Rediscover Your Christian Roots: John to Constantine, Part 5

I am impressed that so many of you are still here. It's a long seminar. I have a comment that someone wrote down that I think is a very good one. In the New Testament, we can see that at that time, their view of Messiah was one that he would come to restore the nation of Israel, so that Jesus didn't fit their view. And he did fit the view sometimes of the weaker people. He didn't fit the view, especially, of the Pharisees. But remember, when he ascends from Mount Olives, the Mount of Olives in the first part of Acts, remember, they just stand and stare at the disciples. It's like, what happens now?

And they have to be told, when are you going to restore Israel? They were still wondering when does that happen? When does the nation of Israel get restored? No under Roman rule, under the rule of the Messiah. And they were told, just go preach the gospel. It will happen when it happens. And they just watched it. It was like, are you serious? To the world? I can't imagine what that would have felt like at the moment.

I think I'm going to go fishing. No, you were not allowed to go fishing. Right? We have to go do this. At the same time, oh, he's not going to restore Israel right now. Now, there's prophecies made to Israel in the Old Testament, but that wasn't Christ's first coming.

Although, remember, he did tell at one point, one of the people there he met, he said, I've come now to the nation of Israel. Now, then he told his disciples, when I'm done, you go to Israel, you go to Judea, Samaria, and the world. We go out from there. I'm just starting this. You take it out. And of course, that's what we're still trying to do today, is take that out to the world. So, I thought that was a very good comment. Their idea, especially if you were a Pharisee or an Essene, of the Messiah, it was totally different. He was going to come as king.

And as the one gentleman said, they had two, many Jews had to believe in two, messiahs. One had suffered and one who was king. No, it's one messiah, he comes twice. Please, I can email this in answer, if I think it's too controversial. Are Catholics and Mormons Christians? I find that there's no purpose in condemning people.

I would just say that Catholicism and Mormonism, the movements, I'm not talking about people now, have a long ways to go to be first century Christians. But so do we. So do we. I'll talk about the Apocrypha. That's beyond anything that I can talk about right now. I'm going to run out of time, so sorry about that. I'm not an expert on the Apocrypha anyways.

Although 1 Maccabees is important, if you want to understand what happened with the Jews there during the time of the Greeks when the Greeks ruled. Okay, where are we now? Well, we looked at the first part of the second century, these trends happening. The desire by many Gentile Christians to separate for anything they saw Jewish, because the Jews were in a revolt and they didn't want to be caught up in the Roman net that was going after them. Acceptance of Hellenistic religion. We find this Platonic Greek philosophy coming into the religion and also the influence of Gnosticism.

These things, plus the fact that you have churches and congregations holding on the bits and pieces of what had been the original Christianity, and it's all getting into a very complicated soup. But before we think that's too weird, I don't know if that's a whole lot different than the United States. Christianity of the United States is a very complicated soup, right? So, let's understand what they were going through could be in similar in some ways that we're going through.

And that's why I want to bring out one story that I think is very fascinating. And this happens in the mid to late second century. There is a disciple of the Apostle John who lives in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. His name is Polycarp, and he kept a Passover service on the 14th of Abib, the first month of the Jewish calendar. Now, these were not Jews. These were non-Jews who had become Christians, and their leader had been taught personally by John, the Apostle John.

And he gets a little upset. I want to go through this story because I want to show you the debates and problems they faced, and how something was changing in the power of what the church was, to put it that way. So what happens is that he writes a letter to the Roman bishop Anacetus. So, he's not called Pope yet, but he is the bishop of Rome. And the bishop of Rome was considered, by this point he's sort of important, okay? Mainly because it's the center of the empire.

And because there is some debate, did Peter ever go there? And they're saying, yes he did. Although, there is zero proof, according to Catholic writers, that he started the Catholic church there. But, whether he went there or not is always debatable. If he was there, he wasn't there early in his career. He was there towards the late part of his career when he died there, possibly.

So, what's happening is the bishop of Rome, he starts to promote Easter. And Polycarp says, but that's not what John taught us. John taught us on the night that Jesus was crucified, he got together with his disciples, and they took this bread and they took this wine, and keep this in remembrance of my death. So, we do this in remembrance of his death, and of course, then we honor his resurrection. But, you're taking this away, which for a long time, this Passover service was at least part of it.

Even people who kept Easter, tended to keep both in one way or another. You're doing away with one to keep this Easter service. And he said, we won't do this. And Anacetas writes back and says, yes you do, you have to do it. And basically, Polycarp goes and sees him, and they decide that they can't fix the problem. And they agreed just to leave it in peace. So, what we have are churches around Rome now are keeping this Easter ceremony. And the churches in the Asia Minor are keeping a different ceremony.

They're keeping a Passover service in the way that they said John had taught them. And since John had gone to Ephesus, there's no reason to think he hadn't done that. So Polycarp dies, and Anacetas dies, and there's peace. Well, Polycretes follows him. He's a disciple of Polycarp. And this now becomes a critical point, and he confronts the new pope. Because at this point, I can't say pope, but they're getting more and more power in Rome.

The Roman bishop is getting more and more power. So Polycarpetes confronts him, and I'm going to read just part of the letter. I put it in the book. I edit it down because it's a long letter. But I'm going to read just part of it. He says, For our part we keep the day scrupulously without addition or subtraction, For in Asia great luminary sleep, who shall rise again on the day of the Lord's advent, when he is coming with glory from heaven...

This is page 156, by the way, if you have the book there. When he is coming with glory from heaven, and shall search out all his saints, such as Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in the Areopolis, and two of his daughters, who remain unmarried to the end of his days, and his other daughter, who lived by the Holy Spirit, and rest in Ephesus. Now he supported his position by claiming that the Apostle John, who also sleeps in Ephesus, as well as Polycarp, and a number of other prominent church leaders, observed the Passover on Abib 14. Among the other leaders was Melito, who lies in Sardis, waiting for the visitation from heaven, when he shall rise from the dead.

Then he says, All these kept the fourteenth day of the month as the beginning of the Paschal Festival, Passover Festival. In accordance with the Gospel, not deviating in the least but following the rule of the faith, last of all, I too, Polycrates, the least of all, act according to the tradition of my family, some members I have actually followed, for seven of them were bishops, and I am the eighth. My family has always kept this day when people put away leaven. So I, my friends, after spending sixty-five years in the Lord's service, and conversing with Christians from all parts of the world, and going carefully through all holy Scripture, and not scared of threats, better people than I have said, We must obey God rather than men.

These weren't the only people to do this. The reason we know this is because of later times. When Constantine held the first Nicene council, and we think of the Nicene Creed, one of the things he said was, we have to shut down the Quatro-Destimans. That's a long time after this. They're still all throughout, at least Asia Minor, and probably other parts of the world.

The Quatro-Destimans means the Fourteenthers. And so here you have a major controversy, and we can, I could, you know, there's numerous controversies you can find, and you can just show these controversies that are happening, and what's happening is, more and more, Rome is becoming the power who determines what is acceptable and what's not. And what happens is, the Bishop of Rome, at this time, basically excommunicates, plicrates, and all the churches of Asia Minor. And some other bishops come along and say, you really can't do that. Come on. I mean, that's not what Anacetas did.

Anacetas said, well, you keep the Fourteenth and Wookiee Beaster. Well, just leave it at that. And they convinced him to reinstate the churches in Asia Minor, and they got reinstated. But even though those churches over the next four generations would adopt more and more of Roman ways, they still never really came together. And that's the reason why you have the Orthodox Church in the East. They just never would submit to Rome after this.

Even though, at this time, they didn't have a lot of Roman customs that were becoming very common in the Roman world, outside of Rome. They slowly would adopt many of those customs, including the use of idols, icons, praying to saints. They all would do that, too. But they still never trusted them. And to this day, they will not accept the Pope as their leader. They accept him as a great person in Christianity, but you're not our leader.

You talk about far-reaching effects. But what's really interesting is, we have a group of people that are doing what they were taught to do by the Apostle John. There's no reason to believe that any of this isn't true. Every once in a while, you'll go through one of these writings and say, that didn't even make sense. But historically, you can prove something's not true. That's why the Acts of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, and all these...

They're not true. You read them, and there's nothing in common with the Bible. The Gospel of Thomas is about Jesus as a child, and he's the most nasty little brat you can imagine. Somebody treats him bad. Some man yells at him. So he kills him. Just like, you're dead. He drops over dead. This isn't Jesus, okay? And yet that was a fairly common book that we still have today. So this becomes a real controversy. Most or many scholars today, historians, believe the quarto decimans were right. They had it right.

That the Passover, when Jesus said to his disciples, I wish to eat this Passover with you, and Jesus is the Passover. I mean, he is the Passover. He was establishing something specific, and they saw it as something you kept at a specific time every year on the night that he was betrayed, on the very night that he did it with them. Henry Chadwick, famous, I mean, he has written a book on the history of Christianity, which is considered a classic.

It's printed by Cambridge University. He makes this about the quarto decimans. It is a possible and so weighty, a practical question for diversity to be allowed. Wait a minute.

You're keeping the, you're still receiving the 14th Passover. You can't do those two things. See, the Passover sounds too Jewish. But there can be little doubt that the quarto decimans were right in thinking that they had preserved the most ancient and apostolic custom.

They had become heretics simply by being behind the times. We're going to find that a lot in the second, third, and fourth century. You become heretics because you're not moving with the flow.

And I find this one interesting because you go back and you read John 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, what Jesus taught that night with his disciples. And then you go read that account and Matthew and Luke and Mark. They all have little different details. And what happened that night and you think, it appears we're supposed to do this. We're actually supposed to do this. And it disappeared from Christianity. So my opinion is we're supposed to do it. They did it. And I think we're supposed to do it. And these people were persecuted for it and eventually shoved out through the Nicene Creed, the very first one. We've got to get rid of these people.

Pardon? Not very nice. I hope you mean Constantine, not me. There you go. I don't know. Someone yells out, it's not very nice. I hope it's not me. No, you set yourself up for that. So a new orthodoxy is growing.

Now what I want to do is I want to tell you, just point out a few men that are really important in building this orthodoxy. They're writings. Remember I showed you Tertullian. He's one of them. They are some of his writings. Now you get into the 400s and it's Augustine. Augustine is the one who sets up doctrine for the entire Catholicism of the Middle Ages. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk and he held on to some of that. So Augustine's impact is great. Augustine's also very smart.

Very smart man. I think he's a very sincere man. But because of allegory, he took the whole Bible in a different direction. He took Barnabas and took it way beyond that. So let me talk about a few men that just know their names. We have to know something. Back story. Give you a little back story. In 1941 BC, Alexander the Great took Egypt, went out on the shore on the coast, drew out some lines in the sand and he said, build my city here.

He left a bunch of Greek soldiers, some Greek engineers and architects, and he left. And they built Alexandria. Alexandria was going to be the center of Greek culture in Egypt. Alexandria, Egypt, exists today. So he starts this. He builds this. And this becomes probably greater than Athens as the center of Greek culture in the world.

In fact, when Julius Caesar shows up and he comes into Alexandria, for some reason, no one knows, but while he's there, because they had the largest museum and the largest library in the world, it catches fire bursts in the ground. Now, there's no proof that Julius Caesar was involved in that.

There have been attempts to make him have done that. There's no proof that he did it. But he was there when it burned and they couldn't get it out. It was a huge library at a huge museum. And it was the center of Hellenism. So here we have, remember I talked about Clement of Alexandria? Okay. 153 to 217. Remember I said that he looked at Plato as sort of someone who prophesied what was going to happen in the Christian church?

Remember Paul said the law there. He's talking about that old covenant. It was a school teacher to bring people to Christ. Remember him saying that? Law? Okay. So he's not saying all the law has no meaning. It's a school teacher to bring people to Christ. Clement of Alexandria, who is an absolute student of Hellenism, student of Greek philosophy, he teaches that Greek philosophy was the school teacher to bring the Greek world to Christ.

Now you understand what he's saying. He's saying the Old Testament is for the Jews to bring them to Christ. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, they're the ones to study to bring the Greek world to Christ. Look up Clement of Alexandria. He's considered one of the great fathers of the Christian church. So now we see what's happening at the intellectual level. You know, what's happening at the quarter decimals is happening at the practical level.

But this is happening at the intellectual level, in which Greek philosophy is part... You have to learn Greek philosophy to study the Bible. Okay? His greatest student was Origen. Origen's fascinating to me. You'll never meet a more dedicated person. But boy, he was unbalanced in some ways. Origen, he wrote volumes and volumes of work. As a teenager, he decided he wanted to be a martyr. He said, go out and pick fights with Roman soldiers. His mom used to hide his clothes because he didn't want to run out naked to keep him from going out.

By 17 or 18, he was actually the headmaster at a school. That's how smart he was. He was the number one teacher at a school. He tried to die for Christ that he couldn't, so he became an aesthetic.

He would sleep on the floor. He wouldn't eat anything but bread. He almost died from the way he treated his own body. If I just treat my body badly and for Christ, I will be better. And it's part of an aesthetic movement that's starting. And so he becomes an aesthetic. He just lives this harsh lifestyle. He's sick all the time.

How dedicated was he?

He read where Jesus said that there are eunuchs for the kingdom of God, so he made himself a eunuch.

So you can't argue his dedication. You can argue his balance.

And his writings contain some of those things. Remember I said Plato believed all souls were created in heaven and were put down in human bodies. Origen taught that. Origen went as far to teach that the stars were living beings.

Now here's this man who wrote all these volumes, became very famous, and shifted, helped shift the wave of Christianity. Towards Hellenism. And he was excommunicated after his death from Catholicism. Later as they started to develop things, we don't want him anymore. But they couldn't help it because it was too important. So they brought him back. They just wouldn't give him a special title. I forget. They gave him a title that's not up here. He's down here. But they had to bring him back because, well, we can't escape him the fact he's important in our development. But, boy, did he have some weird ideas. Of course, he comes from Alexandria, Egypt, the center of Hellenism. There's one other person that comes from North Africa, and I want to mention him. Tertullian. And these three began to create the thought processes that moves farther and farther from the New Testament, Old Testament. Now, they didn't reject, especially Tertullian, he didn't reject the Old Testament. But he didn't think in terms of the Old Testament. He thought in terms of allegory and these new interpretations. And they were all influenced by Platonic ideas. He comes from North Africa. He actually comes from Carthage. And here, even Tertullian, all of them, and Clement, you see ideas like the Eighth Day from Barnabas. It's introduced here, and over the next hundred years, it keeps showing up and showing up, as an explanation of something that, it's not biblical. I mean, there's no biblical Eighth Day. But this new doctrine that has been formed has passed on. Actually, during his lifetime, he was excommunicated by the Bishop of Rome. He became part of a movement, the only, I guess, the only way to describe it, it seems like, it was almost like a modern Pentecostal movement. So he became part of that, and he was excommunicated. But once again, later it's like, I mean, how can we excommunicate a man who wrote this much? So both Origen and Tertullian are now back in the, sort of the major developers of what became the Catholic Church. They claim they're all Catholic. At the time, they were still arguing what the universal church even meant. They all claimed that they're still forming. Now, I want to start into something else before our break, unless there's some other questions. Because we're into the real heavy stuff here. This is the hard stuff, because we're outside the Bible. But we're into this time where you're thinking, how's this going on? And we don't know what the average person's believing. What seems to be, that's all over what is the Roman Empire, the average person, as a Christian, believes all different kinds of things. That's what it appears. And all we can look at is certain movements, and certain people who wrote a lot, and their writings became important. Okay, let's move on. I didn't think there'd be a righteous, not exactly everybody's favorite subject.

I may be the only person that finds him interesting. Yes?

You know what? Actually, I think I went ahead of you, because I went on 46. Earlier on, you talked about the eighth day. And the first time I heard about the worship of Sunday was from the Roman. So what's the difference between the Sunday and the Sunday that is mentioned with Constantine, compared to the eighth day?

Okay. When Constantine makes a... We'll talk about that in a minute. Because when he declares about the Sunday being a special day of worship, there's a complex reason why he's doing that. The eighth day was just the development of a whole theology that, like I said, nobody today teaches the eighth day. But a whole development of a biblical or a doctrine without a biblical basis, and you can't say eight people going into the ark, justifies an eighth-day mystery day. I'm just showing how this formed to justify a certain line of thought that said, Sunday should be the day of worship. But in a way that, like I said, is ridiculous. Nobody would agree with that today. When we get to Constantine, he has a lot of different reasons. And it's really not has to do with the eighth day. That's a theological argument that he would not have cared about. Probably wouldn't even have known. So that was a good question, though. Okay. Is that it? You want to take your break now, or you want to go another ten minutes and then take your break? Now? Okay, let's take it now. And then, I'll tell you what, we'll come back and we'll end before four o'clock. Because I know everybody's getting tired. So we'll end before four o'clock.