Evangelicals of the 1st and 2nd Century.

[leftyladyfrommo]

Has anyone else read up on this movement? The church in the 1st and 2nd century was almost torn apart by Christians who were practicing talking in tongues and dream revelation and prophesy and ecstatic states and all sorts of interesting stuff.

Poor Iraneus (sp) tried for years to form a more universal church just to keep the Christian Church from fracturing along a thousand different lines.

We think we have problems with that today - but it was even worse then.

[SPKrazy]

1. From A Different Perspective

"Poor Iraneus" decided that the four gospels, John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke were the four corners of what would later become the new testament

He basically decided that there were too many different beliefs splintering among Christians and so HE decided what Christianity would become. He found an audience in the powers that be, and the rest is history.

Some of these other sects may have practiced a more authentic Christianity than the one laid out in the synoptics and John.

Literature was destroyed. Iraneus did all this to "save the Church" as he believed it wouldn't survive without it.

He could be right. But did he actually save the Church? Or did he just cut away a rich and vast world of ideas and writings that may have given a truer and more complete picture of Jesus, the man, and Jesus as Divine.

I'm not impressed by "poor Iraneus", since the texts found at nag Hamadi and other finds are showing us, there was a world of writings and practices in Christianity that went way beyond what was to become Catholicism.

[leftyladyfrommo]

2. Oh,Ii don't disagree with you at all.

Actually, I am a huge fan of Thomas. And if Thomas had been included in the canon - or if some of the other ealy stuff had been included - we would have seen a very different church.

But I think the phenomenon of the - I don't know what they called themselves - the ones who believed in revelation and dreams and faith healing and speaking in tonques and all of that is interesting to me.

Here in Missouri and this whole region we have the snake handlers and drinkers of battery acid. Fascinating stuff.

I'm a mystic so I am interested in the age old question of what is real revelation. When is it real? When is it imagination or just plain old illusion? It is something that all mystics are very aware of and careful of.