(January 13, 2015 at 2:05 pm)Godschild Wrote:(January 13, 2015 at 1:11 pm)Davka Wrote: My understanding, based on years of (admittedly layman's) reading and picking the brains of various scholars, is that these "memoirs of the apostles" were not the synoptic Gospels + John, but rather included various writings which today are called the "gnostic gospels."
In the Early Church, there was a huge variety of opinion among believers. These opinions can be roughly divided between Christian Gnosticism on the one hand (Early Christian Writings, Gnosticism), and what was to become the Catholic church on the other.
Gnosticism is far closer to today's Charismatic movement than to Roman Catholicism. Its focus is the individual's relationship with Christ, with a strong emphasis on "knowing" which can be likened to the "Born Again" experience. Christian Gnosticism was a strongly spiritual movement, and was decentralized by its very nature. This decentralization posed a problem for those who wished to impose a political structure on the church, and was bitterly opposed as heresy by the early founders of what became the Roman Catholic Church.
Prior to the founding of the Roman Catholic Church, there was no accepted new Testament canon of scripture. The Biblical Canon was established in part to strengthen the centralized, top-down structure of the RCC. Writings which encouraged individual spiritual experience were discarded and often destroyed, and those which were useful to a top-down, priest-based system were edited to fit the RCC doctrine and declared to be the Word of God.
Current-day Evangelical Protestantism is far closer to the spirit of Gnostic Christianity than most Christians know.
The protestants had no problem with developing from the Bible as it stands today, we did not have nor need those documents to develop a personal relationship with Christ. Those documents that did not make it into the Bible seem to be important only to those who want to destroy Christianity, that speaks to the truth of the Bible.
GC
Nonsense. There are scholars working to debunk the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the sayings of Buddha. Does that somehow speak to the truth of those religions?
Reality is a bit different from your version, I'm afraid. Modern-day Evangelical protestants have applied their gnosis (aka cultural bias) to the Bible just as heavily as any previous group of Christians. In fact, if you jump back through history in 300-year increments and take a look at accepted Christian doctrine in each time, you will find that today's American Christianity is very different from Luther's Christianity, or the Christianity of any other period - or, in fact, accepted Christianity today in different parts of the world. The claim that there is an unbroken thread of belief stretching back `2,000 years is simply untrue.
But I'm sure you pastor repeats only what he learned in Seminary, assuming he even attended any school of higher education. Very few Christians bother to actually study their own religion, and those that do invariably end up being "liberal" Christians, if they remain Christian at all.
