Christian Origins | The Professor's Convatorium

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance,
it is the [willful] illusion of [divine] knowledge [and revelation].”
— Stephen Hawking, modified by me

Actually I want to further clarify the title of this post: “Theological or Factually Historical?” No, better yet, “Theologically Canonical or Factually Historical & Widely Verified?” Yes, much better.

Agnotology. What is it? What does it mean? What is its significance to us today?

I think I can help you get a general, in-depth understanding of what agnotology is, what it means, and why it is very significant to us in the 21st-century and beyond. Just go to my 4-part series, Games of Unknowledging. However, if you are incredibly impatient with a lacking attention span, then here’s a simple quick definition of Agnotology:

Agnotology is the process of intentionally creating or encouraging doubt or ignorance (or lack of knowledge), for example by spreading false information, in order to influence opinion, sell an ideology, sell a product, or gain an advantage, or the study of these processes.

However, for the purpose of this blog-post I want to distinguish the growing chasm between religion (Abrahamic religions especially) and historical fact that is verified and corroborated by the majority of scholars and experts in all the many, many scientific fields of human history.

Christianity Cracking, Crumbling, and Collapsing as a Truthful Faith

The most significant of these failures is the historical reality of widely diverse “Christianities” or denominations, today over 40,000+, and the political process of deciding the New Testament canon over a 400–700 year period, known as Ecumenical Counsels of the Early Catholic Church (circa 4th-century) and their highest ranking priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. The first one you may have heard about was the First Council of Nicaea from May to July of 325 CE. After the Nicene Council the were followed-up by no less than seven (7) all the way into 754–787 CE at the Palace of Hieria near Constantinople of the Eastern Roman Empire. Why so many counsels to decide what theology was correct, was truthful, was divine revelation over 400+ years and then everything that was wrong? What were the many disagreements, fractures, mistakes, false testimonies of the nature of “Christ the Messiah?” It begs the bigger question of What was all of the mass confusion among the earliest Christians?

The major problem of earliest Christianity in the 4th-century and 5th-century was:

Divine Inspired Unity vs. Human (or Roman) Politics and Welfare — the traditional religious narrative suggests that Jesus established a single, clear doctrine passed down perfectly through his apostles. However, historical and archaeological discoveries—most notably the Nag Hammadi library found in 1945—proved that early Christianity was a chaotic web of competing groups with radically different beliefs.
The “Orthodoxy” — the heavy indoctrination we know today did not naturally emerge as the sole truth; it was codified through centuries of intense political maneuvering, theological debates, and Roman Imperial intervention.
The Selection of Scripture Was Absolutely Political at the Start: The books of the New Testament were not bound together immediately after Jesus’s death. For the first few centuries, different Christian sects used completely different gospels. The choice of which books to include (and which to burn or banish) was a slow, human process finalized centuries later. Books like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary were rejected not because they lacked historical merit, but because their theology didn’t align with the specific faction that eventually won political power.
Imperial Intervention (The Council of Nicaea): In 325 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great—a political ruler, not a religious prophet—convened the Council of Nicaea. He did this because Christian infighting was threatening the stability of the Roman Empire. The council voted on foundational doctrines, such as the exact nature of Jesus’s divinity (the Arian controversy). This solidified the reality that modern Christian orthodoxy was heavily shaped by Roman statecraft.
The “Synoptic Problem” and Textual Evolution: Textual criticism shows that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses as eyewitness accounts. They were written decades later (between 70 and 110 CE) by anonymous, Greek-speaking authors, not Mishnaic Hebrew-speaking Jews such as Jesus Christ. Furthermore, Matthew and Luke heavily copied from Mark and a lost source known as “Q,” changing details, theological emphasis, and even historical timelines to fit or retrofit their specific interests and audiences.

Ultimately, whether these facts “undermine” or dismantle Christendom as I think they do, all depends on the faith-believer. For fundamentalists or Christian Nationalists today who require literal, historical inerrancy, these facts pose a severe challenge. For progressive or mainline theologians, they simply show that God worked through the messy, complex reality of human history, a bit of a cop-out in my opinion. Why? Because if you collect the entire whole of everything related to Earliest Christianity up to the last seventh ecumenical council, which certainly includes Roman Empire recorded extant history (of which they were obsessed with) and all Jewish literature such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Tannaim Period of Jewish rabbinic-sage literature that does indeed still exist between 10–220 CE… during the lifetime of Yeshua bar Yosef, or Jesus, they overwhelmingly show just how messy, erroneous, retro-fitting in hindsight to cover problematic (false?) theology of the new Roman Catholic Church, and how the person named Jesus or Iisoús in Koine Greek in the canonical New Testament, was in fact NOT the divine resurrected messiah the Roman Empire (via Greco-Roman tradition of Apotheosis) fabricated. For example, there were many, many regional pagan and Jewish historians of the time during Jesus’ lifetime or within less-than 100-years of his life that have NO INDEPEDENT RECORDS whatsoever of a “Jesus Christ.” That is damning of Christianity. Furthermore, within a century of Jesus’ life do any of these known authors/historians make any mention of the later twelve disciples or apostles. They are:

So this begs the question, Why the literal hiding of such a supposed Lord and Savior of all humankind to the rest of the world? What’s the purpose of that? There is none and it is very, very poor foresight for an All-knowing, All-present theological God.

The Stark Comparisons and Distinctions Within Christianity Then and Today

historical fact	Christian belief	historical reality
The New Testament	A divinely inspired, unchanging set of books.	A curated collection from dozens of competing texts by early church leaders/men.
Early Church Doctrine	A unified, universally agreed-upon faith.	A fractured landscape of Gnostics, Marcionites, & Ebionites who fiercely disagreed on the nature of Jesus Christ.
Rise of Roman Orthodoxy post-320 CE	The Holy Spirit naturally guided the “true faith” to world victory.	Roman Imperial enforcement outlawed, suppressed, and destroyed competing Christian sects.

The above table, the lack of independent historical sources, the widely diverse, disagreeing, sometimes fighting sects over the nature of who Jesus actually was from a Greco-Roman tradition, versus the historical realities of the time period between 63 BCE and 70 CE known as the Jewish Late Second Temple Period, all show as a whole that the roots of earliest Christianity (i.e. The Way Movement) through the end of the Seven Ecumenical Counsels in 787 CE reveal at best Christianity’s flimsy foundation. At worst it clearly reveals no unified theology, doctrine, or orthodoxy of practices or faith. Why?

Plain and simply, the vast chasm that existed between imperial Greco-Roman (Hellenistic-Herodian) traditions, language (Koine Greek), and culture was factually incompatible with Jesus’ beliefs, his Jewish background, he and his people’s Mishnaic Hebrew language that also included Syro-Aramaic at times, and their long established Jewish literature and traditions on who, what, and why the Jewish Messiah was to arrive for them. Because of those deep chasms between two clashing cultures—Roman Empire vs. Judaism—when the earliest Roman Catholic Church began to ascend, particularly after the siege and sacking of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE killing most Homeland Jews… the hijacked, edited, redacted, ambiguous, suppressive manmade orthodoxy of forming the Biblical canon over seven Roman counsels in a 300-400 year period was failing and failing bad. As a result, the Christian canons became so heavily contaminated and contradictory it caused incessant confusion among all Christians then and to this day over a simple 1st-century CE Jewish rabbi-reformer who failed to be the Jewish Messiah according to Jesus’ own people then and today.

Live Well – Love Much – Laugh Often – Learn Always