The Development of the Christian Creed

This is a continuation of the previous blog dated 19 May. That blog was concerned with how the Christian religion and scripture originated, which you can read here: The Origins

This blog is concerned with the conflicting beliefs espoused by people who eventually emerged victorious over fellow Christians holding different views from their own. What Jesus actually said or preached is now lost in mists of antiquity, the NT having become a repository of the victors' inconsistent views.

The Messiah or a Reforming Prophet?

Paul’s writings pre-date the four Gospels. Paul wrote some 40-50 yeas after Jesus’ death while the four Gospels appeared during the succeeding 50 years, written by scribes who relied on oral traditions. Paul’s views are at odds with the accounts in the Gospels as well as in the book of Acts, written by the author of the Gospel of Luke. Paul introduced the splendid idea of Jesus being offered up by God as a sacrifice for the sins committed by others! Apparently, people never questioned the injustice and gullibility inherent in this claim of vicarious sacrifice. People were mesmerised by the idea that a mere belief in Jesus, the crucified Messiah, was enough to "save" them and it also freed them of the need to follow Jewish Law. At a stroke, the Jewish Law became irrelevant: the only way to wash away your sins was through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus!

The scribe who wrote the Gospel of Matthew some 25-30 years after Paul, flatly contradicted him by asserting that the followers of Jesus needed to keep the Jewish Law!

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfil. ……….Therefore whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments ………. Will be called least in the kingdom of heaven …….. For I tell you , unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:17-20).

Paul, however, was quite clear that whoever followed this alleged exhortation of Jesus was in danger of losing his/her "salvation". What one book of the NT lays down in strong terms is contradicted equally strongly in another book! The fact that both views exist in the same scripture makes a mockery of the NT: if one part of the scripture is correct then another part cannot be. If there is a devout Christian who believes in both Paul and Matthew simultaneously then he/she needs to have his/her sanity tested. 

To the early Christians known as the Ebionites, Paul was the arch-enemy with his convoluted ideas of Jesus’ death and resurrection: "salvation" came only from Jesus’s death. Put simply, Paul transformed the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus. The Pauline dogma was also opposed by Jesus' brother James, leader of the Church in Jerusalem, who accepted Jesus as a reforming Prophet sent to regenerate the moribund Jewish religion. Within a century, however, the followers of Jesus had turned Christianity into a distinct anti-Jewish religion.Paul’s anti-Jewish stance was mild compared to the views expressed in various Gospels which did not make it into the canon authorised by Emperor Constantine. Even the canonical Gospel of John has Jesus declare the Jews to be the “children of the Devil” (John 8:42-44). 

The conflicting Gospels

It is thought that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Both Matthew and Luke, writing 15-20 years later, used Mark as one of their sources, hence these three are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels. This is the reason why almost all of Mark’s parables and stories can be found in Matthew or Luke, though some of them were changed to emphasise certain points that Matthew or Luke thought important. For example, Jesus’ death is described differently in Mark and Luke. In Mark he is a terrified man led to his death (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”) but in Luke he is a fearless, benevolent and sagacious man unconcerned about his own impending death (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”).

If Mark is to be believed, Jesus had already announced the end of evil times and the onset of Kingdom of God: “The time has been fulfilled; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). Two thousand years later we still await the establishment of that kingdom of truth, peace and justice by the “Son of Man” even though, according to Mark, Jesus blurted out: “Truly I tell you, some of those standing here will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God having come in power” (Mark 9:1). [Apparently, “Son of Man” is a reference to the second appearance of Jesus on earth after he has died and is resurrected and becomes, in some sense, “Son of God” as well!]

John’s Gospel, written much later than the other three, is quite different from the Synoptic Gospels. There is no mention of the virgin birth or any details of Jesus’s early life. This Gospel wrestles with the theological issues which sharply divided the Christian communities a hundred years after Jesus’s death. It talks about the mystical Word of God, that existed in the very beginning, was itself God and through it God created the universe, and eventually became a human being, namely, Jesus [“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” (1:14)]. The miracles Jesus performs in John are referred to as “Signs” of one come down from heaven to give eternal life to those who believe in him. This is reinforced with many “I am” sayings attributed to Jesus: “I am the bread of life”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the resurrection and the life”, etc. Unlike the parables in Mark, we are assailed with long speeches by Jesus!

The idea of a Kingdom of God on earth is an alien concept in John! To John “Kingdom of God” exists in “heaven”, not on earth, and believers in Jesus will reside there with God for ever; others will be condemned. No mention here of the “Son of Man” to establish God’s Kingdom on earth! John’s Gospel was written towards the end of the first century CE, by which time the entire generation addressed by Jesus had died without witnessing Jesus’ prophecy of Kingdom of God come true! So, what does the anonymous scribe of the Gospel of John does? Easy. He creates a Kingdom of God in heaven, not on earth! Is it possible to retain one’s sanity and still be able to make sense of John’s convoluted theology?

The early Christians, who had access only to Mark’s Gospel, would have known nothing about the unusual birth of Jesus, being born of a virgin, or that he existed before his appearance on earth. With the appearance of Matthew’s Gospel many years later, the Christian dogma expanded to include the idea of Jesus’ mother being a virgin. Then, with Luke, Jesus also acquired the status of “Son of God”, who is vaguely of divine origin, his mother having been impregnated with The Holy Spirit. (Luke 1:35) explains what Mary learnt from the angel Gabriel: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God”. At this stage in the development of Christian dogma, Jesus was created when he was born. The idea of him having existed before his earthly life came later with John.

The Divinity of Jesus and the dogma of Trinity

While the Old Testament is all about the Jewish Prophets, the New Testament revolves around a single controversial personality. Until you get to the Gospel of John, Jesus is referred to as a “son” in much the same way that the Old Testament prophets are, that is, as someone close to God. I have lost count of the number of “sons”, “begotten sons” and “firstborns” mentioned in the OT.

One of the earliest Christian sects, the Ebionites, were quite clear on the matter of divinity: since there can be only One God, Christ is not God. For Christ to be God, there had to be two gods: Jesus was a human Messiah, adopted by God to be his “son”, but he was a man from first to last, not a divine being.

Then there was another early sect, followers of Marcion, who believed in two Gods, the wrathful God of the OT and the God of Jesus, the God of love and mercy. Still others believed in multiple divine beings and they had no difficulty in accepting Jesus as divine.

Over the succeeding 300 years, Chiristianity evolved, rejecting much of the early dogma as heretical. The essential dilemma was: can Christianity remain a monotheistic religion while accepting Jesus as a deity? Eventually, the dogma of Trinity was invented and all opposing views were declared heretical. Tertullian, a noted heresy hunter, declared some 200 years after Jesus’s death:

“The Father is one, and the Son is one, and the Spirit is one …. they are distinct from one another …. The Father is not the same as the Son, since they differ one from the other in the mode of their being.” Having established that the three are distinct, Tertullian then declares: “they are not different in substance though they are different personalities”. That, in a nutshell, is the dogma of the Unity of the Trinity: All three are God manifested in three different personalities!

Tertullian’s convoluted arguments were debated and refined over the following hundred years as people wrestled with the nature of the relationship between Father and Son. In the fourth century the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and set about unifying the religion, which could then be used to unify his fractured empire. In 325 CE the famous Council of Nicaea was held, attended by the most important bishops and priests in the empire, where the final form of the Christian religion in the Roman empire was at last established, with its central dogma of Trinity:

All three persons in the Godhead are eternal beings and they had always existed. They are three but they are One because they are of the same substance!

All those mind-bending arguments are now forgotten, pious Christians quietly accept the dogma of Trinity spun by the theologians, some 200-300 years after the death of Jesus.

Does the New Testament support the dogma of Trinity?

There does not seem to be an explicit statement of Trinity in the NT, not even in the Gospel of John where Jesus is clearly referred to as being divine. The later Christians found such exclusion from their scriptures unnerving. Ehrman says that a specific reference to the Trinity was accordingly inserted ( John 5:7-8):

"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these are one.
And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."

Make of it what you will!

 Ehrman has written a separate book about changes made to the Bible in the first 300 years after Jesus: “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why”.

Conclusion

Ehrman: “Jesus’s divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’s own teaching".

Although the Christians of Rome won in the end, insisting their beliefs to be ‘orthodox’, it was not the original form of religion conveyed by Jesus and his apostles. The 4^th century Nicene Creed claimed Jesus to be “fully God and fully man”, and also that he was “begotten not made, of one substance with the Father”. Neither claim was made by the disciples or apostles of Jesus! Such obtuse theology made its appearance a hundred years or more after the death of Jesus.

There have been numerous archaeological discoveries, comprising ancient scrolls dating back to the first 200 years CE. None of these support the view considered “orthodox” by the established church and accepted without question by a majority of Christians. Those discoveries are simply “heretical” compared to the “orthodox” dogma. Texts in favour of “orthodox” dogma have never been found!

Jesus is supposed to have died, or crucified according to orthodox belief, around 30 CE.

The Origins of the Christian Religion and Scripture

In July 2015 I wrote a blog about the Old Testament of the Bible (OT), which you can read here: The Horrors of the Old Testament

This blog is about the development of the Christian religion and the emergence of the second holy book of Christianity, the New Testament (NT). Both the religion and the scriptures took shape after the death of Jesus, who was born into a Jewish family. As a Jew he is said to have accepted the Jewish scriptures, believed in the Jewish Prophets of the OT and followed the Jewish religious law. At the time of Jesus’ death Christianity was little more than a sect within Judaism. Within a hundred years, however, Christianity had transformed itself into an anti-Jewish religion of gentiles.

The NT came into being decades after Jesus’ death. If a Muslim, with a good understanding of the Qur’an, is introduced to the NT he/she will be struck by its many contradictions and inconsistencies, and by the preponderance of statements which are insulting to human intelligence. This is quite bewildering for one who has been instructed in the Qur’an to use one’s powers of thought when reading the Qur’an and to think deeply when the same subject is illuminated from different angles in different parts of the Quran. Those who do not, are likened to cattle or to one who is simultaneously deaf, blind and mute. Needless to say, for a Muslim the NT is not an easy book to read, especially as wisdom and guidance are scattered through its pages, side by side with the convoluted theology and the confused thinking.

What is one to make of this amazing mix? I needed to understand the origins of Christianity, which I eventually did, thanks to this excellent book : “Jesus, Interrupted” by Bart D. Ehrman. The author started out as a staunch Christian who considered the Bible to be the immutable Word of God. His years of studying the Bible, and the origins of Christian religion, eventually led him to become an agnostic.

I learnt from Ehrman that there are numerous books which were, at one time or another, considered canonical but were later excluded from the Scripture. These books were not written by the followers of Jesus, who were all lower-class Aramaic speakers from Galilee. They would have been unfamiliar with the refined Greek in which the books were actually written. Most of these books were written by anonymous writers decades after Jesus’ death, who relied on oral traditions as their sources. To validate the anonymously written books, and to give them authority, it was decided to link them to established names. Hence the attributions such as “the Gospel according to Matthew”, etc. This explains why the books of the NT are so different from one another, full of contradictions, inconsistencies and discrepancies: the anonymous accounts were written by men who did not know each other and probably lived in different countries in the Roman empire, and they modified the stories in accordance with their own cultural traditions. None of the original copies of those books have survived. What we do have are copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered as the Christian religion took shape after the death of Jesus.

In summary, the NT consists of 27 books, which were written by 16 or 17 authors over a period of some 70 years (compare this with the OT, consisting of 39 books, written by dozens of authors over a period exceeding 600 years). Four of these books are Gospels (Jesus’ sayings, plus a description of events in his life) while the remaining books consist of writings by, or attributed to, Jesus’ disciples or apostles, or their companions. The 4 Gospels are those linked to the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Of the remaining books, one is a book of Acts, which describes what happened after Jesus’ death (his “ascension to heaven”). A large part of Acts is concerned with an early convert, Saul of Tarsus, who came to be known as apostle Paul, and who established much of the Christian dogma which later came to be accepted as official canon.  No less than 13 books simply comprise Paul’s letters to the churches he founded. These letters, which establish Christian religion in Paul’s image, are somehow considered as ”inspired”. Biblical scholars think that Paul wrote, perhaps, six of these letters, the remaining letters were written by others but attributed to Paul.

The first certain reference to the four Gospels included in the authorised NT occurred around 180 CE by a church father called Irenaeus. At that time lots of other Gospels were floating around, some claimed to have been written by Jesus’ disciples Peter, Thomas and Philip. These contained too many "heresies" unacceptable to church fathers in the Roman empire, and were excluded from Scripture.

John and Matthew were two of the 12 disciples of Jesus while Mark was said to be a companion of disciple Peter and Luke was a companion of Paul. In fact, the Gospels attributed to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were not written to be part of the Scripture. These Gospels were written anonymously from oral traditions: none of the writers claimed to be an eyewitness. They simply state what they think Mark, Matthew, Luke and John might have related after the death of Jesus. Hence the attribution: “The Gospel according to ….”. With the passage of time their accounts acquired a mystique and an aura of holiness, eventually becoming a part of the Scripture.

Here is a quotation taken from pages 267,268 and 279 of Ehrman’s book:

“Christianity, as has long been recognised by critical historians, is the religion about Jesus, not the religion of Jesus. The beliefs and perspectives that emerged among Jesus’ later followers were different from the religion of Jesus himself.

There were numerous Christians involved in these transformations, who reinterpreted the traditions of Jesus for their own time. Christianity emerged over a long period of time, through a period of struggles, debates, and conflicts over competing views, doctrines, perspectives, canons, and rules. The ultimate emergence of the Christian religion represents a human invention, arguably the greatest invention in the history of western civilisation.

It would be impossible to argue that the Bible is a unified whole, inspired by God in every way. The Bible is not a unity, it is a massive plurality. God did not write the Bible, people did. “

In the first century CE the Christian beliefs differed widely. These diverse Christian communities bickered among themselves concerning their rival theologies and they competed bitterly to win converts. They all claimed to be the true exponents of Jesus’ religion and they had books to back up their claims. The group that eventually won was the influential one based in Rome, the centre of the empire. It declared this Roman Christianity to be the catholic religion - universal religion – followed by the disciples and apostles of Jesus. Thus was born Roman Catholic Christianity, which re-wrote history to present itself as always having been the largest and truest Christian sect.

With the exception of Paul’s letters, the NT is essentially a collection of forged documents, written anonymously but attributed to Jesus’ disciples or apostles or their companions. Ehrman, again:

“A large number of books in the early church were written by authors who falsely claimed to be apostles in order to deceive their readers into accepting their books and the views they represented”.

This blog has dealt with the background to the established Christian religion and the authorised Scripture (NT). In the next blog I intend to comment on the contents of the NT and the fundamental Christian beliefs.