Mohammed Vs Jesus Case

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 Jesus's 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