The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The First Two Centuries

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, March 13 2007, 20:25:14 (CET)
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I was never any good at homework If something was interesting, I’d bother…otherwise the teachers could flunk me to their heart’s content. I have, as far as formal education is concerned, an undisciplined mind, but humankind didn’t advance by passing the tests their grandparents put before them…we moved on by asking new questions…when given the answer to the quiz and asked merely to memorize it, I prefer to ask a better question.

How did Christianity “spread” in it’s first two centuries? Dr Joseph says that scholars can form no certain ideas and I believe it…there was nothing extraordinary about Christ when he first came to some attention…and I doubt there were many converts at all. For the first 70 years we do know that there was no such thing as a Christian…only Jews who accepted Jesus as the promised Jewish Messiah, no one else was waiting for one…although why they kept on believing when he left without fixing much of anything…promising to be back if things got worse..which he knew they would on account of the type of farewell party humans threw for him, I’ve never understood…I wouldn’t want a plumber back who came….saw….told me to have faith in him and then left…saying I could expect him to come around when I was up to my eyeballs, and not just my knees, in my own crap. This would not inspire confidence.

The Christian sect of Judaism became its own religion when Paul convinced them they should accept gentiles…in order to grow their numbers. I guess that came about, we’re supposed to think, on account of the hordes of distraught gentiles banging on the church door to be allowed to join. That pleasing image is offset by Paul’s admission that they weren’t attracting much in the way of Jews, the first people you’d expect to believe in a Jew Messiah…something does not make sense.

But, since we’re dealing with religion and nothing is supposed to make sense, or where’s the otherworldliness of it…we must press on knowing the religion itself will be no help in unraveling it’s history or appeal.

If you know the career of a painter, what sorts of things she paints and in what style…and there comes a couple of “lost years” when you have no record of what was produced…and then she emerges again with a new style entirely, you’d not be far off the mark if you decided she must have been discovering a new style or refining her old one in those lost years, given her new style when she re-emerges. You might be able to make a sound guess as to what she was doing those two years…where she left off just before going into seclusion and what the genesis and evolution of the new style must have been if it derived from her old style, which you were well familiar with.

If I paint only straight lines…disappear for two years to reappear painting circles…it wouldn’t be hard to guess that somewhere in those two years I started painting curved lines...increasing the curve till arriving at the circles I now paint. In those two missing years obviously I was preparing to go in circles.

The Jewish Messiah would be known as such when he did what he was contracted to do for the Jews. He came…he spoke up…he got killed…never mind levitating to heaven, which was not part of the original deal…and things only got worse. The hapless Jews, as was their custom, turned this into yet another sign of god’s gift to his chosen people…in that he was so pissed at them, he ruined all their hopes, as a lesson to do better next time…that “lesson” being his gift I suppose Christians, the neo-Jews and now neo-Cons…are preparing to do better, though I don’t see any signs of it. This could go on forever and maybe that’s the whole point. People weren’t bad because god screwed up, they’re bad because they’re bad, regardless of god...in which case what’s everybody waiting for…but never mind. You don’t want to bring your mind into church...your knees will do.

Assuming that Judaism was the straight line that went into those two missing centuries, (really 130 years) and Christianity is what came out…a circle…just how did Judaism begin to “bend” into Christianity…and how did this make it such a desirable thing that now everyone wanted to join when they didn’t before…? And…when and what changed to make people stop wanting to join, and then reversing the process entirely to where people were more than willing to leave…and any new converts had to be brought kicking and screaming into it?

Answer that on a quiz.

Somewhere along the way…and Durant as well as Dr Joseph discuss this, the Church agreed to become a part of the state apparatus. For one thing people began to leave their property to the church…either for safekeeping as they played at being hermits, or to be used for charitable works because priests came up with this method of enriching the church, which would buy the penitent sinners a better seat at god’s table. It may have been innocent enough at first with well-off members realizing that this impoverished bunch of Jews needed financial support to spread and grow their message…something they claimed Jesus wanted them to do.

But since the Church had no military arm of its own and no king would allow them to, a deal was struck in which the Church would teach people to render up to Caesar, “verily upto ye assholes”…and Caesar would protect the Church’s wealth and property…helping by executing “heretics” and generally keeping the “faithful” that way.

But this didn’t happen in those two centuries, however, the slight shift from humble poverty to turning that inevitable Jewish “knack”, we all believe those people have in their genes, into pure gold may have begun then. In other words even a pious Jew can see the main chance…even if he’s a Christian-Jew. Perhaps the idea of selling the franchise to any king or emperor who saw the value in such a joint venture, and creating the contractual arrangement to satisfy both parties, is what was taking place those two centuries when proprietary rights and patent protection would have ruled, as “purists” were purged from the party of God to be replaced by “realists”.

Dr Joseph and various sources he cites say that Christianity spread most easily and at first exclusively among Jewish communities already in BetNahrain. In 70 AD the Romans threw all Jews and Christian-Jews out of Jerusalem. Deprived of their Temple and its bloody environs, to the relief of their pets…the exiled Jews joined their brethren to the East, or set up new communities. Since the historic Israel had been rejected and had rejected its Messiah…those Jews might indeed have been induced, from despair if nothing else, to redefine the role of their Messiah who, as Christians now, they believed had actually come for everyone.

Perhaps now began the changing of the role of the Messiah from instant First-Aid, a cure-all for whatever ails you, Cosmic Snake Oil…to someone who must be awaited and prepared for yet again. Now perhaps came the shift from a kingdom on earth, as was promised in messianic lore, to an indefinite somewhere up above the clouds…to be later modified again so the dead wouldn’t have to wait till Judgement Day but could avoid jail, moving quickly on to “Go”.

Judiasm, which is all Christianity is…came out differently after those first two centuries than when it went in. And it seems it became less and less popular or any kind of a religion of peace and love but rather a competition and an excuse to get as much as you could on earth…even the ascetics were “covetous”…so was everyone. So are they still…more and more.

Christianity was never “natural” to anyone who wasn’t born into Judaism…and it didn’t even appeal to all of them. How much less of an appeal did it have to people half way and all the way around the world who had their own personal take on eternity and gods…people who never heard of a Jew let alone a Jewish messiah and had no need of one until…until Christianity came, offering its bitter pill as the cure for the bitter guilt it afflicted millions of children with, most of them newly-made orphans.

There may have been a time when this new sect of Judaism, like the Essenes, held some magical charm due to fevered tales of a “Teacher of Righteousness” or the Christ. But people are people and neither Cannibalism nor Christianity has improved them much. I think when Judaism emerged as full-fledged Christianity…it had lost whatever appeal it had to Jews and non-Jews alike…and had been seized upon by the types of bishops and prelates and patriarchs one reads of more and more…the kind who used absurd disputes over the nature of Christ etc. to create local followings of mentally unbalanced people willing to kill and die for such trivialities…and that these sects alienated people more and more…rather than inspiring any healthy ones to join..

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