The adventure of the first Christians

This article by Alain Moufarège, a Lebanese layman, offers a historical and theological study of the earliest christological formulations in Christian literature of the first two centuries. The author successively examines the Odes of Solomon, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the work of Irenaeus of Lyon, analyzing the way in which each of these witnesses attempted to put into words the mystery of the incarnation. The central idea is that the first Christians, close to the founding event, approached the person of Christ with careful reserve, combining poetic intuition, confession of faith, and refutation of heresies. The contribution of the article is to show that this nascent christology, still hesitant and sometimes contradictory, bears witness to a fruitful tension between the necessity of speaking and the respect for mystery, a tension that foreshadows the great conciliar definitions of later centuries.