Sunday, August 05, 2007

THE REAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY




I can’t believe that the Pope’s statement saying that only Catholics can be saved because they are the “true” Christians set me off on this religious blog thread but I must see it to the end because things need to be said so people will know how full of crappola the Pope really is.

I left off with the discovery that Christianity did not start and develop homogeneously to this day; it evolved from hundreds of differing belief systems, scriptures, etc…

There were actually two people that caught on way before everybody else. They were both Germans and both had similar names but lived at different periods.

Note: You don’t have to go to a library to check up on my stuff; just Google whatever you want to confirm.

The first one was F.C. Baur (Ferdinand Christian Baur) (1792-1860). This dude was one bright boy, a theologian by training, he could see things or maybe was brave enough to see things that others did not; he paid a price for his bravery.

He argued that early Christianity represented a synthesis of two opposing theses: Jewish Christianity and Pauline Christianity (Peter versus Paul).

He saw that the Paul of the Acts of the Apostles and the Paul of the Epistles are two different Pauls. He saw the conflict between the two Christianities in the New Testament and how the authors tried to mediate between the two trying to make Peter and Paul appear as compatriots and not as the opponents they really were.

He was also to first to question some of the Epistles of Paul as not being written by him. This was a daring idea for that time in history since most people believed the Bible was the word of God and how could forgeries make it into the Word of God - Bible (New Testament).

The other German was Walter Bauer (1877-1960). He published a book in German in 1934 but because of the Nazis and WWII, it was not translated into English till 1971: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.

This is the man who concluded from his studies that there were many, many Christianities at the beginning but that Roman Christianity became the dominant Christianity because of various factors that we have mentioned before.

The kicker was, he said, that the practitioners of the now orthodox Roman Christianity then rewrote the history of the conflicting Christianities making it appear that the Roman Christianity was always the dominant one or the “right one”. This view has stuck through the ages because they (Roman Catholic Church) destroyed all writings in support of the other Christianities – until we found them again thanks to people that just couldn’t bring themselves to destroying “their” sacred books.

This knowledge did not officially come into the public realm until 1971 and the poor guy died in 1960. I bet you even now, many Christians don’t know about this or for that matter, give a crap about it because they don’t see how this changes anything.

Well pardon me, but for one, this makes the statement by the Pope total BULL!

It also puts a damper on Protestantism’s cry of “Scripture alone” and explains why the Romans Catholic Church insisted it is not 'scripture alone' but also “Tradition”. They knew that the New Testament was created by the Roman Christianity for the express purpose of substantiating their claim as the one, true religion.

How can you trust a New Testament that excluded hundreds of gospels, epistles and the like and only picked the ones that supported their theology? The New Testament is not the word of God; it is the word of the Roman Catholic Christianity that won the battle of the Christianities in the three centuries after the death of Jesus.

Let all that sink in for awhile and then we will talk again.




No comments:

Post a Comment

CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS: Stay or Go...

Another subject that I feel needs some clarification because it is so divisive among us is the issue of Confederate Monuments, why they ...