Jesus wars pdf download

This is an attempt to edit the four gospels into a consistent account, in this case focusing on the words of Jesus. There is plenty of connecting narrative around the instances where Jesus speaks, so this is better than simply presenting each quote out of context.

The focus on what Jesus is attributed as saying makes it easier to browse the core texts of the New Testament. All in all, a very useful reference. Last week, around 20, people downloaded books from my site - 5 people gave donations. A world to lose. How the Church lost half the world -- What was saved Jesus Wars reveals how official, orthodox teaching about Jesus was the product of political maneuvers by a handful of key characters in the fifth century.

Jenkins argues that were it not for these controversies, the papacy as we know it would never have come into existence and that today's church could be teaching some-thing very different about Jesus. It is only an accident of history that one group of Roman emperors and militia-wielding bishops defeated another faction. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review.

Books for People with Print Disabilities. Blocked at germany. A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany. Project Gutenberg believes the Court has no jurisdiction over the matter, but until the issue is resolved, it will comply.

For more information about the German court case, and the reason for blocking all of Germany rather than single items, visit PGLAF's information page about the German lawsuit. All IP addresses in Germany are blocked. This block will remain in place until legal guidance changes. The words that Jesus uses for I am —in Greek, ego eimi —recall the declaration that God made to Moses from the burning bush. We might better translate it as I AM.

Jesus appears to be saying that he is the same eternal God who brought Israel out of Egypt, not to mention creating the world. Not surprisingly, the crowd tries to stone him for blasphemy. For later readers of the Gospels, then, Father and Son must be one and the same. But just as we are absorbing that amazing fact, we read on to find Jesus stating that he is distinct from God the Father. The Father is greater than I, he says. When Jesus foretells the end of the world, he admits that the exact timing is unknown either to the Son or to the angels, and only the Father knows precisely.

If the Son knows less than the Father, the two must be different. What does it mean to say that Christ was at once God and man? Certainly the Jesus of the Gospels seems utterly human—he bleeds, he loves, he gets angry, he dies in grotesque agony.

Yet somehow we have to reconcile that fact with the doctrine of the Incarnation. The same was in the beginning with God…. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. The Word was made flesh, God became man. But how does that Word relate to the man called Jesus?

What does the letter to the Colossians mean when it proclaims that all the fullness of God lives in Christ, in bodily form? Problems and paradoxes abound. When Jesus arrived in Bethany to find that his friend Lazarus has died, he mourned: he groaned in the spirit, we are told, and he was troubled. Jesus suffered all-too-human grief, and, as is reported in one of the most famous verses of the whole Bible, Jesus wept.

But think that text through. Jesus wept, so Christ the anointed wept—and, therefore, are we to believe that God, the creator and source of all being, really wept? More sensationally, how, in fact, had Christ suffered on the cross—had God really died? These paradoxes were not concocted by later Christian theologians, working long after the supposedly straightforward beliefs of the apostolic age.

As early as , while the New Testament was still under construction, the great martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch proclaimed Christ as God come in the flesh. Ignatius addressed believers, whose hearts were kindled in the blood of God.

God weeping is one thing, but bleeding? Even faithful Catholics who accept that the communion wafer is Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, dare not make the leap that would proclaim it the Body of God. God and Christ are different. Through the first four centuries of Christianity, believers tried many ways of resolving these problems of Scripture and logic.

In that sense, we should think of Christ as a manifestation of God walking the earth, clothed in human form as a convenient disguise. The Word took on flesh as I might put on an overcoat. Others saw Jesus as a great man overwhelmed by God-consciousness. Somehow, the Spirit of God had descended on him, with his baptism in the Jordan as the likely moment of transformation—but the two natures always remained separate.

Christ, from that perspective, remained chiefly human. Some thought the two natures were merged, indissolubly and eternally; others thought the connection was only partial or temporary. So was Jesus a Man-bearing God, or a God-bearing man? Between those extreme poles lay any number of other answers, which competed furiously through the first Christian centuries. By , most Christians agreed that Jesus Christ was in some sense divine, and that he had both a human nature Greek, physis and a divine nature.

But that belief allowed for a wide variety of interpretations, and if events had developed differently—if great councils had decided other than they actually did—any one of these various approaches might have established itself as orthodoxy.

In the context of the time, cultural and political pressures were pushing strongly toward the idea of Christ-as-God, so that only with real difficulty could the memory of the human Jesus be maintained. And yet it did just that. At a great council held in at Chalcedon near modern Istanbul , the church formulated the statement that eventually became the official theology of the Roman Empire.

This acknowledges Christ in two natures, which joined together in one person. Two natures existed, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person.

We cannot speak of Christ without declaring his full human nature, which was not even slightly diluted or abolished by the presence of divinity. That Chalcedonian definition today stands as the official formula for the vast majority of Christians, whether they are Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—although how many of those believers could explain the definition clearly is open to debate.

But as we are told, Chalcedon settled any controversy about the identity of Christ, so that henceforward any troublesome passages in the Bible or early tradition had to be read in the spirit of those powerful words. But Chalcedon was not the only possible solution, nor was it an obvious or, perhaps, a logical one.

In particular, we easily find passages that suggest that the man Jesus achieved Godhood at a specific moment during his life, or indeed after his earthly death. Not only were Monophysites numerous and influential, but they dominated much of the Christian world and the Roman Empire long after Chalcedon had done its work, and they were only defeated after decades of bloody struggle.

Centuries after Chalcedon, Monophysites continued to prevail in the most ancient regions of Christianity, such as Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The heirs of the very oldest churches, the ones with the most direct and authentic ties to the apostolic age, found their distinctive interpretation of Christ ruled as heretical.

Pedigree counted for little in these struggles. Each side persecuted its rivals when it had the opportunity to do so, and tens of thousands—at least—perished. Modern Christians rarely feel much sympathy for either side in such bygone religious wars. Did the issues at stake really matter enough to justify bloodshed? Yet obviously, people at the time had no such qualms and cared passionately about how believers were supposed to understand the Christ they worshipped.

Each side had its absolute truth, faith in which was essential to salvation. Horror stories about Christian violence abound in other eras, with the Crusades and Inquisition as prime exhibits; but the intra-Christian violence of the fifth- and sixth-century debates was on a far larger and more systematic scale than anything produced by the Inquisition and occurred at a much earlier stage of church history.

When Edward Gibbon wrote his classic account of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , he reported countless examples of Christian violence and fanaticism. This is his account of the immediate aftermath of Chalcedon:. Jerusalem was occupied by an army of [Monophysite] monks; in the name of the one incarnate Nature, they pillaged, they burnt, they murdered; the sepulchre of Christ was defiled with blood….

On the third day before the festival of Easter, the [Alexandrian] patriarch was besieged in the cathedral, and murdered in the baptistery. The remains of his mangled corpse were delivered to the flames, and his ashes to the wind; and the deed was inspired by the vision of a pretended angel…. This deadly superstition was inflamed, on either side, by the principle and the practice of retaliation: in the pursuit of a metaphysical quarrel, many thousands were slain. Chalcedonians behaved at least as badly in their campaigns to enforce their particular orthodoxy.

In the eastern city of Amida, a Chalcedonian bishop dragooned dissidents, to the point of burning them alive. His most diabolical scheme involving taking lepers, hands festering and dripping with blood and pus, and billeting them on the Monophysite faithful until they saw reason. Even the Eucharist became a vital component of religious terror. Throughout the long religious wars, people were regularly and frequently reading others out of the church, declaring formal anathemas, and the sign for this was admitting or not admitting people to communion.

In extreme episodes, communion was enforced by physical violence, so that the Eucharist, which is based upon ideas of self-giving and self-sacrifice, became an instrument of oppression. They dragged and pulled [the nuns] by main force to make them receive the communion at their hands. They were dragged up to communicate; and when they held their hands above their heads, in spite of their screams their hands were seized, and they were dragged along, uttering shrieks of lamentation, and sobs, and loud cries, and struggling to escape.

And so the sacrament was thrust by force into the mouths of some, in spite of their screams, while others threw themselves on their faces upon the ground, and cursed every one who required them to communicate by force.

So vital did this question appear, so central to the character of faith and the future of Christianity, that partisans on either side were prepared to divide and weaken the church and empire and risk revolutions and civil wars. In the long term, these schisms led directly to the collapse of Roman power in the eastern world, to the rise of Islam, and to the destruction of Christianity through much of Asia and Africa. Apart from Islam, the greatest winner in the conflict was European Christianity, or rather the fact that Christianity, for better or worse, found its firmest bastion in Europe.

So much of the religious character of the world we know was shaped by this conflict over the nature of Christ. The mainstream church kept its belief that Jesus was fully human—but at the cost of losing half the world. If religion shaped the political world, then politics forged the character of religion. In the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, the outcome was shaped not by obviously religious dimensions but by factors that seem quite extraneous.

This was not a case of one side producing better arguments in its cause, of a deeper familiarity with Scripture or patristic texts: all sides had excellent justifications for their positions. All, equally, produced men and women who practiced heroic asceticism and who demonstrated obvious sanctity. To oversimplify, the fate of Christian doctrine was deeply influenced by just how well or badly the empire was doing fighting Attila the Hun.

In the long term, the christological debate was settled by one straightforward issue: which side gained and held supremacy within the Christian Roman Empire and was therefore able to establish its particular view as orthodoxy. And that was a political matter, shaped by geographical accident and military success.

Just because one view became orthodoxy does not mean that it was always and inevitably destined to do so: the Roman Church became right because it survived. However remote these conflicts may appear, they involved all the vital themes that would so often rend the Christian world in later eras, from the Reformation through the Victorian conflicts between faith and learning, and on to our own day.

Great councils like Chalcedon were debating such core issues as the quest for authority in religion, the relationship between church and state, the proper ways of reading and interpreting Scripture, the ethics and conduct demanded of Christians, and the means of salvation. Pivotal to these ancient Jesus Wars were the four great questions that, to different degrees, have shaped all subsequent debates within Christianity.

Foremost is the deceptively simple question posed by Jesus himself: Who do you say that I am?