Religion Part II: The History of the Bible, The Evolution of God, & The Invention of Christianity

As I mentioned in my previous post, my early understanding of and thoughts on the Bible all came crashing down in college when I took a course called The History of God. This course opened my eyes to the context in which the Bible was written, and taught me how to think more critically about the concept of religion. Because the course was so life changing for me, I've been wanting to summarize some of the information from it to make it easily accessible to myself and others who may be interested. So that's exactly what I've been doing sporadically for the last 6-ish months.

And then I finally asked my husband to read/edit the nearly finished product... Lol mistake.

Ben had a much less religious upbringing than I did, and therefore didn't understand the bulk of this post when reading it. He eventually skipped through to the conclusion, which finally made some sense to him. So, on his advice, I'd like to preface this post by warning that it takes a deep dive into the history of Israel (the main contributor to Christianity). A strong foundational knowledge of Christian concepts will therefore be of great use when reading it. But, for those without a heavy background in Christianity, I've included a few "summary" paragraphs at the end of the more convoluted sections to try to simplify the main points. So, without further ado:

Who Wrote the Bible, And When?

Before getting into the thick of the history of Christianity, it is important to first discuss who authored the Bible. And the annoying answer to this question is that: no one knows for sure. Biblical scholars have spent centuries investigating this ancient book, but still can't say with certainty who wrote it, when exactly it was all written, or in what circumstances it was written. But they do have some educated guesses.

The Bible is split up into the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is the basis for Judaism, and chronicles the story of the Israelites leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew. The New Testament, on the other hand, records the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, forming the basis for Christianity. The New Testament was originally written in Greek.

Opening up the Old Testament are the first five books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These books are known as The Torah in Jewish tradition. They are also often referred to as The Five Books of Moses, because it was traditionally thought that Moses (the Hebrew prophet who led the Israelites out of Egypt and across the Red Sea toward the Promised Land) wrote these first five books of the Bible around 1300 BCE ("Before Common Era" or "Before Christ"). There are several reasons for us to doubt that Moses alone authored all five books though. In addition to a lack of evidence that Moses ever even existed, the end of Deuteronomy also discusses the death and burial of him. If Moses supposedly wrote Deuteronomy, then how could he have written about his own death and burial?

Furthermore, the Bible also often tells different versions of the same stories. The story of creation in Genesis, for example, is told twice in two totally different styles. The first creation story (Genesis 1) is a vague and poetic account of God creating the heavens and the earth from darkness, and it does not speak of Adam or Eve. Furthermore, in the original text (before it was translated into English), God is referred to as "Elohim." Based on context clues, scholars believe this story was written down around 900 BCE. The second creation story (Genesis 2-3), on the other hand, is much more specific, telling a detailed story of Eve coming from the rib of Adam and being tricked by a serpent into eating the forbidden fruit. In the original text of this creation story, the author referred to God as "Yahweh." Scholars believe this version of the story was written around 600 BCE. These very first few chapters of the Bible were clearly written by at least two different authors, with two different names for their God, in two different periods of history.

Another early example of the Bible having different versions of the same story is in Genesis 6-7, where God sends a flood to Noah and the ark. In different places of the same story, God tells Noah to take 2 of every animal, but then tells him to take 14 of some animals. Additionally, in many parts of the text the flood is said to be 40 days long, but is then said to be 150 days long in another. The story is unclear and riddled with contradictions.

To explain these contradictions, confusing changes in writing style, and different names for God, most Biblical scholars agree that the stories of the Old Testament were developed by many ancient humans in an attempt to make sense of their mysterious God and the world around them. Such stories, ideas about God, and religious traditions were then passed down orally over many generations before ever making it onto paper. This passing on of religion through word-of-mouth storytelling undoubtedly left room for error and bias to creep in and cause changes in the stories over time, much like in the game whisper down the alley. The final versions of the stories that made it into the written Bible are therefore almost certainly different from their originals. The Old Testament is chaotic and lacks congruency because God himself had no real hand in the writing of it -- humans created the Bible, with God as their muse.

The same can also be said about the New Testament. A few decades after the death of Jesus, around 70 CE ("Common Era" or "After Death"), the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John emerged. These independently-written books are often referred to as The Gospels in Christianity, and were traditionally thought to be eyewitness accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. It is now agreed upon by Biblical scholars though, that these books were not actually authored by their namesakes. In other words, Matthew did not write the book of Matthew, nor did the anonymous author(s) of Matthew know Jesus personally. Rather, it is much more likely that the stories of the gospels were first passed on orally until finally being recorded many years later, perhaps by groups of authors for each book. This theory explains why the gospels have so many differences and even contradictions between one another. In fact, there are actually over 80 different gospels known to Biblical scholars, some of which having vastly different views of Jesus than the four official gospels of the Bible. (Note: the four official gospels of the Bible are called the canonical gospels, and the remaining gospels are called non-canonical gospels, meaning they were not considered worthy of making it into the official Bible by those who curated this ancient book). This is evidence that the unknown authors of the gospels may have been inspired to write down the stories they heard of Jesus's life, but Jesus himself certainly took no part in helping them record these stories or in fact-checking them.

If finding complete historical accuracy and absolute truth in the stories of the New Testament is an impossible task due to how many imperfect human hands had a part in writing them down, what then is the point of the New Testament? How can we find meaning without finding absolute truth? Perhaps instead of assuming Biblical inerrancy (the belief that the Bible is completely free of any errors or contradictions), we should start taking the Bible for what it really is: a combination of many different human perspectives on Jesus and the divine, all squished into one book. The gospels can therefore be thought of as different branches of early Christianity (much like the different Christian denominations that we have today, such as Catholic and Protestant), each with its own set of beliefs about God and interpretations of Jesus.

The History of God and the Invention of Christianity

Now that we've established that, rather than God himself, it was actually countless imperfect humans who wrote the Bible as a way of recording their ancient stories and ideas about the divine, let's dive into the history of God and of the Christian religion. To summarize some of the main points of this complex history, I will be using a book titled The River of God by Gregory J. Riley, a Ph.D. professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity. Before summarizing his work, I'd also like to mention that Riley himself is a Christian. I feel that this is important to note because much of the history that he reveals may, at first glance, seem damning to the Christian religion. It is, however, possible to accept the truth of the history of Christianity and the Bible AND still remain a believer. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Christians often trace their beginnings back to ancient Israel. In other words, it is usually assumed that Judaism and the Old Testament came out of Israel first (Jesus himself and nearly all of his followers were, after all, Jewish), followed by Christianity and the New Testament. The actual history of Christianity is not quite so simple though. Yes, Christianity was created mainly from Judaism and is somewhat a continuation of the history of Israel. But Christianity actually has a much wider historical base and complex lineage than Judaism alone. Christianity was also heavily influenced by ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Canaanite, Persian, and Mesopotamian cultures and religions. This is because ancient Israel was never left to develop on its own. Israel was never in isolation to grow as one single nation with one single religion. Rather, ancient Israel was constantly in contact with other nations and cultures. Ancient Israelites were even forced from their homeland and exiled to Mesopotamia at one point in history. This means that outside cultures and religions had a constant influence on Israel and it's religion.

One surprising example of this outside influence that got incorporated into modern Christianity is the use of baptisms to initiate people into the Christian church. Baptism was not adopted straight from Judaism, but rather it came from the Greco-Roman (Greek and Roman) pagan world in which Christianity arose. To be clear: I do not say this to accuse Christians of practicing paganism, nor am I trying to upset anyone who has been baptized. I share this fact only to explain that historical context must be taken into account if we truly want to understand all of our beliefs and traditions. "One's telescope determines one's cosmology." To fully understand the modern Christian religion and some of the more obscure or contradictory texts/traditions that can be found in it, it is necessary to widen our telescopes and look at the ancient cultures and religions that helped to shape early Christianity apart from Israel alone.

Riley therefore suggests that the Christian religion not be thought of as one single river coming straight out of Israel/Judaism. Rather, Christianity should be thought of as a much more complex river system with many different tributaries flowing into it at different points throughout history, and eventually branching off into the different streams or denominations that we have today. The five main pillars of Christianity -- Monotheism, the Holy Trinity, the existence of the Devil, the concept of the soul being separate from the body, and the need for the savior Jesus Christ -- are all actually newer concepts that did not come from ancient Judaism alone. Where then did these parts of the Christian religion come from? I'll explain their origins one-by-one like Riley does.

Summary: Christianity was heavily influenced by the history of ancient Israel and the religion of Judaism, but many other ancient nations, cultures, and religions also contributed to the invention of Christianity. Read on to learn where some of today's Christian concepts actually originated from!

Monotheism

Monotheism is the belief that only one God exists. Modern Christianity is obviously a monotheistic religion, but this concept is actually fairly new in human history, and it did not come straight from Judaism. Rather, the idea that there is only one God came from science. Let's go all the way back to the beginning with the creation story.

In ancient cultures, God was not thought to be pre-existent to Earth. There was no such thing as nothingness, and there was no such thing as a God who created the world out of nothing. Instead, ancient humans imagined the creation of the world to begin with chaos. This chaos was thought of as water in darkness, like a stormy sea at night, which filled the whole universe. Different cultures had various beliefs about this chaos. The Greeks, for example, believed that the chaos gave rise to the gods, the earth, the sky, the seas. Egyptians even had several different versions of the chaos story, one of which featured a particularly powerful god who came out of the chaos and only then turned the chaos into order, forming humans from clay on his potter's wheel. Remnants of these many early creation stories can be found in the original Hebrew Bible. In Genesis, for example, God creates the world from watery darkness and then forms Adam from clay. (Note: Your particular Bible, like my own, may not mention clay. This is because English translations of the original Hebrew Bible are not always exact. I will explain this in greater detail in another post, but if you can, just trust me for now that the original Hebrew Bible does contain pieces of these very first creation stories).

The world that was created from this chaos was first believed to be quite small by ancient humans. It contained three stories or layers all within a bubble: heaven above with the gods, Earth in the middle on a flat disk, and the underworld below for the dead. The Earth in the middle of the world was viewed differently depending on which ancient culture you ask: Egyptians saw the Earth as consisting of only Egypt and its closely neighboring lands, and the Israelites saw the Earth as only containing Israel, with Jerusalem at the very center of it. In other words, these ancient groups of people did not know how far the world stretched beyond their own lands. Heaven was thought to be just above the Earth, where the gods dwelled in their homes. All ancient cultures were polytheistic, believing in many gods who had human-like bodies and could even sometimes be reached by humans on Earth. This explains the Roman Pantheon, which was where ancient Romans went to worship their many gods. And it explains the ideas behind the Disney movie Hercules, which features many ancient Greek gods that are quite accessible to humans.

Pieces of these ancient ideas about the world can be found all throughout the Old Testament. In Genesis 3:8, God walks through the Garden of Eden as if he has a human body. In Exodus 33:23, God shows his hand and back to Moses on the mountain, again as if he has a human body. Food gifts, incense, and animal sacrifices by large priesthoods were also common ways to worship the ancient human-like gods, which explains the many animal sacrifices mentioned in the Old Testament. In Genesis 4:4, for example, Abel gives fat portions of his animals to god. No religions were originally monotheistic -- all started out with belief in multiple gods. Even Judaism featured many gods at first, which explains the Exodus 20:2-5 commandment "You shall have no other gods before me... for I the Lord your God am a jealous God." This passage was meant to address Israelites about whether or not they should worship one god alone (who they called Yahweh), or if they should be allowed to worship the other gods available to them in their culture at the time. This is evidence that Judaism was not yet a fully monotheistic religion when this passage was originally written.

How then did ancient polytheistic religions give rise to the more familiar monotheistic religions that we know today? One way is called inclusive monotheism, which is when one god becomes the greatest of them all and begins to oversee lesser gods. The fundamental motivation for this mode of monotheism was for one ancient king to be able to use his religion to expand and solidify control over a wider territory. In other words, if an ancient king conquered a new empire, so too did that king's god. The most "powerful" god helped a king to win control over a new empire, and this powerful god then absorbed the qualities of the lesser gods below him that he just defeated. Adaptations of this concept of inclusive monotheism have even been taken up by modern Judaism and Christianity: the one Christian God is served by lesser divine beings (or angels) who do his bidding. The ancient concept of divine hierarchies has been infused into modern Christianity.

Another way in which polytheism gave rise to monotheism in ancient cultures is called exclusive monotheism, which is the complete denial of the existence of other deities. This type of monotheism, which attempts to invalidate all other divine beings apart from the one true God, can also be found in modern Christianity. Isaiah 45:5 in the Bible, for example, states that "I am the Lord and there is no other; besides me there is no God." Both inclusive and exclusive monotheism have found their way into modern Christian beliefs.

The most important historical event that influenced ancient religions to transition from the belief in many gods to the belief in just one god, though, was actually rooted in science. As ancient astronomy was born, humans began to realize that the world was much bigger than they originally thought. The sun, the moon, and five other planets that could be seen by the naked eye were charted and their movements traced by mathematicians and astronomers. (See: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton). This led to the scientific discovery that the Earth is not flat and is not the center of the universe, but rather it is spherical and orbits the sun. With this new understanding of the cosmos, a major question had to be posed: Where is God now? Beginning to understand how vast the universe actually is made ancient humans realize that the gods (or the one God) could no longer be just above Earth in a reachable heaven. God could no longer be human-like, he could no longer be imagined eating with Abraham or turning his back on Moses. To make sense of their new understanding of the world, ancient humans eventually termed their God as the "Monad" (or the "one"), who exists in an eternal and immaterial divine dimension. This is how God came to be invisible, immeasurable, infinite, and beyond human comprehension. This new concept of an invisible God can be found throughout the Bible, such as in 1 Timothy 6:16: "God dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see."

If God has never been seen though, how can we know for sure that he even exists? And what should we make of the original creation story then? How could an abstract and immaterial God have created our material world? The only way for such a god to be perceived is through the One god becoming many, or God having mediator(s) of his will. This is where Jesus comes in.

Summary: The Christian belief in one single God (which is called monotheism) is a fairly new concept. All ancient religions first started out as polytheistic, meaning they believed in multiple gods. The shift from believing in many gods to believing in just one God actually came mainly from science. Ancient cultures first believed in a Hercules-like universe, where all of their gods hung out just above them in heaven. But when the actual size of the universe was found to be much larger than originally thought, ancient humans had to re-adjust their ideas about the divine. It was soon believed that perhaps just ONE infinite and unknowable God exists and oversees our immeasurably huge universe.

The Holy Trinity

Christians are Christian not just because they believe in one God, but because they follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. Before Christianity became a religion though, there was no such thing as a Holy Trinity (or the concept of the Father (God), the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit). Before the Christian era, there was no theoretical framework in Scripture that explained the relationship between these three. It was never addressed in the Old Testament, nor did any New Testament authors address how the three related to one another. The original text of 1 Corinthians 8:6 ("There is one God, the Father, from who are all things, ... and one Lord, Jesus, through whom are all things."), for example, leaves out any mention of a Holy Spirit. This is because Christians had not yet developed their central doctrine of the Holy Trinity. In fact, this passage has been termed a binitarian formulation, and it embarrassed the scribes who later copied/translated the original texts. Because the Christian scribes could not explain the lack of a Holy Spirit in this passage, they retroactively added the Holy Spirit to the text. But where did the concept of the Holy Trinity originate from then?

Christian trinitarianism arose as a brilliant solution to a long series of controversial questions about the relationship between Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. The trinity was first understood in three different ways:

Inclusive monotheism explained the trinity as being One high god coming in the form of many. In other words, God could take on different forms as he pleased, including the human-like form of Jesus Christ. This inclusive monotheistic concept was called modalism, and was one of the earliest and most popular understandings of the trinity. With modalism came many more questions than answers though. For instance, if Jesus was God, then to whom was Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane? And does that mean the Father himself underwent the suffering that Jesus did when he was hung on the cross? Modalism did not make logical sense, but survived for a long time because it was passed on orally. Those teaching it were mostly uneducated and illiterate -- (only about 10% of the Roman empire could read at this time, and those that could were among the upper-class who could afford these very expensive texts). This meant that those passing modalism on did not have the written word to question the issues that it raised. Modalism was eventually defeated when educated Christians finally read the written gospels closely and found the concept to be impossible to reconcile.

Another concept of the trinity arose from exclusive monotheism, and explained the trinity as including only One high god, who was served by lesser divine beings or angels. This concept originally developed in Persia and Egypt, and was then inherited by Israel after the exile. Additionally, the concept was heavily influenced by the Canaanites, who believed in the high god "El" who was served by one main son named "Baal." This melding of monotheism with old Canaanite religion led early Christians to understand Jesus as an agent or servant to the One god. Among the highly educated, Jesus was now thought to be a mere man or angel, somewhat subordinate to God, but "adopted" specifically by God to be his son due to his personal righteousness.

The third and final concept of the Holy Trinity, and the one that has most heavily influenced modern Christianity, was called emanationism. Emanationism stemmed from the ancient pagan stories of gods producing families out of their own bodies. When Greek scientific advancements crushed the ancient belief that gods could be human-like though, the concept of divine offspring had to be "upgraded" to instead suggest that the One god emanated spiritual children without a body at all, meaning God created Jesus and the Holy Spirit out of his own essence. Additionally, the original creation story in Genesis 1 had to be updated: it was no longer thought that dark chaos gave rise to Earth and the gods. Rather, nothingness existed at first, and the universe was then created out of nothing by God himself. Modern Christianity has the Gospel of John to thank for laying out the conceptual framework of emanation, which ultimately became the very foundation of Trinitarian theology. John is the only book in the Bible with verses suggesting emanation. In John 8:42, for example, Jesus states that "I proceeded forth and have come from God." This type of language is almost exclusive to the book of John, making John the basis for the creation of Christian Trinitarianism.

Although these ideas of a Holy Trinity were beginning to develop among several different early Christian religions, the Trinity doctrine was not officially defined until the creeds of the 4th century. Constantine, who had defeated Rome in the year 312 CE and then Licinius in 324 CE to become the sole master of the ancient empire, was big on Christianity. He did not like that there were vastly different beliefs among early Christians at the time, and he wanted unity among them for the sake of progress of the gospel and for political harmony. In order to bring unity to the faith, Constantine held a council in Nicaea in the year 325 CE to create the Creed of Nicaea -- (a creed is a confession of faith, or a statement of the shared beliefs of a community). All participants of the meeting were required to sign the creed, and those who refused were immediately exiled. And so the first Orthodox Christian creed was created, stating that there is one God, one Lord Jesus Christ (the Son of God), and lastly the Holy Spirit, which was casually tacked on to the end of the creed with no further explanation. Disputes over the legitimacy of the Holy Spirit broke out though (again, many original texts of the New Testament completely failed to mention the existence of a Holy Spirit), which eventually led to another meeting called the Council of Constantinople in the year 381 CE. Those in attendance that did not believe in a Holy Spirit were outnumbered, resulting in another creed that more officially defined the Holy Spirit as being a divine part of the Holy Trinity. Since then, Trinitarianism has been the official teaching of the Christian church.

Summary: TBH, I don't even know how to summarize this section lol. Despite growing up Christian, I have never fully understood the role of the Holy Spirit, and this was the section that my husband was also most bogged down by when editing. Let's just chalk it up to this: No one knows for sure what the Holy Spirit is/does, or where exactly the concept came from in the history of Christianity. Early Christians simply needed a way to understand the relationship between God and Jesus. The Holy Spirit was only later added into Christianity to explain and put a name to the divine force or influence that God has over the universe. Make sense? Got it? Still no? Okay me either, let's move on lol!

The Devil, Demons, and the End of the World

For most ancient cultures that believed in the previously described Hercules-like universe that was made out of three stories (heaven above, earth in the middle, and the underworld below), it was assumed that all three levels were a unified system, or a monism. In other words, the universe which contained both the spiritual world of the gods and the material world of the humans was all wrapped up into one harmonious system. The humans were meant to obey their gods, and when they did, their gods brought them rewards. When humans did not obey their gods, they were brought punishments such as dark and stormy winds, disease, death, etc. There was no devil, nor was there the concept of good vs. evil. There were only rewards and punishments that came from the gods. And when the gods fought amongst themselves, the conflicts were referred to as combat myths. Such combat myths were used by the Israelites to describe the conflicts between their god (Yahweh) against his enemies, and to describe Yahweh's rise to sovereignty over other gods of this time.

When the nation of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians in 731 BCE, the belief in a monism began to change. The chaos that the Israelites believed their universe was made from now appeared to have defeated their Lord. Yahweh's people suffered national catastrophe for his loss: the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed and much of the population was eventually exiled to Babylon in Mesopotamia for two generations. This exile lasted until the Babylonian empire itself was then defeated by Cyrus and his Persian army in 539 BCE. Cyrus was very tolerant of other customs though, and finally allowed the Jews in Babylon to return to their own lands and rebuild Jerusalem. This release from exile was not the only thing the Persians gave the Israelites: the Persians also gave Israel an old and highly influential view of the spiritual world, called dualism.

The Persians (whose ancient religion we now call Zoroastrianism) believed in both a god AND an equal rival of god: the devil. Both god and the devil had their own armies of angels and demons, and god originally formed the world as a battleground on which to eventually defeat the devil. God and the devil therefore had to fight over the loyalty of humans, and it was the expectation that one day the devil would be defeated for good and cast into the eternal fire of hell. Once this happened, it was believed that the old heavens and earth would then be burned up and recreated as a home for the resurrected righteous followers of God. This perspective was very different than the previous Israelite belief in events happening in sequential order with no purpose or greater meaning, and with no end in sight. This idea of a salvation history, with all events on earth and heaven being a part of a larger drama with an inevitable climax, was brand new to the Israelites.

Gradually the Jews began to adapt this new concept of dualism into their old traditions. A devil was even retroactively added to old Jewish stories. The Canaanite god Baal, for example, was originally the greatest competitor of Israel's god Yahweh, and their combat myth was believed to be the ultimate cause of the Israelite's exile. After Zoroastrian dualism was introduced to their culture though, Israelites began to identify Baal as the devil rather than a rival god, and even named him Beelzebul (or "the Ruler of the demons") in the text of Mark 3:22.

More evidence of this shift from a monism to a dualism can be found when comparing the stories in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles. 2 Samuel 24:1, which was written before the exile, states that "the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David" to count the people. 1 Chronicles 21:1 on the other hand, which was written after the exile, states that "Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people." Before the exile, the anger in the story came from the Lord, but after the exile, the anger came from Satan. This difference reflects the new idea that God was wholly good, while the source of all evil was the devil. This embodiment of evil came by many different names in the New Testament, owing to the fact that many different traditions and ideas were melded together to construct the Christian concept of the devil.

A final example of dualism being retroactively added to older stories is in that of Adam and Eve. The serpent in the Garden of Eden was not a symbol of the devil until after the exile. In fact, when this creation story was first written, serpents were actually a symbol of many positive things such as wisdom and of renewal of life (owing to the shedding of their skin). The original authors of Genesis did not call the snake "the devil," nor did they refer to the serpent as a dark spiritual power as they so easily could have. Additionally, Satan does not appear anywhere else in the first five books of the Bible. This is evidence that the concept of the devil was not yet known to the people who wrote these early religious texts. He was only later added.

The idea of the devil having an army of demons to back him was also only introduced to the Israelites after the exile. Before then there was no such thing as demons, but rather it was believed to be the gods who brought ill-fortune to humans who disobeyed them. Angry and bad-spirited gods were to blame for disastrous weather, complications in childbirth, plagues, disability, epilepsy, and death. It was not until they were introduced to Zoroastrian dualism that the Israelites began to blame their misfortunes on demons working on behalf of the devil.

Over time, old combat myths were combined with this new concept of dualism to form a core Christian belief: that there exists one sovereign God who presides over lesser divine beings, some of whom are righteous (angels), but others of whom are evil (demons) and choose to follow God's arch rival (Satan). It is the job of these demons to tempt humans into sin (such as lying, adultery, and the worshipping of false gods) to pull them away from the one true God. According to Zoroastrian belief though, good was eventually expected to defeat evil, leading to a cosmic eschatology (or "end account" of the world) and a final judgement.

This brand new idea that there would be an end to the world was one of the most important consequences of dualism. But it came with a problem. Up until their release from exile, Israelites had not expected an end to the world. Without a devil or demons wreaking havoc on the universe, there was simply no need for an end. Rather, pre-Christian Israelites believed in what can be called Israel's National Restoration, which is outlined in the Old Testament and is based on a series of never-ending covenants the Israelites had with their God. A covenant with Abraham promised the land of Israel and vast progeny to last forever. And a covenant with Moses at Sinai not only revealed the Ten Commandments (including that the people of Israel shall have no other gods before Yahweh), but also spoke of blessings and curses that would be put upon Israel. The Israelites therefore interpreted their exile as one such curse. They rationalized that their occasional worship of other neighboring gods caused Yahweh to become jealous, and so he used surrounding nations to punish the Israelites and send them into exile. But the other nations were too harsh, so Yahweh then promised not only to restore Israel, but also to punish the other nations. Jerusalem was promised to someday become the center of the world, prosperous and at peace forever. Israel would have no end.

Upon being released from exile and introduced to dualism though, early Jewish Christians began to combine their original belief in a National Restoration of Israel with the Zoroastrian idea of a final judgement and end of the world. The result was a widely held belief that a new heaven and earth would one day be formed, with Jerusalem coming down from the heavens to be at the earth's center (Revelations 21:10).

Not all early Christians held this exact view of a materialistic Kingdom of God. John 18:36, for example, suggests that "My kingdom is not from this world." Disagreements on what exactly the end of the world would look like were just one of many within early Christianity, which ultimately led to the creation of the Creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople to try unify the religion. Even so, the Creed of Constantinople remained vague and general about the final Kingdom of God, ultimately leaving it up to individual believers to decide for themselves what they expected in the afterlife.

Summary: The concept of the Devil was not introduced to the ancient Israelites until their release from exile by the Persian army in 539 BCE. Modern Christianity therefore has the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism to thank for this concept, for the Israelites eventually chose to incorporate this new idea into their own religion and it eventually became a pillar of the Christian faith. With this new concept of a Devil and a fight between good vs evil also came the idea that the world would eventually come to an end, with good finally defeating evil. How exactly the world would end and what would come of Earth and of humans has never been settled though. The Bible theorizes many different endings, but no one knows for sure what may happen, and so it has mostly been left to individual Christians to decide for themselves what they believe.

Keeping Body and Soul Apart

With scientific discovery causing shifts in the way ancient humans viewed the divine also came an inevitable shift in the way humans viewed themselves. At first during the time of the three-story universe, humans saw themselves as empty clay pots. Human breathe was the "breathe of life," and when people stopped breathing they returned to the clay of the Earth from which they came. The quality of one's life during these times therefore did not matter. Humans tried to uphold their contractual agreements with the gods: to worship and provide sacrifices to them so that they may be rewarded with good fortunes such as rain for their crops. But ethics were not of great concern, as all were eventually expected to descend into the underworld. These ancient views of life and death were simplistic and depressing, and the finality of death was emphasized over and over again in ancient texts.

Very few ancient cultures started out having a concept of an afterlife. Persian dualism was one that did though. Unlike other ancient religions, Zoroastrianism suggested that humans were born pure and sinless, endowed with reason and wholly free to choose between good or evil. For Zoroastrians, ethics were therefore of great concern. And at the time of judgement they believed a resurrection would occur -- fleshly bodies would be scattered, and then either re-formed to live in a newly built and upgraded world for all of eternity, or would descend into a fiery hell.

It was Greek philosophical influence that contributed most to the eventual Christian belief in a soul separate from the body though. As science forced change in beliefs about the divine (from the gods being close by and materialistic, to being much more spiritual and complex), so too did it shift how humans viewed themselves. Greek philosophers eventually theorized that air was the element that made up all life, and that it holds material bodies together. Air became the spirit or soul that controls the body, and both God and humans were made up of this material. It was philosophers like Socrates and Plato that suggested that the soul is divine and immortal, and that perhaps the purpose of death was to release the soul from the body so that it may return to God in heaven.

Christian views of the body, soul, and afterlife were therefore heavily influenced by both Persian dualism and Greek philosophy. Persian dualism did not believe in souls separate from bodies, and Greek philosophy did not yet have the concept of a devil -- it was Jesus who brilliantly combined these two traditions into something new. Jesus taught to nourish the soul instead of the body; he taught his followers not to worry about Earthly possessions or their status in the church, but rather to worry about serving and helping others in order to achieve true wealth and an eternal life in heaven. Jesus, like Socrates, was eventually killed by his opposition for encouraging people to tend to their souls, but the death of Jesus had an added layer of the devil entering Judas to betray him leading to his crucifixion (Luke 22:3).

Savior of the World

The main belief of Christianity is that Jesus is the savior of the world, and through him eternal life in heaven is possible. This core piece of the Christian religion was not established easily by any means though. Before Jesus, there was no such job description as "savior of the world." Older cultures did not need a savior, because there was no devil that people needed saving from, and no such thing as souls that needed to be saved. No prophets of any culture had ever envisioned such a figure; no outside help was ever predicted to save the world. Even in the time of Jesus, most people still held traditional views about death: that it was final and bleak. In the time of Jesus, the average person died before puberty, many women died in childbirth, there was a lack of medicine to fight off disease as well as a lack of dental care, malnutrition was rampant due to unstable food sources, and so on. Life was short and death was final.

It was again the combination of Zoroastrian dualism and Greek philosophy that suggested a need for a savior. Zoroastrians believed that the devil was to blame for creating false religions to keep all of humanity deceived. And Greek philosophers believed that one's soul is separate from the body and is of divine nature. These two ideas were combined by highly educated Jews, who thought that the devil was to blame for tricking humans into believing that the material world of money, temples, and animal sacrifices was all that there was. Therefore, because humans were incarnated in fleshly bodies that were tempted into these worldly pleasures, they were inevitably blind to their own sins. Humans needed a savior who could do more than just defeat national enemies and bring them material prosperity like a king. Humans needed Jesus, who a handful of educated Jews believed was sent by God to save humanity by fighting off the continued worship of materialistic false gods.

Not all believed in the new teachings of Jesus or of his title of "savior of the world" though. In fact, during his time, very few did. By the time of Jesus, Israel was divided: "genuine" Jews resided in Judah (the south of Israel where Jerusalem was located), while another group of Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) resided in Galilee (the north of Israel where Nazareth was located and where Jesus was born). Galilee was the region of Israel most open to foreign influence and most distant from the beliefs and practices of the Jerusalem temple. For these reasons, Galilee and Jerusalem were practically foreign to one another. It was the traditional belief of Jerusalem Jews that a kingly Messiah would one day come to fulfill the prophecy of Israel's National Restoration. This king was expected to be like Moses: a high priest or prophet.

So when Jesus came and was claimed to be the Messiah by a small group of Jews in Galilee, it seemed to be a huge contradiction to what was originally expected. The Jews of Jerusalem did not believe that a crucified Galilean Jew could be the Messiah of the Old Testament meant to rule Israel for all of eternity. But for the Jews of Galilee, the life of Jesus was beginning to make sense, for they were heavily influenced by the Zoroastrian concept of evil and the Greek concept of a divine soul being separate from the material body. They no longer believed in an Earthly eternal kingdom. Jesus's promise of a spiritual kingdom therefore began to make sense to the Galileans. And so the new religion of Christianity was born, splitting off from Judaism.

The unexpected entrance of Jesus and the invention of this new religion still needed to be justified though. If it was always in God's plan to send his son Jesus to be the savior of the world, then why were there no earlier signs of it? Why did the religion of Christianity unfold so slowly over the course of history rather than all at once at the very start of humanity? Early Christians rationalized that ancient humans were not educated enough to be presented with the entire religion all at once. In other words, God slowly presented Christianity to humans in order to allow their intelligence and understanding of science to catch up. The main Christian concepts of One omnipresent and omnipotent God, the devil and his demons, a soul separate from the body, and a need for a savior of the world all had to be rolled out in due time for humans to fully understand it.

Christianity is therefore both a very old and very new religion. It branched off of Judaism, and was heavily influenced by many other ancient religions as well. Jesus, however, brought a new and inspiring message that ultimately created a never-before-seen religion: he taught that regardless of social class, education, ethnicity, and other Earthly burdens, all those who are faithful and ethically obedient are promised an eternal blessedness in the spiritual kingdom of God. This inspiring new message was why Christianity survived and succeeded as a religion. It gave all people access to a better way to live and a better way to die.

Conclusion

When taken at face value and read without considering the wide historical context in which it was written, the Bible is messy, confusing, and hugely contradicting. This is because the Bible does not contain just one single religion. Rather, it contains the influences of many ancient religions. Why? Because Israel never existed on its own. Its religion was never left to develop in isolation. Israel was forced time and time again to assimilate to the new ideas and influences of its surrounding nations and of its conquerors. Many vastly different traditions and experiences therefore contributed to the creation of Christianity. If one widens their point of view, it becomes easy to see that many different tributaries entered to river system that created modern day Christianity. The Bible is a reflection of this huge river system, with hints of each individual tributary found all throughout it. The Bible may have been "inspired" by God, but it was certainly not written or edited by the divine. It is covered in the fingerprints of many ancient humans that came from very rich and diverse backgrounds.

Hence why the Bible and the early Christian religion contained so many competing views. Early Christians seldom agreed with one another. Division and dissension was rampant within the early church. The gospels alone prove this: Not only do the 4 most well-known gospels of the Bible contain many major differences, but 80+ other non-canonical gospels also exist outside of the Bible, some of which containing hugely contradicting interpretations of Jesus and the divine. The existence of such differences was difficult for many early Christians to cope with, and even led to the establishment of the creeds of the 4th century, which were created to try to standardize the religion. Furthermore, to rationalize such differences, many early Christians blamed the devil, insisting that those who worshipped differently than them were under the devil's influence. Early Christians often tried in invalidate the differences of others in order to feel more valid in their own religious practices.

This tendency continues today. Many people of the Christian faith still see differences in opinion, belief, and way of life as problems to be solved. Those that have trouble tolerating such differences often try to condemn the groups of people they are at odds with. Some weaponize the Bible to deny others their human rights. Some quote scripture to try to validate their prejudice. Some use the patriarchal culture of ancient Israel to try to maintain traditional gender roles. This is of course not to say that all those practicing Christianity are guilty of weaponizing their religion against others. But religion does have a blatant history of being used as a tool to prop up power and oppress those who lack it. This religion that was supposedly created from Jesus's teachings of love, acceptance, and grace all too often gets used as a vehicle for hate, prejudice, and self-righteousness. Since the very beginning of the Christian tradition, differences have been seen as a problem to be feared and solved rather than a simple fact of life to be accepted and celebrated.

My purpose in outlining the history of the Bible is therefore to try to strip it of its power to harm those who differ from us. After all, the Bible was never meant to be a weapon. It is not without error. It is not a guide to living the perfect life. It was never meant to be taken out of its ancient context and applied to a completely different world than that in which it was written. The Bible is very simply a collection of different ideas about God and interpretations of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, written by many humans of vastly different cultures and backgrounds. Christianity has a rich and diverse history that has endured many changes throughout time. And it still has the capacity to hold major differences amongst its believers; it still has the capacity to endure change. In fact, Christianity was created out of differences and out of change. These things should therefore not be feared. They are not threats to Christianity or tests of God. They are simple facts of life, and should be embraced. The River of Christianity has always been flowing, picking up new ideas and discoveries about the world as it goes, and it will never stop flowing. Perhaps faith can remain free of outside influence and change. But religion cannot.

Sources:

The River of God, book by Gregory J. Riley

The Bible for Normal People, podcast by Pete Enns and Jared Byas https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/