Which “Original Faith” Are We Trying to Recover?

Why going back to the beginning isn’t as simple as we’d like it to be

Every few months, I encounter some variation of a familiar claim: that if we could somehow peel back the accumulated layers of history and recover the “original” faith of the first apostles, our present-day disagreements would evaporate. The appeal of this idea is obvious. It reflects a sincere desire to escape centuries of institutional complexity and return to a moment when following Jesus seemed simpler, purer, and unmediated by human interpretation.

Yet as someone who loves history, I must say — gently but clearly — that the past does not cooperate with this nostalgia. The world of the first century was not a unified theological landscape waiting to be rediscovered. It was already diverse, contested, and internally fragmented.

Second Temple Judaism was already fractured

Consider Second Temple Judaism. Modern Christians often speak of it as if it were a single, coherent religious system. Ancient sources tell a different story.

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing at the end of the first century, describes four distinct, competing philosophical movements vying for Jewish loyalty: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and a “fourth philosophy” focused on revolutionary, armed resistance to Rome (Antiquities 18.11–25 [Niese]; Whiston 18.1.2–6).

A quick footnote on historical precision: Josephus doesn’t use the word “Zealot” in this specific text. That name belongs to a related but distinct group that later seized control of Jerusalem during the great revolt of 66–70 CE. The lineage between the movements is real, but the historical labels are much messier than popular retellings suggest.

The disagreements among these groups were not minor disputes over carpet colors or musical styles. They were massive, incompatible accounts of what covenant faithfulness to God required under Roman occupation:

• The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead and defended a rich oral tradition running alongside the written Torah.
• The Sadducees, drawn largely from wealthy priestly circles, rejected both the resurrection and the oral law entirely.
• The Essenes viewed the entire Jerusalem Temple establishment as hopelessly corrupt, withdrew into monastic desert communities, and wrote the texts we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• The Fourth Philosophy held that submitting to Roman taxation was a direct, idolatrous betrayal of God’s sovereignty.

The lived religion of ordinary people was even more varied and far less neatly categorized than these four labels suggest. In other words, the Judaism of Jesus’s time was not a monolith but a complex ecosystem of competing convictions.

Early Christianity wasn’t tidier either

The same is true of early Christianity. For much of modern church history, scholars assumed that orthodoxy was original and heresy was a later deviation. In the 1930s, Walter Bauer famously challenged this narrative. He argued that in many ancient cities, theological diversity came first — and what we now call “orthodoxy” only won out because the church in Rome had the political and institutional muscle to make its version stick.

More recent scholarship has corrected Bauer’s overstatements — Paul Hartog’s edited volume reassessing Bauer’s thesis region by region is a good example, going back through the evidence city by city and finding the pattern doesn’t hold up nearly as consistently as Bauer claimed. But the basic point survives the correction: the earliest Christian communities did not speak with a single voice.

We don’t need scholarly theories to see that early church was complicated, though. We only need to read the New Testament. Scripture itself preserves intense, live tension among people who all claimed Christ:

• Paul confronts Peter to his face in Antioch over table fellowship with Gentiles (Galatians 2:11–14).
• The Jerusalem church, under James, has to be persuaded at length that Gentile converts can be received without requiring circumcision and full Torah observance (Acts 15).
• The four Gospels give us four theologically distinct portraits of Jesus, not a single, harmonized transcript of his life.

These texts were written in the midst of unresolved tensions, not after a consensus had been achieved — they were written in the middle of the mess, to help the earliest believers navigate it. This diversity isn’t accidental noise in the text. It is living proof that deep, vigorous disagreement existed inside the apostolic generation itself.

What the diversity does — and doesn’t — tell us

It’s tempting, at this point, to reach for a psychological explanation: humans draw tribal boundaries because ambiguity is uncomfortable, and purity narratives are how we manufacture the clarity we crave. There’s something to that. But it’s worth resisting the move to treat it as the whole explanation, because it’s a razor that cuts everything — including whatever theological convictions the person making the observation actually holds.

Noticing that a boundary served a social function doesn’t tell you whether the boundary tracked something true. The Council of Nicaea met inside a specific set of political and ecclesial pressures; that observation, by itself, says nothing about whether the homoousion is correct. Sociology of religion can describe how a consensus formed. It cannot adjudicate whether the consensus was discerning something real or merely consolidating power. Those are different questions and collapsing them is its own kind of intellectual shortcut — dressed up as skepticism rather than nostalgia, but a shortcut all the same.

What do we do with a past that was never pure?

Not relativism. But we do have to give up the nostalgia.

If we appeal to “first-century practice” as our ultimate Christian standard, we must reckon honestly with the fact that first-century practice included the apostles disagreeing sharply about circumcision, Torah observance, and church fellowship. If we appeal to “the original faith,” we need to clarify which expression we mean — Jerusalem’s or Antioch’s, James’s or Paul’s — because they were not identical carbon copies.

Fortunately, the historic church already offers us a better tool than restorationist nostalgia. In the fifth century, a monk named Vincent of Lérins proposed a famous test for genuine Christian teaching against rival claims: hold fast to quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est — “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” (Commonitorium 2).

This standard was never meant to deny the dynamic diversity of the early church. It was meant to locate something more modest, durable, and foundational underneath it — not a uniformity of culture or practice, but a core deposit of faith: the bodily resurrection of Jesus, his absolute identity as Lord, and the radical continuity of the God of Israel with the God revealed in Christ.

And we see evidence of that core remarkably early. Paul’s citation of a pre-existing creedal formula in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 — that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, that he was raised — shows that these convictions were already widely recognized within a few years of the crucifixion, long before any ecumenical council met to define them.

This reframes the question we should be asking. Instead of searching for a mythical, perfectly unified “original church,” we should ask: amid the real disagreements of the earliest Christian communities, what did they consistently recognize as the foundational deposit of faith? And where did they discern genuine departures from that deposit?

The unity Jesus prays for in John 17 was never a call to effortless uniformity. It was a call to covenantal fidelity sustained in the midst of difference. Tracing that thread through history is more demanding than appealing to restorationist nostalgia — but it is also more honest, and ultimately more faithful to the complexity of the tradition we have inherited.