Making sense of the world

In my childhood, I think I had the belief that the world made sense and I just needed to discover it. I think I hung on to traditional Christianity and studied it, thinking that one day I would understand it enough that it would all make sense. I remember one lecture I listened to and the professor said we are sense making machines, that we try to make sense of the world. I think Buddhism has done that for me, that I understand how the world works through a Buddhist lens.

I remember my reaction as a youth to Lutheran Catechism classes when I wondered about the people that lived before Jesus. Were they grandfathered in? I have always had somewhat of an uncomfortableness with Christian teaching. I think to myself that Christian beliefs are so complicated that most people are heretics. It is not just me as can be seen in this quote I linked in this 2007 blog post  that I captured from this article, Indeed one suspects that if one were to ask the average churchgoer to spell out what they meant by saying that Jesus is divine, they would probably align themselves, without realizing it, with one of the ancient heresies, rather than with orthodoxy. 

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 Excerpts from After Jesus Before Christianity

A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements

By Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, Hal Taussig, The Westar Institute

Jesus came down from heaven to establish the Christian church. He was a fantastic person whose birth marks the very beginning of civilizations. He taught the truth and did God-sized things. He handed on his complete teachings to his most loyal followers, the Apostles. These Apostles then relayed correctly to the Bishops of the early churches all of the great things Jesus said and did. These first Bishops correctly passed down Jesus's teachings and magnificent deeds to the next two plus centuries of Bishops. The faithful line of Bishops summarized perfectly Jesus teachings and acts in the 4th Century Nicene Creed which carried full truth and authority to the 21st century. 

As the Christianity Seminar patiently examined the available evidence, the idea that this master narrative's assumption that Christianity, acted as a unified, continuous, early tradition in an unbroken line, representing a single truth, made little sense.

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Much new research points to multiple and different stories of Jesus peoples, not Christians, in the first two centuries. The seminars work on these first two centuries resembles not a predestined Master story but more a set of Mosaic tiles in the process of being pieced together.