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and totally pacifist and egalitarian and anti-establishment stories of the New Testament have survived for two thousand years, in the keeping of the worst bastards ever to form a religion.
Their few successes in 'Bowdlerizing' the New Testament--that rot about "thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church" (--if there is anything Jesus DIDN'T say, it's THAT), and largely expurgating Mary Magdalen, and burning and banning the earliest gospels, with their even wilder, even more open-minded Christianity--most of which editings occurred in the 5th Century AD--the essential message of love and peace is still incontrovertible and pervasive in the 'synoptic' (official) texts, and is probably why the official Church kept it well hidden--as a rare "voodoo" book, written in Latin, which almost no one could understand, and which most people had no access to--until around the 15th century (when books and translations began to be available). Once people began reading what Jesus actually said, the corrupt, wealthy patriarchy of the Roman Church was a big trouble. "Give all you have to the poor, and come, follow me" wasn't their idea of 'christianity' at all--and their complete reversal of Jesus' revolutionary message, a message that is evident everywhere in the New Testament--by their accumulation of property, their use of violence, their favoritism to the wealthy and powerful, their enforcement of a rigid class structure against the poor, and their creation of a fetishistic, monolithic religion, including centuries of brainwashing and mind-control--were the causes of the Protestant Reformation.
Although Protestant religions developed a couple of branches of anti-Jesus oppressors, it is, on the whole a more flexible version of Christianity--much more open-minded (based, as it is, on individual conscience and a relationship with the Divine that is unmediated by "authority") and was the medium upon which our own Founders' ideas of individual liberty and equality were fostered. Some historians stress "the Protestant ethic," Puritanism and all that, but I think they miss something more fundamental, which was the rejection of the Roman Catholic Church as any kind of authority on the meaning of the New Testament and on what God wants. God became once again (as it was among the earliest Christians) a matter of individual inspiration by which people could attain love and inner peace. (Read "Jefferson's Bible," a project of Thomas Jefferson himself, in which he expurgates any authoritarian elements that had been interpolated into the New Testament, and assembles the main thrust of these documents: its liberating message.)
As I say, it's a miracle that Jesus' teachings survived. I think probably the truest version of Jesus' religion circa 400 AD is to be found in the Pelagians--condemned as "heretics" by the monolithic institution builders of the era--but much, much closer to Jesus' actual views. Pelagius did not believe in "Original Sin." He believed in the complete free will of human beings to choose right or wrong. He was anti-dogmatic and anti-authoritarian. All people were capable of choosing the good, whether they were "baptized" or not. Their choice of the good was not dependent on their obeisance to authorities in Rome as intermediaries of God's grace. People have the inherent ability to choose the good, with Jesus as the best example of what the good is.
The Pelagian monks in England, for instance, were part Christian, part Pagan, reverenced local Pagan customs, and lived in poverty with the people. Their strongest characteristic was tolerance. Many were credited with miracles, and were probably scientists of the Druid tradition ("wizards"). But they were eventually overrun by the "baptism by the sword" armies that Rome sent out across Europe to exterminate such ideas, and impose a uniform, top-down ideology that all must agree to and obey, which was extremely hostile to Nature worship. England, Wales and Ireland were the last holdouts of Pelagianism, and with their virtual extinction, the "Dark Ages" ensued--a period of vast ignorance, intolerance and oppression that lasted a thousand years.
Pelagius himself, though he preached in Rome, is generally described as British, and may have been Irish. Some Pelagian monks survived in rugged seaside and island outposts in Ireland, a country that Pagan Rome never entered and that 'Christian' Rome never really conquered, if you want my opinion.
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