Early Christianity Archives - Page 2 of 8

Here’s How We Know the Canonical Gospels Were Originally Anonymous

The four canonical gospels are traditionally attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew is said to have been a tax collector who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. Mark is a minor figure mentioned in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles who is said to have worked as a translator and secretary for the apostle Peter. Luke is said to have been a Greek physician who became a travelling companion of the apostle Paul. John is said to have been a fisherman who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles along with his brother James.

Despite how well known these attributions are, however, New Testament scholars have realized for well over a hundred years now that the four canonical gospels were, in fact, originally anonymous works. They only became attributed to the authors to whom they are so widely attributed today in the second half of the second century CE, around a hundred years after the first of these gospels was originally written. In this article, I intend to explain the evidence for how scholars know this.

Filthy, Obscure Greek Myths, Accidentally Preserved by Clement of Alexandria

The early Christian writer Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) was probably born in Athens, but he lived most of his life in Alexandria, where he was a teacher at the Catechetical School, also known as the Didaskalion. He was extraordinarily well educated and well read in ancient Greek literature, mythology, philosophy, and theology. As a devout Christian, however, he believed that traditional Greek and Roman religions were rife with immorality and depravity. His earliest surviving work is a treatise titled Exhortation to the Hellenes, in which he condemns traditional Greek and Roman religions and exhorts Greeks and Romans to adopt Christianity.

One of Clement’s primary goals in the treatise is to prove just how perverted and morally depraved traditional religions are. He rightly points out the immoral and often rapacious behavior of the Olympian deities in the stories that are well known, but he also retells some extremely obscure and absolutely filthy Greek myths that are not recorded in any other sources before him. As a result, Clement accidentally preserved these myths for posterity—myths that we otherwise would have no idea even existed. (One of them involves a god inventing a dildo in order to anally masturbate on a dead lover’s grave!)

Was Jesus a Communist?

People have been claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a communist or socialist for a very long time. Notably, Francis Bellamy (lived 1855 – 1931), who is best known today as the author of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, was a Baptist minister and self-proclaimed “Christian Socialist” who attracted a great deal of negative attention during his lifetime for frequently claiming that Jesus was a socialist. In more recent years, various pro-communist memes about Jesus being a communist have gone viral on the internet.

I’ve seen so many different expressions of the idea that Jesus was a communist over the years that I’ve decided to write an in-depth article examining whether this is an accurate characterization of Jesus’s teachings. There are indeed some genuine similarities between the views that are attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and communism. There are, however, a number of enormous differences between Jesus and contemporary revolutionary communists that make the claim that Jesus was a communist a profound mischaracterization of his teachings.

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.

What Did Jesus Really Say about Homosexuality?

None of the canonical gospels portray Jesus as having said anything whatsoever about homosexuality. You can scour every last line of the four canonical gospels and you won’t find anything that can be unambiguously interpreted as a reference to homosexuality in any form. As far as the canonical gospels are concerned, Jesus did not condemn homosexuality, but he did not endorse it either.

Fascinatingly, though, it is possible that there may have been an alternate, non-canonical version of the Gospel of Mark in circulation in the second century CE that implied that Jesus himself had sexual relations with men. The existence of this possible version of the Gospel of Mark is controversial and many scholars regard it as a flat-out hoax. Nonetheless, it is worth talking about—even if only for the sake of curiosity.

In Defense of Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s Prayer

On 3 January 2021, Emanuel Cleaver, an ordained United Methodist pastor who is currently serving as a Democratic representative for Missouri’s 5th congressional district, delivered the opening prayer for the 117th Congress. For the most part, it was an entirely conventional mainline Protestant prayer, asking for the usual sorts of things using the usual language. At the very end, though, Representative Cleaver added some remarks in an effort to make the prayer more inclusive, saying:

“May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon us and give us peace—peace in our families, peace across this land, and (dare I ask oh Lord?) peace even in this chamber for now and ever more. We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and God known by many names by many different faiths. Amen, and awoman.”

Naturally, Republicans are extremely outraged over this (or at least pretending to be extremely outraged in order to make their supporters feel outraged). They have, however, expressed their outrage in ways that show they clearly don’t have particularly in-depth knowledge of Christian history or even the Bible itself.

How Was Saturnalia Celebrated in Ancient Rome?

Saturnalia is an ancient Roman holiday in honor of the god Saturnus that began on December 17th. The Romans believed that, in very ancient times, before Iupiter became the king of the deities, the cosmos had been ruled by Iupiter’s father Saturnus. They believed that the reign of Saturnus had been a “Golden Age,” in which all human beings had lived together in harmony and simplicity, and that Saturnalia was a temporary restoration of Saturnus’s reign on earth that could only last until the end of the festival.

I’ve written about Saturnalia before—usually in the context of debunking popular misconceptions about it being the source of modern American Christmas traditions. This year, however, I’ve decided to write about it again, focusing on what we know about how the holiday was actually celebrated.

Where Does the Idea of a “Saint” Come From?

Most people today are familiar with the concept of a “saint,” but the question of when and how this concept arose is a very interesting one. The basic idea behind the Christian conception of sainthood can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which contains stories about holy people using their special connection with God to perform miracles for the benefit of others.

This idea is expanded on in the writings of the New Testament and in other early Christian texts. Early Christian ideas about sainthood may have been influenced to some extent by similar Greek and Roman stories about holy men performing miracles. By late antiquity, a conception of sainthood similar to the one most people today are familiar with had developed. Although saints have become less prominent in western Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, ancient and medieval stories about saints continue to influence contemporary western culture.

Was Jesus Literate?

The question of why Jesus of Nazareth didn’t write down any of his own teachings has puzzled many Christians and non-Christians alike. From the perspective of a literate person in the twenty-first-century west, it makes little sense why a person who saw himself as a prophet would not bother to write down any of his own ideas. Most of us are accustomed to getting our information about religion from books, so we tend to assume that it would have only been natural for Jesus to write down his teachings.

The problem with this assumption is that Jesus was not a twenty-first-century literate westerner, but rather a first-century CE Jewish itinerant preacher from Galilee. Although the canonical gospels consistently seem to portray Jesus as literate, it is an open question whether the historical Jesus was actually literate. Furthermore, even if Jesus was indeed literate as the gospels portray him, there are several good reasons why he might have decided not to write down his teachings.

What Does the Genesis Creation Story Mean?

The first three chapters of the Book of Genesis have been studied, interpreted, reinterpreted, and misunderstood by people of diverse religious convictions for around 2,500 years. The stories recounted in these chapters have had an enormous impact on world religions, mythologies, literatures, and cultures. Most people think that they understand these stories. Nonetheless misconceptions abound—not just about what the text means, but also about who wrote it, what it actually says, what sources the text is based on, and how the text has historically been interpreted.

In this article, I want to take a deep dive into the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, debunk some popular misconceptions, and hopefully do my part to help others understand these stories that have become so influential. This is going to be a bit of a long read, but, by the end of it, hopefully, you’ll know pretty much everything you wanted to know about the Genesis creation stories.