What was the very first Christian Church ?

The First Church of the Nazarene: Reclaiming a Name History Forgot

The Nazarenes: The Original Church

Long before any denomination claimed the name, there was a community in Jerusalem whose members were known simply as Nazarenes. They were the direct disciples of Jesus of Nazareth — the men and women who had walked with him, witnessed his death, and proclaimed his resurrection. They gathered in homes and Temple courts, shared their possessions, broke bread together, and awaited the fulfilment of everything their rabbi had promised.

They did not call themselves Christians. That term came later, coined in Antioch (Acts 11:26), and was initially a nickname — possibly derisive — meaning "partisans of Christ." The original, native designation for this community was Notzrim — Nazarenes — drawn directly from Natzeret, the Galilean town from which Jesus came.

The evidence is embedded in Scripture itself. In Acts 24:5, when the Apostle Paul stands trial before the Roman governor Felix, the Jewish prosecutor Tertullus does not call him a leader of the Christians. He calls him "a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes." This was the recognised, legally-used name for the movement — established enough to be cited in a Roman court as an identifiable religious group.

What is remarkable is that this name never died. The Hebrew word Notzri (נוצרי) — Nazarene — is still the modern Hebrew word for Christian. When a Jewish Israeli today refers to a Christian, they use the same root word that their ancestors applied to the disciples of Jesus in the first century. Two thousand years of history, and the name held. No other designation for the followers of Jesus carries that kind of unbroken linguistic continuity.

The first Nazarene community was wholly Jewish in character. It observed Torah, kept the Sabbath, and gathered in the Temple precincts. Its leader was James, the brother of Jesus — a man so rigorously devout that even his opponents called him "James the Just." Peter and John were its public voices. The women who first announced the resurrection — Mary Magdalene among them — were among its foundational witnesses. This was not a gentile religion. It was a messianic renewal movement erupting from within the heart of Second Temple Judaism.

This, then, is the first Church of the Nazarene. Not a denomination. Not a creed. A living community gathered around the memory, presence, and promise of one man from Nazareth.

Before the Nazarenes: The Essenes as Spiritual Prototype

To understand the Nazarene movement fully, we must look back further — to a community that preceded it by at least two centuries and almost certainly shaped the spiritual landscape into which Jesus was born. The Essenes were a Jewish sect active from roughly the second century BCE through the first century CE. They are known primarily through the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at Qumran in 1947, which revealed a community of extraordinary theological depth and disciplined communal life.

The Essenes were separatists. They had withdrawn from what they regarded as a compromised Temple establishment and formed intentional communities in the wilderness, devoted to Torah study, ritual purity, shared property, and urgent eschatological expectation. They called themselves the Sons of Light. They spoke of a New Covenant. Their writings describe waiting for a Messiah — in some texts, two Messiahs — and the imminent dawn of a new age.

The parallels with the earliest Nazarene community are striking and well-documented. Both practised communal sharing of goods — Acts 2:44 describes the Jerusalem church holding "all things in common," a practice Josephus and Philo both record as central to Essene life. Both used ritual water immersion for purification and initiation. Both centred their community around sacred meals with covenantal significance. Both read Scripture through an urgent lens — the age of fulfilment was at hand, the Spirit was moving, the old order was passing away.

John the Baptist connects these two worlds with particular force. He operated in the same Judean wilderness as the Qumran community. He baptised. He preached repentance in preparation for one coming after him. Many scholars believe he had direct contact with Essene or closely related desert communities before beginning his own public ministry. If so, then the man who prepared the way for Jesus was himself shaped by the tradition that most resembles the movement Jesus would found.

The Essenes were not the first church in any formal sense. That designation belongs to the Nazarene community born at Pentecost. But they were the first draft — a proto-community of Jews who had already turned away from institutional religion toward a covenant-based, Spirit-expectant, communally-rooted walk with God. They prepared the ground. The Nazarenes broke it open.

What the 1908 Denomination Borrowed Without Knowing

When Holiness revivalists gathered in Pilot Point, Texas in 1908 and named their new denomination the Church of the Nazarene, they chose well — better, perhaps, than they knew. The name was intended as an act of humble piety, a gesture toward simplicity and identification with the Jesus of the Gospels rather than the trappings of established religion.

But the name carries far more weight than any act of denominational branding can contain. It carries the Aramaic cadence of Galilee. It carries Paul's voice echoing in a Roman courtroom. It carries two thousand years of Jewish memory preserved in the word Notzrim. It carries James the Just in the Temple, and Peter addressing the Pentecost crowd, and Mary of Magdala running from an empty tomb. And further back still, it carries the echo of white-robed men at Qumran, bending over their scrolls in the desert, speaking of a New Covenant not yet arrived.

The first Church of the Nazarene did not meet in Texas. It met in an upper room in Jerusalem. Its founding document was not a denominational charter but the outpouring described in Acts 2. Its membership was recorded not in any earthly registry but in what Revelation calls the Lamb's Book of Life.

History forgot its own name. But the name — Notzrim, Nazarenes, the followers of the one from Nazareth — never forgot itself.