Scratch Christians

Ingredients without a recipe

When I have the rare opportunity to discuss two of my favorite topics, politics and religion, I avoid identifying with common labels. Claiming that you are a Democrat, conservative, Catholic, Adventist, and so on immediately prompts others to make assumptions about you. As an adult who is intrigued by the gray area, I believe controversial subjects should be approached with nuance.

As a young man, however, I saw politics and religion in black and white. My strict worldview was defined by my church, which vigorously defended its very specific denomination. In fact, we did not even identify as Christians, even though we believed in Jesus. We were convinced that 99% of so-called Christians were unsaved.

In the decades since I left that environment, I have learned that Christianity spans a broad diversity of beliefs, rituals, and traditions. I have visited many churches, and more significantly, read numerous books. One of my favorites is Frank Mead’s Handbook of Denominations in the United States, which outlines the roots of 200 modern sects. He references dozens more which once existed but are now lost to history.

As the label implies, Christians all have one characteristic in common, which is their belief in something about Jesus Christ. He is the central figure of the religion. To what degree he was human or divine, and what he really meant by his teachings, have been debated since he is believed to have walked on the earth.

With one exception, all Christians have also shared another trait, which is reliance on their textbook, the Holy Bible. As with denominations, Christianity has seen many different versions of this book. Disagreements within the realm of Christianity today typically arise from competing translations and interpretations of these scriptures.

However, the Bible — in any form — has not always been central to Christianity. The one exception is the very first Christians who initially appeared during the first century of the common era (CE). They did not have a Bible, or more precisely, a New Testament (NT). Even if they did, most of them couldn’t read.

Would they have been aware of any texts at all?

Key Ingredients

We all learned in history class that only nobility and priests were literate in the ancient world. Scholars estimate that just 3% of the population could read or write in the first century. Formal education was primarily accessible to the upper classes.

Books as we have them today did not exist. Scribes painstakingly wrote on media such as stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, and parchments of dried animal skin. Without modern storage technology, the method for preserving a crumbling text was to make another copy by hand. The great civilizations of the ancient world each had laws, religions, plays, and poetry; so any of these texts may have existed in the first century.

To the Jews of Palestine, who were the majority of the population, the most important text was their Bible, the Torah, which was completed by the 2nd century BCE. The millennium of oral history it chronicles describes a perpetual struggle for orthodoxy among the Israelites, who were often tempted by the cultures of their neighbors or conquerors. Many drifted toward foreign religious practices, while others preached repentance and a return to puritanism.

Palestine was part of the Roman Empire in the first century, governed either by Roman prefects, such as Pontius Pilate, or Roman-appointed upper-class Jews, such as the Herodians. Although the Roman Empire allowed some local autonomy, many Jews of Palestine were indignant toward the Romans and their representatives. Since their resistance was rooted in sectarianism, the literate leaders of the Jews would have been versed in the Torah as well as its various apocryphal texts of similar provenance.

Jesus arrived during the most turbulent time in Jewish history. His message, as described by the gospels, competed against native Jewish influencers. He was highly critical of Judaism and yet accommodating toward the Romans. When the zeitgeist of rebellion culminated in the Jewish wars with the Romans between 66-136 CE, those who followed Jesus rather than rallying around extremists could have survived Roman destruction, even if only to be scattered abroad in the end.

The Mixture

If we set aside the gospels, can we determine what Jesus may have taught and what his followers may have believed? Given that they were likely Jewish, and that some Jews had a tendency to explore beyond their heritage, which other ideologies may have contributed to the paradigm of the first Christians?

Appendix 3 in Mead’s Denominations provides a timeline of Christian belief systems beginning with the period of 30-100 CE, which included Ebionites and Gnosticism.

As already described, Judaizers were Jews who wanted to preserve their religion. This included Messianic Jews who expected a warrior king to lead a revolution and restore their national independence. The most radical Judaizers were principally responsible for the insurgency against the Romans.

Both Judaizers and Ebionites revered the Torah, but the Ebionites also attempted to incorporate the teachings of Jesus. Unlike other Christians, they did not believe Jesus was divine. This divergence is not surprising; what anyone knew about Jesus during or shortly after his lifetime was either from firsthand experience or secondhand recounts. The gospels, and all other texts of the NT, were written later, and even then were not canonized and widely accepted until the fourth century.

Gnosticism is an abstraction that is difficult to glean from scripts. Outside of Judaism, which was practiced by a fraction of the entire Roman Empire, most other religions in the Mediterranean did not have central sacred texts. Emperor worship may have been the state-sponsored religion, but the belief systems of indigenous people existed long before Rome, and they were oral traditions.

Volumes of books have been written about these old religions, and almost always, by authors who derided their beliefs. The Christians of the fourth century, now supported by imperial decree, mocked these customs as pagan, a Latin word meaning “rural.” As the lines separating the Empire from the Church blurred, holy armies violently erased longstanding traditions and the people who practiced them. Hence, Christian orthodoxy crystalized on the grave of paganism.

Perhaps in an attempt to win converts, the Roman Catholic Church borrowed many artifacts from the old religions. Babylon Mystery Religion by Ralph Woodrow is one of many books which elaborate on this overlap. A simple example is that most Christian holidays were appropriated from ancient pagan festivals. The word Easter, specifically, is a derivation of Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of fertility.

The outer trappings of paganism, such as their gods, festivals and symbols, were in fact metaphors for hidden (or mystery) teachings preserved by sophisticated initiates. Authors Freke and Gandy explain how many pagans remained elementary, never graduating beyond the profanity of materialism — a fault which probably earned the ire of their critics. For example, public orgies of sexuality celebrated baser instincts while disrespecting the deeper meaning of the marriage of soul and spirit.

Gnosticism, which promoted gnosis or personal experience of God, refers to the metaphysical teachings that underpinned paganism in all of its ethnic manifestations. Mithras of Persia, Osiris of Egypt, Dionysus of Greece and Bacchus of Rome were all demigods of similar legend — mythical characters of folklore intended to transmit sacred teachings about the relationship between humanity and divinity. In contrast to Christianity, none of these cultures claimed their heroes were historical figures.

The Missing Ingredient: The New Testament

Jesus appeared in Palestine amidst this religious and political mixture. Whether as a historical figure or as an idea, Jesus meant different things to different people. The parallels between Jesus and the demigods of old were uncanny and disturbing to early Church fathers like Justin Martyr and Tertullian. The creation of the NT itself was unable to stem disagreements about the Jewish god-man until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE imposed censorship at the tip of the sword.

When, exactly, were the NT books written? This question remains up for debate, because as historian Marko Marina aptly explains, researchers will draw different conclusions depending on their motives. The order of the NT books portrays a fairly cohesive narrative told by a succession of Jesus’ disciples. However, academic scholars generally agree the books were written in a different sequence and by other authors.

The earliest contributions to the NT were letters written by Paul. Modern scholarship attributes only seven to his hand between 48-62 CE: Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians and Philemon. We do not know how many people read — or more likely, heard — Paul’s letters in the first century. Marina explains, “Producing a letter involved a lengthy process, and getting it to its intended recipient required navigating a complex and unreliable system of couriers.”

By his own account, Paul was not an eyewitness to Jesus, and his letters make no references to even the most famous gospel stories (which were written after his death). Because of his personal revelation of Jesus, his figurative interpretation of salvation by faith, and even his knowledge of pagan philosophers such as Aratus, Menander and Epimenides, many people today still debate whether Paul was, in fact, a gnostic.

The canonical gospels were written between 70-100 CE. If Jesus died in the early 30’s CE, and his disciples were near his age, the gospels could not have been written by them. Life expectancy in the first century was 35-40 years. For this reason, most scholars believe the four gospels that made it into the NT (out of many gospels that were written) were authored anonymously. Incidentally, the Gospel of John is often considered to have been composed by a gnostic because its content and style vary dramatically from the three synoptic gospels, which are grouped together because they appear to have been written from the same source material.

With the exception of Jude, which could have been written as early as 50-90 CE, the remaining general epistles of the NT appeared between 70-130 CE. Again, most scholars agree none of them were written by anyone contemporary with Jesus. The book of Revelation has the most agreed-upon date of origin, 94-96 CE — near the end of the reign of Domitian, the last of the three Flavian emperors. As the most mysterious book of the NT, Revelation deserves an essay of its own; but here it is sufficient to say that the original Christians probably knew nothing of it.

No Recipe

Without the NT, the religion established upon Jesus Christ must have been initially chaotic. It was born in the first-century crucible of a Jewish identity crisis amidst fierce Roman imposition. The masses learned about this new god-man by word of mouth, debating how his life and teachings were both similar and different from the Judaism and paganism of their time. As a new spiritual path, Christianity offered potential answers without a clear roadmap. Devout converts must have relied on the nudges of their inner compass until a new priesthood and their holy writ materialized.

Any conversation about the original Christians must begin within this context.

Commonly viewed today as the history of the first Christians, the book of Acts may have been written as late as three generations after Jesus’ ministry. To depend on it as an accurate account of the first Christians is, at best, an act of faith. Even so, none of the Christians portrayed in that story had a NT!

A record of Christianity after the first century is available, written and preserved by the victors of doctrinal conflict. In the Western hemisphere especially, Christianity was shaped by the political dynasties which derived power from the religion. The Roman Empire of the first century morphed into a Holy Roman merger of state and church. Eventually, the Roman Catholic Church became a state of its own, purporting to be God’s government on earth.

The Protestant Reformation initiated the first of many schisms from Catholicism, which led to hundreds of denominations. Similarly, the history of the NT we have today began with two centuries of debate, settled by imperial councils in the fourth century, only to be contested again during and after the Reformation. The world now contains thousands of versions of the Bible.

Today, those who have found solace in their understanding of Christianity may rightfully have no interest in considering the competing ideologies of the first century. Anyone else who loves Jesus, but struggles to find their peace within modern churches, might just rediscover something lost to time that was, in fact, a secret ingredient to the original Christians.