Chapter 11, "The Big Surprise." My father was in the Air Force, and I grew up on a military base. As a result, we were rarely able to have a garden, so I grew up never having eaten a vine-ripened tomato. Instead, all of the tomatoes I ever ate as a child had come from a grocery store. They had been picked green and sat in their bin at the market, in a motley coat of green, pink, and light red. Their flesh was a pinkish, light red, and was quite firm. In fact, it was almost crunchy, like a cucumber.
And I liked them. As far as I knew, this is what a real tomato was supposed to be like. One day, after I had left home, some friends invited me over to their house for lunch. They were country folks, and a hefty portion of our lunch came out of their garden. Sitting right in the middle of the table was a plate of sliced garden-fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes. I eyed them with suspicion. There they were, a deep blood red, not at all the color that tomatoes were supposed to be. I suspected they must be rotten.
Yet, being a hungry, skinny kid of 18, I wasn't about to offend my hosts and miss out on being invited back sometime. So I politely placed some of the tomato slices on my plate when they were passed to me. Feeling as if all eyes were focused on me, I gingerly inserted a slice of those strange-looking tomatoes into my mouth. As I played around with the piece of tomato on my tongue, I noticed uncomfortably that it practically dissolved in my mouth. It wasn't at all crunchy like a tomato was supposed to be.
It didn't even taste right. "These definitely are rotten," I thought to myself. I'm sure glad I wasn't raised in the country and forced to eat rotten tomatoes like these poor country people. Slowly, over a period of several years, I finally came to realize that those "rotten" tomatoes were actually what real tomatoes are supposed to taste like. What I had grown up with was far from the real thing.
In fact, I eventually came to enjoy vine-ripened tomatoes so much that I now dislike having to eat the store-bought kind. My wife and I are not big gardeners, but every place we live, we always have at least a small plot with fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes. When it comes to Christianity, we have all grown up with the store-bought kind. It is all we have ever known, and we have grown accustomed to it. To us, real Christianity should taste, look, and feel like the kind we have.
So when we first come face to face with genuine, primitive, vine-ripened Christianity, it doesn't look right to us. It doesn't taste like what we want it to taste. And unless we are driven by deep spiritual hunger, we quickly reject it and go back to our store-bought variety. First subheading: "Get Ready for a Shock." I think the biggest shock to all of us Protestants, or evangelical Christians, when we read the early Christian writings, is the discovery that the Reformation was no return to primitive Christianity.
Many of the cardinal doctrines of the Reformers do not find any support at all in the historical record of early Christianity. In fact, probably everyone who reads the early Christian writings today finds that some of his or her beliefs are not supported by the historic record, regardless of what denomination he or she belongs to. At the same time, everyone finds some of his or her beliefs are precisely what the Church taught in its early years. In fact, some groups find that most of their beliefs are the same.
But most of us don't. I found that only about half of my beliefs match theirs. But that's not the only jolt we receive. Most of us also discover that the early Christians weren't at all like we had imagined. That's because we have so Westernized, modernized, Protestantized, and sanitized the apostles that we take them out of their historical setting. When we are transported back to their real-life setting, we find a Christianity that is often strikingly different from ours.
Let me tell you some of the things I'm talking about. First of all, you will find that the 2nd-century Christians did not have a 20th-century knowledge of science and medicine. You will also discover that the early Church used the Septuagint as their Old Testament, rather than the Masoretic text. A footnote on that: the Masoretic text is the Hebrew text of the Old Testament that became standardized and recognized as authoritative by the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.
It became the uniform text used by Jews and Roman Catholics during the Middle Ages. The Septuagint was the first translation made of the Old Testament into Greek. It is our primary witness of an older text type used by many Jews in the 2nd and 3rd centuries before Christ. The Septuagint was the primary Old Testament version used by the early Christians, and it has remained the Old Testament text used by the Eastern Christian churches down through today.
You will learn that they sometimes quote from spiritual books that most of us have never read, like Enoch and the Wisdom of Solomon. You will find that they see in the Mosaic Law various spiritual truths that we would never have thought of. And not only will you discover that many of their beliefs and practices are different from ours, you'll also discover that their whole pattern of reasoning is often different. In fact, sometimes their logic just doesn't make sense to us.
But perhaps what offends us the most about early Christianity is that it was a Christianity that crucified the flesh rather than indulging it. It was a Christianity far removed from today's gospel of easy believism. Next subheading: "What Should Our Response Be?" So what should our response be to all of these strange things? I can tell you what my initial response was: I quit reading the early Christian writings. After a couple of evenings of reading the Ante-Nicene Fathers, I just said to myself, "That's it.
These guys are way off base, and I don't need to listen to any more of them." I pitched the volumes of their writings back on my library shelf, and I tried to simply dismiss them from my mind. I believed that it was the prompting of the Holy Spirit that made me go back to them. So a few months later, I gave them another chance. This time I began with a different writer than I had the first time. But the results were the same. "This can't be right," I kept saying over and over to myself.
"The early Church couldn't have been like this." I disappointedly shoved the books back on the shelf. And I decided again to call it quits. Yet, I eventually came to realize that I could not change the truth about historic Christianity by ignoring the evidence. Whether I discovered what the early Christians believed or not, their beliefs were still there. I couldn't change them by closing my eyes to them. I realized that I owed it to myself and my family to find out what primitive Christianity was really like.
So the third time, I approached these historic writings with a different attitude. The first two times, I had continually argued with them as I read, saying things such as, "No, you can't mean that," or, "Didn't you guys read what Paul said?" and so on. This time I realized that if I was ever going to find out how the second generation of Christians understood the apostles, I was going to have to temporarily set aside everything I believed and just listen. I knew I was under no obligation to adopt their doctrines.
But I owed it to myself to honestly know what those doctrines were. When it's all over, I reasoned, I'll still be free to take back all of my present beliefs. So I began reading with a different frame of mind. This time, I just listened to what they had to say, rather than arguing with them. Gradually, I became used to their way of thinking. Finally, after reading their writings every evening for about six months, I was overwhelmed with a thirst to go back and read the New Testament again. So I did.
In a couple of evenings, I read the whole New Testament, gulping in its spiritual waters. I had previously read the New Testament dozens of times, from beginning to end. But as I read it this time, something was marvelously different. I noticed all sorts of statements in Scripture that I had never seen before. My eyes were open to verse after verse that had formerly been hidden from me.
More importantly, I noticed an incredible similarity between the teachings and thought patterns of the New Testament writers and those of the 2nd-century Christians. I suddenly realized how my eyes and ears had been closed to so many things in Scripture all of my life. I perceived how much we have Westernized, modernized, and sanitized the New Testament. Most of the things I found strange in the early Christian writings had been in the New Testament all along. I simply had never noticed them. Let me illustrate.