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 his followers most likely believed he had a perfectly ordinary human birth. Claims of his mother's virginity arrived "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 and anarchistic message. The first Christians, Erich Fromm argues, "were imbued with hatred and contempt for the educated rich and rulers, in short for all authority."[3] Karl Kautsky describes Jesus's attitude 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."[4]
"Jesus never calls upon anyone to work," writes Jacques Ellul. "On the contrary, he constantly takes the men he calls away from their work, e.g., Peter, James, Levi, the man in the parable who wants to try out his oxen, and so forth. It is possible that Jesus worked, but this is by no means certain, and even if he did, it proves nothing. Like others he obeys the necessities of human life." From Ellul's perspective, Jesus's indifference towards work builds on Judaism's notion of the sabbath as "a sign of liberation.[5]
These egalitarian beliefs were put into practice through a horizontal organizing structure. 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." 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 ecclesiastical 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."[6]
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.[7]
Although the early Christians were mainly free proletarians, it's likely, according to Kautsky, that they shared the Essenes' opposition to slavery. However, Christianity's institutionalization did away with any explicit opposition to slavery. Kautsky describes a "decline of communism" among the movement.[8] By 312 CE, Christianity became the official religion of the very Roman Empire against which Jesus and his followers had rebelled.
The influence of the early Christians on anti-authoritarians has been extremely vast, including on the Diggers, John Brown's raids, and the Catholic Worker.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), 60-1.
- ↑ Kautsky, Foundations, Book Four.
- ↑ Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976), 496.
- ↑ Fromm, The Dogma of Christ, 60-1.
- ↑ Fromm, The Dogma of Christ.
- ↑ Kautsky, Foundations, Book Four.
