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

I did not make this up. When I read these things, I was as dumbfounded as I could be. I was stunned and shocked…or I was amazed, I don’t know, I’ve exhausted my vocabulary. I haven’t gotten over it. Here is the next incredible thing about Him: He is smiling. Say praise the Lord. He is invariably and always happy, and everyone in the crowd around him is happy. For pity’s sake, don’t look so unhappy. In the background, a raised hand may be visible. To an archaeologist, this is incredibly significant – a bodily symbol of joy and rejoicing.

Now let me tell you something else incredible: from the time of Constantine until this day, which means right now, June 1987, there has never been a period or age of Christian art in which the happy Lord Jesus was depicted. Never has there been, nor has there ever been, any period when Christians had smiles on their faces. Something terrible happened after Constantine. This isn’t one obscure piece of artifact; this happens again and again. But here are some other things I could never have figured out. This has come through a very brainy scholastic work. There is no depiction of the cross or the resurrection in these early years. Now you’re, but wait a minute. Just wait a minute. Are they heretics, or are we maybe a little off here? Because the resurrection…through the eyes of the scholar…he says these people have not created these things. These people are not heavy into doctrine. What they are depicting here is a living Lord, someone that they personally sense a great living relationship with. And here’s another thing. He is always depicted as triumphant. It is as though they have taken the triumph of the cross, the victory of the resurrection, and brought it back and depicted it within his own earthly life. That is a remarkable thing when they see victory everywhere. Deliverance everywhere.

Well, let me tell you what else is not there: the incarnation is never depicted; the word is “never.” They are not seeing him, they’re not worried about it. Please understand, these people are believers. They are not worried about whether or not he was born a virgin. They have accepted that; it is not under contention. What they depict is their personal relationship to Him, as they view Him in their hearts and minds. Now, there are a couple of other little things about all of this: as they study the crowds, they find a variety of dress. They find nothing typical. Nothing is repeated. Nothing that shows stagnation, stereotype. No one’s trying to preach a sermon on his pet view of how we ought to conduct ourselves in all this. Now, one other incredible thing, and when I read this, I had to say, “Wait a minute. This doesn’t fit.” There is no depiction of the Lord’s supper in any solemn way, nor is the Lord’s supper ever depicted by cup or bread as best as they can interpret. The most frequent, in fact, the almost universal depiction of taking the Lord’s supper or the Lord’s table, depending on where you come from, is the Lord feeding the multitude whether it’s the 5,000 or some other thousand; it’s the Lord himself feeding a multitude of people and once more, and boy, this ought to make you stop and wonder if it is always depicted as a joyful festivity. They can only be taking the Lord’s supper, the Lord’s table, whatever you want to call it. They could only be taking it in the middle of themselves, with unabashed joy to be able to depict the way they depicted it.

Are you awake? You are awfully quiet. Does that not mean anything to you? It’s not solemn. It’s not miserable. It’s not mournful or groanful. It’s not some terrible time of searching out your heart. I had to go back and reread the stories of the Lord’s feeding the multitudes to see why that would relate to the Lord’s supper. I think, saints, they must have understood a lot, because it is in this passage that the Lord says, “What I’m speaking to you is not flesh and blood, but what I’m speaking to you is Spirit and Life.” Could they have possibly truly understood the depths of that statement, looked past the feeding of the multitude, and understood what He was saying, and joined in an eternal rejoicing with their Lord? I think there’s a strong possibility that’s what we’re seeing depicted. Well, I would go on and on and on, but I want to quote…no, I’m going to wait…don’t let me, Bridget, don’t let me leave this meeting without quoting to you what was the summation of the archaeologist interpretation of all of this artifacts concerning the Lord Jesus Christ as He was being understood and seen in the local body of believers everywhere.

Now, I’m just going to quickly tell you a few other things because we’re moving along here time-wise. In Egypt, a great deal of papyrus has reached the poor, and because of the dry climate there, it has been well preserved. It’s been dug up. All sorts of things are found there. They have found all sorts of accounts. They have found all sorts of industry and commerce recorded, and religious censuses taken door to door in many cities. They have found architectural studies of all the houses in their towns. They have also found taxation lists describing every commercial and residential building in the city. You have to understand that people worked where they lived, and they lived where they worked. So that if you walked up to this guy named Diogenes and said, “What’s going on in this building?” He would say, “I have a wife, three kids. I’m running a pottery. I also sell wine and oats for cows.” And they’d write this all down. Now, literally thousands and thousands of such documents from this era have come to light, and the results are absolutely fascinating. A lot of correspondence has emerged from this age, and I’ve got to stop here and talk to you a little bit about this book.

Tomorrow, I’ll try to give you my one reservation for this book. Now, that book cost me $30. I bought 30 copies of this and brought them with me. I got them wholesale, and if you pay $20 for them, I’ll break even. I’m going to take the rest of them back to the publisher because those 30 books cost $500. I would have brought 200. This book, actually the chapter on the papyri, goes through and lists many of the Christian findings that are there. They are mindboggling. The only pre-Constantinian hymn ever found was found in North Africa on the backside of an invoice for corn, and it is a Christian hymn. You can read it. They’ve even attempted to set it to music here. And Baptists are going to be thrilled, speechless. How many of you are, or were, Baptists? Will you please raise your hand? Oh, my cow. That’s per everybody. How? All right. Have you ever moved your letter from one place to another? Well, they actually found one of these things, and it’s late 200, probably around 280 AD. Here again, it screams so much to Maximus. It doesn’t say to the bishop of the church in or the holy so and so; to Maximus, our brother. Greetings. We commend to you Theophilus, our brother in the Lord. We pray for your help, and the letter is unsigned. The guy who sent it wasn’t even important enough to sign it. There’s no Christian name in there. There’s no great spillage over of…you ever get one of these letters from a brother or a sister, and you could throw the first three pages away? Oh, dear brothers, and the peace and the Lord and the Holy Trinity, and on and on, and then you go to page after page after page of that. There’s none of that there, saints. This screams volumes as to how those people were thinking.

In the middle of all this, they come up to one of the censuses in Egypt, and they find a statement that this fella is using this place to sell pottery and corn, and the Ecclesia of God meets here. Now, I’m going to talk about church buildings later, but this is mind-boggling for any hope of the Roman school of archaeology holding out. It’s crumbling fast. Here is an ordinary home used for living and selling things. We know the name of the man, just an ordinary, good old pagan name, and the house is being used as a Christian gathering, and this is almost at the time of Constantine.

And here’s the one that I thought was the funniest of all. It was written…again, I’m speaking of the reeds that came out of Egypt, used as paper to document civilization in that day. Somebody has obviously written this dear Christian, and he’s in trouble because there’s a Christian house there, or they’re trying to tax the church. I don’t know what it is, but it’s just downright hilarious. They have obviously asked him, “What does the church of the living God, that meets in your home, what does it own?” And his answer is classical. “The church owns no slaves, no gold, no silver, no furniture. It owns no property. It owns no corn, no this, no that. It owns nothing except an iron gate.” Say, praise the Lord. This is a church standing at the precipice of the Constantinian era, meeting in a home. It hadn’t got a candlestick. It hadn’t got a candelabra. It hadn’t got a cross. It hadn’t got an altar. It hasn’t got any paraphernalia whatsoever. Somehow or other, that home had to have been where the church was meeting; it had to have an iron gate put up somewhere. And they had ordered an iron gate from Alexandria and had it installed, and for what reasons we could only guess or imagine, and there they are, the Lord’s people own one iron gate. I’ve been a member of a fellowship of believers that owned nothing but folding chairs, and when we bought them, we made a covenant that we’d take them out to sea and dump them. If it came down to the church owning anything, I can relate to their sense and the feeling that they must have had on that day.

Now, this is not all. There is correspondence from Christian to Christian. Now again, we should be looking at an era in which there is an overlordship of bishops, where there is ritual, where there is orthodoxy, where the entire Christian family throughout the entire Roman Empire ought to be basically monolithic, stereotype everybody almost the same way, except for these heretics over here somewhere. Here is this pile of Christian correspondents, free open non-religious, no Christian names, even a minimum of Christian terms, and listen to this, not one single reference to any kind of clergy. As one of the writers said, by all statistics and all mathematical formulas, by all matters of chance, by the amount of literature there, there ought to be many references to elders, bishops, deacons, or other kinds of Christian leaders, and they are not there.

Don’t you care? Don’t you care just a little bit? Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Can’t you say, “Praise the Lord.” Say, “Praise the Lord.” Thank you. In fact, in one of the conclusions to all this, one of the authors said, “Taking all the Christian evidence that exists during this era, pre-Constantine, his statement is that there is virtually nowhere…we’re talking about in everything combined…there is virtually no reference to any clergy. Brother, praise the Lord. You’re getting…what’s emerging here is a free-swinging bunch of Christians meeting in homes, with a strong understanding of itineracy. I didn’t make this up.

Now, I’m going to have to take this next one and say it’s been plucked from the tombstones and the crypts. It’s been taken out of the museums. It comes out of the literature, the documents, everything, and I thought this was one of the most precious things imaginable, both on their tombstones and in everything else they do. And again, I’m quoting one of the authors just almost perfectly here. I think he said, “This was in direct contrast to all other elements of society within the Roman Empire.” It’s a little bitty thing. Christians dropped their last names. No one else did, and it seemed to be universal. Now, can you imagine why? Because…and this is on their tombs, this is your final resting place where you’re going to be remembered forever, this is in their correspondence to one another. In direct opposition to all customs of that day, Christians dropped their last names, and they did not have Christian first names. They dropped their last names. Why? Do you know? Does anybody want to make a guess? Yes, sister.

It indicated their social standing. You could tell by their last name whether they were royalty, upper class, middle class, or lower class, and especially whether they were slaves. I’m going to quote again in all of Christian literature and everything else that’s been put together from 100 to 313 AD, there is virtually no or absolutely no reference to a Christian as a slave. Now, by other means, they had discovered that many of these little local assemblies of believers in these cities were probably 50, 60, 70, or 80% slaves, with some of Caesar’s household, some middle class, some Jews, some soldiers, but they all, in the Christian community, that they understood to be the ekklesia, they all universally dropped their last name. Brothers and sisters were looking at a classless society. This screams to the scholar. This screams to the archaeologists that there is one pervading thing going on among them. They have an enormous, overwhelming sense of community to which they are all totally committed.