“And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” ~Acts 4:33-35
The glorious beginning of the Early Church is often tied to these verses, expressing the Utopian image of commonality, apostolic preaching, and the purest representation of Christianity’s core. This memory is powerful; even today I often hear in churches a call to “return to the ways of the Early Church.”
The problem is that this portrayal is an idealized constructed memory, neglecting the every day experiences of the community, fraught with issues and complications just like any other social group. Veiled in the text are those needy persons who aren’t cared for, internal group dynamics of division and disagreement, and those who identify as Christians not included in the master narrative. Thus, to say we want to return to “the ways of the Early Church” is not return to a tangible community but to an idyllic memory.
As my new adviser, Elizabeth Castelli, writes in her book Martyrdom and Memory:
“The gospels as examples of collective memory are also partial, in both senses of this term: they preserve only a selection of what the first followers of Jesus might have remembered about him, and they are filtered through religious and ideological interests” (35).
We often insist that the biblical texts ought to be connected in some way to a demystified account of the actual historical conditions under which those texts attempt to reflect. However, Stephen Knapp contends we should be wary of “the reconstructive impulse itself or, more precisely, in the impulse to go behind the official memories recorded in canonical texts” in order to reveal the authoritative “real” historical community. Knapp continues, “It’s one thing, after all, to grant authority to a text that one supposes was written, directly or indirectly, by God; on the assumption that God’s mind hasn’t changed since the text was written, one reads the text to find out what God (presently) wants. But the same thing cannot be said about historical events- unless one supposes that God providentially manipulated the events to produce a kind of dramatic or moving-pictorial writing” (129).
This is not to say the selected verses from the book of Acts are unimportant or easily dismissed; rather, their significance lies in their ability to preserve the Christian memory of what the early community hoped to be. We can not know the historical kernel that lies beneath this Acts’ portrayal, but we can celebrate the ideal of the memory. Indeed, this hope is the universal aspect of the text that we as modern readers are invited to participate in.
I was recently talking with my friend Guy, who is serving his first rabbinate position in my neighborhood, and I asked him how he would approach the historicity of the Seder in this first public Pesachim services. And he replied,
“I generally teach that historicity is not the only kind of truth, i.e., these are “True Stories” and some parts of them may or may not have actually happened. Stories like the Exodus are True in that they are sacred master narratives that shape our lives as a people and as individuals, True in that they are deeply complex and challenging and resonate with the human condition in its encounter with the divine. So even if the Exodus never “happened,” it is still happening to us and for us, and to live inside of a sacred narrative is a gift and a rich way to live one’s life. Finally, the non-historicity of the stories is, in a sense, exactly what allows the Rabbis and we today to tell and retell them through midrash that only deepens and extends the stories’ truth.”
In the same way, we can approach the Early Church master narrative as a rich gift to help us shape our lives. This does not mean I need to be like the historical members of the Early Church, attempting to return to a pristine historical core. Their members think and act differently than I, they treat women and persons of color differently, their worship looks and sounds distinct, and their cultural values do not always mirror my own. Instead, I can hear the ancient hope of the Christian community, and I can participate in that stream.
In the Christian community, we share a memory and an idyllic hope for the future. This shared memory allows each of us to come with our stories, fears, and despairs, and to not feel that we don’t have a place in the community; in fact, those shared stories sustain the community. And our goal in creating liturgical spaces and using religious ritual is to remember our master narratives, not to recreate a literal history.
We don’t need to be the Early Church; its memory is powerful enough.