the death of Jesus Christ and up until just before Mark's gospel was written. Everything.

[00:00:35]Everything between the year 33 and up to like 65 AD is contained in this circle.

[00:00:40]How much do we actually have from that time period of anything written by a Christian author? It looks like this.

[00:00:51]only 13 tiny little incidents. And the problem is we don't even know if that's accurate because the circle could be twice as large or it could be twice as small. We really have no idea. For the first 30 or 40 years of Christian history, we only have Paul's letters.

[00:01:12]It's why he's one of my favorite historical figures to learn about. I absolutely love Paul and learning about him. It's such a fascinating story. is that we have this one man who is writing clerical work communicating with the churches that he's established and it's so infuriating that not only do we only have this set of letters but it is entirely one man's perspective. We have no documents whatsoever or letters written by apostles other than Paul himself.

[00:01:43]There is not a single surviving text anywhere in the world that was written by an eyewitness to Jesus Christ during his lifetime. Paul allegedly met Jesus on the road to Damascus, but again, that was after Jesus's death, probably a year or two afterwards. So, there is nothing that gets us closer to the historical Jesus than Paul himself, a man who during Jesus's lifetime never met him.

[00:02:11]But why is it like this? Why do we only have one source for 40 years of Christian history? Well, the first thing to consider is that Christianity in its earliest form was a religion that was only really appealing to the extremely disenfranchised or slaves. Two groups of people that are not particularly well known for their literacy. You have to consider that without Paul, Jesus's movement is almost entirely going to be led by people who are illiterate. Peter himself is referred to in the Acts of the Apostles as being somebody that is illiterate.

[00:02:47]The Bible literally says the biggest leader of early Christianity, aside from Paul himself, was an illiterate man. So what we have is a movement almost entirely led by people who are illiterate and who have the assumption that Jesus is going to come back at some point in their lifetimes which doesn't particularly encourage people to write anything down. If Jesus is coming back in the next year or so, what is the point of putting together a formal written document explaining who he was when he's going to tell you in the next like couple of months? That's why like literally the only time that Paul found it fit to write that we're aware of to churches that he had established was to clarify things about somewhat more than basic theology in Christianity and how they should behave or to tell people that he was on his way to go and see them. That's kind of it. It's it's so funny to me that Paul's letters are considered scripture in the Christian cannon because I can understand the basis for why they are. But it's also kind of funny that you go from the Old Testament, which is just a long series of like these incredible stories. Then by the time you get to the New Testament, and Paul's letters have been circled in, you'll randomly get to a point where it's a halfpage letter from Paul asking for somebody to free a specific slave. But why were Paul's letters preserved? How did they survive from the 50s to the 60s up until the modern day? Well, the main theory is that what happened is that these churches received these letters from Paul to some extent either for their bad behavior or to clarify something about theology or practice. And they said, "Okay, this is an authorative statement from Paul the Apostle. We're going to make a bunch of copies of this and make sure that everyone around here understands that this is the rule set that we have to manage by." It was incredibly important to these churches to say, "Look, we have a statement from Paul. We are going to preserve it." And this is where we run into something that I've nicknamed uh the Ronaldo problem.

[00:04:46]Uh when it comes to text preservation, imagine you are a future historian. It's after a world war or something. society has built itself back up, but you're a historian going through like the old world rubble maybe like a hundred or 200 years later trying to piece together like certain things like a lot of digital documents and preservation that way or computers have just been like destroyed. So, you're just going you're trying to find like little segments or whatever you can that details what the world was like before the war. And several hundred years in the future, you're going through some old ruins, uh, looking for old texts, anything you can find, and you find something. You find a halfb burnt copy of a sports magazine. And in it, you find an article about Ronaldo and his career achievements. And you think, okay, this is great. We can learn about preWorld War II sport. Let's get into it. So, you've gone through it. You've read this whole thing about like Ronaldo and his career achievements from this 200-year-old fragment of a magazine that you found. Here's your problem. Now explain what football is. Here's the unfortunate reality. Of all the material that has been written about football or football players or watching the game, it's probably very likely that only 1 to 2% of all the physical media that exists about football is actually explained to you what the game is. Think about it.

[00:06:14]How many times have you actually seen printed media that explains to you in very basic terms what the sport of football or soccer actually is and how to play it in its most basic set of principles. The unfortunate reality is that people throughout history understandably tend to think preserving the more complicated things is more important than the basics.

[00:06:38]It's it's fascinating because the only time we really get a clear window into what Christianity was in like say the 30s AD is when Paul is recounting what he has already told people about the faith and he's also explaining that this is what it was first explained to me as kind of a miracle. It's in a letter of his that survived. But like in the most simplest terms, what was Christianity in the 30s when Paul first encountered it?

[00:07:03]Paul explains in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 that for when I handed on to you of first importance what I in turn received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Peter then to the 12. That little gem there is kind of the closest we get to understanding what was the theology of Christianity before Paul showed up. And it's pretty simple. The the things that we know are pre- Pauline as he's explained how the religion was presented to him when he first encountered it properly was that it's about Jesus dying for your sins, him coming back from the dead and then appearing to his core followers after his death. It's not a detailed explanation, but it's a very interesting and important one. It's kind of like if you were that future historian trying to learn what football is from scraps of new of sports magazines. If suddenly you came across a segment of an interview that said something like, "Hey, we kick a ball around a field for 90 minutes and kick goals, it's a pretty good way to make a living." Like that one quote would give you heaps of context as to what football was without actually finding a deep dive into the rule set. by no means a unique experience, but it's just so difficult trying to piece together stories and understand what the world was like when you are so far removed in time.

[00:08:33]Something that I think everyone who's ever had some degree of interest in ancient history has probably felt when you're trying to connect the dots, but half of them are missing and half of the ones that you have are probably fake.