Revelation 21:1-5
Most of us are used to thinking about the church like a fully formed thing from the beginning. First Jesus died. Then he rose. Then a few weeks later the disciples were inspired to create the church. It emerged pretty much the way it is now: its doctrines in place, its theology fully formed, its leadership training all figured out. We know, of course, that the Protestants broke from the Catholics in the 16th century, but we’re not really sure what difference that made. We pretty much assume that the givens about church in our lifetimes – committees, hymnals, Sunday school – were always there. If we trace the way we do things back through time, we’d find out that it’s pretty much the way Jesus told us to do it. This way of doing history has been called “assuming the finished product.” If we know how things are today, we can find their roots in ancient times, or perhaps in key movements like the Reformation. But what if we don’t take our assumptions from today with us when we go back in time? What if we look at the past for its own sake without looking for the roots of what the church is now? If we could take a time machine back to the first and second centuries, what would we find?
It’s a little like the difference between a finished building and a pile of lumber. The lumber pile could become the house of our dreams, or it could become something quite different – an ice cream store or a motel.
Since the early 1980’s, it’s been the work of the Westar Institute to try to find the ancient possibilities that came before the finished product of modern Christianity. They began with the Jesus Seminar which asked what part of the Jesus story is probably history and what part is the interpretation of the people who followed after him? They knew a couple of things to be true:
The Gospels were written 50-80+ years after Jesus died, after all the eye witnesses to his life were also gone.
The Gospels weren’t written as history – at least not by our standards which expect the author to be accurate about the facts. They were written as commentary and persuasion – the authors were writing to convince people to believe in Jesus because they believed he was the most important, God-given light for the world. There were two to three generations of interpreters between the man Jesus who lived a particular life and the telling of his story, which has a life of its own.
First the Jesus Seminar asked, “What did Jesus actually say and which of his words have been embellished over time?” They developed detailed criteria for that scholarly work, debated for years, and finally produced a Bible which color-coded every saying of Jesus from Red to Black (of course he said that! to of course he didn’t!) with a lot of pink and gray in between. It’s impossible to be precise because the record is ancient.
Next they tackled the stories about what Jesus did with the same kind of study and rankings. Their purpose was to use the very best scholarship available to produce a picture of Jesus in his time and place that could be easily understood by ordinary Christians in ordinary churches. Hundreds of Bible scholars volunteered their time to write about Jesus for us.
Why would they do that? Because they believed Jesus was (and is) real and knowing as much as possible about him matters.
Why do it now? Because, believe it or not, so much more information is available to us that even 100 years ago. Of course people in the first century knew a lot about their own moment in history, but over centuries that first hand knowledge was obscured by layers of tradition – just like a family story is embellished over time, so that our great-grandparents would hardly recognize the story of their times. Each generation put their own stamp on this thing called church and assumed that their way was the way it’s always been. In our lifetime, many new manuscripts have been discovered which give us new information about very old things. The Dead Sea Scrolls taught us about Hebrew scripture because of the variations they revealed in the manuscripts. The Nag Hamadi Library, dug up in the Egyptian dessert by nomads looking for fertilizer, provided early Christian writings we had never seen before. A search of ancient monasteries uncovered copies of books we thought had been lost forever. So even though we are further from Jesus that say medieval scholars, we have more information than was available to them.
After Westar finished their detailed analysis of what we know about Jesus, they turned to the people who followed Jesus in the first and second century – before they were called Christians and before they organized as a single church. They finished that piece of their work and published it just two years ago, and the book containing their report gives us something to talk about in the weeks ahead. They asked and answered questions like:
Who followed Jesus? Why did they think he mattered?
What did they believe about him?
How did they organize themselves?
How did they respond to the challenges of their day?
They discovered that far from being a single movement that became the church as we know it, the earliest believers were diverse. They described their faith in a variety of ways. They disagreed about what Jesus’ teachings meant. They gathered in groups that looked very different from each other. They chose their leaders in different ways, and preferred some of the early disciples more than others. They were the building blocks of the early church. Some of these groups flourished. Some died out. Others were eliminated as heresies in later centuries. In the first two centuries they made a rich soup of possibility, some of which has been lost to us until now.
So why should we care? Just like first century Jesus followers, we too live in transitional times. Christianity has been a given in our lives, but it’s not a given for future generations. We aren’t sure what the future will bring, if anything. If we can discover more about our roots, if we can search wider and deeper for the meaning people found in Jesus, maybe we can find more options for those who care enough about Jesus to follow him. If we go back, we may find new ways forward. We can affirm the parts of our tradition which are truly treasures for us. And we can try on new ways of relating to Jesus which echo ancient ways. We are looking for possibilities.
Most of all, like people in every generation, we are looking for Jesus. Who was he? Who is he? Why does he matter? We are looking because from the beginning, those who knew Jesus believed that he connected them to God. And in our deepest heart of hearts, people are looking for God.