Primitive Christianity to institutionalization: Context of the Roman Empire (first century)

Abstract

The present study considers the experience of the new Christian religion in the context of the Roman Empire of the first century, seeking to highlight several aspects of its earliest institutionalization. Primitive Christianity was not a singular movement but was instead reflected in the existence of many small domestic communities without an orthodoxy standardized in faith, an ecclesiastical hierarchy, or centralized institutions. The study will reveal the ways in which Christianity spread through the imperial and synagogal infrastructures, as well as through the use of Greek cultural references. It will also discuss the dominant types of Christian organization, which would benefit from the socially entrenched arrangement of the old patriarchal house as a framework for the centralized and hierarchized institutional development to take root in Christianity, in a manner analogous to imperial bureaucratic architecture.