A question for Christians

barfizz

Can you give me your opinion on the origins of the Christian church,
We know that there is a gap between the time that the New Testament was written and the death of Christ.
How did it move away from Judaism and take on a completely different set of rites and rituals?

santing

barfizz wrote: »

Can you give me your opinion on the origins of the Christian church,
We know that there is a gap between the time that the New Testament was written and the death of Christ.
How did it move away from Judaism and take on a completely different set of rites and rituals?

The origins of the Christian Church we find in Acts 2 with the baptism of the Holy Spirit
The time gap is between 30 - 60 years (writing of Paul's letter to Galatians till the writing of Revelation)
It moved away because it was completely different, see for instance Galatians 3, Ephesians 2, Hebrews 7

A completely different set of rites and rituals? Well, in the New Testament you only find two rituals, Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Everything else is added outside of God's revealed plan, and most of the time has been borrowed from Judaism.

Fanny Cradock

Actually, some historians/ theologians would date 1 Corinthians to around A.D. 35. This is around 5 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus and about 3 years after Paul's conversion. 1 Corinthians 15 is important because Paul is seen to commit to papyrus one of the earliest (if not the earliest) creeds of Christianity - one which would most likely have only been passed on via oral tradition before hand. The conclusion is that such a creed had already formed the rudimentary basis of what was the first and, in many respects, purest Christian church.

How Christianity arose out of Judaism - an incredibly legalistic belief system - is very curious. Some people would argue that this is circumstantial evidence for the truth of Christianity. But even to the converted, this is probably only somewhat convincing.

hivizman

A very interesting book that I read some time ago is John Dominic Crossan The Birth of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1996). Crossan aims to fill the 'gap' between the crucifixion and the letters of Paul and then the Gospels. Crossan is somewhat controversial as a writer, but the book was certainly, as I recall, a work of careful scholarship. His main argument is that Christianity operated, at least in Galilee, as a Christianised Judaism rather than as a separate faith. Some of the tensions, as set out in Acts, between Paul, Peter and James, as to the relationship between the developing Christianity and traditional Judaism, may have been experienced differently in Palestine and in the more hellenised world of Asia Minor and Greece itself.

Perhaps the following quote from John Robinson's Redating the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1976) sums up the problems nicely:

Estimates of how long it takes, say, for doctrines to develop or structures to become institutionalized, for a golden age to decline into a silver, or for documents to travel, vary wildly. Some can squeeze the whole of church history up to the conversion of Paul into a single year, others require decades for the emergence of the conditions in I Peter. And nothing is so slippery as the relation between Christology and chronology.

barfizz

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

How Christianity arose out of Judaism - an incredibly legalistic belief system - is very curious. Some people would argue that this is circumstantial evidence for the truth of Christianity. But even to the converted, this is probably only somewhat convincing.

From my understanding, Paul began his teaching based on a set of visions and did this for many years, I belive that he only met Peter and James many years later and then only for a few days, how did he manage to dictate/direct the future of the church when he had no contact/direct knowledge of the teachings of Jesus?

PDN

barfizz wrote: »

From my understanding, Paul began his teaching based on a set of visions and did this for many years, I belive that he only met Peter and James many years later and then only for a few days, how did he manage to dictate/direct the future of the church when he had no contact/direct knowledge of the teachings of Jesus?

Paul was hugely influential in shaping and directing the future of Christianity because he wrestled with the biggest question that the early Church faced - namely "How do non-Jews fit into this whole thing?"

Jesus sent His disciples out to preach the Gospel to all nations (Matthew 28) and promised the disciples the power of the Holy Spirit to be witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). However, the early Church was predominantly Jewish, Hebrew speaking, centred in Jerusalem, and only gradually opened up to other people when forced to by the threat of a church split (Acts 7), by persecution (Acts 8) and by a direct vision from God (Acts 10). One possible factor was that few of the initial leaders (Peter, James, John etc) had the theological or academic ability to work through the implications of these gradual openings.

Paul was a trained theologian, much more knowledgable in the Scriptures than the fishermen from Galilee, and lived much of his life outside of Palestine. Therefore he was used by God to make explicit in the New Testament what was already implicit in the Old - that Jesus came to bring salvation to all the world, not just the Jews.

The visions Paul received from God were influential, but not his only base. From his earliest days as a Christian Paul was in contact with other Christians - and he saw first hand how they lived their faith in a Gentile environment.

barfizz

Sorry but I am not sure you have answered my question?

Are you saying that the religion that jesus was part of was not good enough and so Paul and others had to create a religion.

PDN

barfizz wrote: »

Sorry but I am not sure you have answered my question?

Are you saying that the religion that jesus was part of was not good enough and so Paul and others had to create a religion.

No, I am not saying that at all.

Jesus did not come to bring a religion. He came so that we could enjoy a relationship with Him, and hence a relationship with God.

Judaism was 'good enough' for its day, but was never complete. Indeed Judaism itself continually changed and developed as God progressively revealed more of Himself to mankind.

Jesus showed us a fuller revelation of God and, by bearing our sins on the Cross, made salvation possible for every one of us. However, the practical outworkings of that and how it relates to our circumstances needs to be continually worked on and developed. For example, Paul had to work out how it related to the Gentiles. Today we have to work out how it relates to contemporary issues such as global warming or atomic weapons.

'Religion' is man's attempts to explain his relationship with God in terms that are relevant to contemporary culture. Sometimes he gets it right - a lot of times he seems to get it wrong.

barfizz

PDN wrote: »

No, I am not saying that at all.

Jesus did not come to bring a religion. He came so that we could enjoy a relationship with Him, and hence a relationship with God.

If he did not come to bring a religion why then did he bother with Paul?

PDN

barfizz wrote: »

If he did not come to bring a religion why then did he bother with Paul?

Because Paul did not create a religion.

Paul was used by God to give us a good proportion of the New Testament Scriptures. He also gave a lot of good advice and teaching as to how we as Christians are to live out our faith in a non-Jewish environment, and how the Old Testament relates to us.

Now, men have taken Paul's words (and those of Jesus, Peter, John, Moses, & a host of others) and used them to construct many religious systems and denominations. But Christianity is not primarily about religion. It is still about having a relationship with God and then living and behaving in a way that nurtures that relationship and makes us a blessing to other people.

hivizman

PDN wrote: »

But Christianity is not primarily about religion. It is still about having a relationship with God and then living and behaving in a way that nurtures that relationship and makes us a blessing to other people.

Are you using the word "religion" in a specific sense? According to my dictionary (Chambers 2003 edition), religion is defined as "belief in, recognition of or an awakened sense of a higher unseen controlling power or powers, with the emotion and morality connected with such; rites or worship; any system of such belief or worship". Your final sentence would fit the first aspect of this definition quite well, I think. So are you equating "religion" with the "rites and rituals" that Barfizz mentioned in the original post?

According to the Gospels, Jesus saw himself as fulfilling the Law, e.g. Matthew 5:17-18: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." [NRSV, Anglicized Edition]

So I would agree that Jesus did not regard himself as promulgating a new religion, and Paul therefore fulfilled the role of developing the theological implications of the stories and reports that he would have picked up from the early followers of Jesus.

PDN

hivizman wrote: »

Are you using the word "religion" in a specific sense? According to my dictionary (Chambers 2003 edition), religion is defined as "belief in, recognition of or an awakened sense of a higher unseen controlling power or powers, with the emotion and morality connected with such; rites or worship; any system of such belief or worship". Your final sentence would fit the first aspect of this definition quite well, I think. So are you equating "religion" with the "rites and rituals" that Barfizz mentioned in the original post?

I guess it's all a matter of semantics, but yes, I am equating "religion" with a system of rites or rituals, or even with another common usage - that of a cultural/religious group that you are born into. So we speak of babies as belonging to a particular religion.

This is one of those rare occasions where I agree with Richard Dawkins when he says that there is no such thing as a Christian baby or a Muslim baby - rather there are babies born to Christian parents and babies born to Muslim parents.

barfizz

PDN wrote: »

Because Paul did not create a religion.

OK! if Paul did not create the christian religion, who did and where did it come from.

There had to be a point in time when someone said we are no longer going to adhear to the jewish faith we are going to gather together all these different sects and start a religion called christianity. with the following beliefs and here they are.

So who did it?

hivizman

PDN wrote: »

I guess it's all a matter of semantics, but yes, I am equating "religion" with a system of rites or rituals, or even with another common usage - that of a cultural/religious group that you are born into. So we speak of babies as belonging to a particular religion.

Yes, good point about the cultural aspects of religion. What came into my mind was the doctrine of "cuius regio, eius religio" as promulgated by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and reinforced by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, where the religion of a territory would be determined by the religion of its ruler. So culture and religion would often be closely linked and in some cases hard to distinguish. This comes up a lot on the Islam forum, where a lot of Muslim practices are questioned as artefacts of Arab culture rather than mandated by the Qur'an.

PDN wrote: »

This is one of those rare occasions where I agree with Richard Dawkins when he says that there is no such thing as a Christian baby or a Muslim baby - rather there are babies born to Christian parents and babies born to Muslim parents.

I also agree with Dawkins here. Interestingly, Muslims believe that we are all born Muslim, as Islam is the "natural religion" of humankind - but then our parents start to lead us astray.

Returning to the culture issue, as you noted in an earlier post, one of the central roles of Paul in the development of the early church was opening up the teachings of Jesus to gentiles. Because he came from Tarsus, in Cilicia, he was Greek-speaking. He was also a Roman citizen and had trained as a rabbi. So he represented a range of different cultures. It is quite likely that Paul knew the basic message of Jesus given his presence in Jerusalem around the time of the martydom of Stephen (see Acts 7:58, 8:1), and I think that part of his conversion experience on the road to Damascus and subsequently in the house of Ananias (see Acts ch. 9) was a mental reordering of his initially confused grasp of what Jesus had been teaching. So the "scales fell from his eyes" (Acts 9:18) not just literally but figuratively as well. Hence Paul was able immediately 'to proclaim Jesus in the synagogue' (Acts 9: 20) because he was now both emotionally and intellectually convinced of Jesus's teachings. Paul met the apostles soon after in Jerusalem, and there is no reason to believe that his contacts with the apostles were limited to those specifically reported in the New Testament.

According to Acts (11:26), it was in Syrian Antioch "that the disciples were first called 'Christians'." This would have been quite early in Paul's mission, because he is reported to have been brought by Barnabas to Antioch, where "for an entire year they associated with the church and taught a great many people".

PDN

barfizz wrote: »

OK! if Paul did not create the christian religion, who did and where did it come from.

There had to be a point in time when someone said we are no longer going to adhear to the jewish faith we are going to gather together all these different sects and start a religion called christianity. with the following beliefs and here they are.

So who did it?

No, there didn't have to be such a point in time at all. History is much messier than that.

The first believers were probably simply known as 'followers of the way'. As hivizman has pointed out, the term 'Christian' (hence 'Christianity') was initially ascribed to believers by other people - possibly as a form of mickey taking or name calling (like calling someone in Northern Ireland a 'Paisleyite' or a 'Papist').

As growing numbers of people in different locations believed the message of Jesus so different churches started. These would obviously share in common the main teachings of Jesus. Letters from people like Paul, since one church found them to be helpful, would be copied and circulated to other churches.

Some of these churches would develop different characteristics due to their surrounding cultural environment. So a church in North Africa might observe baptism in a slightly different way from one in Gaul or Armenia.

There has never, as far as I can tell, ever been a period in history when all Christians have been encompassed in one earthly organisation. The Christian 'religion' instead described a lot of different groups which had a certain common set of core beliefs and values but also had significant variations.

Some of these groups banded together in certain times to form alliances, hierarchies and denominations. But no one group ever achieved total domination so that they, and they alone, constituted Christianity.

philologos

The divergence came as a distinction between the Gentile Church of Paul, and the Jewish Church of James in Jerusalem. Unfortunately the Jewish Church died out in subsequent centuries. There is a movement happening in Israel and the United States to emphasise the Jewishness of Christianity, the Messianic Jewish movement which emerged in the 1960's. It's gaining a lot of popularity amongst Jewish converts to Christianity.

Fanny Cradock

You are probably talking about organisations such as Jews for Jesus, Jackass.

Some very interesting posts, guys. Well done.

barfizz

Thanks for your replies, its always good to hear what people think.