Essay About Sixth Century And Early Third Centuries Ce

Mohammed Vs Jesus Case
Essay Preview: Mohammed Vs Jesus Case
Report this essay
C H A P T E R 9
CHRISTIANITY
“Jesus Christ is Lord”
Christianity is a faith based on the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
He was born as a Jew about two thousand years ago in Roman-occupied
Palestine. He taught for fewer than three years and was executed by the Roman
government on charges of sedition. Nothing was written about him at the time,
although some years after his death, attempts were made to record what he had
said and done. Yet his birth is now celebrated around the world and since the
sixth century has been used as the major point from which public time is measured,
even by non-Christians. The religion centered around him has more followers
than any other.
In studying Christianity we will first examine what can be said about the life
and teachings of Jesus, based on accounts in the Bible and on historians knowledge
of the period. We will then follow the evolution of the religion as it spread
to all continents and became theologically and liturgically more complex. This
process continues in the present, in which there are not one but many different
versions of Christianity.
The Christian Bible
The Bibles used by various Christian churches consist of the Hebrew Bible (called
the “Old Testament”), and in some cases non-canonical Jewish texts called the
Apocrypha, and what Orthodox Christians call the Deuterocanonical books, plus
the twenty-seven books of the “New Testament” written after Jesuss earthly
mission.
Traditionally, the holy scriptures have been reverently regarded as the divinely
inspired Word of God. Furthermore, in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, “the
Gospel is not just Holy Scripture but also a symbol of Divine Wisdom and an
image of Christ Himself.”1 Given the textual complexity of the Bible, some
Christians have attempted to clarify what Jesus taught and how he lived, so that
people might truly follow him.
The field of theological study that attempts to interpret scripture is called
hermeneutics. In Jewish tradition, rabbis developed rules for interpretation. In
the late second and early third centuries CE, Christian thinkers developed two
highly different approaches to biblical hermeneutics. One of these stressed the literal
meanings of the texts; the other looked for allegorical rather than literal
meanings. Origen, an Egyptian theologian (c. 185-254 CE) who was a major proponent
of the allegorical method, wrote:
ISBN: 0-536-98811-0
Living Religions, Sixth Edition, by Mary Pat Fisher. Published by Prentice-Hall. Copyright © 2005 by Pearson Education, Inc.
CHRISTIANITY 285
Since there are certain passages of scripture which . . . have no bodily [literal] sense
at all, there are occasions when we must seek only for the soul and the spirit, as it
were, of the passage. Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a
farmer, “planted a paradise eastward in Eden,” and set in it a visible and palpable
“tree of life,” of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth
would gain life; and again that one could partake of “good and evil” by masticating
the fruit taken from the tree of that name (Gen. 2: 8, 9)? And when God is said to
“walk in the paradise in the cool of the day” and Adam to hide himself behind a
tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which
indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual
events (Gen. 3: 8).2
During medieval times, allowance was made for interpreting scriptural passages
in at least four ways: literal, allegorical, moral (teaching ethical principles),
and heavenly (divinely inspired and mystical, perhaps unintelligible to ordinary
thinking). This fourfold approach was later followed by considerable debate on
whether the Bible should be understood on the basis of its own internal evidence
or whether it should be seen through the lens of Church tradition. During
the eighteenth century, critical study of the Bible from a strictly historical point
of view began in western Europe. This approach, now accepted by many Roman
Catholics, Protestants, and some Orthodox, is based on the literary method of
interpreting ancient writings in their historical context, with their intended
audience and desired effect taken into account. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, emphasis shifted to questions about the process of hermeneutics, such
as how to understand ancient texts that came from other cultures, how individual
passages relate to the whole text, how the biblical message is conveyed
through