Episode 290 – Christianity’s Origins
This week we wrap up the three part Dustin' off the Degree series on Christianity's origins. In the news we have FMG bills, rising vaccination rates, the heart warming response to the Hindu temple's vandalism in Kentucky, the Pope admitting some nuns are sex slaves, and more!Email us at contact@htotw.com or leave us a voice message at (541) 203-0666 or htotw.com/speakpipeSupport the show at htotw.com/donateSubscribe at htotw.com/subscribeDustin off the Degree - What are Christianity's OriginsChristians generally believe that Christianity is purely descended from Judaism, but is that really where it comes from?If we start with the earliest Christian texts, which were written by Paul to churches he had previously founded in Syria and Asia Minor, we find Paul bragging that everything he preaches was revealed to him in visions, in other words he dreamed it up, and he paints the picture of a god taking human form for a few days to be killed. He doesn't even give him a name, just a title, savior. In Hebrew this is Yeshua and in Greek it is Christos. In other words, Jesus Christ is redundant.If you look at the gospels, Matthew and Luke both copied heavily from Mark, and Mark is the story of Yeshua, the savior, told in the style of Homer's Odyssey. These gospels were also all written anonymously, and according to tradition both Mark and Luke were assistants and scribes for Paul. The gospel of John was written much later and tells a very different story, it just has the same characters.The author of Luke also wrote Acts, which tells the story of the early church, so if we accept the traditional author and his relationship with Paul, this story also comes from, or at least is heavily influenced by Paul.What I can say with the greatest degree of certainty is that Paul was the founder of Christianity. Now, with much less certainty I have two hypothesizes of Christianity's origin.Hypothesis 1 - Paul's movement onlyIn my first hypothesis, Paul has a fever dream of a god taking the form of a man and dying for humanity's sins. He then travels around preaching about this and starts the Christian church. The story grows over time to this savior being a demigod born of the Jewish god raping a teenage girl, in the style of Zeus. This demigod then gets a backstory using the well known and familiar template of the Odyssey and details, like John the Baptist, are added in an attempt to make it easier to recruit Essenes, Mandeans, and members of the Jewish diaspora. Some of these details may have drawn on stories of actual people, the rest were probably made up whole cloth.Hypothesis 2 - Movements coming togetherThe book of Acts includes includes two stories of Paul visiting with the apostles in Jerusalem, in the first he pissed off enough people that he had to escape death threats, in the second he was able to call a council what decided doctrine. In this hypothesis Paul had his fever dream and found a group of Essenes that he thought would be receptive to his message, they weren't, but he picked up some ideas from them. Years later after he had found and developed a large enough group, he returned and they merged movements. The gospels and the book of Acts were then written to show that they had always been united.To answer the original question several months ago, is Christianity descended from Judaism? The systematic destruction of records definitely makes it harder to answer this question, but I would suspect that early Christians probably borrowed bits and pieces from Judaism, kind of like how Mohamed borrowed bits of Judaism and Christianity in establishing Islam, and kind of like how Joseph Smith borrowed bits of Christianity. And much like the establishment of Islam, within a century there was nothing Jewish left.NEWSIdaho joins other states in bills to ban female genital mutilationLast year a federal court in Michigan ruled that the federal law banning female genital mSupport the show