I hope you are a fan of archaeology like I am.  I am fascinated by how our ancestors lived and how our present world has been shaped by their efforts in the past.  I have been captivated most recently by church history, of all things!

Here’s what piqued my interest.  When I was a child, the ‘Church’ I received was a massive and monolithic structure.  All the important questions had been answered, and your job as a good Christian was to believe, Period!  Questions were allowed, but only if they were asked humbly and with great respect.

Since retiring a couple of years ago, I have been able to catch up on recent research exploring the very beginnings of the Christian faith.  As I have delved into these materials, I have found that the early church was anything but the monolithic structure I received as a child.  In fact, there were very different understandings about what Jesus taught, radically different understandings of who Jesus was, and wild differences in how people responded to all of this.

For example, Jesus is often referred to as ‘Rabbi,’ which means teacher.  That’s a pretty easy concept for all of us to grasp, since we have all had many different kinds of teachers.  We know from our own experience what teachers are like.  But in other places in the Bible, Jesus is the cosmic Logos – that great Being through whom “all things came to be,” as described in the gospel of John.  Here are two very different understandings of who Jesus was and what he was about.  One is simple and humble, the other is grand and cosmic.  Which one is accurate?

Another anomaly.  We have all heard of ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ but I have never heard the phrase, ‘Jesus of Bethlehem.’  Yet, it’s my understanding that during Biblical times, people were called by their birthplace – for example, Saul of Tarsus.  Is this an indication that Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem?  Does this mean the narratives surrounding his birth – such as the journey to Bethlehem, being born in a manger, the shepherds receiving word of his birth from the angels, the three wise men from the East, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt – are all made-up stories?

And speaking of his birth, why do only two of the four canonical Gospels record the birth narratives?  The stories in Matthew and Luke are cosmic in their significance.  If you are trying to ‘sell’ a new religion, you certainly would want to marshal these stories as evidence.  So why did Mark and John omit the birth narratives?  What’s going on here?  

As these questions arose, I began to wonder how the monolithic church that I received as a child came to be.  And what happened to the wide variety of understandings about the teaching and person of Jesus that existed in the first 200 years after his death?  In an attempt to answer these questions, I have decided to dig a little and explore what we know about the early church and its many different perspectives.

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Let’s start with the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s execution and the very natural reaction of his followers to run and hide.  Imagine what it was like for his disciples – they begin the week with the crowds in Jerusalem cheering them on, waving palm branches and welcoming Jesus into their city with “Hosannas” and shouts of joy.  The crowd probably had a mix of expectations.  Some of them expected Jesus to be the Messiah and to lead a rebellion to throw off their Roman overlords.  Others expected some kind of religious revival, where the religion of the Jews would be purified, and the Jewish people would regain their favored position in God’s eyes.

Seven days later, however, the expectations of the crowds and Jesus’s disciples are in ruins.  Jesus has been executed by the state as a criminal, and his disciples have fled or are in hiding in Jerusalem.  The Jesus movement is completely disorganized and trembling in fear.  Their revered leader is not there to guide them.  What should they do?

Despite following their Rabbi, their teacher, for three years or so, the disciples are running in fear for their lives.  The crowds, once so fervent in their adoration, have turned.  

You can imagine the crowd’s disappointment, too.  They had expected some massive triumph, but instead they got the worst possible outcome.  The catalyst for their supposed triumph was arrested, tortured, and publicly executed.  The crowds felt betrayed.  So their disappointment turns to rage, and they actively look for this ‘charlatan’s’ disciples so that they can vent their anger.

In this chaotic situation, something vitally important is missing!  It is so simple that we take it for granted, and as a result, it is invisible to us.  It is simply this: none of the institutional tools we take for granted existed yet.  There was no creed – no clear understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus.  The term, Christian, hadn’t been invented yet, so there wasn’t even a label for their group identity.

There were no scriptures.  There was no organization, no church structure.  There was nothing authoritative to go on, so there was no guidance whatsoever.  Basically, these early followers of Jesus had to make up a church as they went forward.

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What these early followers of Jesus had were memories of his teaching and his actions.  It seems likely that some of these followers took notes when Jesus was teaching.  But since these early followers tended to come from the lower levels of Jewish society, it seems likely that most were illiterate.  The frequent mention of scribes in the New Testament indicates that these literate members of society were few in number and had a special place on the social ladder.

So, what would you do if you found yourself in this situation?  Your entire world – all of your hopes and expectations – has utterly collapsed.  You are now being hunted, and the crowd wants your blood.  You are terrorized, so you do what feels right – you run and hide.  If confronted by someone who recognizes you, like Peter, you deny any knowledge of this Jesus fellow.  You are in fear for your life!

Some, like Peter and Jesus’s brother, James the Just, stayed in Jerusalem.  After the uproar died down, they emerged and developed a school of Christianity that focused on tailoring the life and message of Jesus so that it fulfilled the messianic hopes of the Jews.  Adherents of this school identified primarily as Jews and remained Torah–observant.  In actual fact, it was not a single, monolithic school, but rather a cluster of related movements that were initially centered in Jerusalem and later scattered across Syria and Transjordan.

James the Just, the brother of Jesus, was the principal leader of the Jerusalem church.  They emphasized observance of the Torah, including circumcision, the Sabbath, Jewish dietary laws, and reverence for the temple, before its destruction in 70 A.D.  They saw Jesus as the Davidic Messiah and emphasized his humanness.  They stressed Jesus’s ethical teaching, especially his Sermon on the Mount.  According to the book of Acts, they practiced communal sharing and lived in poverty and simplicity.  Authority was located in the “brother of the Lord,” James the Just.

After James died in 62 A.D., and after the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., the group scattered and was marginalized.  Jews tended to see them as just another reform group, and eventually came to see them as too Christian for Judaism.  The Gentile Christians, on the other hand, came to see them as heretical because of their emphasis on the Torah and their focus on the humanity of Jesus.  For these Christians, they were too Jewish for the emerging Catholic Christianity.

So what can we make of all this?  In my view, it is crucial to realize that this Jewish Christianity was the original matrix of the Jesus movement.  As nearly as we can tell from a divide of some 2000 years, this flavor of Christianity was as close to Jesus’s actual teaching as we can determine.  The Pauline theology of faith and salvation by grace eventually supplanted this initial Jewish Christianity.  What is more, we can start to see that the Pauline theology, so familiar to us today, was only one of many schools that developed after Jesus’s execution.  

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I think this is probably enough for this week.  I suspect that many of you are hearing about these many different strands of ancient Christianity for the first time.  I know, when I first heard about this, I was kind of stunned and then amazed.  The monolithic church that I received as a child turns out not to be a monolith at all, and it certainly didn’t start out that way.  The monolithic appearance results from the “winners” of these theological battles writing the history.  As a result, they get a chance to tout their own views and smear their opponents, sometimes even erasing them from the record.  While this is not how I would have preferred things to develop, it is, sadly, our all-too-human propensity – both in religious and political history.

Next week, we will continue our exploration into the development of the early church.  As I have explored in this area, I am continually amazed at the differences between what I thought was true and what is actually true.  It is helping me understand that our faith is far more complex than I realized

Once again, I want to encourage you to practice your meditation daily.  In our spiritual efforts, consistency matters greatly.  I would rather see you meditate for five or 10 minutes every day rather than one big 30-minute session followed by nothing for the rest of the week.

That’s all for now.  Remember that you are blessed in every way, today and always!

With deep affection,

P.S.  These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written.  We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.

So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring.  If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter series helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

To access the other newsletter editions of the “Inside The Invisible Newsletter,” or if you’d like to read ahead or go back.

Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.