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

Well, what was their view of the church? They have been able to dig up three, maybe four, Pre-Constantinian meeting places. One of them is fascinating because it survived for a little while into the post-Constantinian era. And by the way, it was in Rome, and it gives great insight into what happened. Now, archaeologists can enter these foundational buildings, study them, and gather enormous amounts of information. The first thing they find out is that this home had Christians meeting in it, and at some point, a wall was ripped out. There is absolutely nothing in it that speaks of anything that has been installed for the purpose of liturgy or ritualistic worship. Toward the end of the 4th century, around 350-360 AD, something was added to that building, suggesting they adopted some kind of liturgy. They’ve got a little raised platform. Then, after 400 AD, it was no longer used as a Christian building. Soon after that, somewhere after 400 AD, the first known choir was installed. It does not appear in any other Christian buildings that have been excavated, and every one of them that has been excavated has been a home. The most well-preserved, almost perfectly preserved, of course, is the home in Duro Europa, and the archaeologists got in there and measured the room. They said that before they tore the wall out, it could hold 40 people. And then they tore the wall out, and then it held 60 to 75 people.

There would be little question in the minds of those people that the assembly of God, the church of the living God in the city of Duro Europa had a total adult population of about 75 people. By the way, there’s half a letter somewhere that’s survived, and it says, “We have doubled this right after Constantine.” It says we have doubled in size in the last year. We have added 50 people. Now that is clear evidence: from 100 AD until Constantine came along, in that town they had 50 believers, and in one year they added 50 more.

What can we gather from all of this information, put it together, and take a good, clear look at it? Here’s what emerges: out of the hand that writes the papyri, there is the reflection of what’s going on in the head and the heart. The paintbrush reflects that person’s own experience, what he picks up with a chisel and chisels into stone. What is put on a grave marker about a brother or a sister reflects the thinking of those people and the way they saw the Christian faith. What are we looking at? What we are looking at is astounding. We are looking at symbols. I didn’t get into this, but in all the symbols of the early church, there is not once a depiction of a cross. It’s post-Constantinian.

All of the things that we consider religious symbols today were not theirs. Jonah was the number one depiction, and you and I, you see, we see Jonah’s being punished by the Lord over into that ocean and that big old whale. Well, when they depict him, they depict him in the belly of the whale, and he’s happy as he can be. The Lord has delivered him. He got a big smile on his face. He’s been delivered by the Lord. Noah has a big smile on his face as he leads all these people and animals in deliverance from the mess around. Always Noah, Jonah, everybody who got depicted got depicted with a smile. The total lack, I’m going to give you the statistics. You can write this down. From the year 400 A.D. and back, every known Christian name was put into a computer. Every known Christian had his name put into a computer and fed out. Eight of them who lived after the rise of Constantine had Christian names, and two had Christian names before Constantine, and that is all. You’re dealing with a group of people who have got their hearts and minds somewhere else. They don’t feel the need to name their kids John, Paul, Peter, and so on. Well, here is the summary, and I will quote it just around the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a quotation. It is not mine.

This takes into account the depictions of baptism. Always a happy, joyful thing. Seems to have no doctrinal statement to it all. It’s always a festival. Christians getting together to have the Lord’s supper. It looks like a big banquet with everybody having fun. Put all of it together with all those pictures of the Lord, and this is what the writer said: “This is what we see. We see a Christ, not one who has come to deliver people from guilt. We find no evidence of a sense of guilt, nor a Lord who has come incarnated upon the earth to fulfill some eschatological role or to buttress some doctrine, but rather a Lord has come to deliver them from the surrounding wisdom that they are in.” The sense that they have been delivered out of the Roman Empire by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now then, I would immediately ask: how do you do that? But the author went on to say, and this is someone who’s battling nothing. These are clinical scientists. He goes on to say: a redeemer who has come to deliver them out of the present system that they are in, and he has come to do this by the agency of a Christian faith community. You ought to say praise the Lord to that, and I’m going to interpret what that means. That means that those people saw these happy rejoicing believers in the Lord are rejoicing out of a Savior and a Lord, a triumphant God who has delivered them out of the world by the agency of the local body of believers with whom they live and breathe and have their being and with whom they joy and delight in great rejoicing. Now say amen to that.

Now, alright, now that’s the second- and third-century believers. Now, what about the word bishop? We’re still being beaten over the head with the word’ bishop’. There was a bishop of this little town and the bishop of that town and the bishop of this town and that town. I predict that sometime in the next 25 years, if the Lord tarries, somebody is going to write a book that’s going to blow bishops right out of the water. And if that happens, then what you’re going to end up with is a Christian community that has local helpers, local elders with people coming through, half-mad men coming through, preaching the gospel to them, undergirding them, helping them, taking off for parts unknown. And that group of believers, by the way, met in homes, in parks, and in cemeteries. Now you have cemeteries. Well, you have to see a Roman cemetery to appreciate it.

Have you ever seen Forest Lawn in Southern California? You have? Well, that’s the kind of cemeteries the Romans built. They made great public parks, and no one seemed to care about the dead. They went out there, and on clear days when it wasn’t raining or snowing or whatever, they seemed to have just one great time with one another. Okay, come back to this. I believe that this bishop problem, we have failed to understand that the word bishop is a transliteration, not a translation. In Greek, it’s not a transliteration; it is the original word, and so much of this was chiseled and written in original Greek. And that word doesn’t say “bishop.” That word means “overseer” or “elder,” and it could refer to any brother in the church who happened to be an overseer or an elder. And some of them, it would seem, indicate the church was meeting in the homes of these bishops, who also ran a little pottery factory. Sold wine and corn, and that’s not the image of a bishop that they’re trying to sell us. But here’s the fun part. The fun part is they’ve been digging around in these cemeteries and finding not “bishop” but “bishops.” Two, three, and four of them are all buried together in one place. Now, the Roman Catholic Church can’t handle that because they’re not supposed to be but one bishop per church or diocese. Here you got three or four of those brothers buried together, and what you got is not bishops, but, praise the Lord, a local plurality of elders.

I think that book is coming, and won’t that be a needed day? Praise the Lord. Well, brothers and sisters, what does this mean for you and for me? For me, it means that the simplicity of the Christian gospel of the first century was held during the second and third centuries. It only began to cave in around 280, and things do begin to change, and there really are individual bishops, and you actually begin to pick up little evidence of a ritual. I have a theory, and that is that the sweeping periods of persecution time after time had killed off Christian leaders, and the lowest common denominator had to keep emerging to the top with less and less understanding and less spiritual foundation, till by the time 280, 290 the church was in trouble.