sorry summerqueen. I think there is anothe person called midsummer and I confused you two.
DP if you look at what I wrote I readily point out that Christianity was influenced by many people and many groups.
There were not really a wide variety of different groups. There were a few small unsuccessful groups who would fade out quickly. However, they had a huge impact on what Christianity owuld become because the Church reacted against these various groups and spurred the Church to more clearly define certain teachings. Orthodox Christianity was always teh bastion of Christianity. It was held together by the authority of Bishops and their union with Rome. We can see this clearly as early as Clement of Rome, Origien and all of the early Church fathers.
Christianity evolved but was created by the person of Jesus. Nobody "made him up." They took what he said and more clearly explained it. Anyway, for the most part I agree with your post. The only thing I would disagree with is that the distinctions are inconvinient because the Orthodox Christians always maintained distinctions with the groups you listed and in fact have devleoped and blossomed into what they are today that is the Catholic and Orthodox Church.
Quote:Constantine and his group of thugs had a great deal to do with the creation of Christianity as we know it. This is especially true for the foundation of the Catholic Church.
Prior to that time, there were a wild variety of different Christianities. To cite a few of the more prominent examples:
- The Ebionites who believed Jesus was a mortal human, conceived the same way all babies are by Mary and Joseph, and adopted by God as a son. The Spirit came down and inhabited his body at his baptist by John the Baptist. The two then formed a symbiotic relationship which was why Jesus could heal people and perform miracles. At his crucifixion, because God can't die, the Spirit left him on the cross. This might explain the quote "why have you forsaken me".
- The Marcionites who believed in two gods. Yahweh, the OT god, was the lesser god of this world. Jesus was separate from and superior to this base god. Jesus appeared in the temple one day as a fully formed adult (no Mary, no Joseph, no childhood) to offer salvation out of this lesser world to a better place. They rejected all things Jewish and would have left out the OT completely.
- The Docetics who believed that Jesus was an apparition of God. They thought the material world was so corrupting that the pure spirit of God could have no part of it. Jesus was an illusion. The idea of an incarnation of God was to them a contradiction in terms.
There was such wild variety between the different Christianities prior to Nicaea as to make distinctions between Protestant and Catholic, or even between Christian and Muslim, look like petty hair-splitting in comparison.
So to answer the question, we have to nail down just what we call "Christianity". The idea wasn't born overnight. Nobody "just made up Jesus one day". Evidence indicates the religion slowly evolved as a synchratic faith. A bit of Egypt. A bit of Persia. A bit of Greece. A bit of Rome. A bit of Judaism...
DP if you look at what I wrote I readily point out that Christianity was influenced by many people and many groups.
There were not really a wide variety of different groups. There were a few small unsuccessful groups who would fade out quickly. However, they had a huge impact on what Christianity owuld become because the Church reacted against these various groups and spurred the Church to more clearly define certain teachings. Orthodox Christianity was always teh bastion of Christianity. It was held together by the authority of Bishops and their union with Rome. We can see this clearly as early as Clement of Rome, Origien and all of the early Church fathers.
Christianity evolved but was created by the person of Jesus. Nobody "made him up." They took what he said and more clearly explained it. Anyway, for the most part I agree with your post. The only thing I would disagree with is that the distinctions are inconvinient because the Orthodox Christians always maintained distinctions with the groups you listed and in fact have devleoped and blossomed into what they are today that is the Catholic and Orthodox Church.
