Hekataios Amerikos

As an undergraduate in college I was struck by the fact that I was being taught things about religion that I had never heard of before even though I had attended church and studied my Bible from the time I was able to read. And I gradually began to realize that the material that I was being taught was, in a way, seen as proprietary to the ministerial profession and that ministerial students would graduate from college with absolutely no desire to share much, if any, of it with the folk. I came to realize that religious authorities generally preferred to keep the folk as ignorant of true religious history as possible so that they could continue to have a monopoly on such knowledge. Thus, nothing had really changed in that regard since the days of Jesus himself. My studies since that time have only tended to reinforce my original observation. After many years of research, I have concluded that even the best histories of earliest Christianity leave out some important points. Usually this is simply a sin of omission rather than being deliberate. After all, no one can know everything about that period in time, take it from me. And neither do I purport to know all about it or even to have every fact that can be obtained about that time. This would simply be impossible. So people, generally, are still left wanting. Still, the overall picture, in my view, is even more daunting than most can even realize. They have no idea what the true origins of Christianity were. They depend upon what they have always been taught or what their preacher says or what they read in the gospels and the book of Acts and don’t even bother to look further. But I couldn’t do that, so I searched and researched even well beyond the attainment of my multiple college degrees in religions/historical studies. I continued because I knew that there was more to know. I found that people in general have no idea that the beginnings of Christianity go back further than the first century CE and actually go back to at least the first and second centuries BCE. They don’t realize that John the Baptizer and Jesus didn’t just suddenly pop up out of nowhere, somehow fulfilling biblical prophecy, and start leading their movements. And they don’t realize that what they have studied and believed is actually history in a vacuum with little or no real reference to the wider world of the time. So all of these sensationalisms and pseudo-histories about Jesus and Christianity are a symptom of the emptiness that we are witnessing here. For even if Christianity had really begun with the first century CE, wewould still be left wanting because the gospels and other writings of the time don’t really seem to fill in several gaps.