When my children were small, I used some of Jesus’ teachings as models of behavior modification,ways of acting to gently influence behavior in others. Little did I expect that early realization would begin a book review.
Deeper study of the Bible brought about the realization that Jesus was helping his followers act out a vision of love in the face of the violence of the Roman Empire of the first century of the Common Era (C.E. instead of A.D.) But then, in the 4th century, the Emperor Constantine co-opted the message to further his hold on peoples Rome had conquered over several centuries. What happened in the centuries between Jesus and Constantine? What happened to Jesus’ message of love and cooperation before it was over-written to support a violent domination system?
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945 proved to be a treasure trove of information about the development of Christianity in those intervening centuries. These 52 texts, many only small fragments, augmented by other archeological discoveries, revealed a range of practices in Jesus’ memory that had been systematically suppressed, first by the early church “Fathers” and later by Constantine’s insistence that Christianity present one unified message to the empire he ruled.
Contributors to the Westar Institute’s Christianity Seminar dug deep into the Bible and other available material from the 1st and 2nd centuries and noted it did not support the traditional party line that Early Christianity presented a single, unitary story about Jesus and his early followers. In fact, they realized that there was no organized “Christianity” until the 4th century C.E. Instead, different groups devised powerful and distinctive ways of remembering the dangerous teachings of an itinerant peasant from Galilee in the early years of the Roman Empire. One thing these early writings had in common was the very creative and courageous ways these illegal gatherings remembered Jesus the Anointed (Christ) in the face of fear, violence and persecution.
Our New Testament and other early “Christian” writings become more powerful and inspiring when read as underground literature opposing the might of the Roman empire.
The Christianity Seminar’s findings are now available as a very readable book, AFTER JESUS, BEFORE CHRISTIANITY (HarperOne, 2021). It’s available in hard back and Kindle. You can find a copy in the Faith Development Room, along with many of the papers and publications on which the book is based. Feel free to sign it out (and please remember to bring it back so other can read it, too.)
Happy reading!
Lyn Pickhover