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5. Filling the Ark Apostolic Mission

There is a fresco from third-century Carthage in which the church is pictured as Noah’s ark, riding the waves of destruction. A dove is shown flying from the ark in search of land (Frend 1984, p. 337). It is a simple but powerful image, suggesting that the Church is a place of safety and security which is able to ride the waves of lawlessness and chaos engulfing the world outside. It encourages believers to seek out and then find safety within the confines of the Christian community, only going out to rescue others by bringing them into its protective custody. Such an image does not encourage the Church to try to change the wider society, only to rescue individuals out of its swirling waters before the end.

Such an image is a stylized representation of a certain approach to mission, an approach that has its origins in certain texts from the earliest period of the Church’s life. To understand this approach, the first of the six historic types located within the Christian paradigms identified by Küng and Bosch, it is necessary to understand the underlying world-view of the first Christians.

Background: Jewish Christianity (c.40–100 ad)

The first Christians were Jews. They came to faith within the Jewish world-view of the time. For many Palestinian Jews this was a world-view dominated by eschatology: they believed the end of the age was near, a time of war, destruction and catastrophe with a promise of salvation for the people of Israel. For many the book of Daniel summed up what they believed: ‘At the time of the end . . . there shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.’ (Daniel 11.40–12.1) There would be deliverance for the people of Israel in these end-times:

But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever. (12.1–3)

Many Palestinian Jews at the time of Jesus interpreted these and other similar passages from non-canonical apocalyptic literature as a description of how Roman oppression would be thrown off and a new age of liberation and prosperity begin for the people of Israel. They expected this ending of the age to take place very soon (Figure 2).

The disciples had been brought up within this world-view and after the resurrection came to believe that Jesus was the figure described in an earlier chapter of the book of Daniel: ‘I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven’ (Daniel 7.13). They believed that Jesus was the long awaited messiah, the Christ. They came to see that his life, death and resurrection were the inauguration of the end-times and that he would soon return in power ‘to deliver us from the present evil age’ (Galatians 1.4). They believed that he would return within their own lifetimes to do this. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, generally recognized as the earliest book in the New Testament, probably written in the early 50s of the first century, provides one of the most vivid examples of this Christian reinterpretation of Jewish eschatological beliefs:

we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall be with the Lord for ever. (1 Thess. 4.15–17)

The connection to the book of Daniel is clear: the same kind of language is being used to describe what is going to happen. But now a messiah and the people he is going to save are identified within this picture of the end-times: the messiah is Jesus Christ, and the people he will save are those who believe in him, Gentiles as well as Jews.

The first letter to the Corinthians, written in the same period of Paul’s life, also contains this kind of description of the end of the age: ‘We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed’ (1 Cor. 15.51–2).

The dominance of this eschatological expectation for the early Christian community persisted (though it was not dominant for all, as the next chapter will show). When Paul wrote his letter to the church in Rome he reminded them ‘what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near’ (Rom. 13.11–12).

It was still dominant a decade or two later, when the first of the Gospels came to be written, probably that of Mark in the late 60s or early 70s. It is seen in the way the Gospel summarizes the message of Jesus, with his words ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near’ placed at the head of the account of his ministry (1.15). It is also seen in the style of the Gospel, which moves the action forward in a swift and urgent way, using the phrase ‘and immediately’ many times through the text, creating a sense of breathlessness within the narrative. It is also seen in the positioning of one of Jesus’ most specific statements about the coming of the end at the centre and turning point of the Gospel. This is the statement in 9.1 that there were some of his followers who would not die before they saw the kingdom of God come with power. This saying is placed in a key pivotal position, between Jesus’ early Galilean ministry and his journey to Jerusalem and suffering and death. And then, most telling of all, the last time Jesus teaches his followers before his arrest he talks about the apocalypse: he describes the end of the age, widespread destruction and his own return, when he would come ‘in clouds with great power and glory’ (13.1–37, esp. v. 26). The allusions to the book of Daniel and other Jewish apocalyptic literature are again clear, but the reinterpretation of Jewish beliefs about the messiah to refer to himself is even clearer. The layout and content of Mark’s Gospel therefore shows that for the second and third generation of Christians the expectation that Christ would soon return at the end of the age was still a dominating belief.

Matthew’s Gospel also demonstrates this outlook by placing Jesus’ eschatological teaching and parables in the highly significant position immediately preceding the passion narrative (chapters 24–5). Furthermore the very last words of the Gospel remind the reader that the age in which they live will end (28.19).

Another example can be drawn from 1 Peter, which is dominated by the expectation that salvation is about to be revealed ‘in the last time’ (1.5): ‘The end of all things is near’ (1 Peter 4.7). All of these passages justify Bosch’s statement that ‘a high strung expectation of the end characterises the early Christian community’ (Bosch 1991, p. 40).

What was it like to live within a world-view that expected an imminent end to the age? 1 Corinthians 7.29–31 gives an evocative portrait of how priorities and allegiances changed:

I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.