| And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).
Most people assume that everything that bears the label "Christian" must have originated with Jesus Christ and His early followers. But this is definitely not the case. All we have to do is look at the words of Jesus Christ and His apostles to see that this is clearly not true.
The historical record shows that, just as Jesus and the New Testament writers foretold, various heretical ideas and teachers rose up from within the early Church and infiltrated it from without. Christ Himself warned His followers: "Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name . . . and will deceive many" (Matthew 24:4-5).
You can read many similar warnings in other passages (such as Matthew 24:11; Acts 20:29-30; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15; 2 Timothy 4:2-4; 2 Peter 2:1-2; 1 John 2:18-26; 1 John 4:1-3).
Barely two decades after Christ\'s death and resurrection, the apostle Paul wrote that many believers were already "turning away . . . to a different gospel" (Galatians 1:6). He wrote that he was forced to contend with "false apostles, deceitful workers" who were fraudulently "transforming themselves into apostles of Christ" (2 Corinthians 11:13). One of the major problems he had to deal with was "false brethren" (2 Corinthians 11:26).
By late in the first century, as we see from 3 John 9-10, conditions had grown so dire that false ministers openly refused to receive representatives of the apostle John and were excommunicating true Christians from the Church!
Of this troubling period Edward Gibbon, the famed historian, wrote in his classic work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of a "dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church" (1821, Vol. 2, p. 111).
It wasn\'t long before true servants of God became a marginalized and scattered minority among those calling themselves Christian. A very different religion, now compromised with many concepts and practices rooted in ancient paganism (such mixing of religious beliefs being known as syncretism, common in the Roman Empire at the time), took hold and transformed the faith founded by Jesus Christ.
Historian Jesse Hurlbut says of this time of transformation: "We name the last generation of the first century, from 68 to 100 A.D., \'The Age of Shadows,\' partly because the gloom of persecution was over the church, but more especially because of all the periods in the [church\'s] history, it is the one about which we know the least. We have no longer the clear light of the Book of Acts to guide us; and no author of that age has filled the blank in the history . . .
"For fifty years after St. Paul\'s life a curtain hangs over the church, through which we strive vainly to look; and when at last it rises, about 120 A.D. with the writings of the earliest church fathers, we find a church in many aspects very different from that in the days of St. Peter and St. Paul" (The Story of the Christian Church, 1970, p. 33).
This "very different" church would grow in power and influence, and within a few short centuries would come to dominate even the mighty Roman Empire!
By the second century, faithful members of the Church, Christ\'s "little flock" (Luke 12:32), had largely been scattered by waves of deadly persecution. They held firmly to the biblical truth about Jesus Christ and God the Father, though they were persecuted by the Roman authorities as well as those who professed Christianity but were in reality teaching "another Jesus" and a "different gospel" (2 Corinthians 11:4; Galatians 1:6-9). |
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