Consider the scenario. Evan assuming that the Gospels accurately describe the scope of Jesus' following, i.e. an inner circle of twelve (minus one) men, an outer circle of seventy and an unknown number of men and women of varying levels of commitment...if they truly believed what Jesus was preaching, they too believed that the world was coming to an end. Not at some nebulous time in the future, but before the people around them started dying off! If they were driven to continue Jesus' mission, they'd be attempting to get as many of their fellow Jews living right so that they could enter the Kingdom of God. (Yup. "Fellow Jews". You read that right, there is little indication that Jesus was preaching to the gentiles.) The last thing that any of Jesus' followers would be trying to do was to start an organization, a church.
Nonetheless, that's what happened.
It's indisputable that something ostensibly based on the teachings of Jesus spread around the Roman Empire and even bordering nations within a very short period of time. How closely what got spread around adhered to what Jesus was teaching isn't so clear.
There are several pieces of evidence that there were competing versions of Christianity in the first century following Jesus' death. Firstly there's the evidence within the scriptures that we have. Throughout the epistles there's repeated references to false prophets, false teachers, people preaching "another Jesus" and even those being labeled "antichrist". These weren't pagans, weren't satanists, they were other Christians who happened to have a different opinion about what Jesus taught and the meaning of those teachings, including what they were supposed to do about them. Then there's the testimony of Paul, who is very clear that he had doctrinal disagreements with other Christians, including Peter. We also have clear historical evidence of self-described Christian movements. The most well known and longest lasting were the Marcionites. Their founder, Marcion, taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus were two separate entities, with the Old Testament God being an inferior, if not evil, entity. He also rejected all the Gospels except for Luke. His movement survived for several centuries as a rival to the Orthodox/Catholic Church. (The Catholics, or Roman Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox were one church through the first millennium, even if there were internal disagreements) Even in the Gospels, there is a difference between the Jesus being presented in the synoptics versus the Gospel of John, and differences in emphasis among the synoptics. .
It's not surprising that there was disagreement. It would be surprising if there were not. Jesus operated in a backwater of the Roman Empire. Even in the more urban areas communication was far from instantaneous. Christian communities, even in the same province would be virtually isolated, with only occasional communication with others. Jesus' teachings would have spread exclusively by word of mouth in the early decades before epistles and gospels came to be written and passed around. Not only would transmission of "the Word" resembled a modern game of "telephone", but as nature abhors a vacuum, so does human nature. Charismatic local leaders would have put their own spin on Jesus' words.
One competing Christianity is the sect we know as the Ebionites. These were Christians who saw themselves as followers of Jesus who retained their Jewishness. In the writings that have come down to us they were opposed by Paul, who insisted that one did not need to follow Jewish law in order to be a Christian. Earlier I mentioned Marcion. There were also numerous sects of Christian Gnostics who held any number of beliefs that we today might consider bizarre. Or anti-Biblical. But who wrote the Bible?
One of things that every group of the various Christianities claimed was that their beliefs were passed down from Jesus' original apostles. By the time the competition among the various sects came to a head, all the originals were safely dead and could no longer be consulted. That didn't stop gospels and epistles from being produced with the names of The Twelve tacked on to them. In addition to the books of the New Testament that we know from our Bibles, there were dozens of gospels, epistles and apocalypses being passed around. There was no standard. Different sects used different writings. There was no central authority to decide which were legitimate and which weren't.
But eventually there was a central authority. Even though the Catholic Church claims that there is an unbroken chain through Jesus to his apostles to their successors up through modern day. It's more likely in my opinion that what became the Catholic and Orthodox Churches coalesced slowly over several centuries until they became the dominant sect of the various Christianities. When Constantine the Great legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire there were still competing sects: the previously mentioned Marcionites and Gnostics, and the Arians in northern and western Europe. A sect called the Nestorians found refuge in the Persian Empire. The Catholic/Orthodox however, emerged as the dominant among the various types of Christianity. Their power, backed by the Empire, enabled them to claim to be the one, true, church, and label competitors as heretics.
Not long after the consolidation of power, the Catholic/Orthodox hierarchy saw the need to establish which writings were authorized — what constituted the canon of scripture. Related to this was the doctrine of Apostolic Succession. The Catholic/Orthodox leadership maintained that they were the successors of the original apostles and that right doctrine had been transmitted from one generation to the next through that unbroken lineage. This succession was both literal — doctrine was passed down, and spiritual — they inherited the spiritual authority of their predecessors. Referring to this authority, they decided what writings were authentic and which were not, destroying many of the alternate scriptures, although some copies survived into modern times.
The process was somewhat circular. The Bible, once established, was what the winning contestant in the Church competition supposedly was based upon, but what constituted that Bible, was what the winners decided would be in it. More on this in a future article: Sola Scriptura.
Start at The Beginning: Part I
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