Transcript

Hey, welcome back to the History of Christian Thought and Practice 1, or as we like to call it, History 1. This is my Unit 2 highlights video.

The title of the video, of course, is a joke.

It's meant to mock and ridicule all those stupid videos on YouTube that use clickbait titles that have little or nothing to do with the content.

But if you have stumbled on this video and you're not in my History 1 class, You're welcome.

And the outro at the end of the video, that's for you.

So stick around until the end to see that.

For my students, you can ignore that outro at the end.

All right, so here we go.

Let's do unit two highlights.

And I'm going to start with some myth busting.

One of the things that people sort of expect me to say when they come into my class is they expect me to say that the hierarchy of the church developed so that powerful, rich people could hold on to their power and their money.

Other people expect me to say that the hierarchy of the church was somehow based on the hierarchies of Roman politics or the Roman military.

And of course, none of that is true.

In fact, to get elected bishop in the early church often meant that you were automatically public enemy number one.

You might as well put your picture up in the post office because there was no power or wealth associated with the job.

And in fact, we know that one of the early bishops, Clement of Rome, was in fact a slave While he was bishop.

And that's another whole story for another day.

But it is true.

And so if the hierarchy of the church did not develop or emerge based on any kind of power grab or any kind of imitation of Roman politics or military, then how, in fact, and why did the hierarchy of the church develop?

We talked about this a little bit last time, and I also recommended my original church video called, Did the Early Church Have Bishops?

So check that out also for more background on the early hierarchy.

Now, we do need to say that there is some influence of Roman social structures on the church in the early days of Christianity.

And there's actually two Roman social structures One of those social structures is something called the patron-client system.

And the patron-client system is a network of hierarchies in which more powerful people have others who are less wealthy and less powerful who sort of Follow them around and sometimes do their dirty work for them, but basically support them.

This becomes important when someone has to go to court because if you have to go to court in ancient Rome, the verdict of who wins the court case is often going to be determined by which lawyer gets more applause from the audience.

If you have to go to court, you need to gather a lot of people to come with you.

So a patron, a wealthier or more powerful person, actually needs clients who are a group, as many as possible, of less wealthy, less powerful people, but who support them.

And they can tell their clients, hey, I need you in court on a certain day to cheer for my lawyer.

They can tell their clients, hey, I need you to vote for my friend in the upcoming elections, all of that.

The trade-off, what the clients get out of that, is that the patron is a kind of insurance policy for them.

If they get into trouble, the patron bails them out.

If they need something, the patron helps them, and they expect to receive regular gifts, often just simply gifts of money, or if they're really lucky, gifts of invitations to dinner to the banquets from their patrons.

Okay, so this whole system of this patron-client system exists all throughout Roman society.

At the top, you have the emperor who is theoretically the patron of everyone.

And then you have a system of patrons and their clients.

And then in the middle, those clients may have clients of their own.

And the people at the very bottom of the social ladder, they may not have a patron.

Some of them may have a... A guild or some sort of society or even a funeral club as a kind of patron so that at the very least, when they die, they know that there's a group who will make sure they get a decent burial.

So you have this whole patron-client system.

And within that system, one of the things we see in the early church is that the church itself functions as a kind of a patron for its poorest members.

In other words, this is the beginning of the whole idea of collecting alms and distributing them.

And the alms might be money, but they might be resources like food or clothing, and they distribute those to those most in need.

Of course, the big difference between almsgiving in the church and so-called philanthropy in the Roman structure is that in the Roman structure, the people who get the gifts The church also can have a patron, in the sense that the church in any given place which gathers in someone's home Very often, the host, the person who owns the home or who rents the apartment space or whatever it is, the person who is the host of the actual worship space, that person will become seen as the patron of that congregation or that parish.

But what we have to keep in mind is that to be the patron of a parish or a congregation, to be the host of a house church, is not the same thing as being the presider over the sacraments.

And so when we hear that someone is the host of a house church, or that we hear that a house church is meeting in so-and-so's house, that does not imply at all that that person was the presider over the liturgy and the sacraments in that space.

The other Roman social system that influences the church is the family.

And the Roman family is, you know, based on, you know, a very common ancient concept of an extended family.

In other words, a family is not simply, you know, the parents and children who live in one small space, but the family includes their parents, anyone who's still alive.

And in the Roman structure, The oldest male parent who's still alive is the father of the whole extended family.

In Latin, the pater familias, the family father, right?

And so this structure influenced the early church as well, because the church, any given congregation, was seen as a family.

And Christians called each other brothers and sisters, and they saw their congregation as their family.

And they saw their presider, their pastor, as the father of that local family.

And this is the origin of why priests are called father to this day, right?

And so the pastor of a congregation is the father of that congregation, and then the bishop But it's still important to keep it straight that the patrons are the hosts, the presiders are the house fathers, right?

Okay, and so this is how the church and its hierarchy developed.

And as we talked about last time, the hierarchy of the church is based entirely on the ancient apprenticeship system.

In other words, there is a master who has disciples or a teacher who has students, and that teacher passes on not only the knowledge, the information, the tradition, But also the authority, especially to particular students or a particular student who then becomes the next master over the next generation of disciples, right?

And so the hierarchy of the church is based on this idea of apprenticeship, right?

The leader in any given place is, at least in theory, a disciple of the previous leader in that place.

And so, you know, this is what happens from one generation to the next.

Now, we can observe that as time goes on and it becomes less and less clear who the direct disciples of previous leaders are in certain places.

We do see the beginning of the development of the practice of electing leaders, and that comes in over time.

But the original system was basically just like we see in the book of Acts, where the apostles are choosing and commissioning or ordaining their own successors, right?

Now, we saw when we looked at the titles for the offices of clergy, and again, if you want more background on this, watch my video, Did the Early Church Have Bishops?

But we saw that in the New Testament and in the document called the Didache, which is one of the documents you will be reading for this unit, in the New Testament and in the Didache, there is a phrase that is used for clergy.

And remember, there is no Greek equivalent of our English word clergy, so when they talk about who the clergy are, this phrase is simply bishops and deacons.

But again, here the word bishop, episkopos, simply means pastor, because in the New Testament and in the Didache, we are still in that earlier phase before the word for bishop has come to designate the specific office of the successors to the apostles, right?

And we saw Clement of Rome in his letter experimenting with the title of high priest for what comes to be the office of bishop.

So what we have in the New Testament and in the Didache, we have that the clergy are bishops and deacons, right?

And then, of course, there are still a few apostles around, so you still have a kind of three-tier hierarchy apostles.

And then pastors, which can be called bishops or presbyters, and then deacons, right?

And then the disciples, the apostles and their disciples are referred to as prophets and teachers.

So it's sort of like prophet, bishop, deacon is the three-tier hierarchy.

But then when we get into the second century, and you're going to see this in Ignatius of Antioch, now the word bishop, episkopos, means the office of bishop, as in the top tier of a three-tier hierarchy, the successor of the apostles.

It's still not a day job.

It's not a paid position.

It's not limited to wealthy people only.

It's not a job that, you know, allows one to get or keep wealth.

There's no money.

There's no power in being a church leader at this time.

But there is a hierarchy, and so the hierarchy shifts from something that looks sort of like prophets, bishops, and deacons to bishops, priests, and deacons, where now in this new phase, the bishops are not so itinerant as the apostles were traveling around like St. Paul, but they're more localized with a sort of regional authority over a city or a region.

Now you might be tempted to wonder why?

Why did the church need a hierarchy?

Why couldn't it just be all sort of flat in terms of its leadership?

And I would say that there are five reasons why the hierarchy developed and why it was necessary.

And these are the five reasons.

Number one, teaching.

Again, the hierarchy is based on that apprenticeship model.

So someone has to Faithfully hand down the teachings of the church from one generation to the next.

And it is within the hierarchy that the authority to do that lies.

So who best to know what Jesus actually taught and what he meant by what he taught than the apostles?

And then who best to know what Jesus actually taught and the apostles actually taught than their disciples?

And you see, on it goes.

So the first reason why The hierarchy developed was to preserve the teaching of the church and to protect it from corruption.

The second reason that a hierarchy was necessary was for the administration of the sacraments.

We're going to talk about the sacraments a little bit more later.

But someone has to administer the sacraments and offer them to the people.

And the ones with the authority to do that are the ones who receive that authority from those who came before them who had that authority.

And again, it all goes back to Jesus himself choosing and commissioning and teaching his disciples who then hand on the teachings and the appropriate way to do the sacraments and the authority to do the sacraments on down to the next generation.

And each generation's clergy then teach and commission the next generation of clergy.

That's how it works.

The third reason that hierarchy is necessary is for the discipline of the church.

Now you may remember there's that uncomfortable passage in 1 Corinthians 5 where Paul actually advocates excommunicating someone who is living in sin and who refuses to repent.

Why is it that the church even does this?

Why is it that anyone has the authority to kick someone out?

And again, as I've said before, remember that excommunication doesn't really mean kicking them out.

It doesn't mean shunning them.

It means that the person who is excommunicated is is excluded from communion.

In other words, that person must stay back and not receive the sacrament until they have confessed and until they have been reconciled to the church.

But all of that, the idea of excommunication, the idea that some people may need to wait until they fix their situation before they can receive the sacraments, the idea that there is a process by which people can be reconciled to the church after serious sin, all of that falls under the authority of the hierarchy, right?

So that's the third thing, the discipline of the church.

The fourth reason that the hierarchy was necessary is to feed the hungry.

It's to distribute alms to those who need them.

It's for the works of mercy Church discipline and feeding the hungry and taking care of the poor.

And the fifth reason that the hierarchy is necessary and the reason that it developed is because It's necessary for the unity of the church.

Without the hierarchy, there is no unity of the church.

And anyone in a communion or in a denomination that has bishops at all, you know, your structure, our structure of an episcopal polity, in other words, a church government that has bishops, that whole structure is based on the conviction that without bishops, The unity of the church would break down.

And this is proven simply by observation, because those denominations that don't have bishops, each congregation is more autonomous.

And they may choose to be that way, but they have to admit that then that is the trade-off, that unity among Others that supposedly agree with them, you know, isn't there.

They don't have the same kind of unity.

So the unity is in the hierarchy.

And this is a little counterintuitive to a lot of folks who might think that unity requires equality and equality requires a flat hierarchy.

But actually, unity is in the hierarchy.

Now, on the subject of unity, Why can't the church just let everyone believe what they want?

And this is going to be addressed in a lot of the readings that you're going to do, not least of which is Ignatius of Antioch.

In the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, we're beginning to see factions who have different beliefs than the mainstream, and they're going off and they're having their own meetings separate from the mainstream church.

Now we've already seen in the pages of the New Testament that there's heresy out there.

You know, St. Paul addresses different kinds of heresy in his letters.

But now when we get into the second century, we're seeing that there are fringe groups on the edges of the church that are starting to have separate meetings.

And Ignatius is addressing this.

And basically what he says is, If you have unauthorized meetings, if you have meetings that aren't sanctioned by the bishop, then you don't have a valid sacrament.

There are no valid sacraments in meetings that are not under the authority of the bishop.

And so this is going to become a real issue, not only for Ignatius of Antioch, who sees very clearly what the problems are, but ongoing as we track through the history of the church and as we look at the different heresies, which we will.

But I just have to quote Ignatius of Antioch right now in his letter to the Ephesians.

He says, In other words, outside of the sanctioned meetings of the church, To have a separate meeting that's not authorized by the bishop, that meeting lacks the bread of God.

That meeting cannot possibly have a valid Eucharist, right?

And now, of course, that's going to bring up the question, well, where are those boundaries then?

Like, how do you know which meetings are within the mainstream and sanctioned by the bishop and which meetings are outside of that boundary?

And that boundary, I mean, that's going to be a conversation that we're going to have ongoing throughout the whole rest of this course.

But that boundary, the boundary between the mainstream church and the fringe movements, that boundary between orthodoxy and heresy, that is the boundary of what Ignatius calls the Catholic Church.

Now, Catholic, as you know, means universal, right?

And so we often use the word Catholic with a small c to mean the universal Church, and that is exactly what it means.

But it has that double meaning, because in using the phrase Catholic Church in opposition to the factions, Ignatius is literally saying that the mainstream Church, we are the Catholic Church and you are not.

And that becomes the distinction.

And so we're going to see more and more of that as we talk more about the heresies.

Okay, now speaking of heresy, let's review the three laws.

As I write in my books, there are three observable laws of the way things play out over the course of the early church and in the development of doctrine.

So these aren't laws as in I'm making a rule.

These are laws as in, you know, three sort of universal observations.

And the idea of three laws is kind of an homage to the three laws of robotics from science fiction, but you don't need to worry about that.

What are the three laws?

Law number one, heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself.

What that means is that orthodoxy precedes heresy.

Orthodoxy comes first, because after all, orthodoxy begins with what Jesus taught his disciples.

And I'm talking about in a Christian context.

Obviously, there is a background to that in Judaism as well.

But in the Christian context, Orthodoxy begins with what Jesus taught his disciples and what they pass on to their people and their disciples.

But when that teaching is challenged, when there is an alternative interpretation proposed, Then the orthodoxy of the mainstream is challenged and it is forced to clarify itself.

And so when I say that heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself, what I mean is that alternative interpretations force the mainstream interpretation to be clarified over time.

And this is exactly what we mean by the development of doctrine.

Over time, doctrine develops because it is increasingly clarified in each generation in opposition to the alternatives.

So, rule number one, heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself.

Rule number two, orthodoxy is the middle way or the place of balance between the extreme alternatives.

Orthodoxy is a kind of middle way between the alternatives Which are always on the extremes.

So, for example, the teaching of the church has always been that Jesus is both human and divine.

It's the both-and answer to the question, not either-or.

But there were challenges to this.

There were alternatives proposed.

Some people said, no, Jesus is divine but not human.

That's one extreme.

All divinity, no humanity.

Others said, no, Jesus is human but not divine.

That's the other extreme.

All humanity, no divinity.

But orthodoxy is in that place of balance in the middle, not as a compromise.

Jesus is not 50-50. He's fully divine and fully human, but it's the both-and answer to the question as opposed to the either-or.

So rule number two is that orthodoxy is the middle way or that place of balance, that both-and answer.

As opposed to the extreme alternatives.

And then law number three is simply that Christology informs soteriology, which means Christology, what we believe about Christ as the Savior, will influence soteriology, which is what we believe about salvation.

So what we believe about the Savior is going to drive us to certain beliefs about how salvation works, which another word for that is the atonement.

Now, it works the other way too, because if you start with assumptions about how salvation works, then it forces you to back into certain beliefs about the Savior, Jesus, right?

But these things are very interdependent.

You can kind of put that on the shelf for later, because we'll get there.

But those are the three laws.

And what this tells you is that It is very important in the early church to receive what was orthodoxy before you.

In other words, in the development of doctrine, the orthodoxy of any given generation is built on the foundation of the orthodoxy of the previous generation.

So you can develop it, you can further clarify it, but you don't get to change it.

Something that was orthodox in one generation cannot become Heresy in the next generation or vice versa.

But what you do is you receive the orthodoxy of the previous generation and you build on it and further clarify it.

And that is the development of doctrine, right?

And so the early church never really had a doctrine of sola scriptura, scripture alone.

It was never enough to say, as I've seen on a bumper sticker, the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.

The church fathers knew that knowing what the Bible says doesn't settle anything because there is still the task of interpretation.

You have to figure out what it means.

Proof of the fact that Scripture requires interpretation is that there's so much disagreement over what it means.

So obviously, not everyone agrees on the interpretation of Scripture, even if we can agree on the actual words of Scripture.

And so, you know, I use this analogy a lot, the analogy of the dump truck.

The New Testament is It's revealed scripture.

It is divinely revealed.

I have a very high view of scripture.

But in the early church, it's almost as if the New Testament is a truckload of bricks that the apostles backed up onto your lawn and dumped onto an open field.

And then as they were driving away, they said, okay, now you build the house, right?

And so all of the building blocks Christian doctrine are in the New Testament, but the church fathers in the early church had to take those bricks and build the house.

What's as important as divinely revealed scripture is the process of apostolic succession in the hierarchy, in the teachers of the church, and in the development of doctrine.

And so it is always the interplay between scripture and tradition.

Tradition actually comes first before the New Testament is even written.

And then that tradition, some of it gets written into the New Testament as scripture.

And then that scripture becomes part of the tradition.

But then the tradition Again, that doesn't mean we always have to interpret Scripture exactly the way the church fathers and mothers did.

It doesn't mean we always have to apply it to our lives exactly the way they did.

But we do have to take into consideration the methodology here.

So in the context of the early and medieval church, the assumption is that there are two ways that truth comes to you.

There are two ways that truth is revealed to you.

One is tradition and one is revelation or sacred scripture.

And they work together, but in some ways, Tradition comes before, at least in the sense of the New Testament.

But then even once you have a New Testament, tradition helps interpret the New Testament and build on it.

And, you know, just one example of that is that when you read the Didache, you may notice something.

If you're careful, if you read carefully and you compare the Lord's Prayer or the Our Father in the Didache against The two versions of it in the Gospels, in Luke and in Matthew, what you'll notice is a development in the Our Father.

Luke's version is missing a couple of lines that are then added in by Matthew.

Now, in my opinion, that's because Matthew was there and remembered, and as one of Jesus' disciples, had a better memory of the Our Father because he was already in the practice of reciting it.

Be that as it may, when you then compare it to the Didache, now we have that tagline, that thing at the end, for yours is the power and the glory forever, right?

That tagline is not in the Bible at all.

And if you have a Bible that adds it, it's only because in that edition of the Bible, they pulled it out of the Didache and stuck it in there.

But that's not in the Bible, but it is in the Didache.

So if you belong to a tradition, That when you say the Lord's Prayer, you include that tagline.

Well, you are getting that not from Scripture, but from tradition, and that's okay.

All right, well, Ignatius of Antioch After writing his letters, Ignatius was taken to Rome and he was martyred.

Actually, he died in the Colosseum, which, by the way, was only about 30 years old at that time.

The apostles, Peter and Paul, never saw the Colosseum because it wasn't built yet when they were in Rome.

But Ignatius was martyred in the Colosseum.

And this is at a time in the early part of the second century when the persecution against Christians is escalating.

And at this exact same time, we see a very interesting, we have a very interesting letter from a pagan governor called Pliny writing to the pagan emperor named Trajan.

And one of the questions he asked in this letter is, you know, I'm not sure what to do with these Christians.

And, you know, he gives away in the letter that the emperor had made a law against the meeting of secret societies.

And at that time, Christianity counted as a kind of secret society.

This is actually one of the reasons why the Eucharist in the history of the Church shifts from an evening meeting within a meal to a morning meeting, to a morning liturgy.

Because of the Roman law against the meetings of secret societies, they couldn't have their Eucharistic meetings in the evening anymore.

They still got away with some meals, but they took the Eucharist out of the meal and made it a morning liturgy so that they could get away with doing it before going to work in the morning.

And when we get to Unit 3, you're going to read the Apology of Justin Martyr, where he talks about early liturgy, and he talks about how Sunday has become the primary day for the Eucharist.

And although he doesn't quite say that it's happening on Sunday mornings, it must be by then because Justin Martyr's Apology is written a good 40 or so years after this letter from Pliny and the Law of Trajan and this whole sort of outlawing of evening Christian meetings under the guise or under the umbrella of secret societies.

Okay, well that brings us to the question of worship in the early church.

Unfortunately, we don't know nearly as much as we wish we knew about what worship and liturgy looked like in the early church.

I've seen people try to pull out of the New Testament a kind of description of worship in the New Testament church, but it can't be done.

It's impossible, so don't try because there just is not enough information there.

But when we get to the Didache, which is That church order manual that was written about at the same time as perhaps some of the later Gospels or at any rate, it's within that same time period as the later New Testament documents for sure.

When we look at the Didache, we can see a couple of things.

First of all, when we look at how the early Christians prepared for baptism and what kind of What kind of catechesis the adult people preparing for baptism would have had because they did do infant baptism in the early church.

But as far as the adults, catechesis for preparing to be baptized is actually more about morality than it is about theology, right?

The early clergy figured that once you were baptized and you started receiving the Eucharist and you were fully participating in the liturgy, you would learn your theology there, or at least they might even teach you some theology in another class after you were baptized, but you would get your theology mostly after you were baptized.

What you needed to know before you got baptized is just how serious a commitment you were making morally by getting baptized, and just what the expectations would be of you as a baptized Christian, because the lifestyle of a baptized Christian included a lot of expectations that would have seemed to the Romans like infringing on their rights, Roman men especially.

Expected to have the right to sleep with whomever they want, and to kill their children if they wanted to, if they didn't want to raise them, and all of these things.

And of course, the church said no to all of that.

And so catechesis, you will see, is actually more about how to live as a Christian in preparation for baptism, because once you get baptized, you're expected to live up to those rules.

More than, you know, how to think or what to believe as a Christian, because baptism was considered such a serious lifestyle change and a serious commitment.

And you will notice, if you read the Didache carefully, you will notice that to the extent that Christian identity is defined as much by what Christians don't do as by what they do or what they think or what they believe.

So very often in the early church what you get is if someone were to say what is a Christian, who is a Christian, the answer might be a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity.

The answer might be that, but for the average Christian, for most people, the answer would be A Christian is someone who doesn't leave their baby out in the garbage pile to die.

A Christian is someone who doesn't sleep around.

A Christian is someone who doesn't go visit the prostitutes.

So Christian identity itself was defined based on these behavioral expectations of baptism.

So that's really something interesting to notice as you read the Didache.

The other thing about the Didache is that this is one of the places where we get the very clear idea that you would never dream of coming to receive the Eucharist without first confessing your sins.

It's just assumed.

You confess your sins and you receive the Eucharist.

And there's biblical background for this.

Jesus talking about reconciling with someone else before taking your sacrifice to the altar.

That's Matthew chapter 5. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 talking about examining yourself before you receive the Eucharist.

And so this is there in the New Testament as well, but in the Didache, it's very clear.

You would never dream of going up to receive the Eucharist unless you had first confessed your sins.

Now, in the very beginning of the Church, what confessing your sins looked like is not entirely clear.

I mean, for the most part, we know that there would have been prayers within the liturgy where people are given the opportunity to confess their sins.

So things like the Kyrie, Lord have mercy, what evolves into the Confiteor, which is a prayer of confession, and things like that.

But as the church develops and as we see more and more people commit sins that are more and more public, we will eventually see that public sin needs a public confession and reconciliation.

And so we're going to see that develop on through into like the third century, where we get the standardization or formalization of the sacrament of confession.

So we're on our way to there already.

Now, many of us Many of you belong to communions or denominations that claim only two sacraments as opposed to the seven that you get in the more ancient communions like Catholicism or the Orthodox Church.

And usually the reason for that that is stated is that those two sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, But in the early church, here's what we have to understand.

In the early church, each one of these two sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, was actually two in one.

So baptism included the sacrament of confirmation.

or what some Christians call chrismation.

In the Western church, baptism and confirmation become two separate rites, not until the third century.

So in the earliest centuries of the church, confirmation, the laying on of hands, the anointing with oil, all of that is just part of one rite, R-I-T-E, one ritual of baptism.

So baptism, It was really two of what we would call the seven sacraments, two sacraments in one, baptism and confirmation done together.

And to this day, even in Eastern Orthodoxy, it still is baptism, confirmation, and in fact, First Eucharist are all done together.

The Eucharist, likewise, is also Two sacraments in one.

Because, as I said, one would never dream of going to receive the Eucharist without first confessing sins.

So if we think of the confession of sins as a sacrament, right, to the extent that it was before it was formalized, It is a part of the Eucharist and the Confession of Sins was part of the whole prayers of the liturgy leading up to the Eucharist.

And so the Eucharist also is really two sacraments in one, confession And to this day, in the Catholic Church, it's taught that by receiving the Eucharist, your venial, your smaller, your everyday sins are forgiven.

Mortal sins require the sacrament, the separate sacrament of confession, but there is still a sense in which the Eucharist includes the forgiveness of sin, at least the smaller, everyday sins, what we call the venial sin.

Now, on the subject of the Eucharist specifically, when you read the Didache, you will see the earliest actual Eucharistic prayer that we have, and you'll see what that's like.

And for those of you in communions or in denominations that have more formal Eucharistic prayers, you can compare it to your own.

The other thing I want you to see is that In the early church, there is really no debate over Eucharistic theology.

And I'm not going to say too much about this here, because you will be reading a chapter I wrote for a book called Handed Down, and that chapter is Eating is Believing, and it's about the history of Eucharistic theology.

And so you're going to kind of get the whole sweep of history there in one chapter.

So I don't need to go into that in a whole lot of detail now, But you do need to understand that there was no controversy over the meaning of the Eucharist or what happens in the Eucharist until about the ninth century.

And even then, it was only a philosophical debate over the meaning of words like real and true.

It was still not really a debate over what was happening in the Eucharist.

Christians in the early and medieval church All believed and always believed that something miraculous was happening in the Eucharist in which the bread and wine in their essences, not in their aspects, not in their accidents, not in the taste and touch, not in the tangible aspects, but in their essences, in the underlying substance, And later, that understanding was described using the word transubstantiation, which does faithfully describe what the early church and medieval church believed about the Eucharist, but the word transubstantiation, that's a medieval word that comes in in the Middle Ages, It's meant to describe what the church has always believed.

The thing to keep in mind here is that what is real is not necessarily the same thing as what is tangible.

In fact, often what is more real is precisely the thing that's not tangible.

If you can keep that in mind, you can get your head around early Eucharistic theology.

But again, you will read my chapter on that and so you'll see what I'm saying.

Just understand that I think the Protestant Reformation tried to get away from the idea of the church being a continuation of the temple with its sacrifices, but the early medieval Christians had no problem with that.

They did see the Eucharist in a kind of sacrificial context.

Not as though the sacrifice of Christ on the cross needed to be repeated, but it was being re-presented in the same way that in the Old Testament they didn't need to have the Exodus again, but they did re-present it In the Passover, right?

And so in the same way that the Exodus is represented in the Passover, the Passion of Christ is represented in the Eucharist.

But there is still something miraculous going on there, and that's what they believed.

Okay, now I want to talk for a moment about this document called the Prothevangelion.

You're going to read this document, if you haven't already, called the Protevangelion of James.

Protevangelion means the prequel to the gospel, right?

And it's not actually by James or any of the Jameses, there's three of them, but it is a document that is a product of the second century.

And one of the reasons why this document is so fascinating is because It is a document that demonstrates how theology can come from the bottom up.

It can rise up from the grassroots and find its way into the highest levels of the hierarchy over time.

You might be tempted to think that because there's a hierarchy in the church that doctrine is a kind of top-down mandate that's enforced on the masses.

But this is one of our documents that tells us that that's actually not true, and there are doctrines that bubble up from the bottom or are a product of grassroots belief that become part of the tradition.

Now, an example or several examples of this with regard to the Protoevangelion would be the specific Marian doctrines, doctrines about Mary.

And you'll see the seeds of all of the Marian doctrines here in the Protoevangelion including the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

The Immaculate Conception has nothing to do with Jesus's virginal conception.

The Immaculate Conception is the doctrine that Mary herself was conceived immaculately, not as the result of a miraculous virginal conception, but that, I guess it is miraculous, but Mary's father was involved.

So the point being that Mary, by a miraculous conception, was born without original sin, which made her will Freer than any other human free will has been since Adam and Eve, right?

And so the point being is that when the angel comes to Mary and says, here's God's plan for you, and Mary says yes to God's plan, she's doing that out of absolutely free will, right?

And her will is freer than our will ever could be because she was born without original sin.

So the seeds of that doctrine are in And then also you'll see pretty clearly the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.

That is that she had no other children besides Jesus.

She remained a virgin her whole life.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, well, wait a minute.

If Mary is perpetually virgin, who are the brothers and sisters of the Lord that are mentioned in the gospels?

And you'll notice that the pro-evangelion tells you exactly what to do with the brothers and sisters of the Lord.

In the document of the pro-evangelion, they are Jesus's step-siblings, children of Joseph from a previous marriage.

And Joseph is presumably a widower, and so their mother has passed away.

And so they are Joseph's children from previous marriage, and they're Jesus's step-siblings.

That is one It's not the only theory in the early church, though.

There is another theory, which is that these are actually cousins or other relatives of Jesus from the same extended family.

Because remember, you know, in the ancient world they were thinking in terms of extended family.

So to call someone using these Greek words brother and sister certainly could include any relative from roughly the same generation throughout the extended family.

So some of the church fathers believed that these are Jesus's cousins.

But no one in the early or medieval church thought they were Mary's children.

So the question was never whether these were Jesus' direct siblings and children of Mary.

The question was always, well, assuming they are not Mary's children, who are they?

And then you have these two options.

But the point here is to notice that there are certain doctrines, including the Marian doctrines, that are clearly a part of the faith of the laity, from the beginning of the church, from before they are ever officially defined or clarified by the hierarchy of the church.

And to circle back to the three laws, this kind of proves the point that heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself, because here are examples of doctrines where, as long as there's no challenge to them, Nobody ever feels like they have to clarify them or define them or defend them or argue for them.

Nobody argues for them because nobody's arguing against them, right?

And so we have that as well.

All right, well, I'm gonna wrap up this session by doing just a little bit of myth busting, which I love to do.

Let's talk about the myth that The dates for Christmas and Easter and even the name of Easter are somehow based on pagan holidays or pagan religion.

That is a myth and it is not true.

Let's talk about the date for Christmas first.

Christmas is on December 25th, at least it is for the Western church now.

There's evidence that at one time this was the date For all Christians, but it's not entirely clear in the East and the East has their own calculation for it, which I won't go into it now, but it kind of proves the point I'm making.

Let's say Christmas is December 25th.

All right.

How did we get December 25th as the birthday for Jesus?

People will tell you it's based on the winter solstice.

It's based on the Roman holiday of Saturnalia or some other Roman holiday.

All that is not true.

Christmas is on December 25th precisely because December 25th is exactly nine months after March 25th.

And March 25th is the Feast of the Annunciation.

The Annunciation is when the angel comes to Mary, right, and says, you are going to be with child.

And the angel is not saying, you're going to be with child one of these days.

The angel is saying, Assuming you agree to it, Mary, you are going to be with child today, right?

And so the Feast of the Annunciation is the date of the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary, March 25th.

Now, I know you're going to ask, well, how did they get that date?

And it's based on a legend that Moses Jesus died on his birthday and so then the interpretation of that legend within Judaism was that the idea of dying on your birthday was somehow a sign of a life well lived, a life lived sort of perfectly in accordance with God's will.

And so then, you know, the logic from there is that, okay, so if Moses died on his birthday and Jesus is more perfect than Moses, Probably died on the day he was conceived, right?

And the early Christians believed that Jesus died on March 25th because they calculated, whether they were right or wrong, they calculated that the original Good Friday on which Jesus died was March 25th.

Therefore, they reasoned that Jesus must have been conceived on March 25th And that's how they get the Feast of the Annunciation.

Now, you may question the logic and the math, and you may question the idea that Jesus must have had an exactly nine-month pregnancy, you know, right, to get to be born on December 25th.

You may question all of that.

But the point is, it has nothing to do with any pagan holidays.

And in fact, you know, we just recently had the Feast of the Nativity of Mary celebrating Jesus's mother Mary's birthday, right?

And same situation.

That date is calculated as exactly nine months after the date of the Immaculate Conception.

So September 8th is nine months after December 8th, which is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

And again, you know, you may question the the methodology for landing on these dates.

But what I want you to see is that in both cases, the birthday is just math.

It's the date of the conception that matters, right?

It's the date of Mary's conception that matters because this is the Immaculate Conception.

It was a miraculous conception in which Mary was conceived without original sin.

The date of the Annunciation matters because Well, the conception of Jesus is the moment of incarnation when the Word became flesh.

That is the incarnation.

The incarnation is not Jesus's birthday.

The incarnation is Jesus's conception.

So the date for Christmas has nothing to do with any Roman holiday or anything pagan.

Now with Easter, it's even more obvious that the date for Easter has nothing to do with any pagan holiday.

And I'm not going to go into it now, but there's a long controversy in the early church over how to calculate the date for Easter.

And it has to do with sort of an argument over whether a lunar calendar should be used or whether a solar calendar should be used.

And I'm not an expert in calendars, but the point is that it was never about How does this relate to some pagan holiday?

It was always only about how does it relate to Passover?

How will Easter, the date for Easter, be calculated in relation to Passover?

That's what the date is all about.

And the name Easter, I know you've heard the myth that it's based on some pagan deity.

It is not.

The name Easter comes from an old German word for the dawn, as in facing east, facing in an easterly direction.

And the point is, is that on Resurrection Day, we turn toward the east.

Now, by the way, this does not mean facing toward Jerusalem, because if you were east of Jerusalem, you would still face east.

It means facing toward the dawn because the dawn represents the resurrection and it has to do also with sort of waiting and looking for the return of Christ, right?

But that's the point of the word Easter.

It has nothing to do with any pagan deities.

So, myths busted and I thank you for joining me.

If you've watched this video to the end, I appreciate that and I hope you found it helpful.

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