IB World Religions 1.6.1. Christianity in Context: Jesus, the Church and the Denominations Notes

1.6.1. Christianity in Context: Jesus, the Church and the Denominations

Jesus of Nazareth

1. Christianity begins with Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher who lived in Roman-ruled Galilee and was crucified in Jerusalem in about 30 CE. Christians hold that God raised him from death three days later, and that claim is what turned his followers into a movement of their own.
2. Christ is a title and not a family name. It renders the Greek Christos, a translation of the Hebrew Mashiach (Messiah), the anointed one whom Jews of the period expected God to send.
3. Almost everything Christians say about his life comes from the four Gospels of the New Testament, written in Greek in the decades after his death.
4. In those accounts he teaches in parables about the Kingdom of God, heals the sick, eats with people his society treated as outcasts, and calls twelve disciples to travel with him.
5. He taught inside Judaism, quoted the Hebrew scriptures and kept the Jewish festivals. Christians read the conflict that ended in his death as an argument within that world.

The first Christian communities

1. The movement began among Jewish followers in Jerusalem. Christians mark its public start at Pentecost, when they hold the Holy Spirit came on the disciples.
2. Paul, a Pharisee who had opposed the movement and then joined it, carried the message to Greek-speaking cities around the eastern Mediterranean.
3. The decisive early argument was whether non-Jews had to keep the Jewish law in order to belong. Acts reports that the Jerusalem leaders decided they did not, and Christianity became a religion separate from Judaism.
4. Early members met in private houses, shared a meal recalling Jesus's last supper, and admitted newcomers by washing them with water.
5. Roman authorities persecuted Christians at intervals for refusing to honour the state cults, and Christians remember those killed as martyrs, a Greek word meaning witnesses. The emperor Constantine legalised the religion in 313 CE, and by 380 CE it was the official religion of the empire.

Scripture and creed

1. Christians call their scripture the Bible, a library rather than a single book. Its two parts are the Old Testament, largely the Jewish scriptures, and the New Testament.
2. The letters of Paul are the oldest surviving Christian writings, older than the Gospels, and were sent to particular congregations about particular problems.
3. The list of accepted books, the canon, was settled gradually and not identically. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include writings called the Apocrypha that most Protestant Bibles leave out.
4. Christians also summarise belief in creeds. The Nicene Creed, agreed at councils in 325 and 381 CE, is recited in Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant services.
5. Denominations read the text differently. Some Christians take the opening chapters of Genesis as literal history, while others use biblical criticism to study the texts as documents shaped by their authors.
6. They also differ over authority. Most Protestant churches teach sola scriptura, that scripture alone is final, while Catholic and Orthodox Christians read it alongside the tradition of the Church.

Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant

1. Christians are organised into denominations, distinct bodies with their own leadership, worship and teaching. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest of them, led by the pope, the bishop of Rome.
2. The Eastern Orthodox churches are a communion of self-governing national churches led by patriarchs. Their worship is the Divine Liturgy, and icons are central to it.
3. The two separated in the Great Schism of 1054, after long disagreement over the authority of the pope and over the filioque, a clause the West had added to the Nicene Creed.
4. The Reformation, opened by Martin Luther in 1517, produced the Protestant churches. They emphasise salvation by grace through faith, the authority of scripture over church tradition, and worship in the language of the people.
5. Protestantism is plural in itself. It includes Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist and Reformed churches, and the Pentecostal churches that began in the early twentieth century and now grow fastest.
6. A fourth family parted earlier still. The Oriental Orthodox churches, among them the Coptic, Ethiopian and Armenian, separated after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE.

Christianity today

1. Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with roughly 2.4 billion adherents. About half are Roman Catholic, rather more than a third Protestant, and about one in ten Orthodox.
2. Its centre of gravity has moved south. Numbers grow quickly in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia, while regular attendance has fallen across much of western Europe.
3. Denominations take different positions on contested questions. Anglican, Methodist and Lutheran churches ordain women in many countries, while the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches reserve the priesthood to men.
4. Ecumenism, the effort to repair these divisions, is itself a feature of modern Christianity. The World Council of Churches was founded in 1948, and in 1965 the pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch lifted the excommunications of 1054.
5. What the denominations hold in common is still substantial. Christians are baptised, read the Bible, keep Easter and Christmas, and confess Jesus as Christ.