Christianity: What Went Wrong?

The beginning was clear and simple.  Jesus taught his followers to love God, love others, and love themselves.  Today, we have conflicting doctrines and dogma clung to by arcane institutions. How did we get it so very wrong? 

The following is a text version of this posting.

The beginning was very different.  It’s safe to say that people from the beginning wouldn’t recognize how things are today.  A case can be made that it all went wrong.  That possibility makes people very uncomfortable.  But the first few centuries of what we now call Christianity were very different from what we know of Christian practice today.

For about two centuries, the followers of Jesus didn’t call themselves “Christians.”  Over time, that’s what others called them – particularly the Roman officials.  No, the followers of Jesus saw themselves as part of the people of Israel.  After all, Jesus was Jewish.  He never stopped being Jewish.  For a few hundred years, his followers saw themselves as following his teaching in the context of being part of the people of Israel.

It’s difficult for us to imagine what life was like for them.  The Roman Empire was a superpower.  Rome maintained control of territory by instilling fear among conquered people and then providing services.  When Rome conquered a territory, a large number of people were publicly executed by crucifixion. Rome preferred this method of execution because it was public, humiliating, drawn out, and torturous.  In addition, Rome would deport residents of newly conquered areas to other parts of the empire where they were used as forced laborers.  In doing this, Rome broke up families and social systems.  These slaves built civic centers, aqueducts for water, and public baths to improve the quality of life.  The assured peace in the empire was built on the fear of violence, deportation, and public execution. 

It’s in this context that the early followers of Jesus organized themselves.  They established small groups to meet in homes.  These groups could have been 2 or 3 people gathered together or larger groups of 14 or 15 people.  They shared meals together.  Using what resources they had, they’d plan meals and socialize with each other.  They told stories of the teacher.  The only Bible was the Hebrew scriptures.  Some people started writing down stories and sharing them from group to group.  There were far more stories than we have today in the New Testament.  Other than sharing meals and stories, these various groups didn’t do the same things.  They weren’t all alike.  Some were led by women, like Chloe’s group, Salome’s group, and Thecla’s group.  Others were led by men.  (Pay attention to Paul’s letters as he greets both women and men as leaders.)  More than anything else, they were counter-cultural.

In the Roman Empire, there was one person who was chosen and anointed as the leader.  That was the emperor, Caesar.  Caesar ruled and provided stability for the empire.  But the followers of Jesus had a very different idea.  They called Jesus “the anointed.”  Today was say, “Jesus Christ.”  Christ is a title.  It means, “the anointed one.”  That’s also what the word “messiah” means.  The followers of Jesus were followers of the anointed one, but their anointed one was not Caesar.  Jesus, the anointed one, provided peace – a kind of peace that was far different from Roman peace.  He established a realm of equality where people shared, demonstrated in the meals they gathered for.  In these gatherings, as Paul wrote, social divisions were set aside:  no male and female, slave or free, but all gathered as one.  They were the living body of the anointed one. 

Who were the people in these groups?  Many were slaves.  Others were people who had been deported from their homes to another part of the empire and came to these groups seeking community and safety.  Most of them were people victimized by Rome’s oppression.  They weren’t the educated elite of their day.  But in these groups, they found a new family, a new relatedness, based on mutual respect and the teachings of Jesus.  Above all, these groups were not all the same.

Followers of Jesus continued having small groups with shared meals until the year 313 CE when the Edict of Milan established Christianity and was decreed to be legal in the Roman Empire.  That’s when things began to change.  People with political power and philosophers began to organize what we know today as the church.  They formed organizations, developed creeds and dogma, and invented liturgies based on the rituals of the Roman Empire.  The books that would comprise the New Testament were selected based on this newly organized religion.  Yet, heated disputes broke out.  Many people simply left the empire and moved to the desert and other remote places to try to continue to be followers of Jesus without the trappings of the new institution.  They preferred simply being followers of the anointed Jesus without the institutional church.

There are a lot of people who are like me.  We grew up in Christian churches and took the teachings of Jesus very seriously.  But at some point, we realized that organized religion had significantly compromised the teachings of Jesus and, in some cases, perverted what was meant to be something of value.  In that context, it helps me a great deal to realize that for a few hundred years, people valued the teachings of Jesus. It was the power brokers of society who created what we know today as the Christian Church.

In my next posting, I’ll address some things we can learn for our lives today as followers of Jesus based on the experience of the early followers of the anointed one.  Perhaps grasping some of the early history of the followers of Jesus can enable us to recapture the vitality they experienced.