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Travel back some forty years to the period between 1962 and 1965. The
Catholic Church was reinterpreting many doctrines that it had held for
centuries, allowing services to be spoken in the vernacular language instead
of Latin, seeking friendship with other denominations, and recognizing good
in other religions.
Going back another forty to fifty years, an Austrian man and his
organization was interpreting Christianity in another way. Adolph Hitler saw
the Jewish people as Christ killers and set out to exterminate all Jewish
people, killing over six million Jews during the course of the Second World
War.
Going back another hundred years, slavery was still in existence in our
young United States of America.
Slavery was an accepted practice because Christians interpreted many of the
books of the Bible as condoning slavery. St. Paul,
writing in his letter to his Christian congregation in Ephesus,
says, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the
flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”
Journeying another two hundred years further back (1611 A.D.) and the
Authorized King James version of the English Bible is first being printed.
Six different “companies” of men each took different sections of the Bible to
translate into the English language : the First Westminster Company took
Genesis through 2 Kings, the First Cambridge Company took 1 Chronicles
through the Song of Solomon, the First Oxford Company took Isaiah through
Malachi, the Second Cambridge Company took the Apocrypha, the Second Oxford
Company took the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation, and the Second Westminster
Company took Romans through Jude.
Another hundred years further and Martin Luther nailed his ‘ninety-five
theses against indulgences in the Catholic Church’ to a church door (1517
A.D.), starting the Reformation and cracking the rigid structures of
Christianity. Christianity became the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox
Church (which had split from the Catholic Church in 1054), and the start of
the Protestant (Lutheran) Church. Protestants kept dividing themselves over
the centuries based on the various interpretations of the Scriptures until we
arrive at our modern day number of over thirty-three thousand different
Christian denominations.
Another three hundred years back and we arrive at a time when certain
Christians were being tortured and killed because their interpretation of
Christianity was not the same as the only authority of Christianity at the
time - the Catholic Church. In 1208, a particular group of Christians known
as Cathars was condemned as heretics and a crusade was set against them. The
Albigensian crusade, as it became known, killed about a million people, not
only Cathars but much of the people of southern France.
This, in turn, led to the formation of the Inquisition, which has its own
infamous history of torture and murder in the name of Jesus and the Church.
Jumping back almost a thousand years to 367 A.D., Athanasius of Alexandria
produced the first list of New Testament books that corresponds to the
twenty-seven books found in the Catholic and Protestant Bibles today.
In 325 A.D., we have men meeting in the city of Nicaea
to discuss and come to terms with the nature of Jesus. The Council of Nicaea,
under the direction of the Roman emperor, Constantine, was to decide whether
Jesus was equal to God or subordinate to God, basing its judgments on its
interpretation of the books of the New Testament. Also, under Constantine,
Christianity became the official religion of all the Roman Empire.
By the Council of Constantinople in 381, Jesus was accepted as the same
nature as God or in simpler terms Jesus became the same as God.
Venturing back to the years around 30 A.D., we come to Jesus and his
followers. Jesus, a Jew, preached the coming of the Kingdom
of God to anyone who would
listen. Jesus followed the Torah, attended the synagogue, made the prescribed
pilgrimages to Jerusalem to attend the feasts, and believed fervently in
God‘s presence in the history of his people: the Israelites.
“And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together,
and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first
commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments
is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the
second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There
is none other commandment greater than these.”
How could this Jewish man have ever thought of himself as God, breaking
the commandment that he said was the greatest? The Lord is one - Love
the Lord your God with your total being.
How far have Christians strayed from their humble beginnings? How could it
have happened that followers of Jesus through the centuries have lost their
way from this Jewish man, who lived and breathed and walked among his people
in a particular place and time? How have these followers of Jesus lost focus
of his simple message of the coming Kingdom
of God – God’s divine
intervention to save his people from all oppressors? How did Jesus become
God? This is where our journey begins.
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