..is like you’ve allude to…doctrinal differences regarding Christianity that reach back as far as the Reformation period.
Basically, Christianity exists in two forms―Catholicism (Roman Catholic/Holy Roman Empire/God and King are one and the same) and Protestanism (Western/New world “stateism”/individual identity)…
…and the defining marker for that “division” is, again, the conflict of “rich” vs. “poor”.
I can go on and on about this (as I’ve show I can do about a lot of things here on more than one occasion), but in the interests of brevity…
…it is very likely that Jesus of Nazareth had no intention at all of creating a “new” religion. If his own commentary is accurate, as we like to think of such things from antiquity, this part of Jesus’ “mission” was nonexistent.
Personally, I don’t regard any of the canonical New Testament gospels as historical “fact” simply because:
none of them were written before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in A.D. 70, and were more than likely written, at the earliest, A.D. 90 or later,
pseudonymed authorship to lend weight to their narratives (particularly regarding aspects of Jesus’ “divinity”), because the apostles for which they were named were long dead
and the need, (after said destruction of the Jerusalem “state” by Rome to quell the insurrection there that had been occurring, off-and-on, for hundreds of years) to appear separate and distinctive from the Jewish laws of Torah which was seen across the Roman empire as disruptive and problematic (largely the way Islam is looked at today, as a corollary)
The Gospel of John, for instance, is often held by many Christians as the standard of what the Christian faith is…excluding the facts that it was not written by the disciple of Jesus for which it is titled, who was long dead at the time of its believed writing in the early 2nd century (more probably a follower of the message Paul delivered to Asia Minor in the two decades after Jesus’ death), and that establishing Jesus’ “divinity” (pre-exisitant Son of God, for one), was paramount for challenging claims of other religious observances in the Greco-Roman world at the time.
The “church” itself was still largely divided on the idea of Jesus as a prophet or “God” himself. Lots of infighting and such going on. Bloody business for a long time, as I understood it. And as business models go even today, sometimes the best way to deal with competition is to buy them out and absorb them into your company . The Council of Nicea, by another name…
The important thing to remember, I believe, about Christianity is that it is (as we recognize it today) the product of social evolution…and that, ironically enough, is a roundabout way of getting at what Jesus himself was doing in ancient Palestine.
Theological definitions and interpretations notwithstanding, it is generally agreed upon by both Christian and secular scholars that Jesus’ messages were primarily about social inequities and injustices of his time. Whether or not this was laid entirely at the feet of the Roman occupation by Jesus himself is hard to discern from the Gospels themselves (again, because a large purpose in their construction and presentation was to suggest that they were not at all Jewish sentiments to the state power of Rome), because Jesus seemed to behave favorably toward the pagan Romans he encountered…even as they were torturing and murdering him.
If we want to talk about what Christianity “is” or “should be”, rocketsjudoka, then I think we would have to look at who all of its divergence and reinterpretation of centuries-old Mosaic law is modeled upon.
Whether or not Jesus of Nazareth himself existed (which I do personally believe), or was constructed to further a particular narrative, it is more than obvious from the evidence we can determine and rely on that his social consciousness was far beyond what is professed to be held in his stead today. And that the very idea that there were some things that are not meant for man to know or understand (particularly things about to how to treat one another, regardless of social standing), flies in the face of Jesus’ existence and behavior.
Old Negro Baptist preacher I used to talk to many years ago as a boy said it to me like this:
“Bible says Jesus is the way, the truth and the life…way I read that, if Jesus said it, then we need to say it…if Jesus done it , then we need to do it…if Jesus said it’s wrong, we don’t need to find no way to make it right…lotta folk don’t like Jesus is the way to go because they don’t like where he leadin’ them, so they figure they change the map to a sunny location…
…in all your getting’ boy…get you some understanding. Jesus ain’t make it hard for nobody to do right that want to do right. God ain’t got all these rules Man got. God ain’t give Moses but ten commandments himself. Where we figure we need to add or take away more from that is what the problem is…”
Old soul’s long gone now, but I’m glad I never got the heart to tell him that those ten commandments Moses got from “God”…were in Mesopotamia a good thousand years earlier…
...even Kosher Jewish people realize that there are certain things that if all people of any religion practice behaviorally without adherence to Jewish dogma or doctrine, (ten commandments) “God” acknowledges and accepts as ”God-fearers”…
Mankind’s “salvation”…after any definition…has always been about what we do for one another.
Jesus said as much himself.
Don’t understand, myself, why more people (especially those devoutly in service to him), don’t get that.
