How much do we know about the Early Christian Church?

[Dr Denis O'Callaghan]

Gentle Reader,

While you have been snoozing I have been studying, For example, Did you know that at: Scripture Studies you can learn that you might not know probably not as much as you thought. Here are just a few things that might surprise you.

Jesus spent his whole life as a Jew, ministering to Jews and never claimed (even according to the New Testament) to have founded a new religion.

Apart from the single (and perhaps questionable) proposition that his followers should "Oppose not evil", not a single teaching of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament was original, and almost all were being actively taught in the area and at the time that he lived. The Gospel of Thomas records 114 sayings of Jesus and many of those sayings are not recorded in the canonical Gospels... but, were circulating in the land of the Jews.

Most of his titles (Rabbi, Messiah, Saviour, Son of God, etc) were current at the time and so were many of the phrases regarded as characteristically Christian before the discovery of Essene documents at Qumran in 1947, the mid-twentieth century.

As far as anyone knows we have no first hand accounts of him, his sayings, his family or his life or death outside of the archaeological discovery of the Talpiot Tomb containing the ten Ossuaries of the family of Joseph, Mary, Jesus, James, Jude, Mary & Martha, etc.

The oldest documents we know of - like the Gospel of Thomas - were deliberately excluded from the New Testament when it was assembled in the Third and Fourth centuries.

We have no early text of any book (except maybe the Gospel of John) of the New Testament. These books were put together several generations after Jesus lived, and are by their own admission written to encourage belief.

We have every sort of evidence that the texts that made up the New Testament were continually tampered with and added to over generations.

We know for a fact that once Christians had agreed to enforce one form of orthodoxy at the Nicene Council, they sought out and destroyed all other texts of the Ebionionites, Marcionites and Gnostics.

We know that the only bishops in the early Church were [Jewish] bishops of Jerusalem. Then in Rome (4th century), the Church developed an hierarchy (Greek: hierarchia (ἱεραρχία), from hierarches over lay people.

See you on the other side.

Denis

P.S. You need to read my 12 part study on Paul the Apostle to get some real answers. (You will have to sign up for entrance, it's a gated community hurry as the groups are filling up fast)