Today on renewing your mind, Dr. Robert Gottfried makes the case that the early church probably

wasn't as doctrinally pure as many of imagined.

It didn't all suddenly become wonderful after Paul wrote his letters.

There was just a proliferation of heretical movements that tried to claim the name of Christ

insisted they were the true church and led to this great competition who really speaks

for Christ and for the apostles.

We know there was false teaching in the early church just based on Paul's letters.

Consider the Corinthian church and the struggles they had and the church in Galatia and its

distortion of the gospel.

You're listening to renewing your mind on this Tuesday as we once again feature Dr.

W. Robert Gottfried series, a survey of church history.

Let's find out more about what was going on within the body of Christ in those early

days.

We're returning now to our study of the ancient church with our focus on understanding

the emergence of the Catholic tradition of the church and we were looking at the Jewish

context from which the church emerged at its beginning.

And we saw the special privileges that Rome had granted to the Jews and that was the

context in which Jesus ministered and in which the early apostles ministered.

But we know from our study of the New Testament that the question of exactly how the church

would relate to the Jewish past was a major issue in the beginning.

How much of Jewish religious life would be imposed upon Gentiles?

And that became a central part of the ministry of the Apostle Paul to help the church understand

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