After Jesus Before Christianity

 

After Jesus Before Christianity – Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig

There’s a term that is being used around 21^st century Christianity called “deconstruction”.  Sadly, many Christians have confused this word with the word “destruction”.  They’re not the same.  So when a Christian states that they are “deconstruction”, red flags tend to go up as many fear they will lose the faith.  That can happen, but “deconstruction” can be a very good thing – if Christianity is true, that is.  An analogy: If you were trying to sell a used car and it was in very good condition, would you worry if the potential buyer was a seasoned mechanic and wanted to thoroughly inspect your car before they bought it?  No, you wouldn’t.  You would be afraid, though, if you were trying to unload a piece of garbage on an unsuspecting naïve buyer.  So the only time to fear deconstruction, is when the faith isn’t true.

What deconstruction has led to however (myself included) is that many of the “truths” that we cling to about are faith haven’t always been believed.  Much of what we believe about the faith has only been taught for a few hundred years.  Yes, a few hundred years is quite a lot, but not in the context of a 2,000 year-old religion.

This is what this wonderful book highlights.  This book gives us an insight of what the earliest “Jesus believers” believed.  We get an in-depth look at why they believed what they did, what they taught, and how they lived their lives; mainly under Roman persecution.  It’s quite fascinating.  A lot of the evidence we have is rather patchy.  The book is written by three authors, and each of them ‘share’ different chapters.  True, it’s hard to know the whole story of how everything operated that long ago, but the consensus among scholars is that life was very different from what many Christians now believe.

Most Christians will rely on their Bible as an answer to everything, yet we didn’t even have such a book until around 390 AD. (This book is mainly limited to the first 200 years after Christ.  Again, this is or isn’t a ‘long time’ depending on context.) So this book examines the life of these people who were ‘followers of the anointed one’.  It’s quite fascinating.  My favorite parts are when the book focuses on the politics and how the faith was practiced, but the book goes into so much more.  We learn how people met in groups, how they ate meals, how they treated men and women  (much more egalitarian then complementarian), and how they bonded with Jesus of Nazareth, since they were constantly experiencing persecution as well.

We learn that words such as “Christian” and “salvation” have very different meanings that what they mean today. We learn that so many of the norms that are now practiced were very foreign to what the earliest believers thought and believed.  To me, this is very refreshing.  So much of my faith is a Christian is based on not questioning the nature of God.  If the Bible SAYS something, it MUST be true AND practiced by every living person if they want any sort of eternal security.  Whatever you might think is fair or unfair is irrelevant.  Who are we to question God?

So although the point of the book didn’t seem to challenge the hard parts of scripture and how people of the faith live today, it definitely has an undercurrent of that.  The challenge is to challenge much of what we’ve been taught over the last two hundred years or so (there’s that word ‘deconstruction’ again) and learn about Jesus, Christianity, and the church with fresh new ideas around the time the whole thing started.

I thought this was wonderful and uplifting.  I’d love to go back in time and see it all unfold.