by TTWSYF 8 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
By some estimates there are up to 40,000 different Christian religions. Everyone of them started by a man or a woman.
Shakers {Ann Lee} , Quakers [George Fox], Baptists [John Smyth] , Mormons [Joseph Smith] , JWs {Charles Russell] etc, etc can all trace their history to a singular human.
All can do this except for one religion. Catholic Church was started by Jesus or the apostles or both?
What say you?
The Catholic Church (and by extension, Christianity) was started by Saint Paul, who wrote more than half the “Greek Scriptures”. The apostles were still attending synagogues in Acts, so they weren’t out to found a new religion.
I strongly suspect Paul was influenced by the guidance given by Plato in The Republic, as to how to organise a noble religion (eg a god of pure virtue, love and not represented by any animal figure, etc). Paul would have had to have read Plato, given his Greek education. That would also explain why he wrote all those letters to those Greek city states; they would have recognised it and been a little more receptive to the message,
All religious faiths born out of spiritualism were made by mankind's own imagination mixed with human ignorance of the world in which we live.
We still ask these supernatural agents for help toward mankind's perils and enduring hardships.
During that period of time (spiritualism) many religions were founded that were considered offline. Some of those religions also looked forward to a coming of the kingdom soon. I drove down into Pennsylvania from the SW corner of NY state and was amazed how many came from that area and that state. The Second Adventists (not to be confused with the 7th day Adventists) were a strong influence on Charles Taze Russell. I will mention that my aunt was a bigwig in the 7th day Adventists and was constantly trying to convert us in a kind way. So I learned a lot about their beliefs and origins in an informational and kind way.
i think jehovah was re-invented by judge rutherford. he knew a good business opportunity when he trod in it.
Paul's version of Christianity is what has survived. In the 1st century there were competing Jesus cults that mostly disappeared, including the one that was started by the writers of Matthew.
Mainly Paul's Theology, and the writer of the Gospel of John, influenced the Church Fathers and those who gave impetus to the Christians. Paul's version was in dispute in his lifetime of course.
The Catholic church of Rome was a later development, and alongside it was the Coptic Church and others. The Church of Rome became the main one when adopted by the Emperor.
Any claim to trace this Church back to the Apostles and thence to Jesus is doubtful to put it mildly, spurious would be more accurate.
But, whoever invented your faith, it is man or woman made, if invented before you adopted it, or if you invented it.
Try either, neither Jesus nor the apostles founded the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church came into existence in the second century, before that we know of Gnostic groups with widely different beliefs and practices like the Cerinthians and the Carpocratians. The Catholic Church pretends, like every other Christian group pretended in the second century, that its teachings came from Jesus and the apostles. They didn't. Go read the church father Irenaeus' 'Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching' where all the guy knows about the apostles comes from 2nd century books like Acts of the Apostles.
Science invented my faith and I love it.
I have decide to follow the words of Paul and John and the Bereans
Not to be followers of men
And
Not to accept beliefs without checking them throughly (1 John 4:1) (Acts 17:11)
Acts 17:11
