One Perfect Love in InI Majesties Empress Menen I , Emperor Haile Selassie I JAH
The Christianity that we see around us now is not the original orthodoxy it pretends to be. In the first years after the life of Yeheshua (Jesus) there were many different sects of Christianity, each with its own interpretation of Yeheshua.
From Bart D. Ehrman’s Lost Christianities:
“In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that Jesus was both divine and human, God and man. There were other Christians who argued he was completely divine and not human at all. …There were others who claimed that Jesus was a flesh and blood human, Jesus, and a fully divine being, Christ, who temporarily inhabited Jesus’ body. …there were Christians who believed that Jesus’ death brought about the salvation of the world. There were yet other Christians who thought that Jesus’ death had nothing to do with the salvation of the world. There were yet other Christians who said Jesus never really died…”
Yeheshua was a Middle Eastern Jew living under Roman occupation and the whole idea of a Messiah was also Jewish. His original followers were all Jews. There were lots of arguments about how Jewish a Christian had to be. Some said that Christianity was an entirely Jewish concern, requiring circumcision and observance of law. Others tolerated Gentiles and still others embraced conversion of the Gentiles.
Paul was a Gentile, the first non-Jewish Christian leader. It was Paul’s version of Christianity that Rome found most palatable. It can be argued that Pauline Christianity saved the faith from passing away into the obscurity of history like all of the other concurrent Jewish and proto-Christian sects of the time or that it co-opted and polluted a purely Jewish movement and was therefore responsible for all of the subsequent follies of the church.
In time Paul’s version of Christianity became “orthodox” (“right thinking”) and became the State religion. Then all other versions of Christianity were ruthlessly extinguished. Only with relatively recent archeological discoveries have they been at least partially re-discovered. This orthodoxy was monolithic until the Reformation and the advent of Protestantism.
Many of the tenets, scriptures and doctrines of modern day Christianity are not original. Issues as central as the divinity of Jesus, the virginity of Mary, the Trinity, salvation, reincarnation, life after death, which gospels are true and which are false, and even whether there should be a Bible, what should be in it and who should be permitted to read it were all decided long after the life of Yeheshua.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam suffer under the weight of their own “orthodoxies” because, by definition, all other thoughts are “heresies”. The highest spiritual aspirations of mankind became defined, dictated, policed and adjudicated by a central authority, reducing them to base partialities.
The earliest state of Christianity should seem familiar to Rastas, there are similarities to the current state of InI. It has only been 32 years since InI have seen HIM, the Gospel of Mark, the earliest gospel included in the Bible, was written 65 years after the life of Yeheshua.
And so InI have the benefit of seeing how other faiths and movements have created their own impediments and failed to serve their intended purpose. Jesus ate with tax-collectors, whores and sinners and many Christians and Christian institutions would rather cast the first stone at them (bun fyah pon dem) than show them Love.
InI can sight many of the questions which confront InI in this time such as the universality of Rastafari, racial consciousness, the pros and cons of establishing centralized authority, the orthodoxy vs. heresy mindset, scriptural interpretation and even theological doctrine in light of modern knowledge of the establishment of the other Judeo-Christian faiths. Let InI reason upon this question;
What will Rastafari be in 400 years from now?
ONE PERFECT LOVE, JAH RASTAFARI
|
|
