AN EXTREMELY SHORT HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN AS FEW WORDS AS POSSIBLE (AND ASSUMING YOU KNOW SOMETHING OF THE STORY ALREADY)

During the Bronze Age, there was an ancient group of tribes in the Middle East who were chosen by God to be his special project. God made deals with them, spoke with them, lead them, sometimes argued with them, and gave them special wisdom. The stories of these tribes were written on sacred scrolls starting around 3,000 years ago. One of the things in these books were predictions that a Messiah would come to help them, rule them, and bring peace to the world.

There was a guy, Yeshua, who lived around the time when “BC” turns into “CE.”

After a full life during which he traveled around and did a lot of preaching, he died. After his death, the disciples who’d followed him during his adventures continued to preach what he’d taught them. Given the average life expectancy at the time, it’s unlikely that any of these survived beyond 70 CE. Nevertheless, that’s the oldest written record we know of regarding Yeshua. There are no contemporaneous writings which mention him significantly, nor any which can be proven to have been written by eye-witnesses. (Historian Josephus has been known to be fake for hundreds of years.)

Another guy named “Saul” was converted to Yeshua’s teachings (although he’d never met him) after Yeshua's death, and changed his name to “Paul.” Paul took it upon himself to travel far and wide, preaching to every country he could reach. Much of church law and dogma is based on what Paul said in letters he wrote to people. He called himself an ‘apostle,’ yet he is not listed among the apostles of Yeshua. He received no special teaching from the man whose message he claimed to bring to all peoples, in fact he received no teaching from Yeshua at all. Yet he felt free to preach things that Yeshua never had.

The main problem for the early church was, Yeshua taught and preached things that were against the religion of his people. The disciples, in their mission to continue his teachings, met with a lot of resistance, again because what they were teaching was against the religion of their people. Paul branched out and preached to those outside Yeshua’s native religion, and also met a lot of resistance because the preachings went against everyone else’s religion as well. Many of Yeshua’s followers were killed because people with different beliefs often are. But slowly “Christiantiy” began to catch on.

About 300 years after Yeshua’s death, a Roman Emperor called Constantine converted to Christianity, and after that things got easier. Constantine invited thousands of Christian Bishops to a council meeting and commissioned them to write up a set of holy books for him. The Catholic Church, was the only Christian church at that time. The sacred scrolls of the Jews were translated (somewhat loosely) from the original Hebrew into Latin and became the Old Testament. The New Testament was translated from the original Greek and Amaraic (a type of Hebrew) into Latin. This was the first time these various Hebrew and Christian texts were put into one book. There were a lot more books or chapters then than there are now, over 100 that we know of having since been deemed unsuitable by the church and left out.

The Roman Catholic Church was the only Christian church for about a thousand years, at which time the Eastern Orthodox Church broke off due to disagreements regarding the running of the church. Time rolled on, until in the 1500s, a German named Martin Luther had the courage to pin a list of objections to church policy on his church’s door. Among other things, he believed that instead of being in Latin (which only priests and scholars could read) the Bible should be in German so everyone could read it. Those who agreed with him broke away from the Catholic Church and became known as Protestants.

The only problem was, as the Bible became available to the common people, there started to be more and more disagreements about its interpretation, so that today we have an amazing number of competing protestant churches, some of which broke away from their parent churches because they wanted to emphasize a single word differently. Up until Martin Luther’s break with the church, Catholicism was the only religion one was allowed to have throughout the Western civilized world (they had entirely different religions in the East, and Islam came into being around 600 AD, but if you lived in Western Europe, there was no alternative); if you weren’t Catholic, you were a heretic, and subject to execution or revilement, and Ghettoization. Pretty simple. When people refer to the great faith of their fathers, I believe a great part of that faith was fear.