hughmcjr

It does not use the word trinity but the implication is there...I am the WAY, the TRUTH and the LIFE...The Holy Spirit is the WAY to the TRUTH which is Jesus to LIFE everlasting which is God the Father. The three entities are all mentioned in scriptures.

Diogenes the Cynic

Let me recommend Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities as an excellent overview of the diversity and "heresies" in the earliest Christian movements.

Here is an interview with Ehrman about the book.

John A. Broussard

It's tough enough trying to figure out how many people belong to what religion these days, without making that attempt for 1st Century Rome.

Even then, it would have been difficult to tell a Christian, even with a score card. Some "Christians" could get out of worshipping the emperor by getting papers saying they did. Other "Christians" claimed that no true Christians would do such a thing. So?

And, of course, many Christians were slaves. If a master objected to that religion, that would have been reason enough to hide one's affiliation.

Besides--heresies and orthodoxies became jumbled from the word go. Was a Christian a Christian if he kept a few statues of the penates under his bed?

The point is that counting heads is difficult in the best of times, even when there are no dangers of their being separated from their bodies.

Killer Mike

Some early Christians believed in 30 gods. Others worshipped Mary and others thought it was Jesus's message, not the resurrection that was important. There was more of a regional diversity when Christianity first arrived on the scene. The Christianity in one geographical region was different then in another. All one has to do is look at the wide diversity of belief in Christianity today. From Episcopalians who interpret the Bible more liberally to fundamentalists who take the Bible literally word for word as "gods word".

Agemegos

It's very hard to say, because its very hard to define or measure the doctrinal fragmentariness of a religious tradition. There are 33,830 separate Christian denominations in the world today, and that is a lot. But my guess is that many pairs among them would have no differences of doctrine.

Buddhist teaching has been very diverse through the millenia, and my guess is that the doctrinal differences among Zen, Jodo, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sri Lankan Theravada would have to give the range of Christian teaching a run for its money. Did you know that even Siberian animism is derived from Buddhism? That's right! A shaman is a [very different] sort of Buddhist monk.

gurugeorge

It's even worse than that. It's not just that the beliefs of "early Christians" were different from "modern Christians", it's that there doesn't even seem to be any conclusive way of showing who the "early Christians" were, or what they really believed in or did. The more you look into it, the more mysterious the whole thing becomes, the more it seems that what we "know" of the history of "Christianity" is stuff that has been filtered by the victors in what seems to have been quite a savage struggle for dominance.

From my amateur and piecemeal readings, it seems to me that the situation was like this: there was some kind of broad religious movement, based on a mix of Jewish and "Pagan" ideas (both religious and philosophical) that individualised and universalised the previously rather social "salvation" found in the widespread "Mystery" cults of the day (by "social", I mean those cults were very much tied to particular localities and served those communities primarily, even if, as often was the case, anybody could participate).

One particular strand of this multi-faceted movement (it wasn't a singular movement, but more of a sea-change in ideas that seems to have induced similar movements all over the ancient world) took a highly literal, extremely specifically historical view of its version of the central myth of the movement (the dying/resurrecting God-man).

By a mixture of luck and acumen, it eventually became the dominant strain and wiped out the others, subsequently covering its tracks.

The rest, as they say, is history.

nj_heathens

The best evidence to date says that the "gospel of Marcion" was written early in the second century CE and was used as a source by the writers of nearly all the other extant gospels. Marcion did not place his story in Palestine, as his intent was to write a fictionalized biography of his Roman emperor based on previous stories of mythical heros. The writers of the canonical gospels (or later editors) are responsible for that setting and the actual names of the characters.

The most important point to make is that these stories are based on the common elements found in Asiatic, Indian, Syrian, Egyptian, Greek and Latin mythologies. Virtually nothing original is found in the various gospels and epistles, but rather they are simply a compendium of previous stories.

The second most important point is that the earliest proponents of the "Jesus" story were Gnostics, most of them previously adherents of a similar mythology. That is, they did not consider the gospels historical, but interpreted them as occuring on a spiritual plane. They greatly objected to the historicizers who, beginning in the third century CE, proposed that the stories should be read literally. In fact they were disgusted at what they referred to as the "carnalization" of their mythos.

Revisionist history has dominated since the historicizers gained control of the Roman legions, which they used to destroy the evidence which tied the gospels to earlier mystery cults and kill the vocal opposition.

Mr. Heathen

benja burns

Now THAT's pretty damn interesting.