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A Critical Interpretation of Hans Kung’s Historical Analysis of the Development of the Hierarchical Church The beginnings of the Christian church are shrouded in mystery. With the lack of evidence about that time in history, it is hard to draw conclusions of any type. However, the historical analyst, Hans Kung, has written a book to shed some light on the subject. In this book, Kung discusses his opinion on the development of the early church, and its hierarchical structure. In the following paper, I will address two of the chapters of Kung’s book, “The Beginnings of the Early Church” and “The Early Catholic Church”. The points that I will focus on are: The makeup and persecution of the early church community and why it was that way, and how, according to Kung, the founders of Catholicism went against how Jesus wanted the church to be governed by establishing a hierarchy. The Christian church, according to Kung, began at Pentecost. When the Holy Spirit came to the apostles and told them to go out and preach the teachings of Jesus it meant that the apostles could claim an identity separate from Judaism. The majority of the first Christians were Jews from Jerusalem that believed that Jesus was the Messiah promised to the Jews in the Hebrew Testament and they believed in the resurrection. “The earliest Christian community did not want in any way to part company with the Jewish community or nation, but to remain integrated into Judaism.”(P. 13). The differences in the beliefs of the Jews and the Jewish-Christians naturally created a separation in the two groups. When the Christian disciples started going out and preaching their faith to people, the Roman Empire saw them as a threat to their power and decided that Christianity would have to be stopped. Because Christianity and Judaism were one, the two most effective ways to persecute the Christians was to execute their leaders, and to destroy the Jewish places of worship. After the Romans burned the Temple of Jerusalem for the second time, a council of Pharisees decided that the Christians were to be excommunicated from the Jewish temple. If not for the early connection to the Jewish faith, the Christian religion would never have established as a major religion. The idea of having one God, called monotheism, was too radi... ... middle of paper ... ... what they thought, there would be no extravagance in the lives of the church officials. Likewise, if the church truly believed in what Jesus taught, they would not be shunning the participation of women in the church; rather, they would be embracing all the people that truly wished to participate in the vocation of a priest or any position in the church for that matter. In conclusion, the early Christian church had its problems in who was accepted into the new faith and why they were persecuted for it. This was because, during the height of the Roman Empire, any group of people that could be dangerous to Roman ideology would not be tolerated, and the Romans would attempt to put a stop to it. These persecutions of the Christians, however, strengthened, not weakened the Christian church to a point that there would be no way to disperse the community of believers. The main reason that the church stayed together like it did was because of the early establishment of a hierarchy, which, while Kung speculates, would not be the way that Jesus would have wanted the church to be governed, worked in establishing the Christian community into a world religion.