For this Sunday I have again decided to pull a post from my legacy blog at RedLetterLiving.net (Click on the logo above to see RLL). It was originally posted 13 years ago, but it seems to be more relevant to today’s version of Christianity
We forget to distinguish between history as a record of the elites and history as a record of the people. While most academics concentrate on the theologians who wrote the treatises and on the bishops who argued about questions of authority, the most important constituency of all gets left out: the vast majority of ordinary people whose lives were dramatically changed by the Jesus Movement. This included women, peasants, and slaves.
Robin Myers – The Underground Church – Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus.
It is important to understand just how diverse the early church was. For the first three centuries there were no creeds or lists of beliefs that you had to follow to call yourself a follower of the Way. For the most part these early Christian groups were just ordinary people who had banded together around their trust in the teachings of Jesus. One common practice was that they would sell their possessions and turn the proceeds over to the leaders of their group to be used for the benefit of all. This was part of their core beliefs of hospitality. We will get into that in a future post.
Because almost all The People of The Way were illiterate they left little behind in the way of written documents. There were some documents being passed around during this period, some of them by the Apostle Paul among others, but for the first hundred years or so, they were simply unavailable to many. But in recent years artifacts of their existence have been found to let us know a little more about them. We also know more about them from the study of tax law and organizational documents from the Roman military of the times. We know that they were a big enough perceived threat to the Roman Empire that many of their leaders, but only a small percentage of followers, were executed in the Coliseum.
We know that they lived their daily lives around their faith to an infinitely greater degree than today’s Christians. But faith to them was not citing a creed, they just didn’t exist for the most part for several hundred more years, but instead faith was defined as a trust in practicing and teaching and wisdom of Jesus Christ. They trusted in what Jesus did and said. It was still centuries away before Christians started putting beliefs ahead of actions.
RJ's Corner 