Early Christianity

continue reading "Is the Christian Leadership Structure Pagan?"

Have you ever taken a vow or made a significant promise, a promise that would determine how you lived the rest of your life? How did you feel about it? Was it life changing? On the other hand, have you ever been handed an ultimatum? Was making a promise or taking a vow different than facing an ultimatum? Did either experience leave you feeling empowered to make a difference in your life or the lives of others? Did either leave you in a spirit of powerlessness as if you'd been forced to give away a part of yourself?

One of these, taking a vow or reacting to an ultimatum, is a choice and a commitment that we often make after much consideration. The other is a choice—often between bad and worse—demanded of us by another person, or group. One is empowering, the other constraining. One is likely to leave you with a new sense of purpose while the other leaves you feeling ravaged. One is your choice and the other is really no choice at all.

continue reading "Comparing Creeds and Power With Commitment and Purpose"

Many of us were taught that orthodoxy is the “right way,” which by default declares every other “way” to be the “wrong way.” But this is all wrong. It's wrong mostly because it is an answer to the wrong question. It's also wrong because it's an incomplete answer, but I'll have to leave that for another time. “Right way” or “right thinking” or “right worship” is the answer to the question of how rightly to “do” something. Doing in this case is really the result not the cause. Defining the right way to do, is a short cut which short circuits the process of answering the right question. Which I'll not specify just now, but you can get a hint from the James 2 link above. For now, my point is that orthodoxy, or standardized theology and worship, not only does not exist but neither is it effective.

Let's begin with a look at this quote from a 1969 book on education. The issue is single-answer, stereotyping and oversimplification in the teaching of history.

continue reading "The Orthodoxy Paradoxy"

A Brief History of the New Testament is a good starting place for those wanting a quick glance at how the NT came to us. It's also a starting place for those recovering from Biblical Literalism and the inerrency/

continue reading "Brief History of the New Testament and Analysis of the Canonical and Apocryphal Scriptures"

From the Introduction Page:

The purpose of this web site is to set out all of the Christian writings that are believed to have been written in the first and second centuries, as well as a few selected from the early third. I have also included non-Christian documents that may have special bearing on the study of early Christianity in order to make this web site a comprehensive sourcebook.

continue reading "Early Christian Writings"

The term Christian was first used of those in the Jesus movement at Antioch, Luke tells us. And it seems that the term Christianism or Christianity was coined there also by Ignatius, the third bishop of Antioch, sometime in the last quarter of the first century CE. He may also be the first to use the term Catholic or universal church in his letter to the Smyrna church. But terms are not what make the institution. Structure and required loyalty to the structure do. This is probably when the Jesus movement became Christianism.

continue reading "Church Evolution: Seed of Institutionalism"

During the life and ministry of Jesus, his followers included folks from many of the several distinct groups that made up the Jewish Heterodoxy. Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, as well as Judas Iscariot, were Zealots. James the brother of Jesus was a Pharisee, according to Jefferey Bütz in his book The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity, as I mentioned before. And we know that Paul, who first persecuted the early followers before he was converted by a frightening vision and teaching from Ananias of Damascus, was also a Pharisee but a Hellenized one. John and his brother James, the sons of Zebedee, had previously followed John the Baptist before leaving John to follow Jesus. Therefore, they were likely Nazirites as was John the Baptist. Some assume that Jesus was a Nazirite also but Jesus debunks that theory himself when he contrasted John's ascetic lifestyle with his own. There were no followers from the Sadducee sect.

continue reading "Church Evolution: Germination in a Bed of Heterodoxy and Diaspora"

Eschatology—although defined as the study of end times—may be, in application, a study of the Religion of Futility. Because, waiting with bated breath for a future glory, or heaven, turns the present into a purgatory or even hell. The present age gets reduced to a time of futile and unproductive death while waiting for a future glorious life. As great a prophet as was John the Baptist, Jesus said he was least in the Kingdom of God. Why? Could it be that he anticipated it rather than drinking it in?

continue reading "Church Evolution: Political Upheaval, End Times and Eschatology"

I was raised in a tradition that prides itself in restoring the first century church. The premise includes stripping away all non New Testament stuff and following only the “pattern” of worship and church leadership found in the NT letters and the narrative found in the Book of Acts. But there's a major flaw in this premise and it's the same flaw found in many arguments against ecclesiastical change as well as the 1,900 year old argument for a standard “universal” church. And that flaw is that there never was a single point from which all church and denominational variations diverged. The bad news is that it's not a simple as you might have thought while the good new is that it's not as simple as you thought.

continue reading "Evolution of the Christian Church: An Introduction"

The Pharisees were originally a separatist group of lay—non priest—teachers who opposed the professional temple crowd, the Sadducees, both politically and philosophically. They had many similar teachings to those recorded of Jesus, and from a modified perspective, one can easily enough read some of the arguments between the Pharisees and Jesus as mere debate among colleagues.

In his book, The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity, Jeffery Bütz, speculates that James the brother of Jesus was not only a Pharisee, but a well respected member of that group and by other Jews as well.

continue reading "Do the Pharisees get a bum rap?"