divided politics by darrell m. west

Author:darrell m. west [darrell m. west]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Secularization

As an adult, my religious views shifted more in a secular direction. When I moved to the East Coast to teach at Brown I was still engaged with religion, but not in a fundamentalist way. I read new discoveries about historic texts, and what I learned about early Christianity surprised me. In 1945 Egyptian peasants discovered a large cache of “forbidden” gospels, including the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, and Truth that were excised from Christian orthodoxy. Called the Nag Hammadi Library, this set of fifty texts shed new light on the origins of early Christianity and how Christ’s apostles disagreed on major points.⁷

In addition, between 1947 and 1956 more than 800 different Old Testament scrolls were found in eleven caves along the Dead Sea, thirteen miles east of Jerusalem. Known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, these manuscript discoveries date back to the period between 200 BC and AD 68, and reveal how religious beliefs unfolded during that crucial time period.⁸

Taken together, these manuscripts demonstrated the impossibility of taking the Bible as literal truth. As pointed out by biblical scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina, the newly discovered writings revealed how the early church was sharply divided about Jesus’s divinity. Some early Christian congregations felt Jesus was the son of God, while others promoted him as a wise prophet who provided new understanding to guide human beings. There were disagreements as to whether Christ represented a reform branch within Judaism or a whole new way of relating to God. Others were uncertain whether Christians should believe in a single deity or a spiritual trinity based on God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost.⁹

According to historical discoveries, Jesus was crucified around AD 33. In AD 70 the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem to put down a major rebellion. It was a time of great persecution in Israel. The suffering and despair led the followers of Christ to write down his sayings, as many were looking for spiritual guidance during this period of great strife. Over the period from 70 to 100, the gospels were transcribed and letters to churches in Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, and Thessalonica from the Apostle Paul were written down.

The new writings discovered in the twentieth century reveal an early church of competing factions, divided by ideology and plagued by bitter disputes between various groups of believers. There was no orthodoxy among early Christians, and the process by which church doctrines were decided unfolded generations after the death of Christ.

Two centuries after the death of Christ, church leaders agreed twenty-six books should form the New Testament. Other books that were widely read by Christians over the first two centuries were suppressed on grounds they did not fit into the mainstream view. Those rejects were burned, discarded, and forgotten until being found 2,000 years later.¹⁰

Bart Ehrman, who started life as a fundamentalist, explains that the current version of Christian doctrine won

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.