Early Christianity thread

...

I only want a discussion

I agree

American Evangelicals are wrong in general. And no, I'm not shitposting. If you want to learn more about the history of your church, you need to read up on the Great Awakenings and the history of Christianity in America. But the basic idea of where your church comes from is that a bunch of uneducated people thought that by taking their own view of the Bible literally they could act like they were recreating the early church. Obviously it doesn't work like that. The early church was quite varied, and did pretty much everything differently to every modern denomination.

>Why did the key figures of early Christianity after the Apostles appear to be some sort of proto-catholic?

A thought experiment for you OP what your sources for the early christians: Who made them and who preserved them?

Here is the problem. If we say that the figures like Clement, Ignatius and so on are all fabrications or they are all heretical, then how can we even trust the Bible and the doctrine we currently believe?

If we trust them, they are still hell wrong

Delete this. We are the true christianity

Yes, you are wrong for believing in God.

Is that right? According to who?

>Why did the key figures of early Christianity after the Apostles appear to be some sort of proto-catholic?
What? Read the Didaché.

>We are the true christianity
I hope this is bait.
American protestant sects are probably the most disgustingly butchered version of Christ's teachings.
This comes from an atheist.

I did. Look like a bunch of jews who are christian

Then who is true?

Christian truth is embodied in the written Word of God, the Bible.Thus, true Christians do not need to look to any human as the source of inspired revelation.

Letting human tradition take the place of God’s Word is spiritually lethal. Jesus warned: “If . . . a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

(Matthew 15:6, 14.)

"God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars."

Martin Luther

If you ask me, none of you are true. But what I can tell you is that Orthodoxy or Catholicism is much more in-line than any fringe Protestant sect.

And he also would leave patterns of it in history, no?

Look at my OP post again, I was also talking about Biblical scholarship which presents a radically different picture than what I was told

>bible believing faithful

There wasn't a bible for a long ass time and even when there was very few christians even knew how to read until the invention of the printing press.

I agree and I find it problematic as an Evangelical

>then how can we even trust the Bible and the doctrine we currently believe?

Well from a protestant standpoint one could argue that as a divine text God preserved and created it in spite of mankind rather than the bible existing because of mankind only.

>If we say that the figures like Clement, Ignatius and so on are all fabrications or they are all heretical,

There are more shades of grey there user. Whilst there are almost never smoking guns there are often many damming documents that shatter religions and these tend to be those that are third party or dug up in secret.

For instance the most contraversial documents in Mormonism arent those relating to the book of Mormon but of Joseph Smiths court records for defrauding people with folk magic and records of him making up elaborate stories about Indians as a youth.

Likewise with Scientology and Dianetics we have Hubbards hospital and military records to show that he didnt have and consequently cure the illnesses with his teachings. Still we know from his affirmations that got leaked from court trails that he genuinely believed in it.

None of these documents would ever have been discovered or known if either of these groups had a monopoly on what books were published.

With early Christianity the sole record we have are the texts preserved by the Church itself and no other.

This gets even worse when you consider that Christianity had a serious problem with writers fasley attributing their writings to apostoles to give them legitimacy.

Yes I find that convincing but there is a big problem with that, how do you know? we could say "because God" but then equally valid the papist could say the same and make clear God guided the church and thus allow it to know what the bible is and true doctrine. This leaves us in an uncertain position

But even if your point is right, we should also expect more faithful adherence to the principles of Protestantism early on when it is still 'fresh'.

I never heard of authors falsely attributing their writings to the Apostles. In fact many of them or the orthodox ones at least, happily cite most if not all the New Testament. I am not one to say there was no canon but it is ignorant to say it was a closed canon

This also poses a problem for Protestantism as it raises the question of why isn't THE article of faith known and even worse, how can it be known? Through itself? Or through some other criterion that enable us to know

>This leaves us in an uncertain position

This is kind of my point the "early church" argument is not as decsive a silver bullet as people think.

>I never heard of authors falsely attributing their writings to the Apostles

Just take a look at all the ones attributed to Paul - there was even one to a great stoic thinker

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament_apocrypha#Epistles

>should also expect more faithful adherence to the principles of Protestantism early on when it is still 'fresh'.

Should we? Paul had to write letters off after those he taught in Rome went heretical after he left and Peter the disciple who had witnessed Christ in person still dennyed him 3 times not to mention Judas. Then of course is the long history of the Jews turning away from Gods commandments. Are we holding the early christians to a unique standard?

>This also poses a problem for Protestantism as it raises the question of why isn't THE article of faith known and even worse, how can it be known?

Well in the Christian context it comes down to a question of faith and whether you think God is best reveled via the bible or by tradition.

read and watch bart ehrman. he answers pretty much everything

We do know that Paul addresses judaizing tendencies or if the whole New Perspective view is right, which seems to now permeate all over New Testament Scholarship today mean that a forensic conception of the Atonement is wrong. Or the fact that good works are in fact not the object of Paul's critique. In fact I even read that Paul in Romans drew from the Wisdom of Solomon, a book my Pastor told me was simply erroneous

The Apostles may be sinners but it is ridiculous to think that true believers dissappear. This is why as an Evangelical this is a big problem

Let us assume that the christian God exists. The Bible is his revelation. But ironically we know the Bible from the Reformers who gave us the supposed true list. When we turn the clock back it is still largely the same with small tweaks here and there but it still poses a rather odd dilemma when we end up looking at the Bible's own history itself. None of the authors seem to think Sola Scripture was the approach and drew from traditions of their day, the Old Testament's Pentateuch is not written by Moses but by multiple sources. Genesis was in fact not the earliest OT book if I remember

Worse, the literalist plain reading view of Protestantism dissapear a when we see how the Jews of the NT period approach Scripture

>The Apostles may be sinners but it is ridiculous to think that true believers dissappear.

Is it ridiculous to think they simply lost control of the narrative and monopoly on instruction?

>But ironically we know the Bible from the Reformers who gave us the supposed true list

And how did they know which texts? could they not have been the vehicle through which the holy spirit acted?

>Worse, the literalist plain reading view of Protestantism dissapear a when we see how the Jews of the NT period approach Scripture

I think the division within protestantism is a better argument than a few scant records of how ancient jews approached it.

And claim that God did not guide his sheep?

Even current knowledge of the early christian landscape knows of the magnitude of heresies surrounding it

Once we acknowledge God acting through human actors we must also concede that we have to trust the early christians on some points as well. This excuse is weak because it just as easily be used by the papists thus bringing no resolution. We also have the problem of the fact that these individuals were responsible for knowledge and development of theology, laying it's foundation for us. But if we acknowledge this, we must also acknowledge the need to look at it from their point of view

Record is not scant as to jewish approach to Scripture

>And claim that God did not guide his sheep?

And claim that God dennyed free will?

>Once we acknowledge God acting through human actors we must also concede that we have to trust the early christians on some points as well.

Not if you belive the Bible to be divine in itself and not just a collection of divine things.

>But if we acknowledge this, we must also acknowledge the need to look at it from their point of view

Do you judge a fruit by its skin?

>Record is not scant as to jewish approach to Scripture

Everything from the ancient period is scant. remember we have around 1-3% of all the written material of that era.

>deny free will
Well, Calvinists do it

Even if the Bible is Divine, it still ends up as the book of the community, not individual. This is why the reading culture at the time of the Bible is in fact aural. People hear the Word itself, not personally read and intepret them as Evangelicals do today and this is worrying

If I judged the early Christians by their skin I wouldn't look deep now wouldn't I?

Forensics also works on what is available. What is available tells us that the Bible and the Early Christians are nothing like Evangelicals and Baptists. Evidence is scant but what is available tells is whatever it is that existed then, it differs from Evangelicals today

It was orally transmitted you fucking idiot.

That doesn't make the problem go away. Because for christians in the first three hundred years and beyond to get the Bible, they need the church and to literally read it under its guidance

Again, links back to the aural reading culture of the time

This is why Christianity wasn't perfected until Luther and widespread reading of the Bible.

Actually that poses a problem as that same aural culture is the same culture of the Apostles and Jesus. So again, looks like it is not good for Bible onlyists

The practice of Paul himself for example draws from tradition as well When he writes his letters.

Fucking burgers, don't know the first thing about Christianity

Tell me then

Nice counterpoint. I think you've convinced me.

Why would I care about convincing you?

One would think you might care to help a brother in Christ who's strayed from his path.

All these fucking Anglo heretics are fucking disgusting. Martin Luther was a mistake, burgers an even bigger one.

Sorry. I mean to just reply to the guy calling me a burger.

The Acts of the Apostles shows the truth of the matter, warts and all. False starts, missteps, false doctrine, Judaizing, the whole works.

It's not until Acts 10 that they even realize that Gentiles can be saved, and that only from an act of God that Peter witnessed, and a vision Peter was given.

If you look at the NT after the gospels, you get the history of the early church; if you read the Revelation, Jesus' 7 letters to the churches in Asia Minor, you not only get 7 types of churches, and their fates, but the 7 ages of the church, and our current predicament (apostate churches).

Being a Christian is kind of like being a Marine; a person is in the Army, or in the Navy, or in the Air Force, but is a Marine. It's an indication that there has been a transformation, and not just a joining to a group.

Christians are christians, no matter how ignorant of the bible they are, no matter how wrong their thinking is, or their doctrine is; they are Christians by virtue of the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit of God, made into new creations in Christ Jesus, or they are not christians at all.

In life, a good rule of thumb is that not everyone who says they are X is actually X. There are a lot of people reading this who think they are Christians, but are not. They're easy to spot because they don't know how to become Christians, and they don't know what Christians know.

This is simply not true. We have tens of thousands of manuscript bits of the NT going back to 20 years after the bible was finished, and entire copies early in the 3rd century.

You're beyond me.
That's me, yeah.

Christianity has a written tradition, not an oral tradition.

What might the person who thinks he is a Christian, but is not, believe? I'm genuinely curious.

Rubbish. There were Christians who started churches in the 30's and 40's AD that still survive.

Martin Luther was a foul anti-semetic Catholic friar.

YOU don't know anything about Christianity.

That membership in the Catholic church, or in the Orthodox church, will somehow lead to them being saved if they practice the rites and rituals of their church, partake in their "sacraments", and generally maintain their membership until they die.

True but the public reading and discussion of those texts is one of the oldest Jewish traditions that carried over. I don't know if you've heard of it, but there's this thing called mass where the bible was read to the people.

300 years later, and in a foreign language, yes.

And all bibles burned that were not in that dead language, yes. By people who murder Christians by the tens of millions.

So how does one truly become a Christian? A personal and reverent relationship with Christ? I'm really racking my brain trying to decide between Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. I've been a Protestant all my life but maybe I've missed something.

It had an oral tradition as well in its infancy, which then became its written tradition. The Bible is a compilation of that tradition. Of course it didn't exist until later, a compilation can be published thousands of years after its individual works are released.
E.g., I own a compilation of the writings of Chaucer in their original Middle English. This does not mean the writings did not exist before this compilation.

Better yet, Hesiod's writings are basically a (heavily biased) compilation of Greek oral tales and religious practices.

My point isn't talking about manuscripts not being present early on somehow. So this is a moot point

This solution is unconvincing as it simply adds an anything goes approach. In fact how do we even know who has the dwelling of the Holy Spirit when practically each denomination could believe in different things and even play by the same sola Scriptura rule.

Even worse why should we trust your intepretation of Revelations when others also exist or that we have Biblical scholarship to shed light to illuminate its meaning

The jews spoke hebrew and their texts were in hebrew. When Christianity arrived in the Roman empire the texts were then translated to their language, Latin. And when the Latin speaking world began to splinted into various different languages, translations of the bible into those languages started to pop up.

>And all bibles burned that were not in that dead language
Filthy, Lutheran lies.

You do what God told his greatest apostle to do.

Romans 10
But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. For “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Two supernatural acts impossible to do without God's assistance:

1. Say out loud Jesus is Lord; and
2. Believe in your heart God raised him from the dead.

The fact that 2000 year old papyrus manuscripts did not survive does not mean they did not exist.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

We have 1800 year old papyri; they suffice to demonstrate a written tradition, not an oral one.

In fact, the Jews also have a written tradition, and not an oral one.

Native Americans had an oral tradition, and the memory of pre-literate people surpasses ours by orders of magnitude. For instance, four men memorized the entire quran before it was committed to writing following the death of Mohammad and one of those four men.

Thank you for this. I think I'm complicating things. I think you've brought me back down to Earth.

Oh look, you're illiterate and historically illiterate.

You have him, or you don't.

If you don't know whether or not you have him, say out loud "Jesus is Lord!" and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead.

If you can do those two things, you have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you.

We know this because it is from the mouth of Jesus:

Matthew 16
Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.

So ergo we now have to believe that God actually chooses who to save and who doesn't since humans cannot turn to God but God makes them turn to him. But this simply results in an inconsistent and problematic God

When we look at Pauline scholarship, we see that Paul describes Salvation as a future reality. It isn't a one time thing that is already done. It is anticipated, present and foretasted. This then eliminates any view of salvation that dares ignore the fact that it is an ongoing process

>jews
>no oral tradition
What is Oral Torah?

The NT was written in Greek but for Matthew, which was written in Hebrew and painstakingly translated into Greek, per Papias. Apparently the tax collector's Hebrew was atrocious.

The latin translation is foul, and full of errors, which is what one would expect from Babylon. Moses did not have horns, and Jesus is not Lucifer, nor is satan a "light bringer" or "light bearer".

Ask God for help; when he says he's near your mouth, that means he will help you confess that Jesus is Lord; when he says he's near your heart, that means he'll help you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.

I will be praying for you to have a clear space to make this confession of faith, and be saved.

>early translators weren't very good at their job
Who would've thought?

God chose to save everyone who would ask God to save them, and did so before he made the world.

Get out of your linear time thinking mode; God sees the end from the beginning.

God says choose: so choose.

It's someone reciting something that is written down, and has been written down for 2400 years.

Maybe you're thinking about the Talmud.

Looks like someone is illiterate on Biblical scholarship. It is well known that Jews have oral tradition and that at the time of the New Testament, the typical Jew would engage in Scripture reading not individually but communially in the Synagogue. Then we have the New Testament authors whose style of writing make clear to us that they themselves drew from Oral Tradition

Paul for example drew from the tradition of his time by using the Wisdom of Solomon. This is also why Papias showed a bias for Oral Tradition

This is not to say Scripture did not exist but to note the role of Tradition in its becoming and what it means to the Early Christians

They did fine; it's just that Matthew had no relationships with Jews, and wasn't allowed in the temple by dint of his traitorous vocation, and so had very little practice with the Hebrew language.

But he wanted to write it in Hebrew, to the Hebrews, to show that Hebrew Yehoshua is the Hebrew Messiah, and King of the Hebrews.

Hebrew.

Thank you again. God bless you.

You explicitly mentioned that God moves the person to believe

So which is it?

It is either foreknowledge or active predestination by intention. You cannot have both and say that human beings will but are in fact predestined by God

Sounds like someone is ignoring the historical record and evidence

The tanakh is not an oral tradition.

The talmud is not an oral tradition.

You seem to think that if people talk, it's automatically an oral tradition.

If you knew the painstaking steps the scribes used in copying the tanakh faithfully for thousands of years, you'd realize they have a written tradition.

Not an oral tradition.

Paul being influenced by the Book of Wisdom is as meaty as Jude being influenced by the Book of Enoch.

Anything they took, and put in the bible, is true.

Neither man endorsed everything in either work.

Again also, anyone who says that

A)OSAS
B)Salvation isn't an ongoing process

Is essentially denying Paul

I didn't, but it's true. God calls the people who are going to choose to love God, and be adopted by God, and citizens of his kingdom.

That could be anyone.

But there's a certain number that will be reached, and when that last man, woman or child is saved, we're sky.

Godspeed.

>Sounds like someone is ignoring the historical record and evidence

I do not mix the holy with the profane, and I do not fall for the traditions of man over the things of God.

Paul wrote what I quoted above; do these things, and you will be saved.

Further OSAS verses are pleniful.

Anyone who thinks salvation is an ongoing process does not understand the nature of salvation, or how a man is sealed at the time of his belief as earnest payment for the final transformation.

You could not more participate in your own salvation process than you could participate in your own sanctification process.

You either consent, or you don't. You either accept the free gift, or you refuse it.

Except that's what oral tradition means. Shit you got by mouth, which is practically all of the Bible and shit before it was written down. Then there's how to intepret the Bible

Like it or not the Bible did not magically fell from the sky. It is written experiences and divine inspiration which can draw from well known traditions that exist, which is what Paul and the NT did.

The culture of the NT period itself is in fact, an oral one and Tradition remained with Scripture given how closely intertwined they are

This is why none of the early Christians after the Apostles follow the rule of Sola Scriptura. They had their own traditions that guide scriptural intepretation and establish doctrine

Talmud contains a recording of Oral Torah you dimwit.

Oral Torah predates the written Torah.

>It is written

Yup.

No, no it does not. It tries to cover everything that the Law of Moses does not, and tries to reconcile everything it covers with the Law of Moses.

>This is why none of the early Christians after the Apostles follow the rule of Sola Scriptura.

Per usual, your opinion contradicts the bible.

2 Timothy 3
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Essentially saying that you deny evidence?

Except it isn't. Paul's own language of running the race for the prize or even how Abraham goes through trials and emerge victorious by faith are indications that he taught not OSAS.

In fact this is also why he does not speak of Salvation as now but as future and anticipated. There is no justification-sanctification stage in Paul. It's about getting into the new Covenant to be saved by the work of Jesus through the act of faith. That's it in a nutshell

In fact if OSAS is true then it also means souls are predestined, for if they fall away, God never called them or saved them to begin with

All it says is what Scripture's function is. It doesn't say that Scripture Alone is the authority. After all if this is so then the NT authors have a problem drawing from oral traditions about the life and teachings of Jesus

That verse also doesn't give us any clear indication of how scripture is to be read, another key aspect of what tradition is

I do not mix holy evidence with unholy evidence, no. The holy suffices.

The prizes Paul refers to are not salvation. They are rewards at the Bema Seat Judgment of all believers.

Paul is in the running to be seated at the right hand of Jesus. That's what he was running for.

Not salvation. He already had that assured to him by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit of God.

complete
thoroughly equipped
every good work

What do you think that lacks?

So you're going to take the word of the most evil people on planet earth, the Jesuits, as to what the bible "really means".

Good luck with that.

So essentially Predestination and thus, no free will because he is already saved and forever saved

But even worse, what is your basis for denying Biblical scholarship and history on a board that is dedicated to History in the first place?

Again the statement simply tells us the function of Scripture. It doesn't tell us how to read Scripture which is itself Tradition.

The use of Scripture for one end doesn't mean sola scriptura.

Except of course many Biblical scholars are Protestants themselves. So this is an irrelevant accusation when it is people who see the Bible as it is and wants to know more about it

Yet it is Satanic on the sole basis that it disagrees with you

Not sure how you could come up with exactly the wrong conclusion, but maybe keep trying.

What is lacking again?

An appeal to authority regarding the bible?

Seriously?

Anyone knows that using scholarship isn't considered fallacy

And here you are not answering my points