where the f*ck did christianity come from? (bonnetthoughts) transcript

Imagine there's a guy who persecutes civil rights activists. Then all of a sudden he says he's a changed man and years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he becomes the number one fan of the civil rights movement. The guy even changes his name to appeal to activists. He claims to have physically encountered the deceased MLK Jr. and says that MLK told him to forget about black liberation and instead preach that the only thing that matters is believing in MLK Jr.'s death and resurrection and that his bloodshed paid the price for human wrongdoing.

That is the magnitude of what Paul did to Jesus's message. There was a time when I believed all of this. Jesus, heaven, hell, salvation, God, Satan. I went to church every Sunday. I led Bible studies. I worked for a church for years. I even started a graduate program at one point for my masters of theology because I'd read the Bible cover to cover a few times and things were starting to feel a little fishy and I thought academia might help me reconcile the questions and contradictions that I was wrestling with.

Spoiler alert, it did the exact opposite. It showed me that Christianity, as it turns out, is not a direct line from Jesus to today. Uh but the product of a very long, highly engineered, deeply political process that took centuries to build. The only real difference between mainstream Christianity, aka nine or sometimes known as Nian Christianity, and newer faiths, the only difference is time. Nine Christians have had 2,000 years to make their version seem normal and 2,000 years to rewrite the story until it fit the needs of empires.

So, when I see something like Jesus first or saved by grace in someone's social media bio, I don't see an innocent statement of faith. I see a reminder of an institution that has spent centuries obscuring its origins and punishing anyone who got in the way. So, here's what we're going to cover. Um, because there's a lot. Girl, I have a feeling this is going to be long. But, we're going to start off with some historical context about the different communities that we're going to talk about so that you know who was who.

And then we're going to talk about Jesus himself, who he actually was, what he taught, whether or not he ever claimed to be God. He didn't. Spoiler. Um, from there we're going to look at Jesus's message and how it got hijacked by this guy named Paul. You might have heard of him. Um, he's the one who turned a Jewish movement into a non-Jewish religion centered on believing in Jesus's death and resurrection. Um, then we're going to talk about the Garden of Eden, heaven, hell, Satan, and how those concepts were constructed over centuries.

And then after that, we're going to look at how the old and new testaments were assembled and also how the councils of the Roman Empire literally voted Jesus into godhood. And finally, we will talk about why this history still matters. And before anyone asks, yes, there are three major branches of nyine Christianity, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant. They split at different times. I was raised in the Protestant tradition if you care.

So, you'll notice that lens show itself a bit, especially when we get to things like the Nino Constantinopolitan Creed and the Protestant Reformation. Let's get into it. [laughter] So, to understand how Christianity became what it is, you have to understand who was involved at the beginning, right? So, there are three main groups. Jewish people and Judaism. We're talking about 1400 B.CE to present. These are the descendants of the ancient Israelites who maintained their distinct identity, religion, and covenant with their God who they called Yahweh.

And so by the first century CE, Judaism was pretty diverse with different groups like the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and other communities. Jewish people never accepted Jesus as the Messiah or as divine. Um, they followed the Torah, which is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and they continue to wait for a human messiah who will restore Israel. The destruction of the second temple in 70 CE led to the cotification of the Hebrew cannon which Christians call the old testament and um it also led to the rise of rabbitic Judaism.

Then we have Jewish Christians and Jewish Christianity which is 30 to 135 CE approximately. These were the first followers of Jesus. Um they were Jews who saw him as a human messiah but remained fully Jewish in practice. They kept the Torah. They worshiped in the temple and they did not believe that Jesus was divine. That's why I keep clarifying human messiah. Um they were a sect within Judaism, not a separate religion.

The Jerusalem church was led by James who was Jesus's brother. He was the center of this movement and they saw Jesus as uh a human who was chosen by God to liberate Israel but not God himself. So the whole Jesus is my supernatural savior who died for my sins beat that came later. Uh eventually Jewish Christians were kind of they were oppressed on both sides by both Jews who saw them as heretics and Gentile Christians who saw them as too Jewish and by the end of the second century Jewish Christianity had largely disappeared.

Lastly we have gentile Christianity 100 CE to present. This is what I'm referring to when I talk about the transition from Jewish Christianity to a new separate religion. This was a transition that was driven by Paul. I hate Paul's guts. You'll learn why in this essay, but it was driven by Paul and his followers. By the end of the first century, gentile Christians had begun to dominate the movement. They rejected the Torah.

They established their own institutions. And at first, Christianity was an illegal religion in the Roman Empire. But all of that flipped in the 4th century when the state conveniently decided that it had a vested interest in what people believed. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. [snorts] But anyway, those are the three groups. >> Was Jesus the Messiah? Well, that depends on what you mean by Messiah. So in first century Judaism, the most popular and widespread expectation was that the Messiah would be a political liberator, a descendant of King David, who would kick the Romans out and restore Jewish sovereignty.

There's no evidence in first century Jewish sources, that the Messiah was expected to be God. Even descriptions like Isaiah's wonderful counselor, Mighty God, were widely understood at the time as hyperbole. Um, so just like poetic exaggerations, not literal claims of divinity. So when Jesus's Jewish Christian followers, mouthful, called him Messiah, they were making a political claim almost like a crew being excited for a new king to come and save the day.

Okay. So when Jesus was crucified, which is now celebrated by Christians as Good Friday, his followers understood it at the time as a political loss. Um like a political tragedy, not a spiritual loss. Okay? So crucifixion at the time also was a common form of state punishment. And Jesus was crucified for sedition, for challenging the authority of the Roman Empire, not for saying he was God. Yes, our pastors lie to us.

Sorry. So Jesus never said he was God. Um, a lot of people like to say that he said he was God because he called himself the son of God, but that phrase was thrown around all the time back then. Roman emperors called themselves son of God, too. It was a title of favor, not a claim of godhood. The Gospel of John made that divine claim on Jesus's behalf decades after his death and his godhood was later decided like literally voted on and politically enforced by the Christian Roman Empire.

So the version of Jesus that we ended up with is a construction kind of similar to what the world did to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but you know they made him white and said he was God. [music] So, present day Christians love to quote John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Okay. But why was any of that necessary? Why do we need to be saved?

Is anyone asking that question? So, the theological idea is that humans are born in sin and need to be saved from themselves. Allegedly, humanity is so broken, as made clear by the Garden of Eden and generations of failed patriarchs like Abraham and Moses and David, that God had to send Jesus in human form a blameless sacrifice to atone for the sin of the world. And allegedly, if you believe in Jesus's death and that it fixed everything and that he rose from the grave, you get to go to heaven.

But here's the thing. Ancient Jews did not believe Jesus was the Messiah, and they did not believe their souls needed to be saved from hell. The Christian concept of salvation, as we understand it, was popularized by a self-proclaimed apostle named Paul, also known as Saul of Tarsus. Yes, they're the same person. But yes, it was popularized by Paul, not Jesus, not the original apostles, Paul. Paul's letters written in the 50s CE are the earliest surviving Christian writings we have mostly because other early Christian writings were either lost or destroyed.

I wonder why philosophers in the ancient world you know they didn't write textbooks they wrote letters and essays and they used these letters to debate ideas and respond to each other's criticisms. So at the end of the day Paul was just a philosopher engaged in discourse. Okay. And Paul is the first source we have that interprets Jesus's crucifixion as a supernatural sacrificial death. He was obsessed with the idea that if you put your faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that you're saved.

So similar to the way that Jesus never said he was God, he also never said that you needed to believe in him to avoid hell. Jesus was a radical who preached liberation from oppression, justice for the poor, and treating others the way that you want to be treated. Paul heard all of that and said something completely different. He was like, "The cross was a blood sacrifice." And if you believe in zombie Jesus with all your heart, you'll go to heaven, girl.

Maybe he just misheard what Jesus said. Oh, right. Paul never met Jesus. He just made it up. Scholars aren't entirely sure where Paul came up with any of this Some argue that he came up with it after his religious conversion on the Damascus road, while others say it developed later in response to controversies involving gentile converts. All we know is that he said he received the knowledge from somewhere higher than himself.

Yeah. So, regardless of where the idea came from, we can't understand his motivations. They were a little shy. Aside from his guilt and probably feeling like justification through works was a hard cell considering he was a former persecutor of Christians, scholars also like to point out that Paul was preaching to Gentiles who had no connection to Judaism. And so his salvation through faith alone doctrine conveniently created a theology that didn't require people to become Jewish to be saved.

And there was also his ambition, right? Paul wasn't one of the original apostles. Again, he never met Jesus. That's just so huge, guys. Paul never met Jesus. Okay. Um, and anyway, his flashy doctrine was just it was a good way to establish his authority. And so, like the theory is that inventing a new theology, one that made Gentiles equal to Jews, gave him basically a following and a reason to be relevant. And so, I just really want to drive this point home because my beef with Paul is unending.

So basically, imagine there's a guy who persecutes civil rights activists. Then all of a sudden, he says he's a changed man. And years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he becomes the number one fan of the civil rights movement. The guy even changes his name to appeal to activists. He claims to have physically encountered the deceased MLK Jr. and says that MLK told him to forget about black liberation and instead preach that the only thing that matters is believing in MLK Jr.'s death and resurrection and that his bloodshed paid the price for human wrongdoing.

That is the magnitude of what Paul did to Jesus's message. Paul's dramatic conversion story is called the road to Damascus. You can read about it in Acts 9:es 3-16. The wildest part about all of it is he didn't even write that story himself. Look it up. It was written by the author of Luke and Acts. But Paul literally never mentions the Damascus road. All that to say, Paul is the guy who wrote a third of the New Testament cannon.

If you walk into the average nine Christian church on a Sunday, pastors are usually preaching from Paul's letters. Some theologians even joke and say that Paul hijacked Christianity and turned it into polyanity because mainstream Christianity diverges so far from what Jesus actually taught. >> So technically the belief in resurrection wasn't invented by Christians. It was already present in second temple Judaism. It was a belief in a general resurrection at the time um like a future event when God would raise all the righteous dead.

Um there's some things kind of reminiscent and inspired by that in the book of revelation. Um but it wasn't a belief that an individual let alone Jesus would rise from the dead. So when the disciples claimed that Jesus had risen, they were technically operating within an existing Jewish framework. They just took it in a direction that no one expected. So in the original and undisputed ending of the gospel of Mark which is Mark 16 1-8 verses 1-8 three women are said to have visited Jesus's tomb.

They find it empty and are told by a young man that he has risen. But the story ends abruptly. In the original Gospel of Mark, there's no appearance of the risen Jesus. And the earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts don't contain verses 9 through 20 that are in our modern version of the Christian Bible today, which are all post-resurrection appearances. Scholars know that these verses were added later because the Greek vocabulary and the style change super abruptly.

Mary Magdalene is randomly introduced as though it's for the first time and there are a ton of inconsistencies. Those stories of Jesus eating and appearing to the disciples and ascending to heaven were likely motivated by a need for a more satisfying ending and to establish what is referred to as apostolic authority. Yeah. So the only narrative accounts of Jesus physically ascending to heaven appear in the book of Luke and Acts which were written around 80 to 90 CE.

And the author of Luke just claimed 11 apostles saw the ascension. But no other source corroborates this event. Like not even the apostles themselves. And you're probably wondering, "But Luke said it happened and he wrote Luke and Acts, right?" Wrong. There's mainstream consensus that the names of the disciples were added to the gospels later. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It blew me away, too. >> The Old Testament was written over a period of about a thousand years, roughly,400 to 400 B.CE.

And by the time Jesus was born, the Old Testament had existed for about four centuries in something close to its final form. And the Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, was already an established collection of sacred texts. And so the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew by the Israelites with a few passages in Aramaic. So just for context, why does Genesis start with Abraham? Okay. It's because the whole thing is structured to show lineage from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to the 12 tribes of Israel and eventually for Christians it leads to Jesus.

And so the narrative is designed to show you this long line of patriarchs who were supposed to be righteous but they kept failing. Abraham lied about his wife being his sister. Isaac played favorites. Jacob was a deceiver. Judah slept with his daughter-in-law. Yeah, I remember that stuff. Okay. Terrible. The point was to show that even the founding fathers, so to speak, couldn't get it right, which in Christian theology set the stage for the ultimate righteous patriarch to come and fix everything.

So that was Jesus, allegedly. Um, the wild and wacky thing is is that we literally don't know if Abraham or any of these patriarchs actually existed. I learned that while writing this essay. Um, there's no extra biblical evidence for them, no inscriptions, no artifacts, no contemporary records, and the text itself contains anacronisms like animals and contexts where they shouldn't be and mentions of Philistines who didn't show up until like centuries later.

So, while the Greeks had Hercules, the Israelites, they probably had someone like Abraham, um, also known as Abram, who functions the same way, a foundational hero who embodies the origins and values of his people. And it's probably more legend than history. The point is is that the the Old Testament was written to explain where Jewish people came from and why their God had chosen them. And later Christians would take that same narrative and repurpose it to prove that Jesus was the fulfillment of it all, even if the Jewish people who wrote the original story never agreed with that.

Um, so important context, Jesus was a Hebrew by ancestry, an Israelite by descent, and a Jew by descent and participation in Jewish customs. He spoke Aramaic and like other first century Jews, Jesus and his followers had a very different understanding of who the Messiah was supposed to be. Um, especially compared to what later Christian theology would claim. So when did Jewish Christians begin to change definitions and create their own version of the Hebrew Old Testament?

Enter the Septuagent. The Septuagent which is often abbreviated as LXX which are the Roman numerals for 70 is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. So according to the legend 70 or 72 technically Jewish scholars translated the Penetuic which is the first five books of the Old Testament. They translated it into Greek in Alexandria Egypt around 250 to 200 B.CE. And the translation of the rest of the Hebrew scriptures followed over the next century or so.

And by about 100 B.CE. the entire Old Testament was available in Greek. And so the Septuagent was the Bible of the early Christians. When the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they are almost always quoting the Septuagent, not the original Hebrew. The Septuagent also contains books that aren't in the Hebrew Bible. books like Tobbit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Cyra, Baroo, and the first and second Mcabes.

Excuse my pronunciation if any of those are wrong. Uh, but these books are called the Apocrypha and from the Greek word meaning hidden. Uh, they were included in the Septuagent but excluded from the Hebrew cannon that was later codified by rabbitic Judaism. The point is translations aren't neutral. The Septuagent was a translation, but the choices the translators made had really significant theological consequences. For example, the Hebrew word Alma, which means young woman, was translated into Greek, as parthonos, which means virgin.

This is the translation in the Gospel of Matthew that claims that Jesus was born of a virgin. The Hebrew text doesn't say virgin. It says young woman, but the Greek translation says virgin. And that translation became the foundation for the doctrine of the virgin birth. Are we understanding the implications? One of the foundational claims of Christianity rests on a translation choice made before Jesus was born. Okay.

So, the septuagent was the bridge between Judaism and Christianity. It is the thing that allowed Greekeaking Gentiles to read the Jewish scriptures without learning Hebrew. But it also allowed the early Christian authors who were writing in Greek to shape the Old Testament text to fit their theological agendas. The Jewish people who wrote and preserved these texts never accepted Jesus as the Messiah. But that didn't stop Gentiles from repurposing those scriptures anyway.

[music] >> So quick note here. There was something called the Intertestamental period. roughly 400year bridge between the Old Testament and New Testament. That period runs from the last book of the Christian Old Testament known as Malachi which is written roughly around 420 B.CE. And it ends with John the Baptist who began his ministry around 27 to 29 CE. It's often called the 400 silent years. This period is when the Greeks took over.

Hellenism spread. The Septuagent was translated. Synagogues emerged and apocalyptic literature shaped Jewish expectations around the Messiah. So the Apocrypha was also written during this time and by the time Jesus showed up, Judaism had already evolved into something very different from what it was in the Hebrew Old Testament. So just a little bit of context about that. Okay. So the New Testament as we know it didn't exist for most of the first century.

Different Christian communities had different collections of writings. So, some had Paul's letters, some had a gospel or two, some had other texts that didn't even make it into the final cannon. There was no central authority deciding what was scripture and what was not. The word canon comes from the Greek cananan and it literally means like measuring rod or standard, something used to keep things straight. So in this context it refers to the authoritative list of books that are considered scripture and the canon was fluid for a pretty long time actually.

So around 144 CE a teacher in Rome named Marcion created the first known New Testament canon of Christian scripture. His version of the New Testament was a modified version of the Gospel of Luke and 10 of Paul's letters. And he cut out anything else he didn't like. He also rejected the Old Testament entirely and argued that the God of the Old Testament was an inferior deity who was like different from the God that Jesus preached.

Kind of bizarre. Anyway, Marcian's canon forced the Orthodox Church to define its own canon. Before Marcion, there was literally no urgent need to decide which books were in and which were out because Yeah. Basically, once Marcon drew a line, the church had to draw its own. And so, the New Testament cannon was shaped, at least in part as reaction to what was believed to be heresy. But even then, the canon wasn't settled because the criteria for which books made the cut were kind of subjective.

They were based on things like apostolic authorship, widespread use in churches, and theological orthodoxy. But these criteria were applied inconsistently. So, some books that were widely used, like the Shepherd of Hermas, which you probably haven't heard of, didn't make it in, while others that were very disputed, like Hebrews and Revelation, eventually became canon. It wasn't until the late 4th century that the New Testament canon was finalized.

But even then, some Eastern churches accepted different books than Western churches. So yeah, the gospels were written decades after the crucifixion by people who were not eyewitnesses in Greek, a language that Jesus did not speak. And according to the consensus of critical scholarship, the gospels were probably written anonymously. And the names that we know like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were probably attached later.

Yeah, those authors were like second or third generation Christians who had never met Jesus and they were writing for the time-sensitive needs of their faith communities. So, the Christian Garden of Eden is pretty much a reinterpretation of a reinterpretation sprinkled with a little bit of Mesopotamian myth, Jewish apocalyptic thought, and early Christian theology. So when we look at the book of Genesis, we see that it places the Garden of Eden at the source of four rivers.

Um, two of them, no one knows that they actually exist or if they dried up. But the two that we do know existed are the Tigers and Euphrates. And these are obviously still flowing today through modern day Iraq and Syria and Turkey. And you know, I think they flow into the Persian Gulf. Is that right? And so ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, was located in what is now Iraq and parts of Syria, Turkey, and Iran.

And so in the Sumerian Eden, gods created humans to be their agricultural slaves to literally grow food and feed it to them in temple sacrifices. And so biblical writers worked off that narrative in Genesis 2:15, where God places Adam in the garden to cultivate and keep it. And the Hebrew word for cultivate is abad, which also means to serve or to work. And the word for keep is shamar. I'm so sorry if I'm butchering these, but that means to guard or to protect.

So Adam's job was to serve and protect the garden itself instead of being a slave to the gods. It's basically a weird inversion of the Mesopotamian creation story. In the Jewish tradition, Gone Eden developed into a concept of two gardens. So the lower garden was the earthly paradise where Adam and Eve lived, the original garden where everything started. And the higher garden became this like celestial paradise which was a destination for where good souls went after they died.

Jewish tradition never saw the garden story as this fall that tainted all of humanity. The Hebrew version of Genesis 3 actually has no words for sin, transgression, disobedience, or punishment. Um, so the Jewish Eden story is just an explanation of why the human condition is the way that it is. So, reasons for why we work and why child birth is painful and why we die. Christians are the ones who remixed things and made the Garden of Eden about some fall from grace that required redemption only available through Jesus's sacrifice.

Dramatic [music] >> Okay, so let's talk about hell. Everyone's favorite. So today we understand hell as this subterranean torture chamber where sinners burn for eternity. Um by the way I cannot describe hell as subterranean without shouting out the incredible work of Siccilio M. Cooper. Their paper fallen does an incredible job of explaining how the original sin in the Garden of Eden shaped verticality. So like heaven up, hell down, and also how blackness got mapped onto the demonic and the damned.

So I highly encourage you to read it. Anyway, the version of hell that we know today doesn't appear in the Old Testament, and it wasn't what Jesus or his disciples taught. Um, the word hell itself doesn't appear in the original Hebrew or Greek texts of the Bible. There's no direct translation. The Hebrew word shiel meant the grave or the place of the dead, which was known as this like shadowy underworld where everyone went regardless of how good or bad they'd been.

Um, it wasn't a place of punishment. It was just where you went when you died. By the time the New Testament was written, Greekeaking Jews had already started translating shiel as Hades, which you know was the Greek underworld. And that's really funny because in Homer's Odyssey, Hades wasn't even a place of torture. But anyway, um Jesus used the word gehenna in the gospels which was translated as hell. But Gehenna was a literal place like known as the valley of Hanome which was like a ravine outside of the walls of Jerusalem.

And so in the Old Testament, Gehenna was associated with some pretty wild things like child sacrifice to the god Molech. And somehow after coming into contact with other civilizations who had concepts of hell and to probably reconcile why bad things happen to quote unquote good people and why the wicked often prosper, I have theories on that. Um, hell started being associated with divine judgment and destruction. And so this view was later adopted by Christians and developed over several centuries.

So that's how hell was created. It's just a bunch of hearsay. Um, there is a popular rumor that Gehenna was this perpetually burning trash dump. I can't tell you how many sermons I've heard about that theory. That came from some medieval rabbi named David Kimchi. Scholars have found no archaeological or literary evidence to support his claim. So, what do we have next? Oh, Satan. So, in the Old Testament, the Hebrew word Satan meant adversary or accuser.

In the original Hebrew text, uh, Satan, uh, wasn't the name of a specific fallen angel. It was a title or a role that humans and other entities could hold. And so, the idea of Satan as this like fallen angel who rebelled against God and rules over a place of torment developed much later during the intertestamental period actually. So, roughly 200 B.CE to 70. And it was influenced by a few things like Persian dualism and Greek mythology.

And so by the time the New Testament was written, Satan had become the enemy of God. And by the medieval period, he had been fully transformed into this scary ruler of hell. So you're probably wondering how he went from she the grave to Satan in this fire and brimstone hell of modern evangelicalism. You can thank theological creativity, innovation. Yeah. Early Christian writers like Tertullian and Augustine developed the idea of eternal punishment.

And by the time Dante wrote Inferno in the 1300s, the cartoonish version of hell that we know today was fully baked into the Western imagination, baby. And the King James Bible in 1611 translated Shol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus. All as hell. So they collapsed four very distinct concepts into one terrifying ooie word. So once this version of hell was constructed, it became a tool of control and that tool was most brutally deployed through the slave bibles of the 19th century obviously.

So in 1807, the society for the conversion of negro slaves in London published an a bridged bible for enslaved Africans in the British West Indies. So the editors removed the Exodus story entirely. So they skipped from Genesis 45:28 to Exodus 19. So that means enslaved people never read about the Israelites escaping bondage. And they removed any verses that would inspire hope for liberation. But they were sure to keep Ephesians 6:5, which says, you know, servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling.

And they kept the passages about hell and damnation. Um, which was obviously just a way to use the threat of eternal torment to keep enslaved people scared and fearful. Um, so the same doctrine of eternal punishment that had been constructed over centuries by theologians was now being weaponized to tell black people that they were damned if they didn't listen to their masters. Terrible. Um, as for heaven, we'll round out this section with heaven.

Uh, the New Testament concept of a blessed afterlife with God also developed over time. Uh the Old Testament had no clear concept of heaven as a reward for the righteous. Heaven was simply where God and the angels lived, not where people went when they died. And so again, it was not until the intertestamental period, that 400 that 400-year period, the Jewish apocalyptic literature began to describe a heavenly reward for the faithful.

And early Christians inherited this and expanded it. But the binary heaven or hell of it all didn't become the dominant Christian view until much later. And even then, it wasn't universally accepted. Early Christian writers proposed tons of alternatives um ranging from purgatory to temporary purification over the centuries, but the version that won, the fire and brimstone edition, was the one that served the institution the best. as you can imagine.

[singing] >> So, let's talk about a couple of competing interpretations of Christianity that argued whether or not Jesus was God and how his godhood was eventually voted on by councils in the Roman Empire. So, there was this thing called Aryanism and it was named after the priest Arias of Alexandria who lived from about 250 to 336 CE if you care. And Aras taught that Jesus was not co-eternal with the father and that Jesus was created by God the father and that meant that he was inferior to God.

And so Aras stressed God's uniqueness and set him apart as eternal and unchanging. Okay? And so he viewed Jesus as God's first and greatest creation but not eternal. So the implications of Aryanism were a pretty big deal at the time because if Jesus wasn't co-eternal with God the Father, that means that he was something less than God, which meant that the worship of Jesus looked a lot like polytheism. You catch my drift?

So if Jesus wasn't fully God, how could his death atone for human sin? The whole Christian system of salvation was falling apart because of this guy. So the NY position argued the opposite of Aras. They said that Jesus was of one substance with God the Father. I think it's pronounced homosius in Greek, of one substance. Anyway, that means that he's co-eternal, unccreated, fully divine and always existed with the father.

So, this was the view that became orthodox, but it wasn't the view that won immediately because Aryanism was pretty popular throughout much of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, even after it was denounced as heresy. But in 3:25 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine summoned the first council of Nika. He had just become the solem of the Roman Empire after defeating his last rival. And he had a problem. The church was tearing itself apart over the nature of Jesus.

They were literally fighting in the streets, girl. And so he called the council because the dissension and the intrachristian conflict were threats to the stability of the Roman Empire. So in May of 325 CE about 300 bishops gathered in the city of Nika. Constantine paid for their travel with tax dollars of course and they debated for almost 3 months and the council ultimately decided to condemn Aras and Aryanism and they declared that Jesus was of the same substance as the father um eternal uncreated fully divine and this was now the official Orthodox position.

Orthodox it literally means like established or corrected belief and oh at this time the council also mandated Easter as a unified celebration propaganda is that not propaganda that's literally state sanctioned propaganda anyway so Nika the council of Nika did not settle this debate permanently Constantine actually pardoned Aras later and after Constantine died in 337 his son Constantius II actively promoted Aryanism which kind of makes sense because Aryanism was politically useful because it mirrored the structure of the Roman Empire.

So it's giving God above Jesus, Jesus above the emperor and the emperor above everyone else. And so it was this divine justification for imperial power. The nine position that said that there were two co-equal entities. It just didn't have the same oomph for imperial authority. You know what I mean? So years later at the council of Constantinople in 381 CE which was convened by Emperor Theodosius I the Holy Spirit was also declared divine and co-equal with the father and the son.

And so this council basically tagged on the holy spirit onto the trinity expanding the nyine creed into what we call the nino constant creed which many churches still recite today but they say the nyine creed to be simple because the other title is a mouthful. So the decision to add the Holy Spirit was driven in part by the Pentecost story in Acts 2 because it was kind of awkward to leave the Holy Spirit out and so they figured you know what we'll add the Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit was upgraded to be equal with God and Jesus and that's how we got the trinity.

Okay so the council of Constantinople is when Theodosius I issued the edict of Thessalonica and that made Nyine Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. So unlike Constantine who had only established like this tolerance for Christianity, Theodosius made it the law baby. He said, "You will believe this or else I will take away your property." He was not playing around. And the edict literally threatened divine punishment and imperial retribution for those who rejected the Nyian creed.

Yeah. It declared that Christians, which were those who believe in the trinity as defined at Nika, were the only legitimate Christians. Technically, the term was Catholic Christians, but back then, Catholic didn't mean the same thing that it does now. At the time, Catholic was like I think it came from the Greek Catholicos, and it means like universal, and it was just a way to reference like all Christians. But anyway, anyone who didn't believe what was decided at Nika was considered a heretic.

And so Fidosius's motivation for all of this was just this like desperate attempt to gain stability after the battle of Adrianople in 378 CE. So to be clear and to really break it down, a bunch of bishops who were brought together by the Roman Empire at a couple of glorified city council meetings voted and enforced the idea that Jesus is God. And they decided that over three centuries after he died for political reasons, not even spiritual ones.

And they didn't even agree on it right away. It took decades of political maneuvering and imperial coercion. It was literally an authoritarian strategy to serve the state's interests. Hm. I wonder why this isn't taught in church. By this point, old Theo had bullied everyone into saying they're a Christian and the church and the state were basically fused. And this continued to define European politics for the next thousand years.

So, as the Roman Empire crumbled in the west, the church became the dominant institution in Europe and dissenting voices were violently suppressed. Bro, I'm talking about the Inquisition, the Crusades, burning of heretics. Terrible. And all this was justified by the logic that had been codified at Nika. Meanwhile, the east west schism happened in 1054 over it was a few things like conflicting customs, beliefs, papal authority, like that.

And that formally split the church into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches. And so by the 1500s, the church's corruption was pretty obvious and things devolved to the point where people were selling indulgences, like literally paying money to reduce their time in purgatory. And this is when Martin Luther comes into the story. He was a German monk and a professor who was fed up. He nailed his 95 thesis to a church door in Wittenberg in 1517, girl.

And he challenged the church's authority. And this sparked the Protestant Reformation and changed the future of Western Christianity. So the 66 book version of the Bible that we have today was mostly decided during the Protestant Reformation. And so yeah, the reformation continued to produce new theological developments. So Luther emphasized justification by faith alone. He was writing on Paul's coattails. And Calvin developed the doctrine of predestination which argued that God has already decided who will be saved and who will be damned.

And if you fast forward to the modern era, Christianity obviously continues to splinter. Denominations are multiplying. Each swears down that they have the correct interpretation of scripture. Fundamentalism reared its ugly head in the early 20th century as a reaction to critical biblical scholarship and it very much embraces literalism and evangelicals emphasize personal conversion and biblical inherency very Paulcoded.

Uh side note, if you grew up Baptist, you've probably heard of the term solos scriptor. It means scripture alone in Latin. In 16th century Europe, that was basically the state's way of saying because God said so. And obviously, it was that energy that sent thousands of people fleeing across the ocean to start colonies in the Americas. But as we see, politicians are still very much co-opting religion and using it to consolidate power to this day.

Catholicism has undergone some changes after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. And other than that, most modern-day mainline Protestants embrace historical critical methods for the most part. But today, there's no single Christianity. There are thousands of denominations with conflicting beliefs about salvation and the nature of Jesus, the authority of scripture, and the afterlife. The next time you hear someone saying a Bible verse dropped from heaven fully formed, it might be worth asking, how many times has that verse been shaped or reinterpreted?

Because there has never been a single universally agreed upon version of Christianity. It has always been fabricated to meet the political needs of the era and used to make entire doctrines up from thin air. I remember what it was like to be a Christian evangelical. I get it. That feeling that you get when you're singing on a Sunday, that perceived safety, it's addicting. It's neurochemical. And the brain doesn't care if a belief is true.

It just cares that it feels good. So, it handles the inconsistencies as God works in mysterious ways and keeps it pushing. This whole essay is not about my beef with lay people. It's about my beef with the Christian church as an institution and the people that shaped it and the people who continue to preserve it and use scripture as a way to make the world less safe for people. And finally, what about God? Bonnet thoughts.

You wrote this whole essay on Christianity and you didn't talk about God. Uh, similar to the incentives that I believe the Romans had for co-opting Christianity, I believe that God is the scapegoat for political cruelty. [laughter] Spicy, I know. Um yeah, if we're left believing in God and arguing about his intentions and whether God is this allloving, all powerful entity, then we're too distracted to actually change the world.

[singing and music]