For most of you in this course, Christianity supplies the familiar concepts by which most of us define what is meant by a religion.  Chances are that at the top of the list of key characteristics would be the importance of a fixed set of beliefs.  However, from your reading up this point you may have noted that outside of Christianity it is not what persons believe but how they act that matters.  In Hinduism, for instance, a worship of the gods is part of how to live, and the ordinary person and a spiritual elite might actually have completely different ideas about what it might mean to say these gods are real.  Confucius in China even seems to have endorsed the idea that there can be a complete separation of belief and practice, and Buddhism for the most part similarly downplays the need to spell out beliefs.  In Judaism as well, the acceptance of God means following the commands of the Torah, not professing any specific set of dogmas.

In a sense we might say that Christianity got off on the wrong foot because of the need to explain who Jesus was in order to justify practices that were equally unacceptable to traditional Jews and to the Roman citizens who were expected to aknowledge the divinity of their emperor.  The most important element of the story of Jesus as presented by his first followers was that, following his execution for subversion, he arose from the dead and then forty days later ascended to heaven.  Almost immediately he was being referred to as the promised messiah--the anointed one (christos, in the Greek that was the common language of the area)--and even more as the literal "son of God."  For any traditional Jew this was blasphemy, since God might send supernatural messengers (angeloi) in human form but would not take such a form himself, and to suggest that Jesus was a different divine person was to seemingly step back from a pure monotheism.  For non-Jews, raised with a mythology of divinely conceived heroes, the idea that a divine person could come from a family of carpenters and then allow his execution as a common criminal made no sense at all.

In attempting to look back at exactly what the early Christians did believe we find a key problem is the impact of Gnosticism in the occupied territories to the east of the Mediterranean.  In a pattern that we find elsewhere, especially in China, various cults offered an opportunity for either literal or symbolic rebellion against an oppressive regime.  A key notion, which cut to the heart of Roman authority, was that the human soul had been trapped in the physical world and could be rescued only by an esoteric teaching coming from the true world beyond this one.  In such a picture Jesus did not really die (one story has him swapping bodies with Simon of Cyrene and then laughing as the Romans crucified his stand-in), and the enlightened are those who completely transcend the physical world.  For most cults this was through a high degree of asceticism, but for some the theory seemed to hold that the truly "pure" could and should engage in otherwise forbidden acts, especially orgiastic sex.

In such an ideologically charged setting the very success of Christianity as a movement almost guaranteed that cult leaders of one type or another would attempt to coopt the story of Jesus for themselves.  By the fourth century, when Constantine was attempting to use Christianity as a basis for consolidating his own authority, an orthodox understanding was arrived at with the Council of Nicaea and rival interpretations were crushed.  On the losing side were the Arians, who had held that Jesus as a man had somehow come to share in divinity so that he was of a like nature (homoiousios) to God the Father but not the same nature (homoousious), with a play between two Greek words that differed by a single letter.  In Egypt, where a severe monasticism had developed as a voluntary emulation of the sacrifices of those martyred by the Romans, at least one group decided to conceal an extensive collection of writings (including the Gospel of Thomas) that might prove unacceptable: these were recovered in the last century at Nag Hammadi and have been an invaluable resource in the effort to reconstruct the different currents of belief in the early Church.

The popularity of Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code and the film based on it have led to a greater interest in all these early writings.  Could it be that the four Gospels found in the New Testament were carefully edited later on in order to leave out inconvenient facts about Jesus, such as the idea that he and Mary Magdalene were married?  Scripture scholars point out that there is no valid basis for such a claim, and the notion of a supposed Priory of Sion preserving a secret genealogy tracing the descendants of Jesus through French royalty has been exposed as a mid-twentieth century hoax.  This does not mean that we have no problems at all in accepting any particular version of the New Testament as the exact words used by the first-century authors.  Until the invention of printing all copies were handmade with the inevitable result that there would be often significant variations in the texts.  Some of these changes apparently were quite deliberate and motivated by the scribe's desire to have the Gospels and Epistles express a theologically "correct" view.  A recent and very readable discussion for those interested is Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus.

One obvious problem is that the New Testament was composed in Greek, the language of most educated individuals in the eastern part of the Roman Empire but not actually the language Jesus used in presenting his teachings (Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew).  The entire Bible was given an "official" translation into Latin by Jerome in 405 (less than a century after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire), but translations into the emerging local languages of Europe would have to wait until the end of the Middle Ages.  The competing Protestant and Catholic translations into English (the King James version and the Douai version) did not appear until the 1600s.  Unlike Judaism and Islam, in which all the faithful are encouraged to read and even to memorize the sacred texts in their original languages (Hebrew and Arabic),  Christianity did not put a special emphasis on individuals reading the Bible until the Protestant Reformation, when printing made mass produced copies of the Bible possible.  Since Christianity, again unlike Judaism and Islam, had not already developed an extensive written tradition of exegesis or formal explanations of the sacred texts, one result of an emphasis on individual reading has been that Protestantism down to the present has come to be characterized by widely divergent interpretations of what should be believed or done that are all supposedly based on the New Testament.

One of the more controversial efforts to trace the historical Jesus in all these accounts has been the Jesus Seminar.  Understandably, any project that does not take the four canonical Gospels as the revealed word of God proves unacceptable to all those who would style themselves fundamentalist or evangelical Christians.  My point in this course is not to endorse either view but to attempt to look at Christianity as it might appear to someone from outside our own culture.

Christianity spread in large part by accommodating its practices to local customs.  The birth of Jesus, for instance, is made to coincide with the celebrations formerly accompanying the winter solstice, and in many areas local divinities were newly venerated as Christian saints (St. Christopher is just one example).  Prayer to the saints conveniently replaced the devotional practices of a pre-Christian past, and the Church gradually came to claim exclusive rights over ceremonies such as weddings.

The theological distinctions, such as debate over the Trinity, that allowed for sometimes violent dissension among the religious specialists did not matter that much to individuals who were as likely as not to be illiterate, but over the centuries there would be individuals who would attempt to reform what they saw as abuses in the Church by insisting that anything not found in the four canonical Gospels was not legitimate.

Buddhism is like Christianity in being a religion spread by missionaries who organized themselves and many of their more devout converts into monasteries.  In both the Buddhist East and the Christian West these monasteries would become wealthy and powerful in their own right, but a key difference is that Christianty, unlike Buddhism, also developed patterns of organization that roughly paralleled political organization in the Roman world.  This meant that there would be bishops who would for practical purposes be no different than the secular rulers with whom they coexisted.  This was especially true for the bishop in Rome (the Pope), who over the centuries periodically claimed authority over any secular ruler.  Buddhist reformers could always establish an independent temple without political problems arising.  Christian reformers became threats to the Church as itself a political structure, and this finally led to crusades, as in Southern France against the Albigensians, as well as to the Inquisition, which could call for the execution of the supposed heretic.

The movement of the seat of power from Italy to the new city of Constantinople in Asia Minor in the fourth century set the stage for increasing tension between the Latin-speaking bishop in Rome and the Greek-speaking bishop in Constantinople.  When the rise of Islam effectively severed contact by sea, these two areas (or patriarchates) became virtually independent.  In the West, in the "Roman Catholic" Church Latin remained the language of worship and the Pope insisted on his spiritual control over the entire Christian world.  In the East there was not just the "Greek Orthodox" Church but several other regional patriarchates that traced their ancestry to the communities founded by the Apostles and maintained patterns of worship in languages such as Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus) or Coptic.  While some bishops in these areas would be recognized as being in union with Rome, most were seen as "schismatic," meaning that they were not in union with Rome.  Also, the key bishops or (patriarchs) were never able to assert the independence of the church from the control of kings or emperors to the degree this happened in the West.

Other differences would emerge.  In the East an effort to distance Christian art from that of non-Christians, statues were banned and instead there were elaborately painted icons, still a characteristic of the religious art of Eastern Christianity.  Also, Eastern monasticism came to emphasize distinctive types of meditative practices, such as the Jesus Prayer.  In the West with the Benedictine monasteries, where monks were expected to spend hours a day in chanting the Divine Office, liturgical music developed to new splendor with the majestic Gregorian chant.

In the Middle Ages another type of Catholic religious order appeared with the Dominican and Franciscan friaries, which were typically smaller and stressed the mobility of its members.  In the Renaissance era Ignatius Loyola established the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), still another order that broke away even more from the original monastic pattern by eliminating the idea of a communal chanting of the Divine Office.  Today there are numerous orders and congregations for both men and women, and the Catholic school system in the United States was made possible because of these groups.  Also, in an ironic twist given the suppression of monasteries in the days of Martin Luther and Henry VIII, today there are both Lutheran and Episcopalian monasteries.

The Reformation is the pivotal event in modern Christian history, since it is from this time in the sixteenth century that we can talk about Protestants and Catholics.  Martin Luther, as the first individual we might term "protestant," was led to his stands because of the widespread abuse in indulgences, which he came to regard as simony.  One key notion involved in the split is the role of an official interpretation of the Bible through Church councils (the Catholic view) as opposed to personal guidance by the Holy Spirit (more typically the Protestant view).  Another is the relative role of faith and works, with the Protestant tending to downgrade the significance of the rituals, especially prayer to the saints, that had come to characterize medieval Christianity.  The reform movement itself quickly splintered into a number of distinct churches that differed markedly in their theologies and their practices.  Among the more extreme was the view promoted by John Calvin that God had already predestined individuals to salvation or damnation, interesting because for later Calvinists a sign of being among the elect would be worldly prosperity (often seen as the basis for the so-called Protestant Ethic).

There is an interesting parallel here with what happened in the Buddhist world.  Early on a reform movement known as Theravada (the Doctrine of the Elders) had rejected the sutra literature as well as the devotional practices characterizing the Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) approach.  The difference is that Theravadins, which we might think of as the "protestants" in Buddhism, remained localized in southeast Asia and did not attempt to match the missionary efforts of Mahayana Buddhists. What we are certainly most aware of it is the extensive network of Protestant evangelists worldwide, with lay people rather than ordained ministers most typically the ones involved.

The Reformation led to other key differences in devotional practices.  For Catholics the role of Mary as the mother of God had given her preeminence in the roster of saints, and indeed some of the greatest cathedrals, such as Notre Dame in Paris, were dedicated to her.  All such veneration of the saints was unacceptable to most reformers, and  this so-called "Mariolatry" was often used as one basis for rejecting the authority of Rome.  Also, with the displacement of the Mass as a central ceremony, Protestant churches made the pulpit rather than an altar the most important part of a church, and instead of the older Catholic liturgy worhip patterns emphasized preaching and the singing of hymns.  In the 1900s in the Southern Baptist tradition the role of a choir became even more important with the advent of Gospel music intended to complement highly emotional preaching.  One film I strongly recommend in order to appreciate better the Protestant tradition as it developed in the rural south is Robert Duvall's The Apostle.

REVIEW QUESTIONS FOR SECTION A:

(1) In the early centuries of Christianity what were differing interpretations of who and what Jesus was?  How did the Council of Nicaea decide the issue of the way in which
Jesus was to be seen as divine?
(2) What is the doctrine of the Trinity?  Is it still an expected teaching for all Christian communities?
(3) What was the language used in the composition of the New Testament?  What is the significance of not having the Bible translated into the languages spoken by ordinary people until after the Middle Ages?
(4) What characterized the life of a Christian monk?  In what ways were groups such as Franciscans and Jesuits different from earlier monastic communities?
(5) What were the factors contributing to the Protestant Reformation?  What were the most significant changes in the practices od those Christians who accepted one or another Protestant tradition?
(6) How did John Calvin's understanding of predestination lead to a different view of worldly prosperity than would have been held in the Middle Ages?

In looking at your text I am asking you to focus on these key ideas:

Later on in the course we will be looking more closely at some more recent movements (groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Latter Day Saints), but a key point I hope to have you see is that Christianity has been a turbulent religion from its inception.  Part of this, in my own view, has been because of the Christian emphasis on doctrinal conformity (everyone believing the same thing), which we have not seen in other traditions.  Far more than in Buddhism, which is parallel in so many ways, it is by understanding the differences that we can really get to understand Christianity as a whole.

This is challenging because of the sheer amount of detail involved, and what may complicate matters is that someone raised in a specific Christian tradition (a Catholic or a Mormon, let's say) will want to understand other traditions as somehow "wrong" to the extent they are different.  For this reason I again ask you to step back from your own beliefs (or lack thereof) as you study this material and prepare your notes.