Jesus was raised Jewish, and according to most scholars, he aimed to reform Judaism —not create a new religion. When he was around 30 years old, Jesus started his public ministry after being baptized in the Jordan River by the prophet known as John the Baptist. For about three years, Jesus traveled with 12 appointed disciples also known as the 12 apostles , teaching large groups of people and performing what witnesses described as miracles.
Some of the most well-known miraculous events included raising a dead man named Lazarus from the grave, walking on water and curing the blind. What Other Proof Exists? Many scholars believe Jesus died between 30 A. According to the Bible, Jesus was arrested, tried and condemned to death. Roman governor Pontius Pilate issued the order to kill Jesus after being pressured by Jewish leaders who alleged that Jesus was guilty of a variety of crimes, including blasphemy.
Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers in Jerusalem, and his body was laid in a tomb. Authors in the Bible say the resurrected Jesus ascended into Heaven. The Christian Bible is a collection of 66 books written by various authors. The Old Testament, which is also recognized by followers of Judaism , describes the history of the Jewish people, outlines specific laws to follow, details the lives of many prophets, and predicts the coming of the Messiah.
These letters offer instructions for how the church should operate. The final book in the New Testament, Revelation , describes a vision and prophecies that will occur at the end of the world, as well as metaphors to describe the state of the world.
Most of the first Christians were Jewish converts, and the church was centered in Jerusalem. Shortly after the creation of the church, many Gentiles non-Jews embraced Christianity. Early Christians considered it their calling to spread and teach the gospel.
One of the most important missionaries was the apostle Paul, a former persecutor of Christians. Paul preached the gospel and established churches throughout the Roman Empire , Europe and Africa. In addition to preaching, Paul is thought to have written 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament. In 64 A. In simple terms, he told Arius to shut up.
But an issue that divisive does not die down so easily, and like so many other theological questions circulating in the day, Arianism, too, ultimately landed in Constantine's lap. Like any powerful, under-educated politician confronted with a real brain-teaser of this sort, the emperor called together his advisors, in this case, Christian clergy from all across the Empire to a synod, the famous Council of Nicaea near Constantinople in CE.
After some vigorous debate, the bishops ended up backing Athanasius and forged the famous Nicene Creed in which adherents and converts to Christianity were sworn to uphold the orthodox perception of Christ as "begotten not made" by God and " who was made flesh, was made man, suffered and rose again on the third day.
The credo did not stop there either. It continued on to an outright denial of the major tenets underlying Arianism and Gnosticism, in fact, any version of Christianity which challenged the Church's authority, forcing its membership to denounce these heresies publicly:.
But those who say that there was once when he was not and before he was begotten he was not and he was made of things that were not or maintain that the Son of God is of a different essence or substance or created or subject to moral change or alteration—the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemn them to damnation. This constitutes the wholesale deprecation of all heresies which were at that time raising their voices in opposition to the policies and existence of not only the orthodox vision of Christ but also an organized Church government.
But even such extreme measures did not forestall the growth of Arianism. Later synods reversed the decision of the Council of Nicaea and confirmed Arian views, which only exacerbated divisions within the Christian world. More important, Arian proponents played well the advantages inherent in their vision of Christ, especially outside the Empire in areas where Church bureaucrats who lived for the most part in Roman metropolises had as yet little influence. The Arian Christians' simpler conception of Jesus as subordinate to and discrete from God allowed them to win many converts, especially among those unfamiliar with the complex theological history underlying Christian orthodox doctrine.
In particular, the Arian monk Ulfilas was able to attract many Germanic barbarian groups to his side, the Goths especially who became avid non-orthodox Christians. Among the administrators of the Church, the internal unrest precipitated by these heresies only intensified interest in formalizing holy services and offices of all sorts.
Doctrine and ritual came to center around what is now known as the seven sacraments : baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, marriage, ordination and final unction. Church leadership fell into the hands of bishops , each of whom oversaw a see , a religious "province" of sorts , in which, as it turned out, not all bishops were equal. Those situated in the great urban centers of the Empire became arch bishops " head -bishops" whose opinion carried more weight because of the large populations they represented.
In particular, the Bishop of Rome stood out among his peers and hence came to be called the papa "Father". From this evolved the papacy and the office of Pope. The justification advanced to lend credence to this bureaucracy sheds light on the psychological machinery of the early Church, all the more because the reasoning used is likely to rest on invented history. The bishoprics and sees of the Roman West grew up in places unassociated with Jesus himself, places it could not even be imagined he ever went in person.
Thus, in order to ground their communities in Christ himself somehow, the bishops had no choice but to build bridges to the apostles of Jesus, but that was difficult, too. There was no clear or credible testimony about the lives of Jesus' apostles after his crucifixion—where did they go? In origin, this unconfirmed history probably served truth less than the western bishops' need to tie their authority directly to Jesus himself.
Through this elaborate reconstruction of the past—the transference of power from Jesus to the apostles and then to the bishops came to be called the apostolic succession —Church bureaucrats linked their authority to the seminal voices and events of the New Testament. But this path to empowerment, be it revisionist or not, also proved no smooth or easy road. Besides the continuing resistance of heretics who sought to undercut and discredit leaders like the Pope, the bishops themselves vied for real control of an increasingly wealthy and influential institution.
In particular, the patriarch of Constantinople, who led a large and well-organized community of Christians in the great capital city of the eastern half of the Empire, was reluctant to take his marching orders from an occidental bishop inhabiting faraway Rome.
Later, as the western end of the Empire began to fall apart, it made even less sense to Rome's eastern denizens to continue obeying some purported papa. By the early Middle Ages ca. Eventually, the growing sense of estrangement between Church officials in Rome and Constantinople led to the division of Christianity into Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox factions. This, in turn, opened the door to military conflicts like the Crusades see Chapter Thus, the early Church's efforts to promote unity within the Christian world by imposing standard doctrine and firm governance only ended up fracturing it incurably in the long run.
The irony and futility of orthodoxy-through-force would, no doubt, not be lost on the Gnostics. Indeed, is that sound we hear from deep beneath the sands of Nag Hammadi the lamentation of an extinguished sect, or is it laughter and echoes of "I told you so"? God the Mother, Mary Magdalene the Apostle, a Jesus who never actually suffered on the cross—it all seems unimaginably foreign to the modern view of Christianity. Even to suggest these sorts of things in most corners of the Christian world today would be to open the door for widespread recrimination and scorn or, worse yet, entice someone to author a best-seller like The Da Vinci Code.
And yet ideas of this sort were not only advanced in Christianity's first centuries but also attracted many adherents and enjoyed considerable popularity, at least to judge from the vitriol with which their orthodox adversaries attacked the "heretics" who promulgated these notions.
To see such a wide range of beliefs attested so near the navitity of Christ's religion may seem odd to many today, not just on theological grounds but because, in general, we're taught to expect increasing differentiation as things expand over time. The widely used, so-called "Darwinian" model of evolution which is built around notions like survival-of-the-fittest and natural selection presumes that growth will be accompanied by rising variation—often presented as graphs that look like upside-down Christmas trees—in other words, we're trained to look for greater complexity over time as things evolve.
While that may be the way things work in paleontology , it's not the pattern of change which the historical study of Christianity presents. Indeed, the great open frontier of the Christian religion in its earliest phase has left behind a record of more creative and pioneering visions of Christ's message and divinity than all later ages combined.
And as time passed, orthodox forces antagonistic to any ideology at odds with institutionized Christianity obliterated those conceptions of Jesus which ran against the growing mainstream.
And once Christ came to be defined in certain ways, and on that perspective of his life and teaching depended a powerful and influential social institution like the Church, it was all but impossible to recast his image without changing what he stood for and, of more immediate consequence, what stood for him.
And that makes tracking down a historical Christ a very difficult endeavor, not so much because the what-really-happened of his life has been obscured in a void of verifiable data—it has been, but that's not the point! All in all, Jesus has proven an ideal target for invented history, which is not to say any particular narrative about him rests on lies, only that he is the sort of figure around which exaggeration and myth tend to accrue.
In other words, as we see so often in history, when people care very much about something, the truth of history isn't likely to be what they serve first, or at all. But it seems safe to say at least this much: out of so many possibilities, one perspective on Christ won out, the literal view of his life and resurrection. Yet we now know this was neither the only nor the most "historical" take on his life story.
Rather, it met the needs of an institution in ascendancy and was the version of the truth most feasible for a world needing comfort and stability amidst turmoil and savage upheaval. And if this was the first time Christian orthodoxy was to go to war with heresy, it would certainly not be the last.
In later ages, others followed the trail mapped out by the Gnostics and their heretical brethren and re-ignited the debate over what constituted a Christ and a God. I don't mean Protestants at the time of the Reformation the early 's CE —though they certainly fit the mold—but nearly a millennium before them, another group began asking questions which challenged the central tenets of orthodoxy and through innovative insight and revelation structured a religion that was both revolutionary and at the same time rooted deeply in the theological traditions of the Near East.
From this was created a new type of believer who would take the controversies of Christianity to different and unexpected heights. More important, their novel responses to classical Christian paradoxes like the nature of the Trinity and the role of an institutional Church would find expression in a different world, in a different language, in Arabic in fact.
They were, of course, the Moslems. Too little information about the actual man in his day can be verified and too many people care about the interpretation of Christ's life and teaching, a situation which leaves historians with no real hope for achieving consensus. The gospels themselves only exacerbate the problem, since they entail numerous difficulties starting with the very language in which they were published. Throughout history, Christians have debated and through theological disputes about their religion.
There are many important distinctions of interpretation and opinion of the Bible and sacred tradition on which the foundation of Christianity is built upon. Since many of these debates have ended in irreconcilable differences in theology and a lack of consensus of the core tenets of Christianity, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, and Evangelicals often deny that members of certain branches are in fact true Christians.
The question of how old Christianity actually is can be debated, but the consensus is that it is a little over 2, years old. Christianity, like other religions, has adherents whose beliefs and biblical interpretations are different.
A traditionalist believes that God worked through human authors so that they produced what God wished to communicate to His current and future followers. Some people believe that divine inspiration categorizes the present Bible as inerrant. However, others claim inerrancy for the Bible in its original manuscripts despite none of those are extant. Christianity began as a Jewish sect in the Levant of the Middle East around the mid-1st century.
Other than Second Temple Judaism, the primary religious influences of early Christianity are Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism. People Charles Wesley C. Places Rosslyn Chapel. Symbols The cross. Texts The Bible Didache Revelation. Women The feminine divine.
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