The Evolution of Christianity

The heart of Jesus' own ministry centered around the future coming of a Kingdom of God on Earth, to be ruled by God himself. According to Jesus, this Kingdom was very close and the forces of evil would be overthrown and only those that followed him would enjoy the fruits of this new rule. The heavens would open and the Son of Man would appear in the clouds to rule in judgement over all the peoples of the Earth. Jesus then makes three crucial points: It would occur during his generation; but no one would know the exact day or hour; and that constant repentance in preparation was needed.

Following Jesus death and Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, Paul begins a reasoning out process to discern the meaning of Jesus' life. He makes two assumptions about Jesus stemming from his vision of Jesus resurrected. The first is that the Son of Man that Jesus was referring to was actually Jesus himself. The second was that the early disciple belief that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah was also true.

Based on these assumptions plus Paul's own vision of a resurrected Jesus, Paul reasons out his argument. Since Jesus is the Messiah and the Jewish concept of Messiah involved a triumphant king of Israel reestablishing the kingdom for the Jews, the Jewish concept must be wrong. "Son of Man" means the Messiah must be reestablishing the kingdom for all mankind, not just Jews. The Messiah is not exclusive to Judaism but inclusive for all that believe in the Son of Man.

Next, Paul reasons out what this reestablished kingdom will entail and concludes that it will reverse the present state of mankind ruled by the evil that was established following the original sin described in Genesis. Just as the Jews believed that sacrifice was needed to wash themselves of their sins, God washed away man's sins with his sacrifice, which occurred with Jesus' death. Consequently, belief in mankind's Messiah would allow people under God's umbrella in this new world where some had their sins washed away and the rest would suffer the burden of sin outside of God's umbrella because of their disbelief.

Paul's last point was that Jesus' resurrection was the beginning of the process which he and the believers of the message would shortly see realized, all within their lifetime. This was the message that Paul taught to the gentiles in the cities of Asia minor and was the message that some of these gentiles found so appealing. They were about to experience the day of judgment and they were on the good side of the scale. Paul's first theological crisis arose when some of these early believers began dying. Had they missed out on the kingdom, and if so, how come? Paul then explains that the dead, like Jesus, will be risen and allowed to enjoy the fruits of the kingdom, followed shortly after by the living believers.

By the time of Luke's Gospel more than forty years had passed along with Jesus, his disciples, Paul, and probably most of the earliest followers. Since this was the traditional duration of a generation, Luke needs to reinterpret Jesus' teaching in order to understand what occurred, or in this case, did not occur.

The Christianity that emerged initiated in Luke but really starting with the Gospel of John and carrying all the way to the present is a religion that was forced to deal with the fact that its founders were entirely wrong. The message that was so appealing to the earliest Christians; that the new social order was about to arrive; required adjustment. This demanded a new theology as the second century Christians tried to make sense of their own beliefs in the face of the fact that their religion's earliest founders were in error.

Every subsequent Christian doctrine, whether from an orthodox, gnostic, Jewish/Christian, or other perspective is a set of explanations designed to reconcile the inconsistencies. All of these doctrines, whether it be the Doctrine of the Trinity, Doctrine of Grace, the concept of predestination or the more modern apocalyptic views of rapture and second coming, are all manifestations of the fact that the earliest predictions proved false.