Early Christians
Among the Early Israelites and "influenced influenced by Essenian models"[1] were the Jewish communistic followers of Yeshua (ישוע). Translated into the Greek Iesous, then the Latin Iesus, he is commonly known today as Jesus.
Jesus was born between 6 and 4 BCE, and it's likely that his followers believed he had an ordinary human birth. Claims of his mother's virginity were "quite late, found only in Matthew and Luke, written in the last two decades of the first century. Neither Mark, the earliest gospel, nor Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament, speak of Jesus's special birth. Nor does the gospel of John. If stories of Jesus's miraculous birth were important and early in early Christianity, it is difficult to imagine their absence from Mark, Paul, John, and the rest of the New Testament."[2]
Jesus taught a communistic message, described by Karl Kautsky as "a fierce class hatred against the rich." As evidence, Kautsky presents some of Jesus's sayings in the New Testament: "For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." "Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God." "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered: and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire."[3]
Among the early Christians, according to Erich Fromm, "there was not even a clearly defined external authority" and there existed protection of "the independence and freedom of the individual Christian with respect to matters of faith." The first Christians, Fromm argues, "were imbued with hatred and contempt for the educated rich and rulers, in short for all authority." It was only by the second century CE that the Christians committed to several centralizing and authoritarian directions:
"This fundamental transformation of Christianity from the religion of the oppressed to the religion of the rulers and of the masses manipulated by them, from the expectation of the imminent approach of judgment day and the new age to a faith in the already consummated redemption; from the postulate of a pure, moral life to satisfaction of conscience through eccleastical means of grace; from hostility to the state to cordial agreement with it--all this is closely conected with the final great change [...] Christianity, which had been the religion of a community of equal brothers, without hierarchy or bureaucracy, became 'the Church,' the reflected image of the absolute monarchy of the Roman Empire."[4]
As a corresponding theological change, according to Fromm, Christians went from believing Jesus was a man who became God to believing Jesus was the Son of God all along. The former interpretation, by saying a human can become divine, contained a radical interpretation of God's permanent authority.[5]
The influence of the early Christians on anti-authoritarians has been extremely vast, including on the Diggers and John Brown's raids.
- ↑ Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity, 1908, Book Four, retrieved from Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/ch09.htm.
- ↑ Marcel J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (New York: HarperOne, 1989), 61.
- ↑ Kautsky, Foundations, Book Four.
- ↑ Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), 60, 61.
- ↑ Fromm, The Dogma of Christ.
