Did early Christians change Christ’s message?

The Jewish people, at the time of Christ, had arrived at a crossroads. In their decision to live by high principles, the Jews, as a people, were far ahead of most peoples of their time. They had taken the next step, also, of recognizing that living for God is the highest principle. They had chosen God, and for this reason, as the Bible states, God chose them.

The most important step on the spiritual path, however, is to make oneself receptive to divine guidance. The next step for the Jewish people would have been to welcome practical spiritual guidance ,  not only through written laws, but through enlightened masters like Jesus Christ who themselves were in tune with God’s will.

Jesus came to teach the Jewish people the true meaning of freedom: not liberation from outer slavery such as they’d endured in Egypt and in Babylon, and were enduring to a lesser degree under Roman rule, but freedom from the tyranny of delusion: from material desires and attachments, from the demands of an arrogant and self-affirming ego. He came to help them understand that their original “contract” with God was primarily inward. Inner communion with God was the essence of Jesus Christ’s message and was recognized as such by spiritually-minded Jews.

The challenge the Jewish people faced was to awaken to God’s love by accepting the guidance of Jesus Christ, an enlightened master, and through that love, to enter into communion with God. But for this next step the Jews, as a people, were not ready.

The early Christians and the Greco-Roman world

Jesus, not surprisingly, was opposed by the narrowly orthodox Jews of his day – the pedants and the prelates who, enclosed in high walls of dogmatism, condemned his fresh perception of truth, inspired as it was from within. The orthodox Jews’ rejection of Jesus had the effect of pushing his followers out into the Greco-Roman world, where the overall approach to life was radically different from the more-or-less unsystematic teachings of Jesus Christ.

In the Greco-Roman world, institutionalism had already been developed to a fine art. As Christianity entered into that world, the early church leaders thought it necessary to adapt Christ’s message to that culture,  for most of them, the only culture they knew. They therefore perceived a need to get organized, and to encase Christ’s teachings in a formal structure, under strict administrative control.

As Christianity became absorbed by the Greco-Roman world, it adopted the rigid disciplines of Greek reasoning to bolster the teachings it was formulating, and shunned the more fluid perceptions that come with soul-intuition. Slowly there emerged an authoritarian Church, centralized and all-powerful. As soon as the Church was in a position to do so, it declared a need for fixed definitions, that is to say, dogmas to protect Christ’s teachings from numerous ideological assaults. Dogmatic definitions offered a safe and easy way of “refuting” error.