Conclusion about the early Christian community?

Answer 1

AnswerEven in the earliest days, there seems not to have been one single Christian community. Paul, writing in the forties or fifties, spoke of false apostles and those who taught a "different Christ" - yet this was just ten or twenty years after Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have lived. The early Christian community as a whole was riven by sectarian conflict, dissention and disagreement. On Paul's evidence, it seems that the difference was not just a case of different communities holding different views about theology. Competing apostles actually went to the Christian communities set up by Paul, apparently to discredit him and preach their own brand of Christianity.

Each of the gospels seems to have been written for a different community, even though three of them depended on Mark's Gospel as the originating authority on the life and mission of Jesus.

Conclusions that can be reached about the Christian communities of the mddle to late first century are that there was no clear understanding among them as to what Christianity meant or what their message should be, and that each community may have been more concerned with gaining members for that community than about advancing Christianity as a whole.