In my previous blogs I have shown how the Roman Catholic Church cannot link itself to Peter and therefore to Jesus of Nazareth because the Church backed Paul and not Peter and Paul had no connection to Jesus whatsoever. Paul did say that he had a vision in which Jesus spoke to him; I call that a delusion.
Before we get into how the Church has been able to keep this charade going, we must understand a few facts about history.
The winners write the history. Peter, James and the rest of the Jesus followers lost. They vanished or were assimilated into the surrounding populace. They were disowned by the Jews and called heretics by the Christians; they had no where to go.
With the Jerusalem group gone, Gentile Christianity prospered and spread.
Also, let’s have a few words about heresy, heretics and orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the belief that you call factual or the “right belief” and heresy is any belief that disagrees with your belief and is therefore the “wrong belief” – kapish?
This has nothing to do with what is ultimately “true” since nothing in religion can be proved or substantiated with “fact” so it’s all about one person’s ideas and beliefs against another’s’; the belief that wins gets to be called “orthodox” and the one that loses becomes a “heresy”.
You will find it very interesting that the discovery that the Roman Church has mislead people since earliest times is quite recent; in our own time (1970s) and that knowledge is not widely known today; maybe it has been suppressed?
Anyway, I find it fascinating so please hold on.
We now know that Christianity “evolved”. Before, most scholars believed that there was only one Christianity or Christian religion at the beginning and that this religion developed through the ages. A better way to say it is that Christians believed that their religion began from a single source (Jesus) with an intact belief system at its base and that Christians just continued to build onto that base throughout the centuries.
That scenario, we now know, was deliberately created by a number of early Church fathers but especially EUSEBIUS (275-339 C.E.). He manipulated history by manipulating history books or historical accounts that were in written form. He did a great job.
Modern archaeology has discovered a number of ancient texts from the early Christian period. One such discovery called the Nag Hammadi Library, consisted of a number of books (Gospels) previously unheard of.
What all these discoveries point to is a period after the death of Jesus that spawned hundreds of Christianities, hundreds of belief systems from one end of the religious spectrum to the other. There were hundreds of preachers traveling from country to country, area to area, all claiming to know what Jesus and his apostles taught and what they wanted the people to do.
Paul, in his letters (part of the New Testament [NT]) is forever bitching about all these “false” teachers (Judaizers) trying to challenge his (Paul’s) teachings.
Most of these “Christianities” had their own “sacred scriptures” which they followed. It must have been a real hodgepodge of Christianities.
What followed was a gradual “cleansing” if I may use that word or a consolidation of all these Christianities into one. The Emperor Constantine (280-337 C.E.) started the ball rolling in 313 C.E. by declaring Christianity the new national, Roman religion giving the city of Rome and the Christians in that city a lot more power and prestige than any other city in the realm.
This was not an easy task. People did not want to hear that they have been worshiping from heretical scriptures or that Jesus was not a god pretending to be a man but was both – huh? Or that Jesus had a father and a brother (Holy Ghost), all gods but really only one – double huh?
It became easier in 367 C.E, when a bishop in Alexandria, Egypt made up a list of books that would become the official New Testament Bible. All other books had to be destroyed. No wonder monks buried the banned books like at Nag Hammadi; they really believed them to be sacred and had a hard time burning them – good for us because we found them and good for us because we keep finding them.
So now 1600 years of Church history has to be re-written and re-examined. We now have a totally different picture of the early days of Christianity and what does that do for today’s Christianity.
I will examine just how and who led to this huge, in my opinion, discovery in the next blog; this one is getting too long.
Before we get into how the Church has been able to keep this charade going, we must understand a few facts about history.
The winners write the history. Peter, James and the rest of the Jesus followers lost. They vanished or were assimilated into the surrounding populace. They were disowned by the Jews and called heretics by the Christians; they had no where to go.
With the Jerusalem group gone, Gentile Christianity prospered and spread.
Also, let’s have a few words about heresy, heretics and orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the belief that you call factual or the “right belief” and heresy is any belief that disagrees with your belief and is therefore the “wrong belief” – kapish?
This has nothing to do with what is ultimately “true” since nothing in religion can be proved or substantiated with “fact” so it’s all about one person’s ideas and beliefs against another’s’; the belief that wins gets to be called “orthodox” and the one that loses becomes a “heresy”.
You will find it very interesting that the discovery that the Roman Church has mislead people since earliest times is quite recent; in our own time (1970s) and that knowledge is not widely known today; maybe it has been suppressed?
Anyway, I find it fascinating so please hold on.
We now know that Christianity “evolved”. Before, most scholars believed that there was only one Christianity or Christian religion at the beginning and that this religion developed through the ages. A better way to say it is that Christians believed that their religion began from a single source (Jesus) with an intact belief system at its base and that Christians just continued to build onto that base throughout the centuries.
That scenario, we now know, was deliberately created by a number of early Church fathers but especially EUSEBIUS (275-339 C.E.). He manipulated history by manipulating history books or historical accounts that were in written form. He did a great job.
Modern archaeology has discovered a number of ancient texts from the early Christian period. One such discovery called the Nag Hammadi Library, consisted of a number of books (Gospels) previously unheard of.
What all these discoveries point to is a period after the death of Jesus that spawned hundreds of Christianities, hundreds of belief systems from one end of the religious spectrum to the other. There were hundreds of preachers traveling from country to country, area to area, all claiming to know what Jesus and his apostles taught and what they wanted the people to do.
Paul, in his letters (part of the New Testament [NT]) is forever bitching about all these “false” teachers (Judaizers) trying to challenge his (Paul’s) teachings.
Most of these “Christianities” had their own “sacred scriptures” which they followed. It must have been a real hodgepodge of Christianities.
What followed was a gradual “cleansing” if I may use that word or a consolidation of all these Christianities into one. The Emperor Constantine (280-337 C.E.) started the ball rolling in 313 C.E. by declaring Christianity the new national, Roman religion giving the city of Rome and the Christians in that city a lot more power and prestige than any other city in the realm.
This was not an easy task. People did not want to hear that they have been worshiping from heretical scriptures or that Jesus was not a god pretending to be a man but was both – huh? Or that Jesus had a father and a brother (Holy Ghost), all gods but really only one – double huh?
It became easier in 367 C.E, when a bishop in Alexandria, Egypt made up a list of books that would become the official New Testament Bible. All other books had to be destroyed. No wonder monks buried the banned books like at Nag Hammadi; they really believed them to be sacred and had a hard time burning them – good for us because we found them and good for us because we keep finding them.
So now 1600 years of Church history has to be re-written and re-examined. We now have a totally different picture of the early days of Christianity and what does that do for today’s Christianity.
I will examine just how and who led to this huge, in my opinion, discovery in the next blog; this one is getting too long.
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