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Acts 11:25 Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, 26and when he found him, he brought him back to Antioch. So for a full year they met together with the church and taught large numbers of people. The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch.
But Paul does mention having persecuted the Church of God.[Replying to post 2 by neverknewyou]
We can only garner what we know of Paul by reading the few epistles attributed to him, he doesn't mention anything about this conversion. Acts is second century church propaganda.
He may have persecuted members of the Jesus Movement within Judaism, but they were Jews, not Christians.tam wrote: But Paul does mention having persecuted the Church of God.
It might be more accurate to say that Paul/Saul and cohorts hijacked the Jesus Movement from Judaism and made up a new competitive religion that was more palatable to Roman officials.tam wrote: If he joined the church he once persecuted, then there has to have been a conversion at some point.
Where is your evidence for this? Can you provide sources for us please?It might be more accurate to say that Paul/Saul and cohorts hijacked the Jesus Movement from Judaism and made up a new competitive religion that was more palatable to Roman officials.
Could you give us examples of Christianity being spread by conquest? Are you talking about physical force or a different kind of conquest? Again, can you provide sources for this?However, Christianity bowed to (or was tailored to please) Rome, and became the official state religion of the empire, from which it spread to Europe by conquest and from there elsewhere in the world (often by conquest).
Jesus worship failed among the Jews and in Jerusalem, but prospered far away among gentiles and pagans of the Roman empire.
In WHY THE JEWS REJECTED JESUS, David Klinghoffer reveals that the Jews since ancient times accepted not only the historical existence of Jesus but the role of certain Jews in bringing about his crucifixion and death. But he also argues that they had every reason to be skeptical of claims for his divinity.
For one thing, Palestine under Roman occupation had numerous charismatic would-be messiahs, so Jesus would not have been unique, nor was his following the largest of its kind. For another, the biblical prophecies about the coming of the Messiah were never fulfilled by Jesus, including an ingathering of exiles, the rise of a Davidic king who would defeat Israels enemies, the building of a new Temple, and recognition of God by the gentiles. Above all, the Jews understood their biblically commanded way of life, from which Jesuss followers sought to free them, as precious, immutable, and eternal.
Jews have long been blamed for Jesuss death and stigmatized for rejecting him. But Jesus lived and died a relatively obscure figure at the margins of Jewish society. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that the Jews of his day rejected Jesus at all, since most Jews had never heard of him. The figure they really rejected, often violently, was Paul, who convinced the Jerusalem church led by Jesuss brother to jettison the observance of Jewish law. Paul thus founded a new religion. If not for him, Christianity would likely have remained a Jewish movement, and the course of history itself would have been changed. Had the Jews accepted Jesus, Klinghoffer speculates, Christianity would not have conquered Europe, and there would be no Western civilization as we know it.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... inghoffer/
In the town of Nicaea, on the shores of what is now lake Iznik in the north-west of Turkey, a council was held in AD 325 that decided the path for Christianity. It was convened by the Roman emperor Constantine to settle a question that was threatening to split the Christian world at the time: what was the relationship of Jesus to God?
The row had been brewing for seven years, since a priest in Alexandria named Arius had promoted a doctrine whereby Jesus was stated to be non-eternal and generated by God.
This challenged the beliefs of the local bishop, Alexander, who vaguely saw Jesus as being derived from eternity and of a similar nature to God. Two rival theological camps emerged and the dispute seemed intractable.
None of this was music to the ears of Constantine, who was sympathetic to Christianity but not yet a member of the faith (he was only baptised on his deathbed). The emperors chief wish was for the large number of Christians living within his realm to coexist peacefully and not spend their time squabbling over what he called small and very insignificant questions.
At the council of some 200 bishops, Alexanders faction skilfully handled proceedings and emerged victorious over Ariuss supporters. In fact, the final resolution went even further than Alexander had before, declaring Jesus to be consubstantial with the father " equal and equally eternal to God.
Desirous to see the matter ended, Constantine used his not insignificant authority to ensure the vast majority of those assembled endorsed the new creed. For biblical historian Geza Vermes, this was a decisive moment in the development of the faith, a fundamental break with the origins of the Jesus movement.
A prophet or a god?
Vermess exploration of these events begins three centuries earlier with the flesh-and-blood Jesus. Did such a man really exist?
I would say it is much more likely that he did than he didnt, says Vermes. To believe that he had been imagined or invented is a much harder task than to rely on the available evidence, which is obviously not as clear-cut as one would like, but is sufficiently good to say that somebody by the name of Jesus existed around the time when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea in the first century AD.
Through his reading of the gospels, with the added context of contemporary Jewish writings, Vermes paints a picture of Jesus as a charismatic prophet, preaching in Galilee about the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God. At this time Jesuss message was transmitted solely to Palestinian Jews, and not yet to the world at large.
Jesus was killed before he could introduce his followers to this kingdom of God, but the impact he had made on those around him ensured that his message was kept alive by a small group of supporters. It was a little Jewish subset, Vermes explains, which had the special peculiarity that they believed Jesus of Nazareth was the crucified, risen and glorified messiah whose return would come very soon.
The group continued to act as Jews, evidenced by the fact that they visited the Jewish temple, which only those of the Jewish faith were permitted to enter.
Outside the Holy Land, however, non-Jews began to be drawn to the fledgling movement, largely through the efforts of St Paul, who spread the word in places such as Turkey and Asia Minor. In AD 49, at a meeting in Jerusalem, the apostles decreed that non-Jews could join the faith without having to take on all the laws of Moses.
This angered traditionalists, but made conversion to the new religion simpler for those in the wider Greco-Roman world. Soon a divide grew between Jewish and non-Jewish members. A major bone of contention was the figure of Jesus.
The divine Jesus
For the early Jewish Christians, Jesus was a messenger, but it was God the father who remained the central figure of the faith. However, when Paul proselytised among pagan audiences outside Palestine, he placed a greater emphasis on Jesus himself, until gradually the messenger began to be seen as divine " and Jewish Christians became marginalised.
Church fathers considered the Jewish Christians to be heretics because they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, says Vermes. They continued to exist in little pockets for the following two or three centuries, but gradually petered out, either joining the church or reverting to Judaism. As St Jerome later said, by wanting to be both Jews and Christians, they failed to be either.
While Jewish membership of the Jesus movement declined, the early church moved further away from its origins and a rift developed between the two faiths. Some Christians began to denounce the Jewish religion.
One of the most extreme was the writer Barnabas, who declared in the early second century that Jews had never been the chosen people. Instead, he claimed, only Christians were.
Now separate from Judaism, the Christians continued to evolve their ideas of Jesus " a process that lasted until the Council of Nicaea. Jesuss relationship to God the father was, Vermes believes, the main problem of early Christianity.
The debate was infused with Greek philosophical ideas that led Jesus to be viewed as a kind of divine message. But, says Vermes, up until 325 there was not a single teacher in the church who dared assert that Jesus was equal to the father. He was the inferior god, not quite the same, not quite as powerful, not quite as eternal as God the father. It required a major dispute and the Council of Nicaea for that leap to be made.
The Council of Nicaea consolidated and furthered changes that had taken place within Christianity during its first 300 years. Vermes argues that a faith based on the preaching and message of a charismatic prophet, became a dogmatic religion of the formalised church, under the supervision and rule of the Roman emperor.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/rom ... h-is-born/
Most who have taken a history course or two are aware that Rome expanded by conquest (and took Christianity with it) into Europe. Later European nations colonized by conquest much of the world (typically imposing Christianity).Overcomer wrote:Could you give us examples of Christianity being spread by conquest? Are you talking about physical force or a different kind of conquest? Again, can you provide sources for this?Zzyzx wrote: However, Christianity bowed to (or was tailored to please) Rome, and became the official state religion of the empire, from which it spread to Europe by conquest and from there elsewhere in the world (often by conquest).
Do you dispute that Christianity has been spread by conquest?As the imperial powers of Europe set their sights on new geographic regions to expand their spheres of influence in the 19th century, Africa emerged as a prime location for colonization due to its wealth of natural resources and purportedly undeveloped economies ripe for exploitation. In reality, European colonization devastated traditional African societies and economies. However, the leaders spearheading the movement cited the white mans burden, a term popularized in Rudyard Kiplings poem to morally justify imperialist expansion. The philosophy underpinning the White Mans Burden consisted of the Three Cs of Colonialism: Civilization, Christianity, and Commerce.
Christianity was one justification that European powers used to colonize and exploit Africa. Through the dissemination of Christian doctrine, European nations such as Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands sought to educate and reform African culture. In his book A History of Africa, scholar J.D. Fage describes the racially based logic of European intellectuals and missionaries saying: Mid-and late-nineteenth-century Europeans were generally convinced that their Christian, scientific and industrial society was intrinsically far superior to anything that Africa had produced(Fage 322). Unfamiliar with the diverse cultures on the continent of Africa, European explorers viewed practices unfamiliar to them as lesser and savage.
To many European nations, Christianity represented western civilization and the basis for Anglo-Saxon morality. Christianity served as a major force in the partition and eventual colonization of Africa (Boahen 12). During the late 19th century, European nations increasingly vied for global power. In an attempt to augment political and regional influence, nations like Great Britain and France needed a justification for expansion.
Essentially Christianity was a guise by which Western governments justified the exploitation and conquest of African nations. In the poem The White Mans Burden, poet Rudyard Kipling exclaims, Take up the White Mans burden, The savage wars of peace"Fill full the mouth of Famine and bid the sickness cease.Originally denoted as a reference to United States imperialism in the Philippines, the Anglos-centric basis of the poem holds true to the root structure of imperialist ideology. Denouncing the religious practices of Africans as witchcraft and heathenism, European nations sought to convert, and then exploit the indigenous peoples of Africa.
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/violence ... -commerce/
Christian means a disciple of Jesus. They existed before Pauls conversion, at least if we believe what the Bible tells.Zzyzx wrote: ...
He may have persecuted members of the Jesus Movement within Judaism, but they were Jews, not Christians. ...
They would have been both Jews and Christians: Jewish Christians. So if Paul persecuted Jews who were Christians, then Paul persecuted Christians.
Paul did not invent "Christianity" (though men may have misused some of his words to do so later). Paul certainly did not invent Christians. A Christian is one who is anointed with holy spirit. The apostles were both Jews AND Christians (they were Jews who had been anointed with holy spirit - such as when Christ breathed holy spirit upon them.)Christianity did not exist until created by Paul/Saul and associates
These would be Gentile Christians. But both Jews and Gentiles were Christians (anointed with holy spirit)." preaching to Gentiles hundreds of miles away from Jerusalem. Antioch is in Turkey (formerly Syria) is 400+ travel miles, 300+ air miles from Jerusalem.
However, Christianity bowed to (or was tailored to please) Rome, and became the official state religion of the empire, from which it spread to Europe by conquest and from there elsewhere in the world (often by conquest).
This occurred long after Paul, and does not negate the fact that Paul admits to having persecuted the Church of God (made of Christians).
Peace again to you,
your servant and a slave of Christ,
tammy
