The Transformation of Early Christianity from an Eschatological to a Socialized Movement

This scholarly dissertation offers a detailed look at how early Christianity reshaped its identity from a forward‑looking, apocalyptic sect into a socially embedded movement. Drawing on the political ideas circulating among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, the author traces how the new faith borrowed, modified, and sometimes rejected contemporary theories of the state, law, and history. The study shows how the eventual merger of church and state—once seen as foreign to ancient thought—emerged as an almost inevitable outcome of the faith’s growing influence.

Central to the argument is an examination of early Christians’ willingness to obey imperial power, a stance that seems at odds with modern moral expectations but rooted in their apocalyptic worldview. By linking prophetic expectations of an imminent messianic kingdom with the rise of chiliasm and millenarian thought, the author reveals how catastrophic expectations shaped political non‑resistance. Readers will come away with a clearer sense of why the separation of church and state was not an early Christian ideal, but a later historical development forced by circumstance.