Do They Understand What Christianity Is?

I started life knowing absolutely nothing about Christianity. I know I must have come a long way in my studies when I now read the greatest of American scholars on the subject of ancient Christianity and I find myself scratching my head and asking - what the hell does this guy think ancient Christian was all about?

Indeed I single out American writers because anyone living in the New World is necessarily removed from anything ancient. We have inherent biases built into our psyche - stupid things like the idea of 'continual progress' - which are totally at odds with the original spirit of ancient Christianity.

Let me give the reader an example.

Whatever appeared in the first century it necessarily manifested a revelation - indeed a revelation from heaven which perfected all that was merely good or very good in the revelation which was afforded to Moses.

There has always been a fundamental disconnect in my mind between Americans and this basic understanding owing to the fact that the first Christians were not Americans and thus 'Americanisms' as such - i.e. the 'practical' reinterpretation of all things Christian within the framework of quintessentially American ideas like progress - necessarily represent heresy or a falling away from whatever was revealed through Jesus and his representatives in the first century.

You see the Roman Catholic Church and the various other 'Christian orthodoxy' all inherently claim to embody that 'revelation' which came through Jesus in the first century. People may scoff at this claim but the point is that the logic is important to recognize - that is, whatever was manifest in the first century is living perfection.

The problem for American evangelicals of all shapes and forms is that it is utterly implausible to believe that any of the stupid and utterly ridiculous things that they preach were ever held by the original circle of Christian believers.

Indeed I know that these foolish people try so desperately hard to imitate what they reconstruct as the 'simple' original beliefs of the apostles. Yet most of what they end up doing is assuming that because the original disciples were fisherman they must have sanctioned stupidity and ignorance.

I hate to break it to these people but by just being stupid and simple doesn't make you a disciple of Jesus. The most fundamental question that you have to ask yourself is what was it that was being introduced by the early Church and the answer - at its most basic level - has to be that it was a 'mystery religion.'

I am not going to spend page after page itemizing what I believe where the central features of this mystery religion other than to say that it must have been similar in shape and constitution to other mystery religions of the first century. Of course on some level it was heralded as 'the perfect' mystery religion - even the perfect mystery religion which completed Judaism.

Yet it is worth noting that the very 'pagan' characteristics which evangelicals typically loathe must have been present in the first days of the religion. The fact that Protestant evangelicals have difficulties with the presence of this interest in 'superstitions' of the Catholic tradition only demonstrates how utterly alienated they are from the REAL first century characteristics of the religion they claim to carry forward into the twenty first century.

Indeed while these intellectually dishonest individuals will never admit it, their revaluation of traditional Christian values and traditions necessarily implies that the original 'perfect revelation' which came to the Apostle in their eyes wasn't that perfect after all.