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Nascent Christianity entered the Apostolic Age as a Jewish institution under the leadership of the apostles. It first developed into an extended Judeo-Christian community oriented toward Jerusalem with most of its members ethnic Jews. By the end of the first century it had separated into hundreds of independent groups. The absence of any universal form of centralized administration resulted in many competing and diversifying Christianities.
During the second and third centuries a significant new and different Christianity arose, among Greco-Romans of pagan stock, as a result of the gentilization of Judeo-Christianity in the Diaspora. Defining itself as orthodox it swamped the old Judeo-Christianity of the first two centuries and distanced itself from Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, and teachings.
The orthodox, culturally Greco-Romans, turned upon and crushed Judeo-Christianity in the fourth century. By the fifth century the orthodox, peopled by millions of Greco-Romans, had evolved into a massive movement seeking exclusive control of Christendom. This orthodox Christianity, claiming that it was apostolic and catholic, formed an aggressive and distinctive Gentile religion in its own right determined to eliminate all dissenting praxis.
Until recent decades little was known about early Judeo-Christianity due to scant literary and archaeological evidence and a general lack of scholarly interest. Traditionally, western scholarship focused upon the early Christian community as an emerging Gentile institution and its development in the West into the Catholic-Protestant Christianity of today�s world.
Following World War II, however, Judeo-Christianity became of more academic interest as Catholic and Protestant leaders in the West commenced to discuss, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the historic Christian hostility toward Jews. This generated serious academic inquiry and various scholars sought to learn more about the culture and times of the first Christians and the Judaisms of the Early Roman Period. Scholarly interest in this period soared upon the discovery and publishing of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Documents for these provided new data and a rich literary legacy to analyze.
Moreover, the post-World War II period saw renewed fundamentalism and the rise of evangelicalism promulgated through radio and television evangelism. As a result, many Christians, seeking to make sense out of their world, sought to emulate early Christian life-ways and to bring early Christian praxis into their lives thus popularizing the study of the ancient church. Reinforcing this phenomenon was the willingness of the governments of Levantine states to permit and to encourage archaeological investigation, resulting in thousands of excavations throughout the Levant. These produced massive amounts of archaeological data.
Efforts to learn more of apostolic Christianity and the world into which it arose has led to a fresh understanding of the Judeo-Christian nature of the early Christian community, the apostles' doctrines and writings, and the archaeology of Jerusalem. Coming to terms with the findings of such investigations, however, results in a paradigm crash for most Christians. Why? The Christianity of the ancient Church is not what they thought.
Page last updated: 12/13/04 07:22 PM.
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