additional lecure material

DEFINING AND REDEFINING CHRISTIANITY

For those who might have called themselves Christians in the first three centuries following the death of Jesus, there was not yet an official group of writings that could be seen as authoritative.  Depending on where an individual lived, the stories of who Jesus was might be was found not in the four Gospels we have today but in a completely different document known as the Gospel of Peter, and this was just one of a great number of writings attributed to those who supposedly had known him in person (including the Thomas thought to be his twin brother, Mary Magdalene, and even Judas Iscariot).  Almost all of these are today regarded as forgeries of one sort or another, most often presented to advance a particular interpretation of who Jesus really was (for instance, a man who had been briefly possessed by God but had died and not been resurrected) or a particular understanding of what was a correct spiritual path (especially a total renunciation of sexuality).  Increasingly characteristic was a hostility toward the surviving Jewish communities that was to feed a Christian anti-Semitism from that time on.

With the transition from a persecuted cult to a state religion in the Roman Empire, what Christians were supposed to believe and how they were expected to live could be more universally defined and enforced.  Groups that dissented were crushed and the books they had used as their own scriptures were condemned with the result that it has only been with a great deal of luck that, as in the case of the Nag Hammadi scrolls, some would have survived to allow us any understanding at all of the diversity present within early Christianity.  Authors such as Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels have been especially prominent in the contemporary effort to explore these alternate interpretations of the Christian message.

There would be relatively minor differences among Christian communities from about the fourth century to the sixteenth.  Roman Catholic and the various Eastern Orthodox churches  that did not accept the authority of the bishop of Rome would all claim to represent the teachings of the Apostles, and they essentially agreed on the idea that Jesus was both divine and human, the Second Person of the Trinity, and that in the liturgy reenacting the Last Supper (the Mass) bread and wine somehow were transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus (the doctrine of transubstantiation).  Monastic life, considerably tamer than the asceticsm of the Egyptian hermits who had "died to the world" to be more like those martyred by the Romans, was given a special status.   With the breakdown of Roman institutions following different waves of invasion (Visigoths and Vandals in the west and Arabs in the east), monasteries also provided the educational opportunities that came to replace the remarkable system of public education once offered by Roman law.

In the west in the Middle Ages there would be attempts to reintroduce some of the teachings thought suppressed, as in the movement of the Cathars in Southern France, but the conjunction of political and religious power assured their destruction.  But then in the sixteenth century a rising sense of nationalism allowed a powerful new movement to succeed.  This was the so-called "Reformation" triggered by Martin Luther. 

We need to understand just what now was happening.  For over a thousand years there had been a general understanding of what it meant to be Christian.  Above all this centered on the group of documents that had come to be called the New Testament--four accepted Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), a group of letters by the earliest teachers (Paul above all), a supposed record of the early activities of the apostles following the death of Jesus (the Acts of the Apostles), and a dramatic envisioning of the end of the world (the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse).  Unlike the "heretics" of early centuries, Reformers such as Luther and Calvin would not claim that there were different scriptures but they definitely offered different interpretations of the New Testamenrt itself.  In addition, like the Theravadin Buddhists in their rejection of the Mahayana sutras, they would not allow that there had been an oral tradition (what Catholics termed "the deposit of faith") to supplement the earliest accepted writings.  Almost paradoxically, this exclusive focus on the New Testament now permitted such a wide variation in beliefs and practices that just what it did mean to be Christian was as varied as it had been in the first few centuries following the death of Jesus.  If poiltical power had once brought about a relative uniformity of belief and practice, political power now allowed a tremendous diversity. 

What began with the Reformation was to continue to the present.  The Reformation emphasis on a private interpretation of Scripture, which did not so much allow individual individuals to find their own meaning as it did to clear the way for especially charismatic figures to impose ideas that varied from the once official dogmas of Roman Catholicism, meant that there would be a wide range of movements, initially supported by local goverments.  Then, as we see with the the religious history of the United States with its Puritans and Quakers as well as its Baptists and Amish and it home-grown movements such as the Mormons and Christian Science, the decision to maintain a poltical neutrality with respect to religion meant that Christianity could never again be seen as some monolithic tradition.  Like Buddhism, it would come to take many forms.
Above I've talked about a parallel between the Protestant Reformation and the Theravadin movement in Buddhism in the rejection of any teachings not expressed in the earliest documents of each tradition (the Dhammapada and the sermons of Gautama for Buddhists and the New Testament for Christians).  Still other parallels can be noted.  One is the manner in which Mahayana Buddhism like the Catholic Church presented the idea that its founder had, as it were, surplus "grace" or merit that could serve as a supernatural treasury of sorts.  The Buddha had than earned more than his own nirvana through his actions, and so the Buddhist who appealed to the Buddha in any of his manifestations was able to get a supernatural bail-out from this divine treasury (the path of tariki we've discussed earlier).  Christ had more than paid back or atoned for the original sin of Adam and Eve and similarly devotion to Christ could be used to pay off the personal supernatural debts that would delay entrance into heaven.  Institutionalized, this led to the practice of granting indulgences (spiritual "get out of jail" tickets) for service to the Church--originally going off to war during the Crusades but later just making a monetary donation (the one practice that above all had led to Martin Luther's denouncing the Roman church).  A Protestant reaction was to emphasize the role of faith and not "good works" as the basis for personal salvation, and with John Calvin, caught up in the logic of seeing God as absolutely free and so not at all nfluenced by  human actions, neither would matter in that all of us are predestined to heaven or hell regardless of what we do.

Traditional Christian doctrines of the Trinity (one God but three divine persons) and the Incarnation (Jesus as a single person who had both an eternal dviine nature and a human nature that begins with his miraculous conception) had been hammered out in the early Church councils when Roman power had allowed for the suppression of alternate teachings.  Challenges to these core doctrines came more slowly than did other Protestant revisions, such as the rejection of the idea of transubstantiation or repudiating Catholic emphasis on the mother of Jesus as having a preeminent place as a mediator for her devotees in the heavenly court.  With the Latter-day Saints, who allowed the Book of Mormon to be a new revelation added to what was present in the New Testament, the notion of the Trinity itself was redefined with God the Father and God the Son both having physical bodies and only the Holy Spirit not having a physical form.  Jehovah's Witnesses, like the Mormons an American tradition that spread worldwide through its missionaries, went even further by saying that Jesus was the archangel Michael in human form. 

Christian diversity can also be seen in more recent movements begun in Africa or Asia.  Most prominent would be the teachings of the Korean Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, whose followers (styled "Moonies") vied with the Hare Krishnas for young converts on American streetcorners during the heyday of the counterculture a few decades back.  Among the most striking practices are the mass marriages arranged by the church on the concept that through the blessing a new lineage would begin that would replace "the false lineage created by Adam and Eve."

Most traditions are better known to Americans in terms of  the daily practices that set members in good standing apart (such as Mormons not drinking coffee or caffeinated beverages and Jehovah's Witnesses by not acknowledging birthdays) than they are through their teachings.  Researchng any of them to get beyond these surface elements can be a somewhat treacherous proposition since as often as not the descriptions first found through an Internet search engine such as Google will be provided by groups that are hostile to them.  In any exercises for this class, make sure that your references are first off to authoritative sources and then to those academic sites, such as the Virtual Religions Index, that attempt unbiased presentations.