How Far Have We Strayed?

Travel back some forty years to the period between 1962 and 1965. The Catholic Church was reinterpreting many doctrines that it had held for centuries, allowing services to be spoken in the vernacular language instead of Latin, seeking friendship with other denominations, and recognizing good in other religions.

Going back another forty to fifty years, an Austrian man and his organization was interpreting Christianity in another way. Adolph Hitler saw the Jewish people as Christ killers and set out to exterminate all Jewish people, killing over six million Jews during the course of the Second World War.

Going back another hundred years, slavery was still in existence in our young United States of America. Slavery was an accepted practice because Christians interpreted many of the books of the Bible as condoning slavery. St. Paul, writing in his letter to his Christian congregation in Ephesus, says, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”

Journeying another two hundred years further back (1611 A.D.) and the Authorized King James version of the English Bible is first being printed. Six different “companies” of men each took different sections of the Bible to translate into the English language : the First Westminster Company took Genesis through 2 Kings, the First Cambridge Company took 1 Chronicles through the Song of Solomon, the First Oxford Company took Isaiah through Malachi, the Second Cambridge Company took the Apocrypha, the Second Oxford Company took the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation, and the Second Westminster Company took Romans through Jude.

Another hundred years further and Martin Luther nailed his ‘ninety-five theses against indulgences in the Catholic Church’ to a church door (1517 A.D.), starting the Reformation and cracking the rigid structures of Christianity. Christianity became the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church (which had split from the Catholic Church in 1054), and the start of the Protestant (Lutheran) Church. Protestants kept dividing themselves over the centuries based on the various interpretations of the Scriptures until we arrive at our modern day number of over thirty-three thousand different Christian denominations.

Another three hundred years back and we arrive at a time when certain Christians were being tortured and killed because their interpretation of Christianity was not the same as the only authority of Christianity at the time - the Catholic Church. In 1208, a particular group of Christians known as Cathars was condemned as heretics and a crusade was set against them. The Albigensian crusade, as it became known, killed about a million people, not only Cathars but much of the people of southern France. This, in turn, led to the formation of the Inquisition, which has its own infamous history of torture and murder in the name of Jesus and the Church.

Jumping back almost a thousand years to 367 A.D., Athanasius of Alexandria produced the first list of New Testament books that corresponds to the twenty-seven books found in the Catholic and Protestant Bibles today.

In 325 A.D., we have men meeting in the city of Nicaea to discuss and come to terms with the nature of Jesus. The Council of Nicaea, under the direction of the Roman emperor, Constantine, was to decide whether Jesus was equal to God or subordinate to God, basing its judgments on its interpretation of the books of the New Testament. Also, under Constantine, Christianity became the official religion of all the Roman Empire. By the Council of Constantinople in 381, Jesus was accepted as the same nature as God or in simpler terms Jesus became the same as God.

Venturing back to the years around 30 A.D., we come to Jesus and his followers. Jesus, a Jew, preached the coming of the Kingdom of God to anyone who would listen. Jesus followed the Torah, attended the synagogue, made the prescribed pilgrimages to Jerusalem to attend the feasts, and believed fervently in God’s presence in the history of his people: the Israelites.