What Did Early Christians Actually Believe?

Every Christian tradition claims to be the one that best represents “the early church.” Catholics point to apostolic succession and the papacy. The Orthodox claim unbroken continuity with the church fathers. Protestants argue they recovered the original gospel that had been buried under centuries of tradition. Pentecostals say they restored the Spirit-filled worship of Acts 2.

They can’t all be right. But they might all be wrong — or at least oversimplifying — because “the early church” was never the unified, doctrinally settled institution any of these claims require.

The First Two Centuries: Diversity Was the Norm

The Christianity of the first and second centuries looked nothing like what any modern denomination practices. There was no New Testament canon (the books weren’t officially listed until the 4th century). There was no creed. There was no standardized liturgy, no centralized authority, and no agreed-upon theology of the Trinity, the atonement, or the end times.

What there was: a loose network of communities scattered across the Roman Empire, each with its own traditions, its own leaders, and its own understanding of who Jesus was and what his death and resurrection meant.

What Did They Believe About Jesus?

Here’s where it gets interesting. The earliest Christians held a range of views about Jesus’s identity — views that would later be sorted into “orthodox” and “heretical” categories, but which coexisted in the early church without clear boundaries.

Some believed Jesus was a divine being who had always existed with God. The Gospel of John (written around 90–100 AD) opens with a cosmic claim: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This “high Christology” sees Jesus as pre-existent and fully divine.

Some believed Jesus was a human whom God elevated. The Gospel of Mark — the earliest Gospel, written around 65–70 AD — begins not with a cosmic prologue but with Jesus’s baptism, where a voice from heaven declares “You are my Son.” Read on its own, this sounds like Adoptionism: God chose Jesus and elevated him at the baptism. Paul’s letter to the Romans (1:4) says Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God… by his resurrection from the dead” — language that could imply Jesus became the Son, rather than always having been.

Some believed Jesus only appeared to be human. Docetism — the view that Jesus’s body was an illusion — was widespread enough that the author of 1 John felt compelled to address it directly: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:2). You don’t refute a position nobody holds.

Some believed Jesus was an angel or a cosmic intermediary. Jewish Christianity, particularly in its earliest Palestinian form, may have understood Jesus through the lens of Jewish angel traditions — a divine agent, exalted above all others, but not identical with God in the way Nicaea would later assert.

These weren’t fringe groups on the margins. They were communities of sincere believers reading the same Scriptures and reaching different conclusions. The diversity is visible within the New Testament itself.

The Canon Was Open

Modern Christians treat the 27-book New Testament as a given. But for the first three centuries, there was no official list.

Churches in different regions used different collections. The Gospel of Thomas was read in some communities. The Shepherd of Hermas was widely popular and nearly made the cut. The book of Revelation was disputed — many Eastern churches rejected it well into the 4th century. Some churches used the Didache (a first-century manual of Christian practice) as Scripture. Others used the Epistle of Barnabas.

The first known list matching our current New Testament comes from Athanasius’s Easter Letter in 367 AD — over three centuries after Jesus. And even after that, churches disagreed. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has 81 books in its canon. The Syriac churches had a different count. The process of canonization was gradual, contested, and shaped by the same political dynamics that shaped the creeds.

Orthodoxy and Heresy: A Retrospective Distinction

The traditional narrative says orthodoxy came first — the apostles taught the true faith, and heresies were deviations from it. The historian Walter Bauer challenged this in 1934 with his landmark work Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Bauer argued that in many regions, what was later called “heresy” was actually the original form of Christianity, and “orthodoxy” was a later import from Rome.

Bauer’s thesis has been critiqued and refined, but its core insight remains widely accepted among historians: the clean line between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” is largely a product of the 4th century. Before Constantine, before the councils, before the creeds, Christianity was a family of related movements with significant theological diversity.

The historian Bart Ehrman, building on Bauer, has argued in works like Lost Christianities that the Christianity we know today is the version that won — not necessarily the version that was original or universal.

What They Agreed On

This isn’t to say early Christians agreed on nothing. Across the diversity, certain convictions were remarkably consistent:

Jesus was Lord. However they understood his metaphysical nature, early Christians confessed Jesus as kyrios — Lord — a title that carried echoes of the divine name in the Greek Old Testament.

Jesus had been raised from the dead. The resurrection was the non-negotiable claim. Paul says it explicitly: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

The coming kingdom. Early Christians expected Jesus to return and establish God’s reign. The ethical urgency of the early church — radical sharing, care for the poor, willingness to die — was fueled by this expectation.

Love as the supreme ethic. Paul’s “greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13), John’s “God is love” (1 John 4:8), Jesus’s commandment to love enemies (Matthew 5:44) — across every strain of early Christianity, love was central.

Baptism and a shared meal. The specific theology varied, but the practices were universal.

What They Didn’t Agree On

The metaphysics of the Trinity. The precise mechanism of salvation. The canon of Scripture. The role of Jewish law for Gentile believers. The acceptability of eating meat offered to idols. Whether Jesus would return in their lifetimes. Whether marriage was encouraged or discouraged. Whether women could hold leadership roles.

These weren’t peripheral questions. They were contested from the very beginning, within the New Testament period, by people who had known the apostles personally.

What This Means for Today

When someone says “the early church believed X,” they’re almost always projecting backward from their own tradition. The early church believed many things, often simultaneously, and the version that became “orthodox” was determined — over centuries — by a combination of theological argument, political power, and historical accident.

This doesn’t mean orthodoxy is arbitrary. There are strong arguments for the positions the councils adopted. But it does mean that the relationship between “what the earliest Christians believed” and “what the councils declared orthodox” is far more complicated than a straight line.

The early church wasn’t Catholic. It wasn’t Orthodox. It wasn’t Protestant. It was something messier, more diverse, and more human than any of those categories allow.

And that’s actually encouraging. It means the faith has always been a work in progress — always contested, always developing, always bigger than any single formulation can contain.

Think you know which early Christians you’d have agreed with? Take the quiz and see what the councils would say.