From small band of Jesus' followers to Christianity, how?

Factual Questions
41

SFAIK this was a matter of debate within Judaism at the time. The OT doesn’t have much to say about an afterlife, but the few hints that might point to one do become more frequent in the later-composed texts, and by the time we are speaking of it was a widely-held belief among Jews. At the risk of oversimplifying, the Saducees (aligned with the priesthood) either dismissed the possibility of an afterlife or dismissed it as unimportant, while the Pharisees accepted and taught an afterlife (involving resurrection). And during the course of the first and second centuries, with the Roman-Jewish wars, the destruction of the Temple and the Diaspora, the Saducee movement basically collapsed and the Pharisees came to dominate and gave us what we now know as rabbinic Judaism.

So, in the very early period of the Christian movement, they were preaching an afterlife (again, resurrection of the dead) while Judaism was divided on the subject. But, certainly, if you liked the idea of an afterlife and wanted a religion which could accommodate that, you didn’t have to leave Judaism to find that. And from the second century onwards belief in resurrection/an afterlife seems to have been pretty mainstream in Judaism.

So, as I have suggested in the post above, there were factors around that may have worked to encourage Jews to embrace Christianity in the early centuries of the Christian era. But I don’t think that teachings on resurrection/afterlife would have been a big factor there.

42

I’m not exactly a biblical scholar but I am aware that the lawyer you refer to in the first sentence was named Saul. He changed his name to Paul upon conversion.

43

My bold.

That would be tenets.

44

Not really. It’s the same name in different languages; Saul in Aramaic or Hebrew and Paulus in Greek or Latin. Then it got translated as Paul when the New Testament got translated into English.

45

They aren’t the same names. Saul is a Hebrew name meaning “prayed for”, and Paul is a Latin name meaning “little”.

46

True. But when linguistic cultures encounter one another, it’s not unknown for a one-to-one correspondence between names to be established based on homophony (sounding similar) rather than etymology. For example, the Irish name Somhairle is by convention rendered into English as Samuel. Etymologically there is no connection at all, but nevertheless when Somhairle Mac Domhnaill moves into the Anglophone world he becomes Sam McDonnell. (There is the option of “Sorley”, but “Samuel” is more common.)

It could well be that such a correspondence existed between common Hebrew and Greek names in the first century CE, and that Saul <-> Paul was one such correspondence.

47

All indications would be that the Jewish church was lead by St James, or at least the Jerusalem church was. Peter could have been charged with converting Jews outside of Israel, though, or outside of Jerusalem.

But cynically, I would surmise that Peter’s main job was to give legitimacy to Paul’s Church and answer questions about Jesus. Peter could have been important for deciding which aspects of Jesus’s life were factual, for the Gospels used in the gentile church, which could possibly be why Jesus’s story starts with Peter leaving John the Baptist’s followers and joining Jesus - supposedly before John died. Potentially, he didn’t know much about Jesus’s life before that, so he shot down all of the biographical elements from Jesus’s youth, not knowing which were real. (This is purely speculation, mind.)

48

A significant difference between Christianity and other religions is thus:
Most faiths require a follower to engage in a lifetime of self-discipline and study in order to be considered worthy of entering “heaven”…whatever that was presented as.

With Christianity, all you had to do was:

Admit to yourself that you were a sinner; you cannot self-deliver.
Jesus…the Son of God…made the blood atonement on your behalf already.
Just accept HIM as your Savior.

And you are IN…JUST LIKE THAT!

49

In certain sects it might be just that easy, but if you go down the links on just this page, you will find that there isn’t a universal consensus on what it takes to be a Christian.

50

Perhaps I am behind on ancient religions, but I’m pretty sure that this statement is completely false. Most religions before Christianity, as I understand it, were mostly interested in specific acts of service. E.g.:

  1. Giving some rice to a god, whose mask you hung up on the wall in the kitchen.
  2. Sacrificing a goat once a year, as a community.
  3. Engaging in an orgy once a year.
  4. Having a shaman bless your land.
  5. Building your house in just such a way so that demons couldn’t enter it.

In Norse mythology, they had Valhalla and you could get there by being a brave warrior, but all that meant was that you got to fight in Ragnarök. But it’s likely that this was a 10th century creation as a response to Christianity.

51

A really interesting book to read in this vein is “Zealot” by Reza Aslan.

Basically, he goes through the life of Jesus from the minute evidence available, (most very biased). Jesus was a wandering fanatic, follower of John. He preached across Galilee north of Jerusalem, then made an entry into Jerusalem to adoring mobs. As a “messiah” he was supposedly going to liberate Judea from the Roman occupation, although it seems he expected this to happen with some sort of combination of Arab Spring and divine intervention (unlike previous and later “messiahs” who espoused guerilla methods). As a threat to the established order, and potential destabilizer, he was executed.

His followers apparently were tolerated to lurk around the temple pushing their message and accumulated followers, but were not a real threat to the Jewish establishment. Then came Saul/Paul. After his medical issues on the road to Damascus, he basically made up his own brand of Christianity, which he preached aimed at Gentiles and lapsed Jews in the Diaspora around Syria and Turkey. He completely made up much of his own religion which had little to do with the original message, and claimed to have received this doctrine directly from heaven. He had a very confrontational relationship with the existing apostles and the Jewish Christians - he says some very nasty things about them in the epistles, they lured him to Jerusalem at one point, ambushed him and staged an intervention with a bath to make him prove he was still a good Jew. Some debate whether Barnabas was his sidekick or a spy for James (brother of Jesus, leader of the church).

The general truce that came out was “Paul, you can say and do what you want with gentiles provided you do not lead good Jews astray”, since the Jerusalem faction apparently stuck mainly to proselytizing Jews. Paul was extremely enthusiastic as other point out above, and there were plenty more gentiles than Jews . Meanwhile, the faction in Jerusalem found themselves in the middle of a rebellion where much of their target audience was killed or driven out, and the temple itself completely destroyed. So Paul’s brand became the dominant one.

As to why it succeeded - there’s a whole chapter, IIRC, in “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”, as to why the old Roman religion effectively disappeared with the edict of Constantine, and faded within a generation. It engendered no great fanaticism or dedication, it was simply a collection of fables and establishment pressure. You might also ask why people are attracted to JW, Mormonism, or fundamentalist Christianity over Episcopalians or Presbyterians. I assume part was the feeling of community. Part was the message of charity and kindness, part was the equality message in a very stratified society.

52

Up until Herod killed him, possibly.

If they weren’t a threat, why did Saul/Paul come around to persecute the church?

Regards,
Shodan

53

Presumably, like the Roman persecution of Christians - from time to time they overstepped the bounds and had to be put in their place, or made an example of, or made a convenient scapegoat… But there’s no indication of persistent and strong persecution. After all, one time when Paul came to Jerusalem, he was hijacked and taken to a purifying bath by the “true” church from within the Temple courtyard, IIRC. So certainly they were tolerated occasionally.

St. Stephen, allegedly the first martyr, apparently annoyed some groups around the temple who denounced him to temple authorities as having blasphemed. This got him stoned. Basically, be careful what you say, and to whom.

Remember, this is a very tiny subset in a tiny community. In our 21st century society of anonymity by numbers and mobility, we forget that even the “cities” of those days were small towns, and everyone knew everyone else’s business. If the authorities wanted to go all totalitarian and round up everyone who espoused Christian views in Jerusalem, they easily could have; and people were not above denouncing their neighbours for fun and profit.

(I still haven’t heard how Saul supposedly planned to “persecute” those Christian heretics in the Jewish communities of Damascus; I assume the power of the Sanhedrin that got St. Stephen stoned didn’t extend too far from the temple… and Roman law would presumably not appreciate one bunch of religious fanatics simply murdering another group.)

54

Given that Peter died around the same as James and that he wasn’t made the new head of the Jerusalem church, I’m not sure that your statement is relevant in any way.

I don’t recall who did take it over, but if you follow the trail, the Jerusalem church ends up migrating out of Jerusalem and never seems to have come under the command of the Pauline church, before we lose track of it in the writings. You can find out more if you look for a thread which was asking what Jesus looked like that I participated in.

55

And Manichaeanism, which was sort of a hybrid of Christianity and Zoroastrianism that was extremely bitterly repressed by both of them.

56

Likely by the time the Jerusalem church had to leave town in a hurry, and stopped ignoring the opportunity to convert gentiles - by then they were probably bumping up against the congregations established by Paul. As all sorts of versions of Christianity spread, the subsequent attempts to standardize beliefs were likely dominated by Paul’s adherents.

There is the suggestion that Clement in the Phillipians epistle is the same as the Clement, second bishop of Rome, appointed by Peter - thus an example that at some point, Paul’s adherents were recognized/accepted by Peter and the Apostles. It was Paul who morphed the Jesus, basically leader of the People’s Front of Judea saving the Israelites from Rome and the corrupt temple authorities, into the ethereal saviour of all mankind. I suppose once the Jerusalem people got out into the gentile world, that was the Christian religion they were already faced with.

57

I am a believer and my faith is pretty strong. I believe Christ rose after his crucifixion. As an engineer I do, however, admit to times of some doubting.

So, either Christ did indeed rise from the dead, or he did not. It’s an either-or situation, mutually exclusive, and I believe there are no other possibilities.

Let’s explore the logical path where Christ did not rise from the dead. I don’t see any compelling reasons here for Christianity’s explosion to be explained. When Christ died, his followers were scared and hiding. What compelled them to evangelize so boldly and vocally? To the point of martyrdom? Paul’s conversion can be seen as God-driven, but if it’s only Paul preaching about Christ, that might not be enough to explain Christianity’s explosive growth.

Then, if Christ rose from the dead and visited with his disciples, and ate with them, I think that miraculous comeback is what sparked the disciples to shun their fears and preach vocally. To me, this miracle alone is what drives the disciples to preach so fervently, and they make their case so compelling to others that the faith of peoples grew so quickly.

I believe it is their seeing the resurrected Christ that spurs the disciples to preach fervently, and that leads (with Paul’s great help) many common citizens to come to the faith.

As Thomas Aquinas said,
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.
To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

58

If Christianity was the only religion to exhibit this behavior you might have a point. But other religions also have disciples who exhibit the same fervor that the early Christians had. If your argument is correct, then all of these religions must therefore have a factual basis to sustain that fervor. And if you object that those other religions lack a factual basis, then you’re conceding a religion can have fervor without it and are opening up the possibility that Christian fervor might also not have a factual basis.

59

Delusion?

Just put air-quotes around “seeing” and your sentence still works.

First off, how foolish were people back then? According to the New Testament itself, ‘astonishingly foolish’. Joseph doesn’t believe a word Mary says about her pregnancy, because, c’mon – but then he does, because an angel vouched for her.

That would convince me. But what convinced him was seeing an angel in a dream.

Now, you know and I know that “seeing an angel in a dream” is, in point of fact, exactly like “not seeing an angel at all”. And yet Joseph accepts it; to him, it’s exactly like “seeing an angel for reals.”

So we have to grant, for the sake of argument, that folks back then were implausibly foolish; almost impossibly foolish; they’d see someone in a dream, and then spend the rest of their lives acting as if they’d interacted with a supernatural entity.

So start with that.

Also: after Jesus died, did his followers get together and talk with religious fervor about how badly they wanted him to come back and assure them that everything was going to be okay? Yeah, I guess. Were they ceremonially partaking of hallucinogens at the time? Maybe. Did they then see what they most wanted to see? Possibly.

I mean, they had a whole call-and-response ritual built around wine that for all I know was ordinary water until someone sprinkled powdered mushrooms into it; that’s an unlikely explanation, but, hey, so is “some guy rose from the dead.”

(At that, “some guy took a lot of drugs and folks thought he was dead” is also pretty unlikely – but is it more or less unlikely than “some guy rose from the dead”?)

Of course, every such mundane explanation sidesteps the one actually offered in the New Testament: his apparent magic was actual magic, because demons.

60

How something morphs from “he was executed and buried” to “he rose from the dead, walked among us for a while, then flew up into the clouds” is an interesting debate

The earliest claim of resurrection, allegedly, is by Paul (surprise!) in 1 Corinthians 15 from what I can find with a quick Google. Some think this a later edit, but it basically says “Christ rose from the dead” and claims some of whom saw him are still alive. Of course, it would not be above Paul to make wild claims knowing that none of those alleged witnesses are anywhere nearby to contradict him… and he goes on to make parallels with everyone’s resurrection at judgement day. So it’s possible that the early disciples’ claim “he is still with us in spirit” morphed into Paul’s claim “he rose from the dead to save us, so shall you rise from the dead on judgement day”. Paul made up much of what is current Christianity without the inconvenience of having to listen to the real apostles, since he claims that Jesus told him directly that he was an apostle and here is the doctrine, etc. etc.