The purpose of this research is to examine the importance of the School of Antioch in the ecclesiastical development of Christianity. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which the school of Antioch emerged and then to discuss the reasons it both became important to the evolution of Christianity and the reasons it was eclipsed by maturing doctrinal and institutional structures of the Church.
In part, the apostolic and patristic periods of Christianity can be discerned by way of careful, selective viewing of a map of Great Rome. The apostolic and postapostolic years of the church-in-formation roughly coincide with Rome's decisive transition from conquest-oriented republic to an empire so called. Whereas Rome had spread from the western/central Mediterranean toward the Levant, Christianity was more or less counterspreading outward from thd Levant. What happened over the course of the first and second centuries as imperial Rome consolidated its power to the frontiers of Asia Minor and northern Europe was that Christian doctrinal power and ecclesial conventions were spreading through the eastern and northern Mediterranean region, from Jerusalem to Antioch in the east and to Rome in the west.
The rise of the earliest Christian Church was dominated by theological/doctrinal issues around which mainstream, or orthodox, Church beliefs were authoritatively established; state persecution of Christianity may have been important, but the doctrinal issues and disputes within the nascent church were of equal importance to the faithful. Out of that dynamic grew intrinsic ecclesial rationalization, during which institutional management, hierarchy, and praxis were gradually being conformed. Pagels documents the view that "the canon of Scripture, the [apostle's] creed, and the institutional structure--emerged in [their] present form only toward the end of the second century." After Constantine's conversion--which...