Examination · Anakalypsis

What Did the Earliest Christians Actually Believe?

The evidence from the first generation — before the councils, before the creeds, before the canon

Within years of the crucifixion, Jesus’ followers were worshipping Him as God, reciting creeds about His death and resurrection, and dying rather than deny it. This editorial examines the earliest evidence — not what later councils decided, but what the first generation actually said and did.

One of the most persistent claims in modern scholarship is that the divine Jesus is a later invention — that the historical Jesus was a teacher or prophet whose followers gradually elevated him to divine status over decades or centuries. If that were true, we would expect to find early sources that show a merely human Jesus, with divine claims appearing only in later documents.

The earliest evidence points in the opposite direction. The earliest Christian documents we possess — earlier than the Gospels, earlier than most of the New Testament — already contain fully divine Christology. There is no period in the historical record where Christians treated Jesus as merely a great teacher.

This editorial examines what the first generation of Christians actually believed, using the sources closest to the events: pre-Pauline creeds, early hymns, Paul’s own letters, and the earliest post-apostolic witnesses. These are not a single stream of tradition, but multiple early layers — creed, hymn, confession, and practice — that converge on the same conclusion.

The creed embedded in 1 Corinthians 15 has already been examined in the Resurrection editorial for what it tells us about the event. Here the question is different: what does it tell us about what the earliest Christians believed?