If you want to know anything about Primitive Christianity, I suggest
that there are better places to look than in the either authorised
Christian textbooks or the fiction of Dan Brown.
Of
course many of the early texts we really would want have disappeared into a
black hole but in the end there are other things to look at, not only
in the recent finds such as Nag Hammadi, but also in excerpts of texts
that survived the book burning of the Imperial Church in the fourth
Century.
And you can look at it any way you want, but the bottom line is that
something very profound happened 2000 years ago.
The world changed - in fact it snapped in two.
Paul and Primitive Christianity
I looked long and hard at whether it was just St Paul syncretising the
ideas of the mysteries with Judaism, to create a new Way for those
excluded by both streams, either by lack of wealth or lack of ritual
purity. But there was more to it than that.
We do have Pauls texts, and Paul is pretty transparent, you can just
about psychoanalyse him. Sure he hated Judaism, and James' Christianity
that insisted on incorporating Judaism as its foundation. (See Paul vs James)
and yes he did have a second conversion experience travelling from
Athens to Corinth. Which just so happens to take him past the home of
the Eleusinian mysteries.
But there was more to it than Paul.
Jesus and Primitive Christianity
Steiner saw the change and was happy enough to acknowledge it was
Jesus.
There was a a universe tilting and extremely powerful convergence of
ideas 2000 years ago, that would have taken more than a man like Paul.
It would have taken a God.
Take for instance the idea of embracing of the cross - the squalid
shaming death of a brutal Rome - a curse under Judaism. And worshipping
a man sentenced to death by the dominant paradigms and authority
structures. Backed by an ever growing group of believers who were
willing to embrace the same death.
Can you imagine what that does to an authority structure?
Far more than an armed rebellion ever could.
But it is not to create a new authority structure to replace an old
authority structure, or replace the old authority structure with
anarchy.
It was to replace it with the Kingdom of God, and Looking past the
editings and redactions of the Bible, the Kingdom of God is the one theme that I
believe is at the core of what Jesus preached, and the heart of primitive
Chrisitianity.
It is present in Pauls letters and in the NT Gospels that were possibly
edited by Pauls adherents, it is present in the Gospel of Thomas who
swears his allegiance to James.
Jesus was the one who came preaching a Kingdom that, no matter how you
try and fit it into Pre AD 70 Messianism it didnt fit.
He wasn't the Messiah the Jews were looking for, yet the Message of the
Kingdom in the heart of primitive Christians defeated the empire of
Rome.
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