I am Catholic today because, after leaving the Church of my childhood and spending years in the World Mission Society Church of God while searching for the truth, I eventually began studying the writings of the earliest Christians. What I found surprised me more than anything I had learned before. The faith of the first and second century Christians looked exactly like the core of Catholic Christianity. Their beliefs, their worship, and their understanding of salvation were entirely continuous with the Catholic and Orthodox tradition and completely absent from the teachings of modern restoration movements.
WMSCOG had shaped the way I understood Christianity during that period of my life. Their focus on the idea of “fulfillment” gave their teachings a sense of depth. They claimed that Christ fulfilled the Old Testament feasts in a new and spiritual way and that Christians must celebrate these “new covenant feasts” as a necessary part of faith. At the time, this appeared meaningful because I was searching for something ancient and biblical.
But when I turned to the actual sources from the earliest centuries of Christianity, I was astonished to find that none of this appears anywhere in the writings of the disciples of the apostles or the bishops who succeeded them. There is no early Christian text that teaches a system of seven feasts in three times. There is no mention of a revived feast structure in the way WMSCOG presents it. There is no hint that Christians saw such celebrations as the center of the Gospel or as the foundation of the Christian identity.
What I found instead was a Church entirely focused on Christ Himself. The earliest Christians are united in proclaiming the divinity of Jesus. They speak of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the God whom they worship. They describe baptism as the sacrament through which sins are forgiven and a new life begins. They explain the Eucharist as the true Body and Blood of Christ received for salvation. They speak of bishops who teach with authority and who continue the ministry of the apostles. They describe the Christian assembly taking place every Sunday, the day of the resurrection, where the Scriptures are read, prayers are offered, and bread is broken.
Reading these ancient writings made me realize that the core teachings of Catholicism are not medieval additions or later corruptions. They are the original beliefs of the Christian Church. This was not a rediscovery of something lost. It was recognition of something that had been preserved all along.
And it also showed me something else. The early martyrs did not give their lives for ritual calendars or reconstructed feast days. They did not die because they followed a special date for Passover or a unique structure of Old Testament symbolism. They died because they believed that Jesus is Lord. They died because they worshiped the Trinity. They died because they refused to sacrifice to false gods. They died because they believed that the Eucharist is holy and that the Church Christ founded must remain faithful even in persecution.
Studying these early Christians brought me back to the Catholic Church because I could see that this was the same faith. It was not reinvented in a later era. It was not reconstructed in modern times. It was preserved through apostolic succession, through the sacraments, and through the unity of belief that the early Church Fathers wrote about so passionately.
In the end, I did not return to Catholicism out of nostalgia or habit. I returned because history drew me back. The earliest Christians worshiped, taught, and lived in a way that is recognizably Catholic, and their witness is what led me home.
Note: I do believe all those baptized in Christ properly are in the body of Christ including protestants. I also believe there are many core doctrines all shared through orthodox and main christian churches that can make them valid. I do believe though the Catholic (meaning “universal”) church does include all proper Christians. There are differences between Orthodox churches and Roman Catholic churches, but even though there are different rites and non crucial traditional differences, there are some teachings that are core to apostolic teaching and were taught by the early church. I will share some now!
What follows is a documented look at what Christians believed between A.D. 70 and 300. These writings come from bishops, martyrs, and disciples of the apostles. Their testimony shows the original shape of Christian doctrine long before later controversies or councils. I decided to show mostly Pre-Nicaean examples since the WMSCOG loves to state how Constantine ruined all of Christianity. All these early church fathers were martyrs, and the only way the WMSCOG could refute there words is to reject by only saying we need the Bible and their interpretations, only AHN the “root of David” can interpret, etc.
“Jesus Christ our God.”
Letter to the Ephesians 18
“Our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived by Mary.”
Smyrnaeans 1
Ignatius was the third bishop of Antioch and a disciple of John the Apostle.
“Await Him who is above time, the Eternal, the Invisible, who for our sake became visible.”