The origin of Christianity
One is forced to talk about the "histories" of Christianity rather than of the "history" of the religion. This is particularly true of the very early Christian movement: There is one history taught by religious historians, which is based on the documents of the time, including the few books that made it into the Bible and the hundreds of others that were excluded. Historians speak of many Christian faith groups teaching conflicting views of Jesus, God, morality, religious obligations, etc. Men and women led house churches. No central authority existed; the congregations were almost completely decentralized.
The establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century resulted in the forcible suppression of paganism. Until that final victory was achieved, Christian thinkers had been obliged to find answers to pagan criticism of their faith. One of their chief points of concern was the newness of Christianity compared with the great antiquity of the pagan cults. This objection was met by the formulation in the third and fourth centuries of a philosophy of history, to which Julius Africanus, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Augustine of Hippo made the most notable contributions. By taking over the Hebrew Scriptures as their own legitimate heritage, Christians were able to show to their own satisfaction that their religion, could be traced back to the very Creation. This philosophy of history, together with their exclusive soteriology, provided medieval Christians with a completely adequate account of the origin of religion, since for them there was only one true religion, and that was their own. Of the other religions, which they knew, they had sufficient explanations. Judaism was due to the culpable obduracy of the Jews in rejecting Jesus as the true Messiah and persisting in the now-superseded Old Covenant, which the coming of Christ had made obsolete; the broken cults of Greece and Rome had been inventions of the Devil and the sinful blindness of men; the new religion of Islam was a false heresy. Of the great religions of Asia, such as Buddhism, medieval Christians had scarcely any knowledge, and these religions had no part in their Weltanschauung.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Jesus selected Peter to be the temporal ruler of the church. Peter travelled to Rome, presumably with his wife, and reigned there as the first Pope. Una Fides, a Roman Catholic apologetics web site, claims that: "History proves that from that time [of the disciple Peter] on, both in the East and the West, the successor of Peter was acknowledged to be the supreme head of the [entire Christian] Church." Peter, Paul and the other apostles ordained bishops as their successors; those bishops, in turn, ordained their successors. Thus, the church's current bishops can trace their ordination through an unbroken line from the apostles; this is called the "apostolic succession."
There is the conflicting view of “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (LDS; the Mormons). Their founder, Joseph Smith (1805-1844), taught a theology of restorationism: He preached that the true Christian church died out in the early 2nd century CE, and did not survive in any form until he restored it as the LDS Church, early in the 19th century.
The "Two by Twos" church (a.k.a. Irvinites, The Jesus-Way, No-Name Church, etc) teach that Jesus founded their group. They maintained a very low profile since the first century CE. It survived until today as the only true Christian church. They feel that they have been continually persecuted by other Christian groups "which from the earliest times have diluted and perverted the true gospel."
Many Christian denominations teach that they alone are the true church. They believe that they alone can trace their lineage directly back to the primitive, first century Christian church. They view the ten thousands of other Christian denominations as having split away from their own church at some point in history.
Each of the above denominations tends to view very early Christianity as a movement, which agreed on almost everything. However, historians view the early Christian movement as being composed of many faith groups, which taught widely varying beliefs. Sometimes multiple Christian congregations would co-exist in a single city, and would agree on little, much like today.
Let us have a closer look at the time before and during which the Christian religion was born. Let us have a look at the “cook pot” wherein Christianity was formed.
