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Essay on History of Christianity as a Mainstream Religion
Christianity is the most extensively dispersed of the world religions, having considerable depiction in all the populated continents of the globe. In the late 1990s, its total membership exceeded 1.9 billion people. Like any system of belief and values—be it Platonism, Marxism, Freudianism, or democracy—Christianity is in many ways comprehensible only “from the inside,” to those who share the beliefs and strive to live by the values; and a description that would ignore these “inside” aspects of it would not be historically faithful. To a degree that those on the inside often fail to recognize, however, such a system of beliefs and values can also be described in a way that makes sense as well to an interested observer who does not, or even cannot, share their outlook.
More or less all the in sequence concerning Jesus himself and regarding untimely Christianity comes from those who claimed to be his followers. For the reason that they wrote to persuade believers rather than to satisfy historical inquisitiveness, this information often raises more questions than it answers, and no one has ever succeeded in harmonizing all of it into a coherent and completely satisfying chronological account.
Because of the nature of these sources, it is impossible, except in a highly tentative way, to distinguish between the original teachings of Jesus and the developing teachings about Jesus in early Christian communities. What is known is that the person and message of Jesus of Nazareth early attracted a following of those who believed him to be a new prophet. Their recollections of his words and deeds, transmitted to posterity through those who eventually composed the Gospels, recall Jesus' days on earth in the light of experiences identified by early Christians with the miracle of his resurrection from the dead on the first Easter.....
