Church History Conference Part 1 – What If Your Most Sacred Church Practices Are Pagan? | Early Church History Shocker

The Jews wanted to disclaim it, but they couldn’t. It was obviously a Jewish synagogue. It had art on the walls of people, and Jews don’t do that, but there it was in bright living color. So, the entire town began to be excavated. The town was Duro Europa, and when you walk out of here today, say, “Thank the Lord for Duro Europa,” because it was to cause a revolution in the interpretation of Christian history, because two doors down, out here near the Mesopotamia River, was discovered for the first time ever a Christian meeting house that came before Constantine. It was a home. This sent shock waves throughout Christendom. By the way, if you want to see a duplicate of that building, you can visit Yale University’s museum; they have built a replica. This thing has historical importance. It’s a home, folks. It was probably built around 180, 190, 200 A.D., no one knows. It was destroyed during a war in 253 AD. It was frozen in the womb of time, waiting there. This caused the archaeological world to scratch its head and wonder whether there’s a place outside Rome to dig for evidence of the early church. A mass of information has been pouring in ever since from all over the area that was once the Roman Empire, and it is devastating all previous interpretations of Christian history A.D. 100 to A.D. 500.

Now, let me see if I can explain to you why the literature has remained the same, but it is the documents and the objects that are causing the revolution. Unfortunately, for us, virtually all the research on this is in German and French, and it was not until there were some other books…I have another book. I will talk to you about it tomorrow. It just came out in English, written by a gentleman named Snyder. I wish that every one of you could own a copy, and the only reason you will not own one this week is that the little book costs $30. I wish every one of you could read it. It is an up-to-date discussion of all these documents. It is putting to the torch all the concepts of the second, third, and fourth centuries. This creates a problem. What about Tertullian, and what about Origen, and what about Ignatius, who was a madman? What about Irenaeus, and Ambrose, and Augustine, and Jerome, and all these other precious saints?

Recently, I believe one of the professors in the archaeology department at Chicago University was reviewing Snyder’s book, and he said…I want to quote him. He said, “For us to study Tertullian and on Augustine and Jerome and Ambrose to discover what the early church was like would be like trying to find out a thousand years from now what 20th-century Christianity was like by studying Brunner, Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, and Niebuhr. You know who those guys are? Well, there won’t be any pain if you never find out. Well, they are philosopher-theologians who write in our day, and if you took everything they ever wrote, including their letters home to mother, and studied it for 300 years, you would have no idea what 20th-century Christianity looks like. It’s not even discussed. They are out in a metaphysical, theological, philosophical, ectoplasmic wonderland. So let us abandon Ambrose and Jerome and all these fellas that we were forced to read and study about. They do not tell us what the early church was really like. Well, then I’m going to tell you just a little bit, and we’re going to quit and go home. Are you still awake?

Tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to ask you to write me notes and hand them to me or to anyone who can get them to me this week if you have questions. I’d like to end all these sessions with a Q&A. I’m going to throw open today and all the rest of the week for you to ask me questions. Now, if you ask me if Ambrose was right or left-handed, I may not be able to tell you that, but I should be able to handle most of what you’re asking, unless you did a paper on some obscure iota subscript, and you want to show us all how smart you are. I may not know the answer to your question. Just quickly, we are going to discover tomorrow that the entire meeting will be shocking and uncomfortable. When I say it’s uncomfortable, I don’t mean they were more pagan or more ritualistic; in fact, they may have been freer than we are.

I want to come back to the word matrix and say this to you really quickly. With a flood of new information coming in, the archaeologists and scholars have been pulling their hair out. The material is there. Everything that’s needed is there. Starting with about 400, you can come all the way back; it’s there. That little 1% is just pregnant with information. To get to 100 AD, coming back to the first century, 180 AD, and it all stops, and there’s no Christian evidence from 180 backward. There’s no graffiti. There are no artifacts. There are no Frescos. There’s no literature. There are no gravestones. All the things that ought to be there aren’t there. They disappear. Why? Did it get burned? No, it’s got to be there. Finally, someone in great wisdom said, “It is there. It’s under our noses, and we’re reading it every day.” And he paid the second-century church perhaps the highest compliment it could ever have received. The Second-century church lived outside the influence of its matrix.

Now, that’s wonderful. I’ll explain to you what I mean. Let me give you a modern illustration. Am I boring you? I’m so afraid you’re just going to go outside and go. In the mid-1950s, rock and roll was invented. I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was by the Lord. You could not find any Christian rock and roll in the 1950s or the 1960s. The matrix, the cultural room in which we live, had not made its way into the Christian fabric. But a historian a thousand years from now would suddenly realize that there was a change in Christian music in the early 70s. You come up to about 1980, and you come up with acid rock that is supposedly Christian. Do you understand that the matrix had won? The social environment had won. Today, when you turn on your Christian radio, you don’t know whether you’re getting a rock radio station or a Christian radio station. The stuff is unintelligible. Sounds like it was written in the bottom basement of Bedlam. The Matrix took over. It only took 30 years. That’s pretty fast. The matrix hadn’t affected the Christians of the second century. They were neutral in it. Excuse me, but you’re not going to understand what I’m about to say, but the Christian faith has not made any inroads into them either. They were in a neutral matrix.

Now, what on earth did you mean by that? I mean, the archaeologist picks up a letter and reads it. Dear Zeus, we’ve been having a wonderful time since you left. Everybody here has really been enjoying themselves. It was just wonderful last Thursday night. Hermes and Diana will pick you up at the boat. We’re looking forward to your return. Signed, Apollos. That’s Christian literature. You want to hear it interpreted? Dear brother, our meetings down at so and so’s house this week have been a gully washer. We’re really glad you came. We’re looking forward to your coming. A sister and a brother will come to meet you at the port and bring you to your brother’s home. Do you understand what I’m saying? They had not even adopted terms like ‘brother’ and ‘sister’. They had not yet created a Christian matrix. You may not understand this, but say, “Praise the Lord.” They were unaffected by the world’s matrix, and they had not created a Christian culture. They were free. They were neutral in it.

Now, if I haven’t gotten through to you, let me explain something. Oh, boy. I hope you don’t drown in this. We have choirs. Well, the Bible teaches in the Old Testament about choirs, right? There were priests in the Old Testament, and there are priests today. The Old Testament had temples. There was ritual in the Old Testament temple observance and choirs, priests, and robes, and somewhere we have believed that there was this solemn meeting in which the Christian faith adopted this from Judaism. I think the greatest shock I had in the study of church history was to find out that that is, and I’m going to make a radical statement here, but history will bear me out, that is a total 100% fallacy. Early Jewish Christianity had very little influence on Gentile Christianity as it swept westward. The tragedy came with the arrival of Constantine, and the influence on the Christian faith came from Rome, not Jerusalem.

Now, here is a mind-boggler. You and I name our kids after Bible characters, right? We think we picked that up from Judaism. I can assure you, without any question whatsoever, that, even though that was a Jewish habit of naming one another Joseph and whatever, and Isaac and Abraham, and all of those things, naming their kids after great Old Testament people, the Christian concept of naming our kids Paul and John and Peter and Joseph came out of the Roman influence of people naming their children after the gods, Apollos and Zeus. Now, what do you think of your Christian name? It started with Constantine, who began naming the buildings he built. He had always named the buildings he had built of worship after gods. He built these buildings for Christians to meet in, named them after saints of scripture, and out of that a new matrix began to form. Christians began naming their children after Bible people. It was really a sad day. If you can understand, I hope you will tomorrow…brothers and sisters, the second-century Christians didn’t name their kids after Bible characters. They were matrix neutral.

I think I lost you. I’m sure you got the…you look like you’ve been hit in the face with a piece of pie. It was not. Now look, let me try one more time. What happens when an artist gets saved? You know what he does? He wants to go make Christian art. What happens when a pianist gets saved? He wants to play Christian music. What happens when a rock and roll band gets saved? They want to make rock Christian music. Well, when a second-century Christian who had been a pagan artist got saved, he did not create Christian art. Praise the Lord. Folks, don’t you know what I’m telling you? They were not of this world. They were not being influenced by their matrix. It was not until 180 AD, brothers, that is, well, I’m sorry, 180 AD. That is a good hundred years after the time of most of the apostles, before a Christian culture began to grow up, a Christian tradition. The brothers and sisters lived free of tradition until that time. Now, I’m going to close with a little…it would be wonderful if I could see that watch. I’d know what time it was.

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s got nothing to do with this, but it has to do with three days from now when I tell you where we got our Christian traditions. I want to close because brother Steven talked about Luther this morning. I would like to tell you where we got our 11:00 Sunday morning church service. Now, a few of you have heard me tell this story, and before I tell it, I did not make this up. This is a true story. This is a historical fact. I told it to a group of people one day. The man said to me, “Gene, you made that up.” I was about to tell him where I got it, and another man said, “No, during the year that we celebrated Luther’s birthday here recently, 500th birthday.” He said, “I heard some Lutheran scholars on television telling this story.” But I’m going to make a point. I want you to listen to it very carefully, because I want you to consider your matrix, your mindset, and what it’s doing to you. And I want to ask you a question: what are you going to do about it? In fact, I am giving you an invitation at this moment. What are you going to do about this story?

In Wittenberg. Martin Luther started the Protestant church services at about 5:00 a.m. At the same time, he’d been saying mass, but Martin Luther had this interesting eccentricity. He loved to talk on Saturday night. And so, one Sunday morning at 5:00 a.m., he got up and announced, “We’re going to start having our Protestant mass at 7 a.m.,” so he could stay up a little later on Saturday night at the tavern or at his home and drink beer. Good German drinking beer and talking. The older he got, the more beer he drank. So, one morning, he got up and said, “We’re going to have an 8:00 a.m. mass.” And he got a little bit older, talked a little longer, stayed up a little bit more, drank a little bit more beer, and one day he got up and said, “We’re going to have a 9:00 a.m. mass.” He got a little older. He drank a little bit more. He stayed up a little bit longer, and he took some more of that beer. He drank a lot more of that beer and more and more of that beer, and one day he got up, and he said, “We’re going to have to have mass Protestant church services at 10:00 a.m.” One morning, he started to get up to change it, and someone said, “Now, Luther, if it’s going to be morning, you’re down to your last hour.” And Martin Luther, because of your beer-drinking habits, moved the church service to this sacred, God-given, unmovable, holy biblical 11 a.m. Why are you clapping? You do it like Pavlov’s dogs.