Part Three: The Outsiders, the Legends, and the Losers
Like most religions Christianity evolved both in its message and its understanding of its founder. Unlike other religions, Christianity performed this feat in a very short period of time. It is often stated that Christianity started as the religion of Jesus and became the religion about Jesus. The focus, which began with the Apostle Paul and ended with the Gospel of John shifted from Jesus as a Jewish teacher and prophet to Jesus as the resurrected savior of the world. In the second century much of the tradition of the Gospel of John would be melded with Eastern traditions to create the Gnostic movement. Interestingly, the primary Gospel used by the Gnostics (the Gospel of Thomas) removed nearly all the apocalyptic teachings and does not even mention John the Baptist.
Of course, what we call the “orthodox view” was not yet estabished. It was still competing with the half dozen or so other theologies.
It is probably not a coincidence that this “middle” view was the view point of the church in Rome and it came to dominate. |
Gradually, the Orthodox view would try to reconcile the contradictions of the extreme end of the Gospel of John as demonstrated in Gnosticism and the Jewish carpenter's son that was the Jewish/Christian tradition. What became clear by the second century was that they needed elements of both in order to survive. Without Paul's apocalyptic message of resurrection and salvation few people would sign up for the new religion. Yet without John's divine Christ it would be nearly impossible to build sustainable churches without a God as the central focus. Merely the son of God would not suffice.
It has frequently been questioned by non-believers why the Christian religion would need four versions of the same story for its Bible and why letters by a convert rather than a founder would become the sacred scriptures. It can now be seen that they were all necessary components for the development of the dominant theology. They would be used in subsequent decades and centuries to fend off the various offshoots such as Arianism, Docetism, the Marcions, Ebionites and Montanists, among others. They would fend off Docetism and its claims that Jesus was entirely spirit and not a physical being with the early Gospels. They would fend off the Jewish/Christian Ebionites with John's Gospel.
This melding of an evolved message into one overarching belief system produced the Christianity that was able to withstand both the early persecutions and later incorporation as a state religion. Clearly the early Christians would not have persevered without their belief in an imminent return by Jesus and a reversal of the social order. It is also equally clear that Christianity could never have become a state religion without an all-powerful God at its head to compete favorably and later substitute for the many Gods of paganism.
What Christianity lost in the process was Jesus' basic message from the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. In a strange way, there was no room for this message in the new religion. Turning the other cheek was nearly an impossible philosophy for people being tortured. Communal living without possessions would find very few ears in an Empire governed by a landed aristocracy, a wealthy equestrian class and an even wealthier Senatorial class.
| "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ". - Gandhi |
The philosophy would survive in spirit, if rarely in practice, with Catholic monasteries. It would not make a popular revival until the modern age and the rise of new age philosophies. As both a reaction to materialism, corporatism and profit theology, the simplicity of Jesus' original message has made a comeback of sorts in new age belief systems that found parallels to Jesus' message in Buddhism. They have grown as a reaction to the fundamentalist direction of many mainstream Christian denominations by highlighting the differences between Jesusism and Christianity. Strangely, the most potent criticism of Christianity among believers comes from the Jesus followers. They can throw up the literal words of Jesus as a counter to most modern Christian beliefs. If it weren't for evolutionary theory, modern science, cosmology, biology, geology, and literary criticism, the Jesus movement would be a potent threat to modern Christian theology.
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