Jesus Wars How Four Patriarchs Three Queens And Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe For The Next 1500 Years – Philip Jen

Mother of God In attacking the term Theotokos, Nestorius went to the heart of the – Christian paradox. We today find the word less shocking than it properly is because memories of the Hail Mary prayer have made the words “Mother of God” so familiar in most Western languages.

Pursued to its logical conclusion, though, 7heotokos meant that the teenaged girl Mary, from a remote village on the fringes of the Mediterranean world, was the mother of the God who had created the world out of nothing, who made the sun and the stats, who had made his covenant with Abraham and Moses, who had appeared in fire and smoke on Sinai. The logical mind revolted. So did the minds of many Christians who had grown up in a world dominated by images of the great and terrifying Mother _.Goddess who predated the gods, and who reigned with them, dei- ties like Egypt’s Isis and the Cybele of Asia Minor.

Must not the Mother of God be a Goddess in her own right, even a greater figure than her son? As Nestorius preached, “Has God a mother?” Then how can we blame pagans for inventing all those mothers for their gods? No, he insisted: “The creature did not bear the Creator, but she bore a man, the instrument of deity.”

Nestorius did not want to see Christian doctrine contaminated by alien practices, especially through popular devotions, the expres- sions of faith that often drew on pagan precedents. In his era, devo- tion to the Virgin Mary was becoming an ever-larger part of popular Christian practice, as Mary became almost a divine figure parallel to Christ.

Already from the second century, apocryphal gospels were putting forth an exalted image of Mary, who was perpetually virgin and whose own life paralleled that of her son. By the fourth cen- tury, we find the idea that she had not suffered an ordinary death, but was instead assumed into heaven. Images of the Virgin and Child—portraits and statues—wete now a commonplace of reli- gious art, and these imitated ancient pagan fisutes of the goddess and her divine son, of Isis and Horus.

Pivotal to these ancient Jesus V/ars were the four great questions that, to di) degrees, have shaped all subsequent det/e; thin Christianity. Foremost is the deceptively simple question posed by Jesus himself: Who do you say that I am? And building on this are the three follow-ups: What is the church? By what authority do you do this? And, what must I do to be saved? More perhaps than in any subsequent conflict within Christianity, these debates over Christs nature involved the most fundamental realities of faith and practice.—from the Introduction Jesus Wars reveals how official, orthodox teaching about Jesus was the product of polit- ical maneuvers by a handful of key characters in the fifth century.

Jenkins argues that were it not for these controversies, the papacy as we know it would never have come into existence and that today’s church could be teaching some- thing very different about Jesus. It is only an accident of history that one group of Roman emperors and militia-wielding bishops defeated another faction. Christianity claims that Jesus was, some- how, both human and divine. But the Bible is anything but clear about Jesus’s true identity.

In fact, a wide range of opinions and beliefs about Jesus circulated in the church for four hundred years until allied factions of Roman royalty and church leaders burned cities and killed thousands of people in an unprecedented effort to stamp out heresy. Jenkins recounts the fascinating, violent story of the church’s fifth-century battles over “right belief” that had ‘reater impact on the future of Christian : the world than the much-touted Counc: ‘ea convened by Constantine a century , _ WEST END BRANCH LIBRARY 5420 Patterson Avenue Richmond, VA 23226 …

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This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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