Religion for Mormons and other Idiots

Early in the fifth century AD, the North African Church in particular was very busy trying to suppress the ideas of the Donatists—a school of Christian belief that chiefly claimed that the validity of any Church sacrament was dependent upon the moral worthiness of the priest or clergy official performing it. Were this so, naturally it would require the Holy Roman Church to be accountable for purging its clergy of perverts, cheats, movers, shakers, and self-promoters of all sorts. It would put in doubt the worth of the entire operation in the minds of those dependent upon these sacraments. To the rescue of the Church, came our now venerated Augustine of Hippo, then, just a middleweight African Bishop and scholar, who countered, quoting Optatus of Mileum, his predecessor; “The Church is an institution, ‘whose sanctity is derived from the sacraments, and not estimated from the pride of persons. …The sacraments are holy in themselves and not through men.’”

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Celtic regions of the British Isles by best estimate, a very intellectual young priest and Celtic monk by the name of Pelagius was motivated to leave his friendly, wet, shamrock-covered isles and take his St. Patrick style ideas into the heart of Christianity and do battle with a Church he felt was going astray. Pelagius however, fell mostly on the side of the Donatists on the above point.

Pelagius’ first trip to central Christendom took him to Rome in 380. There he found a pompous, opulent, wasteful, prideful, and overtly corrupt Church that appalled him. Everything about the Church in Rome was in opposition to his ascetic Celtic upbringing. He was galled by the extravagance of the hierarchy—particularly the Pope. Pelagius was insulted to hear what he called a “moral laxity” in the doctrine of Divine Grace hehad heard a Roman bishop cite from Augustine’s Confessions. The idea of helplessly begging for whatever Grace God might give with no hope of influencing God’s Grace one way or another, imperiled the entire moral law, as Pelagius put it.

In his visit to Rome and the course of his many debates in various forums there, he found his closest collaborator, a lawyer named Celestius. Pelagius became primarily the speechwriter and Celestius became the battling orator, promoting what became known as “Pelagianism.”

Pelagius retired to Ireland at length, taking with him his disciple Celestius. Here they continued to flail away at the Bishop of Hippo and his then yet-to-be-canonized doctrinal inventions. At the very moment when Augustine was just starting to find regional Church acceptance of his doctrinal masterpiece, Original Sin, Pelagius declared this newly invented doctrine to be abominable and spoiled a lot of Augustine’s fun and fame. It was from then on, open warfare between these two saintly men—as both acknowledged the other to be.

According to Pelagius, Adam’s sin didn’t fatally corrupt humanity, but instead he taught that“Over the years our sin gradually corrupts us, building an addiction and then holding us bound with what seems like the force of nature itself.” (Letter to Demetrias, VIII) Humans by nature have a clean slate at birth, and it is only through voluntary sin that humans are made wicked. In theory, a human could live a sinless life and merit heaven. In practice however, man, being by nature imperfect an unequal to God, sin always stained mankind one way or another given enough time and temptation. Pelagius was not therefore, making a claim as his detractors maintained, that man would be just fine without God’s Grace anyway.  He was saying however that the argument made by Augustine that if killed, unbaptized infants burned in hell, was a load of crap. Pelagius was saying that dead babies never had a chance to sin willfully or otherwise and were given a “pass” by God.

About 412, Pelagius took a trip to Palestine where the Bishop John of Jerusalem, a good friend, welcomed him. Pelagianism had spread like wildfire around Carthage, and the appearance of its author in Augustine’s back yard so-to-speak prompted a flurry of opposition from the Augustinian camp. Augustine had already disseminated four official letters condemning Pelagianism. Augustine’s associate Jerome, AKA “Saint” Jerome, a Latin Church scholar, happened to live in Jerusalem. Jerome had also authored several strong letters attempting to censure and eradicate Pelagianism. Visiting with Jerome at the time was another virulently anti-Pelagianist, Orosius, a pupil of Augustine. Together Jerome and Orosius publicly charged Pelagius with heresy and demanded action from Bishop John of Jerusalem. John called a council in July 415.

Church records suggest that Orosius’ lack of Greek made him look unprepared and not very convincing as the main prosecutor of the case against Pelagius. Bishop John’s Eastern heritage also made him far more willing to entertain the idea that humanity was basically good rather than utterly evil at birth. The council delivered no verdict on the issue and the Synod of Jerusalem remanded the argument to the Latin or Western Church, since Jerome, Orosius, Pelagius and Celestius were all disciples of the Latin Church.

A few months later, December of 415, two deposed bishops came to Palestine ostensibly to give evidence against Pelagius before the Synod of Diospolis, headed by the Bishop of Caesarea. The council was met but neither instigating bishop showed up for various odd reasons. Orosius had also intended to carry on his prosecution at this venue but left Palestine with no explanation after a consultation with Bishop John of Jerusalem. Pelagius did appear, armed with letters of recommendation from many scholars and Church authorities including Augustine himself, who in spite of their disagreements upon doctrine, gave a hearty endorsement of Pelagius’ moral and scholarly credentials. The Synod of Diospolis declared: “Now since we have received satisfaction in respect of the charges brought against the monk Pelagius in his presence and since he gives his assent to sound doctrines but condemns and anathematizes those contrary to the faith of the Church, we adjudge him to belong to the communion of the Catholic Church.”

As if to settle up with Jerome and Augustine once and for all, in 416 Pelagius wrote his most famous tome, On Free Will. Or: De Libero Arbitrio . This work did a major hatchet-job on Augustine’s theories.

As if to shut Pelagius up once and for all, Orosius, faithful lackey of Augustine, came crying back to Africa where Augustine took matters into his own hands and convened two local synods on their own authority. This council wrote an official letter of condemnation of Pelagius and his teachings, and sent it to Pope Innocent I of Rome. Now, even though sanctioned by four other bishops, Augustine of Hippo had no serious title or right or following in the greater Christian body. Even with his four back-bush bishop buddies Augustine had no Apostolic See and no universally binding right to define what was or wasn’t “orthodox” without it. Augustine’s church hadn’t been founded by one of the original Apostles and that made him an inherently inferior bishop. Luckily, he and Jerome both were great pals with Pope Innocent I of Rome.

Pope Innocent needed little convincing from Augustine and his African council of bishops. He immediately ordered a response from Pelagius. Pelagius put together his arguments in a letter and sent it back to Pope Innocent I. By the time it arrived however, Pope Innocent I was dead as a doornail. The letter was read by Pope Zosimus of Rome instead. In 417 Zosimus declared that he had been duly impressed by the defense Pelagius had made of his ideas and their basis in scripture and tradition, and declared him innocent of heresy.

Augustine was shocked. In 418 he called the Council of Carthage. This council named nine beliefs it claimed in particular were universal and orthodox in all the Church and always had been:

1. Death came from sin, not man’s physical nature. [I could write pages on the stupidity of that notion.]
2. Infants must be baptized to be cleansed from original sin.
3. Justifying grace covers past sins and helps avoid future sins.
4. The grace of Christ imparts strength and will to act out God’s commandments.
5. No good works can come without God’s grace.
6. We confess we are sinners because it is true, not from humility.
7. The saints ask for forgiveness for their own sins.
8. The saints also confess to be sinners because they are.
9. Children dying without baptism are excluded from both the Kingdom of heaven and eternal life.

Augustine pointed out simply that Pelagius had denied each one of these basic, universal Christian beliefs, and therefore he was in effect a heretic regardless of what the Pope had just found. Pelagians were thereafter banished from Italy, and by extension, the Western Church entirely, but it wasn’t quite that simple or immediate however. The most reliable versions of the story claim that since Pope Zosimus had already declared Pelagius innocent of heresy, and of course, as a Pope he wasn’t inclined to admit he’d goofed the first time, that Zosimus. Augustine likewise, a loyal Western Church product, wasn’t going to push the issue too hard with Il Papa, so Augustine went to friendly civil authorities and had Pelagius, Celestius and all their followers declared public nuisances and disturbers of the peace, and the actual order banishing Pelagianism from Italy came from the Emperor and governors, not the Pope.

Now, I have just two points for you to consider with this little bit of history. And this is Christian history, recorded by the winners, not some secret conspiracy nonsense pulled from hidden archives. It is not even contended by Christians:

First, going on some five-hundred years into Christianity, two major players with major authority and thoroughbred Christian scholarly and clerical pedigrees came to two radically opposed conclusions from exactly the same sources. Both claimed they had come to these beliefs via preserved scripture and Church tradition. Both claimed the most canonized records supported their own interpretations and completely condemned their opponent’s opinions and interpretations.

Secondly, It took multiple councils and scores of bishops to get any sort of condemnation of the doctrines and writings of Pelagius, and likewise, having had the case before him twice the Pope in Rome Himself could not bring himself to issue an open condemnation of Pelagius. Conversely, there was no instant affirmation of anything Augustine was arguing throughout all the same councils, and again, even hearing the case twice the Pope in Rome Himself did not overtly endorse Augustine’s notions instantly as patently and universally perfect Christian tradition. It took some time and intrigue to make the endorsement finally. Therefore, five-hundred years and countless Popes and priests and bishops and scholars into Christian history, it was not quite certain to even the Pope, whether or not man was basically good or inherently, utterly evil. It was not quite sure whether or not the innocent unborn really were innocent, or whether they were doomed to eternal fire and pain unless rescued by the Church. And then, it was not even certain if you could rescue anyone at all, or if this person or that person was going to be “Elected” by God no matter what you or they did, and if this one or that one was just going to be ripped into the fires of hell because God had already decreed it when they were created. These brutally, extreme opposite concepts came evolving through hundreds of years and thousands of Christian thinkers and Christianity en-mass still couldn’t be sure which one was “orthodox” and which one was “heresy.”

How did Pelagius escape condemnation so many times in so many councils? Well, that was easy. Five-hundred years into Christianity all that had really been worked out is the Nicene creed and a couple of other vague statements of faith. All he had to do was confess his belief in these by then couple-of-hundred-years-old creeds and the whole rest of the controversy was anybody’s guess. The Nicene Creed is gibberish and could mean anything. It’s nothing to confess it and then go on to bigger problems.

And it’s an ongoing chain of viciously enforced guesswork by whatever Church or civil political and intellectual forces were at play. Two-hundred years before Pelagious saved his butt by clinging to the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed, there was the poor shmucks who were excommunicated trying to hammer out the Nicene Creed. You had one faction ready to kill and sentence to hell the other over inserting this one word or that other word that means almost the same thing. The winners of that argument became professors of “what the Church has always believed.” The losers became heretics. But that much had been settled by Pelagius’ time. So he just copped his faith in a nebulous Creed bickered out hundreds of years before his time and was then free to experiment with bigger ideas.

According to Roman Catholic records, which seem to go out of their way to prove the Pope was going to condemn him anyway–Pelagius and Celestius fled the hearings, leaving them unfinished. Augustine and his disciples had a connection to Valerian, who held an influential position in Ravenna, and this civil connection developed into the secular power taking part in the dispute directly through the Emperor Honorius, by rescript of 30 April, 418, from Ravenna, banishing all Pelagians from the cities of Italy. Somewhere in there when the emperor got involved, Pope Zosimus had a change of heart under the combined civil pressure and growing clerical support for Augustine. It became a popularity contest, and to support Pelagius was to insult the honor of Augustine. Augustine and his friends were favored by the emperor. Ergo, supporting Pelagius was also insulting the emperor. Zosimus finally issued a Papal condemnation of Pelagianism and in spite of this pressure, and several waves of pressure from both the Pope and civil authorities, by 428 18 bishops in Italy alone still refused to sign the Papal decree condemning Pelagianism. The penalty for this was being deposed from office and yet they refused.

Pelagianism in fact spread and grew until it was finally beaten and hounded to death through the Greek Church, Gaul, and into the British Isles, and had morphed into Semipelagianism, which attempted to take the best features of both Pelagius and Augustine’s ideas and reconcile them. It took until 529 to forcefully convince all of Christianity that man was born evil and God saved whoever he wanted and your human input of any sort was pointless.

Pelagius and his followers represent the last remnant of the other side of a doctrinal and philosophical war fought and won by Augustine of Hippo and his followers. The only evidence of Pelagius’ writings remains as quoted excerpts appearing in papers Augustine and his fellows used to defame them. That is the Christian pattern. The Greek Church doesn’t even name Pelagius or illustrate his “heresies.” He just vanishes in Eastern tradition out of the historical record along with all of his supporters. That is why a thousand years later John Calvin or Martin Luther during the Reformation and Protestand Movement, could probably honestly believe the Church had always believed Augustine’s entire body of guesswork.

But wrong or right, the fact is, it’s not even logically possible to claim that Augustine’s beliefs have always been orthodox and universal. It took a hundred years and more after the Bishop of Hippo first pulled Original Sin and Predestination out of his saintly backside just to decide Augustine’s ideas had always been believed by the Church. In the meantime, obviously not everyone in the Church was believing it for over a hundred years.

If Augustine’s ideas were all that universal and traditional, these debates could have never run for whole lifetimes and beyond, through trial after trial. Pelagius’ wholly opposing arguments could never have gone before higher and higher clerical authorities as Augustine personally tried to batter them down into infamy, while Popes and bishops and scholars scrutinized them without reaching any clear and unanimous insight into which of these two radically different positions were really the “orthodox” Christian faith.

Taking both arguments into account, and taking the sheer time, talent and effort put into proving the truth of either or both sides of the Pelagius v Augustine debate presented to and through many noted Christian judges and juries, all that the story of Pelagius actually proves is that both Augustine and Pelagius were pulling it all out of their backsides and making it up as they went along. What the Council of Carthage really proves, is that until 418 Christianity didn’t really have an official opinion on anything either Pelagius or Augustine had to offer.

Christian history shows indeed, that variations and combinations of both Augustine and Pelagius were melded and blended to become Semipelagianism, Arminianism, Calvinism, Methodism, Unitarianism, Wesleyanism, and a number of Eastern variants. And while the West claims to be the product of the pure and undefiled Christian tradition via Augustine, little concessions have been made over the generations to mitigate some of the most stupid and evil of Augustine’s assertions. For example, the last of Augustine’s quoted nine canons used against Pelagius at Carthage is no longer widely taught in Roman Catholicism. A Mormon, but not a polite one mind you, would say, because it’s the most evil and asinine. It’s self-apparently wrong and ungodly. Joseph Smith wasn’t the first to say as much and he wasn’t the last.

From a Mormon standpoint mind you, both Pelagius and Augustine were full of bologna. Mormons can’t even fathom that Christians could have, do, or ever did believe the sort of idiocy Augustine came up with. When Christians attack Mormonism, all a Mormon really need do is say, at least Mormons don’t have to believe that little dead babies are burning in flaming sulphur for all eternity through accident of birth.

The current Catechism of the Catholic Church states that children who die without baptism are “entrusted to the mercy of God.” The problem with that statement is that the very heart of this Augustinian nightmare we now call Christianity, of necessity sends even the aborted fetus to hell. No amount of “Provisional Grace” and postulating about “Mercy” or “Limboizing” and praying them out of hell with the help of a friendly saint or the Virgin Mary or begging for the intercession of Jesus Christ gets around the matter of all flesh being born utterly evil and thus deserving and doomed to hell unless you are Elected to be baptized into the Church and receive the necessary sacraments. If you die before that happens, however young, in or out of the womb, on this continent, on Mars or under a totalitarian state that refuses to let you know anything about Jesus, the Bible or the Church, all that means in Augustine’s theory is that you were not Elect and God chose not to Elect you. The manner of, or reasons for your non-election is irrelevant. God did it to you. How He did it to you or why He did it to you is above your pay grade. You are powerless to change it. You are powerless to change God’s mind on it.  Hell and Heaven are predestined.

Here it is straight from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Some codices containing a ninth canon (Denzinger, loc. cit., note 3): Children dying without baptism do not go to a “middle place” (medius locus), since the non reception of baptism excludes both from the “kingdom of heaven” and from “eternal life”.

So, the Roman Catholic Church in this case, can choose to just omit printing it out and teaching it to little kids in confirmation class, but after the Trinity, the doctrine of Original Sin is the very core of the faith. It is the very core of virtually all modern, mainstream Christianity, and the more even an “enlightened” Protestant, American Christian variant claims to be “Traditional” the more that sect generally emphasizes it. If you have Original Sin, you have Augustine, and if you have Augustine, you have babies burning in hell.

It’s that simple.

Which gets me to my unnanounced third point in this historical episode. Let’s assume the Roman Catholic Church, representing “What Christians have always Believed” for the moment, condemned Pelagius for not believing that unbaptized children went to hell. We know this actually happened, and we know Augustine was behind it. This made Pelagius a heretic, because he did not confess loyalty to a major canon that the Church has “always” believed. Well, the “Church” doesn’t believe that any more. The “Church” therefore has stopped believing something it has “always” believed. A “universal” belief is now no longer “universal.” And the “Church” now believes another new thing it has always believed.

Many of us have been raised on the King James Bible. I hate to come back to bashing that venerable old record around, but there is no better evidence that the “Church” adjusts from era-to-era what it has “always” believed than the preface from the “Authorized Version.”

The Epistle Dedicatory

TRANSLATED OUT OF THE ORIGINAL TONGUES:
AND WITH THE FORMER TRANSLATIONS DILIGENTLY COMPARED AND REVISED,
BY HIS MAJESTY’S SPECIAL COMMAND

There are no manuscripts in the original tongues of the entire New Testament. The lie here is multiple: No original manuscripts exist nor do even copies of manuscripts pretending to be from the original New Testament authors in the “original tongues.” We have some Greek versions written long after the death of the original authors. The King James Bible also originally contained the Apocrypha and that got dropped entirely. Even today zealous Christian sects preach this particular version to be written directly from the mouth of Jesus into King’s English. But, Jesus personally had nothing to do with writing or preserving any of it. This is also not the “Authorized” version any more. The sanctioning clergy that commissioned and purified this “perfect” English Bible has adopted a new one.

But if the “Church” tells you this King James Bible is the real thing, the actual Bible Jesus wrote Himself and then handed down exactly like it is, and you’re still all too willing to believe this impossible fantasy in spite of all the absolute proof it never could have happened that way even from Christian records themselves, well, you’re just helplessly ignorant. You’re just going to let it slide on by without making waves when the “Church” tells you God is like a shamrock or that all the uncivilized, dirty little dark babies in the Heathen Nations have not been Elected and that’s why it’s fine that they burn in brimstone forever.

So, case closed. The “Church” changes what it believes. Sometimes the “Church” changes what it as “always” believed so much it has to change its name from Catholic, to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, or to Protestant from Roman Catholic, or Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, from Protestant and so forth. Or for that matter, from ELCA to LCA to ALC to EIEIO. The “Church” promotes what it believes at the moment and validates it by claiming it has “always” believed it. If you claim you find this to be also true in Mormonism, you must first also openly confess it in “Christianity” because Mormonism has only been at it for a couple of hundred years and still hasn’t made the radical sorts of basic doctrinal changes that your so-called “orthodox” Christianity has made hundreds if not thousands of times or the two-millenia it’s been inventing itself.

As a refresher, I’m attaching a handy chronology of Christianity’s general development to re-orient you before I move into the Reformation and Protestant Movements.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvcApologetics Toolkit

DEVELOPMENT OF THE BIBLICAL CANON

adapted from materials of Professor Paul Hahn of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas

---

Development of the Old Testament Canon

1000-50 BC:

The Old Testament (hereafter “OT”) books are written.

C. 200 BC:

Rabbis translate the OT from Hebrew to Greek, a translation called the “Septuagint” (abbreviation: “LXX”). The LXX ultimately includes 46 books.

AD 30-100:

Christians use the LXX as their scriptures. This upsets the Jews.

C. AD 100:

So Jewish rabbis meet at the Council of Jamniah and decide to include in their canon only 39 books, since only these can be found in Hebrew.

C. AD 400:

Jerome translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin (called the “Vulgate”). He knows that the Jews have only 39 books, and he wants to limit the OT to these; the 7 he would leave out (Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach [or "Ecclesiasticus"], and Baruch–he calls “apocrypha,” that is, “hidden books.” But Pope Damasus wants all 46 traditionally-used books included in the OT, so the Vulgate has 46.

AD 1536:

Luther translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to German. He assumes that, since Jews wrote the Old Testament, theirs is the correct canon; he puts the extra 7 books in an appendix that he calls the “Apocrypha.”

AD 1546:

The Catholic Council of Trent reaffirms the canonicity of all 46 books.

---

Development of the New Testament Canon

C. AD 51-125:The New Testament books are written, but during this same period other early Christian writings are produced–for example, the Didache (c. AD 70), 1 Clement (c. 96), the Epistle of Barnabas (c. 100), and the 7 letters of Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110).C. AD 140:Marcion, a businessman in Rome, teaches that there were two Gods: Yahweh, the cruel God of the OT, and Abba, the kind father of the NT. So Marcion eliminates the Old Testament as scriptures and, since he is anti-Semitic, keeps from the NT only 10 letters of Paul and 2/3 of Luke’s gospel (he deletes references to Jesus’ Jewishness). Marcion’s “New Testament”–the first to be compiled–forces the mainstream Church to decide on a core canon: the four gospels and letters of Paul.C. AD 200:But the periphery of the canon is not yet determined. According to one list, compiled at Rome c. AD 200 (the Muratorian Canon), the NT consists of the 4 gospels; Acts; 13 letters of Paul (Hebrews is not included); 3 of the 7 General Epistles (1-2 John and Jude); and also the Apocalypse of Peter.AD 367:The earliest extant list of the books of the NT, in exactly the number and order in which we presently have them, is written by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his Easter letter of 367. [Note: this is well after the Constantine's Edict of Toleration in 313 A.D.]AD 904:Pope Damasus, in a letter to a French bishop, lists the New Testament books in their present number and order.AD 1442:At the Council of Florence, the entire Church recognizes the 27 books, though does not declare them unalterable.AD 1536:In his translation of the Bible from Greek into German, Luther removes 4 NT books (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelations) from their normal order and places them at the end, stating that they are less than canonical.AD 1546:At the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church reaffirms once and for all the full list of 27 books as traditionally accepted.

---

Digitized and formatted in HTML by the Augustine Club at Columbia University, 1995

http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/timeline.htm

The following timeline of Christianity summarizes some of the most important events in Christianity since its founding about 2,000 years ago. (Events in light grey are non-religious events included for historical context.)

c. 4 BC
Birth of Jesus

c. 26 AD
John the Baptist begins ministry

c. 27 AD
Jesus begins ministry

c. 30 AD
Crucifixion of Jesus

c. 35
Conversion of Paul

c. 44
Martyrdom of James

c. 46-48
Paul’s first missionary journey

c. 49
Council of Jerusalem

c. 50-52
Paul’s second missionary journey

c. 51-52
First and Second Thessalonians written

c. 53-57
Paul’s third missionary journey

c. 57
Letter to the Romans written

c. 59-62
Paul imprisoned in Rome

c. 60
Andrew martyred by crucifixion in Achaia (Greece).

c. 66-67
Second Timothy written

c. 68
Martyrdom of Paul

70
Fall of Jerusalem

c. 90-95
John exiled on island of Patmos

c. 95
Book of Revelation written

c. 96
Clement of Rome’s Letter to the Corinthians written

c. 120
Didache written

202
Christians persecuted under Septimus Severus

211
Christians tolerated under Emperor Antoninus Caracalla

222
Christians favored Emperor Alexander Severus

230
Origen’s On First Principles

235
Christians persecuted under Emperor Maximin the Thracian

238
Christians tolerated under Emperor Gordian III

244
Christians favored under Emperor Philip the Arabian

251
Cyprian’s Unity of the Catholic Church

254
Death of Origen

303
Diocletian orders burning of Christian books and churches

312
Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity

313
Edict of Milan establishes official toleration of Christianity

325
Council of Nicea

336
Death of Constantine

354
Birth of Augustine

367
Athanasius lists all 27 books of NT

379
Basil the Great dies

380
Christianity made official religion of Roman Empire

381
Council of Constantinople

386
Augustine converts to Christianity

389
Gregory of Nazianzus dies

395
Gregory of Nyssa dies

c. 400
Jerome’s Vulgate (translation of the Greek Bible into Latin)

407
John Chrysostom dies

411
Council of Carthage condemns Donatists

417
Pope Innocent I condemns Pelagianism

420
Death of Jerome

430
Death of Augustine

431
Council of Ephesus

451
Council of Chalcedon

787
Second Council of Nicea

950
Olga of Russia converts to Christianity

1054
Great Schism between East and West

1093
Anselm becomes Archbishop of Canterbury

1095
Council of Clermont: Pope Urban II proclaims First Crusade

1098
Crusaders take Antioch from Turks

1099
Crusaders recapture Jerusalem from Turks

1122
Concordat of Worms

1141
Peter Abelard condemned

1144
Fall of Edessa (crusader state)

1187
Fall of Jerusalem to Turks

1215
Fourth Lateran Council

1309
“Babylonian Captivity” (until 1377)

1337
Hundred Years’ War (until 1453)

1378
Great Western Schism (until 1423)

1409
Council of Pisa

1413-14
Lollard rebellion

1415
Council of Constance. Martyrdom of Jan Hus.

1420
Crusade against Hussites

1431
Joan of Arc martyred

1431-49
Council of Basel

1438-45
Council of Ferrara-Florence

1453
Fall of Constantinople to Turks

1478
Spanish Inquisition founded by Ferdinand and Isabella

1483
Birth of Martin Luther

1492
Expulsion of Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella

1505
Luther becomes a monk

1517
Luther posts 95 Theses

1521
Luther excommunicated

1530
Augsburg Confession

1534
Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy

1536
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion

1541
Colloquy of Regensburg

1555
Peace of Augsburg

1559
Elizabeth I’s Act of Uniformity

1590
Michelangelo completes the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome

1609
Baptist Church founded by John Smyth

1611
King James (Authorized) Version of the Bible produced

1729
Beginnings of Methodism, led by John Wesley

1738
John Wesley feels his “heart strangely warmed” during a reading of Luther’s preface to Romans on Aldersgate Street in London

1775
American Wars of Independence begin

1783
America wins independence from Britain

1793
Louis XVI executed

1797
Second Awakening begins

1798
Pope Pius VI is prisoner of France

1799
Schleiermacher writes Speeches

1801
Cane Ridge Revival

1804
Napoleon becomes emperor

1807
Hegel writes Phenomenology of the Spirit

1808
French occupy Rome

1810
Mexico wins independence

1812-14
British-American War

1814
Reorganization of the Jesuits

1816
American Bible Society established

1822
Schleiermacher writes Christian Faith

1826
American Society for the Promotion of Temperance founded

1830
Joseph Smith produces Book of Mormon

1834
Spanish Inquisition officially abolished

1838
Abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean

1841
David Livingstone to Africa

1845
Methodists and Baptists split over the issue of slavery

1846
Pope Pius IX (until 1878)

1854
Dogma of Immaculate Conception of Mary

1859
Darwin publishes Origin of the Species

1861-65
American Civil War

1861
Presbyterians divide over the issue of slavery

1869
First Vatican Council

1870
Dogma of Papal Infallibility

1872
Moody begins preaching

1875
Mary Baker Eddy writes Science and Health

1882
Neitzsche declares “God is dead”

1895
Five Fundamentals

1900
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams

1906
Azusa Street revival

1908
Henry Ford introduces the Model T

1910
World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh

1914
Assemblies of God founded

1914-18
World War I

1917
Russian Revolution

1919
Prohibition passed into law

1925
Scopes “Monkey” trial

1932
Barth’s Church Dogmatics

1939
Hitler invades Poland and sparks WWI

1945
Nag Hammadi Library discovered in Egypt;
US drops atomic bombs on Japan

1947
India wins independence from U.K.

1948
World Council of Churches founded

1950
Papal encyclical Humani generis

1956
First issue of Christianity Today

1960
Birth control pill approved by FDA

1961
First human in space
Papal encyclical Mater et Magistra

1962-65
Second Vatican Council

1963
MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech

1968
Papal encyclical Humanae vitae

1969
First man on the moon

1971
Intel introduces the microprocessor

1973
Roe vs. Wade

1987-88
Televangelist scandals

1989
First woman ordained in an apostolic-succession church (the Protestant Episcopal church). Fall of the Berlin Wall.

1997
Birth of the internet

Sources

1. Earle E. Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries (Zondervan, 1996).
2. Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity (Prince Press, 1999).
3. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, Vol. I: to A.D. 1500 (4th ed., Prince Press, 2000).
4. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service, 2004.

http://ministries.tliquest.net/theology/apocryphas/nt/

http://www.maplenet.net/~trowbridge/NT_Hist.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Christianity

http://www.internationalbibles.com/catalog/services/versions.htm

 There are two-thousand years of important Christian thinkers to skim through before I can get back to my main complaints against Mormonism. Most scholars or researchers or creative writers who mine out the many flamboyantly negative aspects of the lives and teachings of these early “Saints” do it for one of two reasons: they just want to dump all over the Roman Catholic Church, or they want to prove the whole Christian Movement is a load of rubbish. In my case I have to admit to neither motivation.

The Roman Catholic Church gets singled out at times in my observations at any rate, simply because it became the biggest and loudest and most vehement example of Christian ignorance, hate, bigotry, genocidal violence and general stupidity. The Eastern Church was populated with many of the same arrogant, evil bastards, they just never applied themselves as eagerly to the task of violently oppressing humanity and repressing enlightenment as the Roman Church did. And unlike the Protestant Movement, or Joseph Smith’s “Restoration Movement,” I’m not really out to write the whole Christian experience off simply to bolster my own claim to have reformed or restored the Church to newfound perfection. The Protestant Movement in particular has its own series of demented, homicidal bastards to justify. Even the devout Protestant Joseph Smith discovered this very quickly after shooting off his mouth about talking to angels and seeing God. His devoted Protestant friends were instantly former Protestant pals.

And the Mormons, well, they’re just getting started. I’m already into the post-Jesus Christian narrative some two centuries and more beyond where present day post-Smith Mormonism has yet to arrive. Mormons are barely leaving their “Apostolic Fathers” behind and through their Apologist era. The Latter-day Saints are into their first batch of Theologians and just getting into their “Utah Fathers” period.

Mormonism has in fact followed more than coincidentally the same sort of developmental path as the early Christian Church. And I mean this not necessarily in a faith-promoting way. I’m not interested in proving “signs of the True Church” in any conventional Mormon fashion. But I am concerned that the Mormon and Christian alike have some conception of what people are like—what typical human beings are like–even when hundreds and thousands of years later we have canonized them and kiss the ground they walked upon as holy. They’re still people. And some of them not very good people, at least in many aspects of their lives and character. When these fallible humans put together any organization it is only a matter of time before human failings corrupt the original, pure intent or at a minimum, dilute the original authority and inspiration.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That means all, brothers and sisters. All. Through the years the term “Saint” has become perverted to mean somebody who is sinless. Saints are sinners too. Saints just believe in Christ as they are sinning and falling short. Anyone with faith in Christ is a saint. Which gets me back to wondering how huge committees of the allegedly pious can study the lives of some of these overtly evil guys who developed Christian doctrine after the passing of Christ, and then make Papal announcements that the world has a new “Saint.”

 A case in point is “Saint” Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria in the early fifth century. (Not to be confused with “Saint” Cyril the Philosopher of the Slavs, or “Saint” Cyril of Jerusalem, both of whom by all reckonings would have been on the other side of many arguments with the Bishop of Alexandria and subject to his excommunication and damnation, yet nevertheless all are counted as “Saints.”) Many write of Cyril of Alexandria with high praise regarding his lasting contributions to the doctrines of the incarnation of the Verb (Word) and his championing of the divine maternity of Mary, and they most all credit him with almost single-handedly polishing off the final Church position on Trinitarian theology. But they also are forced to admit that as stunning as his scholarship and religious zeal were, his personal character was indefensibly low.

After an anti-Christian outbreak in his local Jewish population in 415 AD, Cyril raised an immense posse of followers and went from synagogue to synagogue, dragged the rabbis and entire Jewish population out of the city, and let in eager mobs to plunder their goods. This led to another riot and some troubles with the governor who wanted peace amongst all sectors of the population, Jew, pagan, or Christian. This second battle culminated with a mob of Cyril’s Christian friends led by a gang of his own fanatical monks, dragging a noted lady and teacher of philosophy, Hypatia, from her carriage, scraping her through the open streets and into Cyril’s cathedral. They then stripped her and ripped her to pieces before the altar of Christ, and then burnt the pieces. When confronted with this matter, Cyril pretended to have had nothing to do with it, but refused to condemn this profane, excessively vile murder executed by his own people in his own sanctuary, or even chastise any of his loyal followers who had been identified as the culprits.

On a day-to-day basis, Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, used his influence to make sweetheart political and financial deals, amassed a huge fortune, extorted tithes and offerings from all through his religious empire and spent large portions of it on his favorite nephews and in bribing judges, politicians, and civil officials to insure his immunity from the law and in general buy some popularity amongst the ruling classes.

The Church, East and West, towards the middle of the first millennium had become a world-dominating political and spiritual force. Despots like Cyril had on the one hand advanced themselves into very select and educated cadres of literate and socially elite scholars. There were monks who formed orders that did nothing but translate or copy and illustrate and hand letter (Illuminate) sacred manuscripts—that is, when they weren’t being recruited to race into the streets to strip and murder respected lady philosophers. They fretted over every word—perhaps not for all the right reasons, but they were a seriously pious bunch.  Unlike the Apostolic Fathers, who were almost entirely preservationists, or the Apologists, who began to experiment with philosophy and non-literal, symbolic meanings they thought they could find in early writings, these latter scholars, theologians, scribes, priests and popes, began to think that every word of holy writ was perfect, God-crafted and very literal.

If Jesus gave his apostles a chunk of flatbread at the last supper and said to eat it because it was his own flesh, well then that’s exactly what he meant. The question then became one of figuring out or at least rationalizing some doctrinal mechanism of how the “host” or sacramental meal “transubstantiated” from bread and wine into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus.

Many Protestants won’t even know why it is called the “Host.” It “hosts” the actual Person, the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. It morphs from a paltry meal into sacred flesh and blood—literally. That’s what the scripture said. And Jesus said it personally. It wasn’t an obscure or debatable quote. I can’t, and don’t have to speak for those generations of Church geniuses who thought this was a clear and logical doctrine, and thought so vehemently that it was true, that they would send you to hell or even kill you for not confessing your belief in it. Today of course, even in the Roman Church, the world is round and isn’t the center of the universe. And maybe Jesus didn’t actually mean we were to celebrate mass by literally eating his magically transformed meat and gore for Sunday brunch. (Too bad for all those folks we sent to hell or tortured into repentance for all those centuries. Joke’s on us…)

Again, I’m weeding out scores of important early Christian thinkers to skim through the two-thousand years of deadly debates about just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Almost inarguably the most important of these however, is one Augustine of Hippo, who lived from November 13, 354 – August 28, 430 AD. Augustine was part of a mix of “Sainted,” Church writers, scholars, theologians, usually clergy,  in the middle of the first millennium known now as the “Latin Fathers.” Cyril of Alexandria and Augustine are both two of the Latin crowd, both led to the solidifying of now longstanding base-Christian theology as far as the West is considered, but neither of them are all that revered in the East. Their contemporaries there became known as the “Greek Fathers.” It is the Latin Fathers who really came to shine in the end, at least relative to Mormonism and the New World, or the whole Protestant, American Christian religious and social experience in general.

Augustine was a Christian Neo-Platonist who became a fairly minor North African Bishop shortly after his conversion from paganism. He spent a lot of time wondering how God could forgive him for being such a horrible sinner during his pagan youth. Since he could never satisfy himself with his own answers, the short story of his personal theology is that he joined in with early Apologist thinking and fell back on the Plato-inspired ex-nihilo creation of everything out of nothing, developed a totally incorporeal God, an inherently evil, physically polluted man, and practically coined the “mystery” defense as the official Church bandage for the big tear in the fabric of every single one of his theories. Though originally many thought of him as an upstart if not a crackpot, his theology managed to go on to dominate Western Church doctrine.

Augustine gravitated for instance, into thinking that salvation is in all cases an undeserved gift that comes by Grace alone. (At the time, nobody had coined the term “Grace” mind you.)  This led to generations after him thinking that at baptism or when otherwise touched by Grace you are physically changed into a purified form of matter and literally become a new man. This mentality led to thinking the host literally transforms into the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Sacrament of the Last Supper. This also lead to a belief that God made certain people “elect” and others doomed to hell, or that at least God chose whom He wanted to save and whom He didn’t care about and let fall to their well-deserved evil fate of infinite torment. Mankind was already rejected and doomed to hell, so it had to be up to God to change that. Man was not made literally of the right stuff to participate in any fashion in his own salvation. That actually made sense to the early Church scholars mind you. I’m not exaggerating this a bit. If you proceed from the asinine assumption that all matter is evil and God thus can’t be made of matter, it all makes sense that salvation had to come through some divine act that changes the nature of the matter you are made of. That then all has to be up to God, not you.

Augustine in his day would have called himself a Platonist—it’s only later scholars who decided that sufficient additions or deviations from purely Platonic philosophy had been made that Augustine and his period fellows should be termed “New”  or “Neo-Platonists.” They were just Platonists who jammed Plato and Aristotle into a Christian framework.

Augustine fixated on the writings of Paul, a Romanized, Hellenized (Greekified) Jew who was also fully versed in Platonic philosophy. Paul was really Saul of Tarsus, a young punk from the Sanhedrin that condemned Jesus and then began systematically killing off their own Messiah’s followers–Saul’s own tribal brothers. Not even Christ’s followers–the Jerusalem-based Church–could stomach the notion of Saul of Tarsus hanging around with them—perhaps due to lingering bitter feelings and perhaps because they just were not too sure about that whole conversion story. So Paul got sent out of town to do all his apostling.  Like Augustine, Paul spent his life feeling very bad about having been such a consummate sinner before conversion. Between Paul and Augustine’s mutations of his writings, essentially all the theology of the coming Reformation and Protestant Movement was hatched. Augustine mused principally upon his newfound mechanism of “Grace,” and the manner that Original Sin was transmitted down through humanity. He tied himself up in knots over questions of how Jesus could be God and yet be born of a woman, virgin or not, and not be infected by Original Sin. (Of course, nobody had invented the concept or term “Original Sin” at the time either.)

The other issue Augustine wrote a lot about was the “Trinity.”

 When Saint Patrick took Greco-Romanized Christianity to Ireland in the 4th century, the Church had resolved to explain God’s nature in terms of a “Trinity,” which Saint Patrick explained through the use of a three-leaved shamrock, three-in-one, of the same substance but separate. That made sense to his converts. Or at least shut them up long enough to get baptized. If you actually look at his analogy, it doesn’t do anything to explain the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Does he mean one God with three heads? Doesn’t that sound like the universally despised “three manifestations of the same God” theory anyway? Isn’t that just the old story about three blind men who each grab a part of an elephant and describe the animal three different ways, as a snake, as a tree, as rope, because one grabs a trunk, one a leg, and one the tail? That was considered heresy in Saint Patrick’s day and still is. The shamrock just camouflages the argument.

Saint Patrick went to the shamrock comparison not because it was so brilliant and clear, but it had that ring or some sort of sense to it compared to the hopelessly convoluted third-century creeds that had emerged from hundreds of years of in-house dogma fights over the Godhead. Some fourteen or fifteen-hundred years later Thomas Jefferson and many others would still be describing the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds as silly nonsense language used to describe a totally mysterious and incomprehensible God, and accusing its authors of being worshippers of Plato, not Jesus Christ. Saint Patrick avoided most of this by pointing to a shamrock, saying, “It’s like this, you just stare at this example and figure it out from there if you need more…” It was a culturally-friendly shortcut. And of course, he chased all the snakes out of Ireland, so he had that going for him.

When Paul went to Mars Hill, a place where Greek philosophers had gathered for ages to wrangle and debate, he noted a statue dedicated to the “Unknown God.” The philosophers there had in truth erected little tributes to all known gods as something of a universal sign of peace and good will—having dedicated the site to worldwide exchanges of wisdom as they understood wisdom to be. The “Unknown God” was an acknowledgement that there was logically one they didn’t know about or didn’t know about yet. It was a bit symbolic of the quest for that unknown god, or gods, or knowledge. It was a gesture. Knowing this, like Saint Patrick, Paul took advantage of the invitation already there for him to use. He didn’t really mean to suggest that this was actually a statue to the Jesus Christ he’d come to preach about, but having found that ethnically convenient side-door open, Paul was happy to sneak Jesus into the meeting and the Greeks were stuck with yielding the floor to him till they’d heard him out. My point is that you’d have to really be one of those Greek philosophers in attendance to appreciate just how clever this ploy was. If Paul had walked into the crowd ranting about Jesus of Nazareth and requesting some time at the podium, he might have been weeks or months getting on the agenda and nobody would have been interested. Paul exploited their own culture, their own philosophy, and inserted Jesus Christ right at the heart of it in one step. Jesus Christ was instantly a part of the Greek concept of deity, or at least one of them—a type  of deity, a new type of god-concept. it was inherently intriguing to them presented in this manner.

16 ¶ Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city ^awholly given to ^bidolatry.

17 Therefore ^adisputed he in the ^bsynagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.

18 Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.

19 And they took him, and brought him unto ^aAreopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?

20 For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.

21 (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there ^aspent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)

22 ¶ Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are ^atoo superstitious.

23 For as I passed by, and beheld your ^adevotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE ^bUNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ^cignorantly worship, him ^ddeclare I unto you.

24 God that ^amade the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, ^bdwelleth not in temples made with hands;

25 Neither is ^aworshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and ^bbreath, and all things;

26 And hath ^amade of ^bone ^cblood ^dall ^enations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath ^fdetermined the ^gtimes before ^happointed, and the ⁱbounds of their habitation;

27 That they should ^aseek the Lord, ^bif haply they might ^cfeel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:

28 For in him we ^alive, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his ^boffspring.

29 Forasmuch then as we are the ^aoffspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto ^bgold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s ^cdevice.

30 And the times of this ^aignorance God ^bwinked at; but now ^ccommandeth all men every where to ^drepent:

31 Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will ^ajudge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ^bordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath ^craised him from the dead.

32 ¶ And when they heard of the ^aresurrection of the dead, some ^bmocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.

33 So Paul departed from among them.

34 Howbeit certain men clave unto him, and believed: among the which was Dionysius the ^aAreopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Acts 17—And now you see how annoying the LDS footnotes can be….

Clearly Paul steered clear of the whole three-in-one-one-in-three conundrum on Mars Hill because he had enough invitation for a discussion about one god and one god only. Three-in-one might have been pushing the issue beyond politeness and credulity. Paul’s arguments seem to make perfect sense even today, by almost all modern cultural, logical, and philosophical standards.

On the other hand, when Augustine converted to Christianity, the Roman variety mind you, as an accomplished scholar and philosophical debater along Greek lines already, he spent his first 15 years attempting to harmonize the Nicene Creed with logic, reason, and the newly minted scriptures.

Not even his Biblical hero Paul was of much help to him in this endeavor. His final product was De Trinitate in which he struggles awkwardly and desperately to find analogies common to human experience that would explain the still developing, three-persons-in-one-God concept. (Apparently he didn’t have any shamrocks handy.)

The key to making Trinitariansim work out in Augustine’s mind was to accept first that God is immaterial. Augustine considered Plato to be a demigod, but still had problems with making an omnipotent God immaterial. Immaterial might be a good illustration for perfect, but omnipotent was another issue. By studying the works of Plotinus, a noted Neo-Platonist Augustine had already followed deeply for years, he first reasoned out with himself how God could be incorporeal. Once he beat that into his own head against his own common sense, he then went on to reason out how God, having no substance whatsoever of any sort, could make the universe and everything in it out of nothing at all:

Because therefore God made all things which he did not beget of himself, not of those things that already existed, but of those things that did not exist at all, that is, of nothing… For there was not anything of which he could make them.

The highest good, than which there is no higher, is God, and consequently he is unchangeable good, hence truly eternal and truly immortal… And consequently, if he alone is unchangeable, all things that he has made, because he has made them out of nothing, are changeable. For he is so omnipotent, that even out of nothing, that is of what is absolutely non-existent, he is able to make good things both great and small, both celestial and terrestrial, both spiritual and corporeal.

–Augustine, Concerning the Nature of God, chapter 26

Augustine was the final expression of Western Christian thought. His thinking formed the basis of the Reformation and Protestant Movements. Remember that, because his greatest works of “reason” are sophomoric gibberish. The example above is fallacious on numerous points, both logically and physically. The assumption that God made the world out of nothing isn’t Christian, it’s Platonism. It’s a false assumption. The concept of immaterial matter is physically impossible. The definition of nothing is nothing. You can’t get around nothing by saying God is just so great and omnipotent that even though He is nothing, and has nothing to work with, He can still create good out of nothing at all. And if that’s so, why isn’t all of creation good by nature rather than evil? If there’s evil in all matter, then it’s God’s fault because He must have put it there. Anything that exists can only exist as an expression of God’s active will.

This is just dogma being painted to look pretty via the pretense of logic. If God could make everything out of nothing, why couldn’t He make everything as unchangeably good as He is Himself if He wanted to? He’s omnipotent right? In fact, being perfect and good, God would not be capable of making anything bad or imperfect.

How could this twaddle sound brilliant to all of the foremost Christian orators, writers, scholars and philosophers in the Western World for the last millenium and a half? That’s the real mystery to me as a modern, intelligent human being. Nevertheless, the key movers of the Western Church came to think that humble Augustine of Hippo had finally unlocked all the great Truths hidden for all the centuries and finally gotten to the root of Paul’s message.

Augustine had lived a fairly disorderly youth and had among other sins, an illegitimate son by a concubine. His pagan father sent him to Tagaste, then Madaura, and then to Carthage to study rhetoric, mathematics and philosophy until he was twenty. He taught those subjects in Tagaste and then Carthage from 375-383. He then went to Rome and won a chair of rhetoric in Milan. Though his Christian mother followed him there eventually and tried to marry him up and make him respectable, he maintained multiple lovers and even after conversion is quoted as having said, “Lord give me chastity, but not yet.”

When he had investigated his mother’s Christianity in his youth, he found it simple-minded. He was completely enamored with pure reason, and determined never to be indoctrinated into anything so senseless as Christianity. His initial observation of the Bible was that it was “incomprehensible and barbarous.” Augustine came along just in time so that “Bible” Augustine was reading had all the same New Testament Books we have today, and in the same order. So when he at first contemptuously rejected the “Bible,” it was essentially our Bible of today.

He became a Manichean for a good eleven years of his youth by best estimates. This is a religious and philosophical school invented by Mani, or Manes, which personified the Supreme Being as light and goodness, a force who is in constant conflict with chaos and evil. Man’s body was the work of the demon. Manichaeism considered man’s nature to be essentially bad and denied any capability of redemption. Man was what he was and God is what He is. Human will in this scheme was a delusion. All things were God’s will and nothing happened if God did not make it happen. This is an extremely Greek view in which omnipotent, often cruel or capricious gods toyed with mankind like pets or little puppets.

When Augustine did finally examine Christianity in his later years, it was under pressure from his mother, a good friend, and a local bishop he became attached to because of the sheer eloquence of his sermons. Augustine became fixated upon Romans 7 and Paul’s other writings about the antagonism between the flesh and the spirit. This is not unexpected considering Augustine and Paul were both Greco/Roman products to begin with and both sagged with guilt over previous behavior. Both of these “Saints” openly wrote of their own guilt and unworthiness. They would tell you themselves that they were the most egregious sinners in their own estimation. It is small wonder that they both made hashing and re-hashing the topics of inherent sin and undeserved redemption their lifetime gospel hobby.

Augustine invented not just the phrase, but the entire concept of “Original Sin.” His problem centered around this business of God’s creating an imperfect world and humans who could even know what sin was, much less want to do it. He concluded through his “brilliant” logic that God created a perfect world and made man good and sinless. But He also gave man free agency, and thus the possibility of sin existed in this perfect world. Using the chaos demon, Satan, the serpent example from his Manichean training, he made the Devil the active agent of introducing sin and evil to God’s perfect garden, and because our First Parents were the active agents of following this sinful example, God was off the hook for any of the blame or responsibility. This willful act was the “Original Sin.”

He had some other problems with that thesis however, and that was explaining how this guilt could be passed on to generations down the line who hadn’t been part of the Original Sinning. Augustine’s detractors reasoned that this made God arbitrary and unfair to hold the innocent newborn guilty for something they had no part in.  Soon, Augustine found a counter to this argument, which he called “Inherited Sin,” which came by way of the filthy act of human reproduction. He defended his claims using a now disputed translation of Romans 5:12:

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

This is King James version. Or at least the fragment that Augustinians like to quote. But let’s look at the whole argument being raised by Paul in this verse a little closer:

12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— 13 for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.

–ESV Bible

Or:

¹²Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— ¹³for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. ¹⁴Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

–NIV Bible

Or this little commentary from the Geneva Study Bible:

5:12 ¹⁰ Wherefore, as by ^l one man ^m sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, ⁿ for that all have sinned:

(10) From Adam, in whom all have sinned, both guiltiness and death (which is the punishment of the guiltiness) came upon all.
(l) By Adam, who is compared with Christ, and similar to him in this, that both of them make those who are theirs partakers of that which they have: but they are not the same in this, that Adam derives sin into them that are his, even into their very nature, and that to death: but Christ makes them that are his partakers of his righteousness by grace, and that to life.
(m) By sin is meant that disease which is ours by inheritance, and men commonly call it original sin: for so he calls that sin in the singular number, whereas if he speaks of the fruits of it, he uses the plural number, calling them sins.
(n) That is, in Adam.

5:13 ¹¹ (For until ^o the law sin was in the world: but sin is not ^p imputed when there is no law.

(11) That this is so, that both guiltiness and death began not after the giving and transgressing of law of Moses, is evident in that men died before that law was given: for in that they died, sin, which is the cause of death, existed then: and in such a way, that it was also imputed: because of this it follows that there was then some law, the breach of which was the cause of death.
(o) Even from Adam to Moses.
(p) Where there is no law made, no man is punished as faulty and guilty.

5:14 ¹² Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over ^q them that had not sinned after the ^r similitude of Adams transgression, ¹³ who is the figure of him that was to come.

(12) But that this law was not the universal law, and that death did not proceed from any actual sin of everyone particularly, it appears by this, that the very infants which neither could ever know nor transgress that natural law, are nonetheless dead as well as Adam.
(q) Our infants.
(r) Nor after the manner of sin of those who are older, following their lusts: but yet the whole posterity was corrupted in Adam when he knowingly and willingly sinned.

The passage in question is attempting (clumsily) to parallel Adam passing death on through his generations–a concept Jews at least would have been familiar with–to Jesus Christ passing on life to all mankind, something that would be weird and foreign to his Roman converts in particular. One man brought death to all mankind, one man brings life. Any other contingencies in the argument are superfluous. And the fact that Adam also brought life to all mankind before he brought death to it further muddies the analogy. Sooner or later any analogy falls apart if you start digging around its base too deeply. That’s the nature of the Greek system.

It is impossible to miss that Paul inserted into this argument what was obviously a very clear principle his audience well understood: Sin is not counted or punishable or attributable to anyone who hasn’t heard the law. If people died before Moses then, they were answering to a physical law which Paul makes very clear is only a physical characteristic passed on from Adam. His audience understood this. This physical death he is maintaining, is obviously not the result of sin in the conventional sense, and is obviously not doomed to be an un-recoverable injustice because God is fair and just. Hence, because Adam brought this physical death to his children, Jesus has been sent by our Father to save all of His children from it. This salvation is free and universal, in the same sense that not one of Adam’s children did a thing to “deserve” being physically imperfect and doomed to die. This Paul makes clear, is separate from the “sin” or willful evil committed by knowing adults. (And a Mormon at least would assume that Paul meant deliberate “sins” were accountable in full and required a conscious act of repentance for entry into a kingdom of glory and return to God’s presence, but not simply for simple physical salvation.)

The punishment for being human is death. This punishment is meted out even without us knowing or transgressing any of God’s laws. Yes, that’s Adam’s fault. It stands to reason however, that having paid the price of this “Inherited Sin” that God then owes us a release. Augustine missed that bit of reasoning. All of mankind will in fact be saved from Adam’s physical sin,  because Jesus was sent to insure it. That’s Paul’s lesson here: There will certainly be no billions of ignorant sinners in the Heathen Nations rotting in hell for never running into a preacher and a Bible. There will be no unborn babies floating around in a Lake of Fire that burns forever but does not consume because they didn’t muster the wherewithal to come on out of the womb and get baptized. That much Paul makes very clear. Remember that when I get around to pen-lashing Calvin and his Protestant chums.

Augustine’s “Original Sin” was supposed to be a quick end-run around a logical stumbling block in other arguments. He had to prove mankind was inherently and irretrievably evil to make all his other theories work—any scrap of authoritative proof would do, by way of any logic. Paul’s reasoning seemed close enough to make God look fair. It wasn’t God, it was Adam damning us all. There isn’t however, anything more corrupt and evil in a Platonic Manichean’s mind that death. It’s the most un-God-like, imperfect, corrupt and un-Divine thing there is–next to copulation, which he made the direct mechanism that passes the sin on. So Augustine never looked any deeper into what he was reading than an easy link to his already well-fixed Platonist rationale. Man is proven inherently evil by the fact that we die. That’s all he needed to see in it, even though the main verse he used never dealt with eternal damnation at all, simply mortal death, a death Paul claimed Jesus would universally save us from a few verses later and in numerous other writings.

(The notion that physical resurrection is a free gift in not Mormonism, it is called “Universalism.” It actually had a big following at one time, and from the early centuries after Christ it never did drop entirely out of the “Christian” mainstream.)

Augustine was quite the innovator, pulling entirely new concepts out of mostly Paul’s writing. Or more honestly, pulled new ideas out of his backside and “proving” them via Paul’s writings. This isn’t my complaint against him, this is in fact the universal challenged of his opposing peers in his own day. But the Bishop of Hippo had a way of wooing over the people who really counted. Augustine for instance invented a totally new concept that some of his most important fellows of status and power thought was better than sliced bread: the omnipresence of God. God was not only immaterial, but He was also everywhere in the universe and inside of everything. He reasoned that, like a man’s spirit is everywhere in his body, so God’s spirit is everywhere in all of creation.God is made of nothing, but it’s a nothing so big it fills the universe. In philosophical terms that’s sheer poetry baby. Dig it.

Omnipresence created problems explaining God’s spirit being not just around or near, or able to see everything, but actually being inside of an inherently evil mankind, inside of Satan, and the whole inherently evil structure of matter. It later became a great way for the Vatican to gracefully back away from claiming the Host actually transmutated into the flesh of Jesus at the Council of Vatican II in 1962-1965, because you could just say it was the Deified immaterial flesh of Jesus and it was inside the Host in an invisible mysterious way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation But you still have God’s essence conceptually permeating Charles Manson and Adolph Hitler in this particular scheme. Augustine never bothered to address this embarrassing logical dilemma in any serious way.

Augustine also never got around the problem of God creating a world in which the possibility of sin existed, or how Satan could have invaded God’s sinless world, or how to be consistent with his other claims, God must have made Satan. He never got around the bold assertion that God made Adam good, but even so, Adam chose to sin. Agency or no agency, there would be no satisfactory reason why Adam should have any desire to sin if God had made him good. Sinning would have been totally repulsive to Adam, as would having lengthy conversations with the devil to discuss  just exactly how he might get down to doing some of it.

Augustine never got the Trinity explanation polished to his own satisfaction either. He just gave up on it after 15 years. His detractors accused him of preaching “personal theology” and essentially claimed he was pulling this stuff out of his backside. As an obscure little bishop, rival Christian thinkers frequently pondered aloud and in print, just who did he think he was to float this sort of idiocy about the Christian world anyway?

Augustine formulated many more troubling questions than he ever came up with clear answers for. But by courting the important bishops and impressing all the most convenient emperors as they came and went to enforce his ideas by force of civil and canon law, and thus silence his critics, he came to philosophically and theologically own Western Christianity. How he managed to pull that off as a minor bishop in a backwater outskirt of barely Christian civilization is the real story here.

It’s a mystery. It’s The Mystery.

About fifty or sixty or so years after Jesus left us, all of his apostles had been hunted and tormented and killed or otherwise had all died off. Most of the written sacred records floating around the “original” Church were of dubious authenticity.

Mormons are wont to boast of having restored the “original” organization of the Church but frankly, what Jesus left behind wasn’t much of a Church in an organizational sense. Organizationally speaking, the Kingdom of God on Earth never emerged. What happened instead was that several kingdoms of slightly different “Gods” dug themselves into several geographical districts. These several, competing variant churches, each one claiming to be the fictional “universal” Church, almost immediately started sniping and hacking and shooting away at one-another. By even their own accounts the first two generations of post-Christ Church leadership moved only in a vague, general way toward a consensus of universal belief. To be even more pointed, the very first “universal” agreement these various branches of the Church hit upon was the notion that they were all independent of any central authority. Any branch of the Church founded by any apostle, or later, friend or student of an original apostle, was agreed to be as authoritative as any other.

In half a lifetime after Christ departed this world, there were none of His original apostles at all. Their students or disciples at that point had none of the same inherent authority to deal with even their own branch’s internal disagreement, disorganization, and in-fighting. They had no hope of enforcing any sort of order and uniformity outside their personal congregations. On top of this, these “Apostolic Fathers” as they became known, were also hounded by pagan and Jewish civil authorities and clergy.

They are today called “Apostolic Fathers” though of course, not even they claimed to be actual apostles. They did not in any way even suggest that they had the mantle of full apostleship handed down to them. But they did have living memory and some records of their masters. Unfortunately, they were beaten and tortured and all their writings and records and scriptures were taken away from them and systematically burned by various pagan Church-States and rival religious authorities. Bishops of the era were frequently publicly whipped and forced to offer sacrifices to the official pagan gods of Rome or other regions. Those who held out in faith were systematically killed off. It was a matter of decades only, until their testimonies and records were nonexistent and un-remembered. (I’ll deal with the “One surviving Group of True Believers” myths later on.)

The paradox of the first century after Christ, is that those branches of the original Church and the authorities who ran them who survived these persecutions, were almost certainly thus proved to be corrupted. Any Christian or branch of Christianity that would not be corrupted or at least compromise to worship the State or regional gods or pay homage at least a bit was destroyed—instantly and violently. Thus, any Christian Church that claims to be still around today from the beginning, is by definition at least slightly bent from the original.  Only the ignorant, average congregant and the seriously compromised clergy who’d been tortured into paying homage to the pagan status-quo remained in the flock. Oh, and of course the willing sell-outs. All the real “saints,” the original saints, were killed. Full stop. The “Primitive Church” as Mormons call it, degenerated in one or two life spans into an organization no more godly or holy than Herod the Great’s little temple operation at the time of Christ.

As these rapidly deteriorating conditions of persecution and rampant heresy overcame them, the Apostolic Fathers tried to preserve or recreate for us essentially all we will ever know of the Savior’s direct ministry after his passing from mortality. The books of the New Testament as we now have them, combined with records known as the “Writings of the Apostolic Fathers,” all of which appeared around 100 AD, just before or after, stem from this era in Church development. The Letter of Barnabus, The Teachings of the Twelve or the Didache, The First Letter of Clement of Rome, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, The Letter of Polycarp, The Fragments of Papius, are some of the chief examples of surviving Church literature from the era.

By name, Apostolic Fathers like Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, and the unknown author of The Letter of Barnabus were probably contemporaries of John the Apostle in his very late years of life. Biographical information on the Apostolic Fathers is thin at best and entirely missing in some cases. Modern scholarship casts even more doubt upon the various authorships but unanimously date these writings to the first century AD and It is fairly certain that these men did have association either with an original apostle or an immediate disciple of an original apostle. These records essentially document Church custom and practice of the first century AD era, and have been of great interest to Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars alike. Oddly enough, many of the arguments Mormons struggle through with modern Christians would be favorably resolved in favor of the Mormon point of view, were either Mormons or Christians in general familiar with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. However, the reflections of the Fathers regarding specific Christian doctrines and customs have largely been passed over in favor of the rationalizing of later generations of Church scholars and theologians.

By the second century and beyond, the Church, (or Churches really) and Church leadership found themselves spending most of their time defending themselves against civil, physical, and doctrinal attack from both Jewish and Roman pagan authorities. This era was recorded by a group of men now called the “Apologists.” On top of constant Jewish persecution, early Christians were inflicted with a series of organized Roman persecutions that generated a more educated, legalistic justification of the Christian religion. These writers were scholars or lawyers, schooled in the Greek philosophical discipline. They made their arguments “logically.” They used allegory and metaphor and symbolic methods to teach and explain and decipher either the scraps of original apostolic scripture, and the older books and Jewish canon—roughly the Old Testament as we know it now, and a few less known or now lost records. They also used the writings of the Apostolic Fathers to formulate dogma and religious practice, but then wrapped it in slick, popular, “educated” and “logical” systems of response. They were only interested in defense of common criticisms of the religion.

Unfortunately, logic is logical to the parties in any given debate relative only to their common assumptions about how this or that operates. When the Church and everyone else, including the scientists and scholars of the period thought the earth was the center of the universe, it made perfectly good sense to the clergy to generate a whole system of teachings based on the assumption that God put mankind in the center of His Creation. It was very testimony-building to believe that you as a Christian were just that special to God. Every chapter and verse of holy writ that seemed to allude to this conclusion or could be made to support this conclusion was played up and played up until it seemed that an earth-centered universe was an integral concept without which the whole Christian belief system would collapse. And when smartasses like Copernicus and Galileo came on to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that God had not put the earth in the center of the universe, it made perfect sense to the clergy to oppress, silence, and snuff out these troublemakers, even if they were obviously correct. It is better that one man should die than a nation perish in unbelief. It is also better than one man shall die than a Pope should ever have to say, “Ooops, had that one wrong…”

Which gets me to the concept of Papal Infallibility, but far to early in my explorations to go into it deeply. Strangely enough, the concept of a central, primal Pope, the Bishop of Rome being same, didn’t emerge for a thousand years and more. The claim of the bishop of Rome or any other Pope being infallible, didn’t come along until the early 19th century. When the first astronomers were being persecuted for contradicting longstanding teaching of the Church, they didn’t even have that personal, Papal infallibility issue at stake in a formal sense. But the Church authority as a general body was quite willing to kill, imprison, and certainly excommunicate its subjects simply for questioning Church “tradition.” This is quite an important and a rather sticky concept, this assumption that this or that doctrine or “Truth” has “always been taught” by the Church and therefore questioning it becomes a denial of the “Faith of our Fathers.” Even if that faith is knowingly false.

With the coming of true astronomy, the Church by empirical, irrefutable evidence was confronted a thousand and a half years into its pretentions to all wisdom, by the fact that its founders had made and perpetuated a foundationally stupid and utterly false assumption about the nature of Creation. Having totally misunderstood all of God’s Creation, the Church then went on to base generations of Church dogma upon it. Now, one would think that if this fact got ‘round the masses, it might lead the faithful to wonder, gee, if the Church was wrong on something so basic as that, just how right could it be about this other stuff?

Popes and Pastors and Prophets of all faiths are called upon now and again to fake their way through an answer to those sorts of suddenly unanswerable questions. That’s what a system of “apologetics” is designed to do–take a load of silly, ignorant twaddle, and present it in a way that makes it look brilliant and sensible. In the second century after Christ, that’s what the Apologists did. They gathered together all the known sacred Jewish and Christian writings and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. They sorted through, gleaned, picked out, discarded, branded, labeled, validated, discredited and filtered all the known sacred and secular works pertinent in their estimation to the formation of the Christian Church. It was the Apologists who first began to carve in stone the vast bulk of Church dogma, and laid down the foundation of what was to become Christian canon scripture. But they did it based upon what made sense to them. To them the world was flat and sat in the center of the universe.

The main problem the Apologists had in this work then, is context. By the second century even the Apostolic Fathers were dead or dying. There was no living association with genuine apostles. The Apologists didn’t even know somebody who knew somebody who knew Jesus, or Paul, or John or Barnabas or anyone near the founding of the original Church. Most of them didn’t even know anything about being a Jew. That tradition was two-hundred years behind them. What they knew was Greco-Roman law, science, and philosophy—with an emphasis on philosophy. They were skilled debaters and persuasive writers but they were working out of a Greco-Roman world view—a view where the heavenly bodies moved around a flat earth on hollow glass spheres like massive window-paintings. Everything in the heavens moved in circles and everything on the earth moved in straight lines. That was logic to them.

So when the question kept coming back about just Who or What God really is, who this Jesus was in relation to God, and how the Holy Spirit fit into the whole scheme, they hammered out the answer to these sorts of questions amongst themselves based on “logical” assumptions of just how life, the universe, and everything really works—from a Greco-Roman world view.

Because no prophets or manifestations from God had taken place in some two-hundred years, it was logical to the Apologists that what recorded insight into the nature of God they had on hand was all they were going to get. God had closed the books and stopped talking to man. If God did not talk to them as earnest and studied and wise as they were, it made no sense that God would speak to anyone else. The notion of a closed heavens and a closed canon started with these men. On the other hand, “We don’t know,” or “There are no records on that issue,” were not acceptable answers for them. When they had no direct insight from legitimate records, they went Greek.

Now, the one central postulate that all the Greek and Roman philosophers universally agreed upon is the notion that all matter is corrupt. Matter, flesh, any physical existence is inherently evil. This was a fundamentally pagan Greek invention and the foundation of their whole scientific, scholarly, religious and political belief system. This is not a concept that came over from Jewish tradition. This is a very easily identifiable and uniquely Greek notion that can be traced exclusively to Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, not Jesus Christ.

It was Plato and his pagan philosophers who first postulated that God, being perfect, being really really pure and far bigger and more powerful than anything man could possibly comprehend, could not have any sort of physical existence. God had to be made of incorporeal matter. God had to be made of immaterial matter—which was a substance but not a substance. That made sense to them. It was logical. The Apologists then had to reconcile this notion with that of a very corporeal Jesus. Were they both God? The same God or actually two Gods? An actual Father and Son? It was vital for purposes of spreading the faith and maintaining unity to have some sort of “logical” final ruling on every point of dogma to keep both investigator and detractor happy when the questions came up.

For Aristotle, there were two souls. One was an animal soul and the other was a rational soul. The animal soul governed growth and healing and breathing and reproduction and  basically the physical senses. Animals had only this animal soul, but no thinking soul. The thinking soul was an act of specific creation. Fragments of this argument have survived in Christian tradition to explain everything from cruelty to animals because they have no intelligence or higher soul, to placing the Negro in a sub-human category due again, to their lack of this higher soul and thus being hopelessly lost to salvation.

Tertullian, one of the generation of Apologists who was prototypical of the full-time, institutionalized “Theologians” who took over Church studies in the late second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries, founded “Traduciansism,” which holds that procreation proceeds from the souls of the parents. When the animal spirit has grown a mortal body to a sufficient state, the rational soul enters into it, or “quickens” the body. For a while Christian theologians found this could be a way to transfer Original Sin to mankind from Adam and Eve, but when this theory lost favor the Church went to other rationale in later centuries–who’s theologians had by then adopted “Creationism,” an explanation for mortality with a slightly different bent that more or less said the spirit and body were created at the same instant and the spirit is the source of all character, the body being no more than a mechanism. Currently this doctrine forms the basis of the Roman Catholic position that at the instant of fertilization a fully created human body and soul are united.

There were early Church factions who thought Jesus and the Father were the same being, appearing to man via different manifestations. There were also originally a lot of Church scholars who thought there were two distinct beings in the Father and the Son. The only thing that was almost unanimously condemned in the early centuries is the contention that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are the same being, the same God all three, but manifested in three separate forms.

The issue of who the Holy Spirit is, has never actually been resolved in world-Christian terms to this day. There is in fact no effective way to resolve it and never has been, because today, as it ever has been, the “Christian” Church or the “Body of Christ,” in reality is little more than a voluntary association of councils and self-appointing committees who only occasionally call conferences to try to negotiate the much-touted, but still entirely fictional, “One Holy, Catholic, and Universal Church.”

The third and fourth centuries moved the Church past its cult status, having outlived the Jewish State and won approval of a series of Roman and Eastern Emperors. But true respectability in this context meant Christianity had to become an orderly State religion that sanctioned, and was sanctioned by, the State leadership. Christianity entered an era called, “Caesaro-Papism” where the Church and the Emperor were essentially bonded together into a single, all-powerful council. Christianity moved into this role with the Emperor Constantine, who among other things, beat up a few Bishops, called a conference, and made them spit out some final creed regarding this nature of God issue, so the Christian State could move on to other business and stop fighting about it.

Constantine moved the Roman world capital from Rome to a new city he build and named after himself, Constantinople. There he could build Christian churches in his own name and install Christian administrators of his empire who could freely worship in a Christian fashion, and the new regime could sidestep in one swift move the whole incumbent structure of Roman Emperor-as-pagan-defender-of-the-Roman-Gods. In the process he killed a son and a wife and never did get baptized until his deathbed, but he did get things done in his new Church-State.

In the third and fourth centuries and beyond, there were several centers of the Church: Rome, Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, and at least for some time, Jerusalem. There isn’t even a suggestion that the Roman Church or its bishop had any primacy over any of the others for century after century. There wasn’t necessarily even any regional “universality” and the various regional bishops would also hold councils and bicker about doctrine, then agree to disagree or sanction one-another with mutual charges of heresy. Local and regional, even global Church dogma changed suddenly and with deadly force as emperors or bishops or even governors and mayors changed.

In 325, Constantine (conceding a little bit of fairness to him as a ruler) set out to resolve a raging conflict on the nature of God. He ordered a council of bishops to convene in Nicaea, where they came to blows over one word, homoousios. They already had a rough idea of what was needed in the creed Constantine had demanded of them. In polishing it up however, it turned out that nearly all their objections hung on this one word. Apart from this controversy it was fairly smooth sailing. Constantine doesn’t seem to have had a personal stake in the question, he simply wanted  to get on with ruling an orderly Christian empire by brutal force. In 326 this council eventually produced what was supposed to be the defining Christian statement of belief.

The Nicene creed did not make everyone happy and create the “Universal” Church Constantine was demanding at all. It set off another string of clerical battles for the next several hundred years. The language of the Nicene Creed itself defines God the Father and Jesus Christ as being out of the same substance, not some separate substances. That was what the big fight was all about. All those centuries, all those years trying to nail it down, and that’s all they came up with. The Nicene Creed also defined Jesus as “Logos” or “the Word,” or more accurately, “the Verb” which implies the acting force or action. Logos was co-eternal with the Father and of the same substance. The whole “Word made Flesh” thing would be hashed for generations with great fury.

But pain of excommunication, torture and death didn’t settle the matter either, and Christianity has had several goes at the same statement like this entry from the Wikipedia:

The Athanasian Creed (Quicumque vult) is a Christian statement of belief, focusing on Trinitarian doctrine and Christology. The Latin name of the creed, Quicumque vult, is taken from the opening words “Whosoever wishes.” The Athanasian Creed has been used by Christian churches since the sixth century AD. It is the first creed in which the equality of the three persons of the Trinity is explicitly stated, and differs from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Apostles’ Creeds in the inclusion of anathemas, or condemnations of those who disagree with the Creed.

Widely accepted^[1] among Western Christians, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, and most liturgical Protestant denominations, the Athanasian Creed has been used in public worship less and less frequently. The creed has never gained much acceptance among Eastern Christians.^[1]

What any of these creeds and professions of faith actually mean is anybody’s guess. The point of these creeds was to auspiciously state the mystery, not explain it. It was very important to these philosophers, which words they chose to explain how you could not understand the nature of God.

Now, the Western Churches adopted the Nicene Creed almost immediately. The Eastern Church basically adopted the creed but continued to argue about what it meant, quibbling about that one word, homoousios, until the Second Ecumenical council, also called the first Council of Constantinople in 381, where the riddle was not solved, but it was agreed to be unsolvable, one of the mysteries of God that was inappropriate to question.

The Nicene Council defined God as pure and immaterial. At the same time it declared the Father and Son to be two divine Persons. Logos, was pure and immaterial, not created and co-eternal of the same substance as the Father. Man was created by God or Logos, out of nothing. The nature of Logos is entirely different than the nature of Man. Man had a spirit, created by Logos, and this (depending on who’s your bishop through the ages) is infused with the animal spirit and body, which is also created out of nothing by Logos. This is pure Platonism. This is Plato’s concept of God and Man.

To this point in the Church-wide doctrinal bickering, the main interest was this so-called “Trinitarian” theology. (To be honest however, the Holy Spirit is given very little thought in the process. It’s really “Binitarian” more than “Trinitarian.”) The Nicene Creed, with the force and authority of the Church, East and West, and the Roman Empire, rather than put the matter to rest, only led to what would become known as the “Christological Conflict” and the “Theotokos” problem–the nature of Mary, the “Mother of God.”

As the battle raged over Trinitarianism however, the winning side became more and more entrenched in the Nicene statement whatever other problems it caused elsewhere theologically. The Nicene Creed http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02033b.htm comes right out and just says God in all His forms is incomprehensible and if you don’t believe it you’re dead to God and more importantly, the Church. That’s pretty stern warning against anyone thinking otherwise.

Depending upon who you want to believe, an even more enhanced version of the Nicene Creed was developed  which further reinforced the mandatory belief in Trinitarian dogma. Until recently this was called the Athanasian Creed without thought to the validity of its actual author. This version probably grew out of some regional conferences starting in about 361 AD. Others contend it couldn’t have been in use any earlier than 500 AD. Frankly, it’s even harder to decipher than the Nicene Creed. The actual author is now widely in question, but it bears strongly the influence of the thinking of Athanasius of Alexandria, the presumed author of the original Nicene language, though it was written in Latin, not Athanasius’ Greek, and in a style of Western authors, not an Alexandrian. This enhanced Nicene language also reinforces the writings and postulations of one Augustine of Hippo, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/ (354-430 AD.) Which brings us to the essentially full-time, professional theologians of the 4th and 5th centuries.

A new development in the Church in the middle of the first millennium, was monasticism. Former priests or sometimes those with no formal Church connection or authority at all formed closed orders dedicated to Christian study. Out of one of these in suburban Constantinople emerged a monk named Eutyches. Eutyches stuck his nose into the then again raging theological fights between Antioch and Alexandria concerning the nature or natures of God and Christ. He favored the Alexandrian position, which had just won out violently and sneakily at the Council of Ephesus in 431 under the pressure of the Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril.

Now, Cyril was a brutal Jew-exterminating thug who called the council after bribing a lot of bishops and the governmental officials involved to grease the system in his favor. He also didn’t inform the Eastern bishops, none of whom would have agreed with his personal doctrinal lines. Cyril passed away in 444 AD but the dogmatic legacy of his council lives on today. At Ephesus, Cyril sought to exterminate a theologist of note at the time, named Nestorius. Nestorius taught that Christ had two natures, a human and a divine nature. Before the incarnation these were separate, and after the incarnation they were again separate. Cyril roused all of Christendom at the time by saying it was blasphemy to split our Lord Jesus Christ in such a way.

Eutyches, picked up the fight after Cyril’s death when Nestorianism was rearing its ugly head again, and argued that there were two natures before the incarnation but after, the two natures were intimately fused into one nature, the human and the immortal bound into one purified and divine nature.

I confess that I am a Mormon, and as such this quibbling bores me to tears. I at once understand why it is so de-emphasized in the LDS system. The specifics of these debates are still treated by general Christianity as if the very essence of light and truth and knowledge is being sorted out. Under the lightest analysis however, they actually sound mindless and in print look completely idiotic—like bad free-verse or a sort of poetic clanging. (It’s a psychological phenomenon common to lunatics who prattle earnestly away and seem entirely convincing till you realize it’s all nonsense.) It pains me to go into much detail about these early theological battles but it is vital for those both Mormon and Christian faithful to understand that they did go on. And on. And on. The claim today is that Christianity represents what “Christians” have “always believed.” There is no such thing. In the first three or four centuries “What Christians have always believed” changed from bishop to bishop, year-to-year, emperor-to-emperor. And it didn’t stop there. This is true whether or not Joseph Smith was a prophet of God or just an idiot-savant with incredible storytelling abilities.

None of the specifics of early Church gibberish actually matters much to most Christians today. They believe in Jesus as their personal Savior and that’s the entire depth of it. Most self-professing Christians couldn’t tell you what their actual religion stands for or what all they’re supposed to believe in if there was money in it. In fact they give money to professional Christians to keep reminding themselves what they stand for and believe in. But not even the professional Christians really get down to the basic guts of the religion. Those who do so, are considered radical, fundamentalist nut-jobs. Sadly, these fundamentalist nut-jobs actually come closer to “What Christians have always Believed” than most modern, mainstream, harmless, Jesus-friendly versions of the faith. Above all else, going way back to the first century, the common thread that holds Christian faith together has been that if you don’t think like we think, if you don’t believe as we believe, you’re burning in hell.

For those still true to Old World Christian religions, the only thing you need to know is that you do not believe in the Faith of your Fathers. Or perhaps, you belief the faith of your fathers, but not of your father’s fathers, or their fathers before them. At some point some group of your father’s, father’s fathers had bought into a violently different Christian faith than yours. You believe the latest version of what Christians have always believed in. You do not believe what Christians have always believed because there has never been an “all of” Christianity and it’s changed what it believes in frequently for two thousand years. It took two thousand years of vicious murder and intrigue between Church and State for you to scrounge together a “Faith” you could even pretend that Christians have always believed.

But back to Eutyches. His nature-of-Jesus Christ argument did win out in the long run, and became adopted almost universally. For the Protestant, however, particularly American Protestant, like Joseph Smith and company in their day, the most important thing that made it into the central heart of every Christian argument afterward however, is the way Eutyches proposed to prove his claims: Eutyches said, “Since God has written a book, He must have put in it everything that was important for us to know. It is just a question of reading God’s book and understanding it. The sentiments of the Fathers are no help.” The authoritative emphasis of Christianity then shifted from those closest the original documents and doctrines, to a feeling that it was all up to the learned Theologians, some holy writings and a lot of “figuring it out.”

Eutyches may have not been the absolute first person to express this sentiment, but in his time and in the major debates he undertook for this or that doctrine, his concept of accepted scripture being the only full authority on earth to speak for God took root as justification for just about anything the clergy, monks, and scholars then cared to argue. Then, as now, of course, you could take any tangential phrase from any Biblical author and make it support anything you want if you’re clever enough. This naturally, was one of little Joe Smith’s first observations and the impetus which he says prompted him to go right to the source.

Smith’s solution of course, was against the rules in the early Christian Church and still is. You can talk to God all you want, but if He starts talking back, you have a problem. Science, logic, now, that was perfectly sound however. The Apostolic Fathers were brushed aside as useless in one stroke. The ramblings of the Apologists took on more importance than those who actually knew the original saints and biblical authors. In fact, by Eutyches’ day, the Apologists had indeed already determined most of the Creeds and arguments that were still being developed, defined and expanded by the Theologians. The Theologians however, were driven to take the Apologetic arguments into more exact language–mighty poetic, philosophical language to glorify the mysteries into even more glorious mysteries. The mysteries of God were not comprehensible to man anyway, so it was simply a case of expressing them in the most poetic and mystical fashion. You must understand that most of Christian spiritual writing and analysis to this day concerns itself with worship and marveling at the Great Mystery that is God–not in getting to the bottom of things.

Eutyches brazenly asserts some three or four centuries into the well-known shambles of the randomly preserved Christian library, that God wrote us a complete, comprehensive manual. This is another good example of how “logic” is often just another word for “BS.” Simply asserting that God wrote a book doesn’t make it true. Proceeding from this unfounded assumption may sound “logical,” but in truth is just silly.

Case in point: the New Testament as we know it was not canonized and adopted by all branches of the Christian Church for another good thousand years or so. Eutyches couldn’t have even get a council together in his own day to agree upon just what book, or collection of books, he was talking about when he referred to “God’s book.” Indeed, half of any council or any number of bishops assembled in the day would violently disagree upon the validity of half the allegedly holy scriptures anyone cared to put before them at the time. Nevertheless, this notion grew that God had written a book, a “bible” or “The Bible” or “Holy Bible.” 

So, having spent three hundred, four hundred years trying to decide if Jesus and the Father were made of the same stuff or two different bits of stuff, the Church then had the problem of figuring out how that decision could be reconciled with a couple of other hard doctrines they’d been mostly ignoring: like explaining Christ, born of a human woman, who lived and died and suffered with an obvious physical body, which He raised from the tomb and went to heaven with. This was clearly the whole point of the surviving New Testament library. There were four known Gospels from genuine apostles clearly telling all about it. The human Jesus born of a mortal woman with God as a Father clearly described in their now totally authoritative Bible did not harmonize now with most of the more mystical theology they’d worked on amongst themselves for the last three or four hundred years.

This “Trinitarian” argument of Nicaea, central as it seems now, was merely the main argument going, not the only argument going all this time of course. The Apologists, the Theologians, had whole libraries full of their teachings that were now going to have to be reconciled with written, authoritative holy scripture. And of course, they hadn’t really defined just what they were going to call holy scripture, or what translation they were going to consider reliable, much less, authoritative.

And while all of Christianity openly knew of these limitations with holy scripture, the notion of a “Bible” still grew more and more promoted and sanctified. And since God was now claimed to have written it, it was the only authoritative Word of God.

Jesus was gone. The apostles were gone. The prophets were all dead. The Apostolic Fathers were all dead. Now the Church and the various councils and divinity schools and holy orders would take these questions up directly from what was fast becoming Holy Writ. Any observation or conclusion made by anyone of any authority was as valid as any other—if it was based upon the Holy Bible. This made getting just the right translation, just the right wording to fit your particular sect just all that much more important.

Did this new move to a Biblical “authority” solve any problems with the “Universal Body of Christ?” No. Christianity thereafter went furiously about, excommunicating and killing one-another for reading or daring to publish the “wrong” Bible. The Bible became just one more reason to torture you to death—usually by piling your “false” Bibles and heretical writings on top of you and burning you to ashes with them in the town square as an object lesson to others who might stray from the Church’s official narrative.