At the end of the 90s, our village was still in a very backward and closed stage, and the people in the village were busy with farming, and the farmers were idle in the sun, and they did not know how to spend a lot of time all day. For some reason, my brother took me to worship in a neighboring village. Children don't understand anything, they just hear people say that if you cry and say in your heart what you want, God will satisfy you. So when I started praying, a group of children started chanting along with a group of adults, I can't remember exactly, but the only thing I remember is my prayer: Let the trees in my house be covered with instant noodles.
The first religion lasted two weeks and died without a problem, probably because none of our prayers had been manifested. The middle elder told us, keep going, and only then will I be able to go to heaven when the world dies. This advice kept me up at night, and I often had nightmares that the earth had exploded, and then I flew into the sky and watched my non-religious relatives struggle in the magma, unable to do anything.
This childhood memory made me not have much good impression of Christianity, and after reading books and gaining some understanding of the history of Christianity, this feeling was even more serious, nevertheless, today I will try to discuss today's protagonist - Christianity with a relatively pertinent attitude.
Speaking of Christianity, I still have to mention Judaism a little. Judaism is a religion that spreads within the Jews, and it has little to do with other peoples, and in the Middle Ages, a Frenchman wanted to convert to Judaism, and no one would pay attention to you.
Legend has it that the Jews were an early Sumerian tribe, and around the beginning of the Xia Dynasty on the mainland, this tribe settled in Canaan (present-day Palestine) under the leadership of the patriarch Abraham. Abraham first gave birth to his eldest son, Ishmael, with his wife Sarah's handmaiden, and then the infertile Sarah finally became pregnant, and Abraham and she gave birth to her sister-in-law Isaac, and Isaac gave birth to his son Esau and his brother Jacob, who also called Israel, and gave birth to twelve children, each of whom was called the patriarch of a tribe, the twelve tribes of Israel, the ancestors of the twelve tribes of the nation of Israel.
Ishmael is called Ismaili in Arabic and is revered by the Arabs as their ancestor.
This type of historical version should be very familiar on the mainland. For example, Shaodian and the Yellow Emperor with Baosheng, and the female Dengsheng Yandi, the Yandi and the Yellow Emperor became the tribal leaders respectively, forming the Yanhuang tribe. Another example is the great-grandsons of the Yellow Emperor, Di Xuan and Jian Qiu, who gave birth to the ancestors of the Shang Dynasty, and Jiang Yuan, who gave birth to the ancestors of the Zhou Dynasty, Houji.
In the past, some readers and friends always scoffed at this when I wrote the history of the pre-Qin dynasty, feeling that the things that were empty should not be mentioned. In fact, every people has its own legends, which are unproven, but not necessarily meaningless.
The Jews later lived in Palestine for many years, it is said that because of the famine, in the middle of the Xia Dynasty on the mainland, they fled to Egypt, and the Egyptians desperately oppressed the Jews for more than 400 years, and the dirtiest and most tiring work was handed over to them, and they had their share in repairing the pyramids, and then the Jews couldn't bear it, and returned to their ancestral homeland Palestine under the leadership of the leader Moses. Then, after more than two hundred years of large and small conquests, in the early days of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the Jews finally established the United Kingdom of Israel in Palestine, and soon the kingdom was divided into the State of Israel and the State of Judea (also called the State of Judah), 22 years before the fall of the Western Zhou, the State of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire in the east, and most of the subjects were exiled by the Assyrian Empire and disappeared. The Jewish state was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire in 586 BC. The Jews were thus taken prisoner of Babylon.
Israel and the Kingdom of Judea
This history is either legend or true history, until the Jews became captives of Babylon, and during these decades of exile, the Jews remembered their ancestors, missed their homeland, and based on the tribal worship and legends of the previous generation of Jews, they gave mythological meaning to the legends of their ancestors, such as the two great migrations of Abraham and Moses, and were given wise choices that were directed by God. In order to give hope to the suffering people, they fantasize that the Jews are the chosen people and that God will send a Messiah to restore the Jewish state and save the Jews from suffering. They compiled some of the words and deeds of their ancestors and some of the customs of early Judaism into a book, which is the classic of Judaism, the Tanakh, which is also called the Bible
Thus Judaism arose. Most religions were born to give hope and sustenance to those who suffer. Judaism is no exception to this.
So Judaism has been deeply bound to the Jewish nation since its birth, Judaism is the religion of the Jews, God is the God of the Jews, so the Jews will not be as enthusiastic about foreign missions as later Christianity and Islam.
This place of Palestine, to the east is Europe, to the southwest is Africa, to the east is Asia, friends who are familiar with history know that the area around Palestine has risen too many great powers since ancient times, such as the early Sumerian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Egyptian Dynasty, the Achaemenid Dynasty of Persia that launched the Greco-Persian War, the Alexander Empire from Greece to India, the Roman Empire, the Arab Empire, the Persian Sassanid Dynasty, the Ili Khanate, the Dormition Empire, the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and so on. Palestine has been repeatedly ravaged, conquered, and reconquered by these empires.
Location of Palestine
So the people living here naturally have a taste of suffering. Therefore, this place is the easiest place in the history of world civilization to give birth to religion.
After the Jews had been enslaved by the Babylonian Empire for decades, the emerging Persian Empire (the Achaemenid dynasty) rose up and destroyed the Babylonian Empire, and the Jews finally had a chance to return to their homeland. It was conquered by Alexander for hundreds of years and fell under the rule of the Seleucid kingdom after the division of Alexander's empire, which was occupied by the Roman Empire in 64 BC. The Jews became vassals of the Romans.
Don't worry, we're going to talk about Christianity soon.
During the reign of the Roman Empire, presumably desperate for endless alien rule, the long-awaited Messiah never came to save the Jewish nation. Some people began to doubt the Jewish faith, so a young man named Jesus, claiming to be the Son of God, appeared in Palestine with the purpose of saving the world. He then went around telling people that he was the Son of God (that is, the God in Judaism), proclaiming that he was the Messiah (Savior) and that salvation could only be achieved by believing in himself, and took twelve disciples in the process of preaching.
In fact, it was a reform movement within Judaism.
This aroused the displeasure of the Sanhedrin, so Jesus was arrested and crucified after being judged by the local Roman governor. Jesus' disciples said that He rose three days after His death, but according to the atheists, this is certainly nonsense. How can people be resurrected from death? This is how Jesus in real history paid with his life for his impulses.
Jesus was crucified
But Christianity began to spread among the Jews, and gradually spread.
Yes, Christianity is the later name, and Jesus' original intention was not to create Christianity, he just couldn't bear the pain of the Messiah's delay, so he made up a set of rhetoric to say that he was the Messiah, and all the words and deeds and exhortations about him were handed down by his disciples, and gradually compiled into a book, which we call Judaism Jesus support.
In fact, Jesus' improvement of Judaism was so limited, coupled with the fact that Judaism forbade alien beliefs, and several of Jesus' disciples continued to adhere to this tradition, so the version of Jesus in Judaism after Jesus' death was only spread within Judaism.
It was not until later that Jesus' disciple St. Paul improved the Jewishism of Jesus. Judaism cannot be the main two obstacles to world religions, one is circumcision and the other is the prohibition of alien religion. Everyone knows that circumcision is difficult for ordinary people to tolerate, and most pagans give up because of circumcision when they convert to Judaism. In the course of his mission, St. Paul abolished these obstacles to the spread of religion.
Thanks to St. Paul's influence, Christianity retained the attractive elements of Jewish doctrine and removed some of the characteristics that were most difficult for Gentiles to accept.
It was only then that the Jewish religion of Jesus began to spread rapidly and spread beyond Palestine and throughout the Roman Empire. Since the Messiah was translated into Christ in Greek, Jesus gradually became known as Christ, and the Jewish religion of Jesus was gradually called Christianity.
Compared to Muhammad's contribution to Islam, Jesus' contribution to Christianity is truly beneficial. Of course, his greatest contribution was his crucifixion by the Romans, thus giving posterity unlimited illusions.
Christianity believes that Judaism has broken its covenant with God, so it claims that Jesus has made a new agreement with God, so they say that Jesus and the words and deeds of his disciples are established into a classic, called the New Testament, the Jewish classic Tanakh is called the Old Testament, and the two books together are called the Christian Bible. Judaism has never recognized the existence of the New Testament, because to recognize the New Testament is to deny the legitimacy of Judaism.
Therefore, although the two religions are of the same religion, the two religions have been incompatible since the birth of Christianity. To acknowledge the other person is to deny oneself. So medieval Christian-dominated Europe discriminated against and oppressed Jews unusually.
The Romans crucified the founder of Christianity, but eventually surrendered at the feet of Christ. However, for the first three hundred years of its existence, Christianity spread only among the lower classes of the people in Rome, and otherwise it was discriminated against and oppressed by the rulers. It was not until the fourth century AD, when the Roman Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire, that Christianity began to prevail throughout the Roman Empire. And with the conquest of the Roman Empire spread around the world.
Constantine the Great did two things that changed the future development of Christianity,
The first thing we've already mentioned is the elevation of Christianity to the state religion of Rome and its promotion. With the fall and influence of the Roman Empire, Christianity developed into a dominant religion in the European world, and later developed into a world religion with the opening of new shipping routes.
The second thing was to move the capital to Byzantium in 330 AD and name it after himself, which means "City of Constantine", which is the thousand-year-old city of Constantinople, today's Istanbul, Turkey. Sixty-five years after the capital was moved, the Roman Empire was divided into the Western Roman Empire centered on the city of Rome and the Eastern Roman Empire centered on the city of Constantinople. During this period, the Church of Constantinople, located in the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, gradually rose in status, and the two major churches attacked each other for falsifying doctrine and not being true Christians. This situation intensified, and finally in 1054, the Christian Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople issued each other's bishops.
Map of the Roman Empire (quoted from Map Emperor)
Christianity also split into Catholicism and Orthodoxy with the split of the two major churches.
This was something that Constantine the Great did not expect at the beginning of his move to the capital.
Why does Catholicism have a pope and Orthodox does not?
Mainly influenced by two historical events.
The first is that the Western Roman Empire was crushed and destroyed by the swarming barbarian invasion in 476, and although the Roman Church lost the protection of the Roman emperor, due to the great influence of Christianity, survival and development were no longer a problem. Instead, the fall of the Roman Empire gave the Roman Church an independent status.
Before the fall of the empire, according to the practice of the Roman Empire, the emperor needed the crowning of the Roman Pope to become a legitimate emperor of the empire, and this alone made the subsequent kings in awe of the pope, and these later countries regarded themselves as the orthodox heirs of the Roman Empire, and naturally supported the state religion of the Roman Empire, otherwise it would be unjustified in the country where Christians were overwhelming. This alone can make the Pope alive and nourishing.
In 751 AD, four years before the outbreak of the Anshi Rebellion, the chancellor of the Frankish kingdom seized the throne with the support of the Roman pope and established the Carolingian dynasty. According to the agreement reached between the two sides, Pepin sent two invasions to Italy, and in 756 he gave the conquered central part of the Italian peninsula, including the land around the city of Rome, to the Pope of Rome, known as "Pepin's Sacrifice", an event that extended the rule of the Roman Church directly from the spiritual world to the secular world. Thus came the Papal States.
The location of the Papal States, the predecessor of today's Vatican City State
After Pepin took the throne, he was crowned emperor by the pope, which is the divine right of kings, and Pepin's emperor was granted by the pope on behalf of Christ. This forced the qualification to rise to a level all of a sudden, and from now on, whoever wants to be emperor must go to the pope to be crowned, otherwise it is not legal. Napoleon could not break out of the cliché either.
Napoleon was crowned emperor
After Pepin's consecration, the Church of Rome gained far more secular power than his colleagues in Constantinople, and the Pope was not only the emperor of the spiritual world of people, but also the emperor of the secular papal states.
Another thing was the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire in 1453 AD. Before 1453, although the Church of Rome had established the Papal States for nearly seven hundred years, thanks to the protection of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Church of Constantinople also established a hierarchical ecclesiastical system under its jurisdiction, in the Orthodox world, the Church of Constantinople is the supreme authority, although he does not have his own secular domain, but the Pope also has the power to control all believers. Even the emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire occasionally had to show obedience to the Pope. After all, to sin against the Pope is to sin against Christ, and if you don't die, you won't be allowed to ascend to heaven.
Until they ran into the Ottoman Turks who did not believe in Christ.
The Turks converted to Islam before the destruction of the Eastern Roman Empire.
After the capture of Constantinople, the Ottoman emperors vigorously promoted Islam, and the church in Constantinople disappeared. Since the king of the Moscow principality (the predecessor of Tsarist Russia) in the north married the princess of the Eastern Roman Empire, he regarded himself as the rightful heir of the Roman Empire, and the center of the Orthodox Church was thus transferred to Moscow. But after this change, the authentic Holy See of the Orthodox Church collapsed, and the various churches of the Orthodox Church did not belong to each other. Therefore, there is no unified Holy See.
The barbarians destroyed the Western Roman Empire, but the Holy See conquered the barbarians, and although the Ottoman Empire, a foreign race, also destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire, it is a pity that Islam has conquered the Ottoman Empire earlier.
So today we often see the Catholic world electing a pope, and the pope has to go out and meet believers everywhere, but the Orthodox Church has nothing to do at all.
Westminster Abbey in Catholic style
The difference between these two major sects mainly focuses on the interpretation of the Bible, which is as boring as arguing about who is more powerful than the Jade Emperor and Taishang Laojun. But religion as a culture still has a different impact on real society. For example, the difference between the churches of the two sides,
Russian Orthodox Cathedral
The Orthodox Church spread mainly in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, namely today's Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and the Balkans, because of the areas ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire. In the Balkans, because Croatia and Slovenia in the east were once ruled by the Catholic Austrian Empire, the eastern population of the Balkans is mainly Catholic, Serbia in the center is influenced by Eastern Rome and believes in the Orthodox Church, while the western regions of Kosovo and Albania are mainly Muslim because of the Ottoman Turks.
The question of religion is a point of contradiction in the Balkans, second only to geopolitical issues.
Distribution of Christianity in Europe
Catholicism was accepted by the barbarians after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, spread successively among the Gauls and Germanic peoples, and spread across the English Channel to the British Isles. The Spanish Peninsula was originally the basic plate of Catholicism, and after the invasion of North Africa by the Arab Empire, the Spanish Peninsula was Islamized, and after the fall of the Arab Empire, several Islamic countries left on the peninsula were successively overthrown by local regimes, and Catholics reoccupied the area.
This was followed by the opening of new shipping routes led by the Portuguese and Spaniards. Catholicism was colonized by both countries, one via the route opened by da Gama to the African coast and India, and the other to Central and South America along the route opened by Columbus. The missionaries' enthusiasm for proselytizing was as fervor as their covetousness for the wealth of the colony.
The spread of Catholicism was naturally colonial in nature
The Frankish kingdom was divided into three after the death of Charlemagne, and then these three countries were reduced to a scattered sand because of the fiefdom system, and the whole of Western Europe became the fiefdom of hundreds of feudal lords, large and small, and the king occasionally centralized, but most of the time it was a nominal monarch, and the relationship between the states and the king was actually a political union, and the centralization of Europe began to take shape only after Louis XIV.
France wasn't France from the beginning, either
In contrast to this situation, Catholicism was embraced by almost all fiefdom subjects, and if the supreme pope declared any king illegal, then he legally lost the legitimacy of the king, and if he had competitors such as uncles and nephews, the latter could use this reason to oppose him or even subvert his position. Rival nations can also use this justification to seek to overthrow his rule. Most terrifyingly, he will become dispensable among his subjects who believe in Christ.
The Holy Roman Empire, which lived for thousands of years, was actually a bunch of independent states, which later gave birth to Germany, Austria, and Italy.
This situation led to the fact that the European Middle Ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire basically lived in the shadow of Catholicism. The Pope ensured the financial functioning of the Church by imposing tithes on the faithful. The church initially introduced this tax on Christians, citing the biblical statement that one-tenth of agricultural and pastoral products belonged to God, and in 779 the Frankish king Charlemagne stipulated that tithing was the obligation of every resident of the Frankish kingdom. In the mid-to-late tenth century, Western European countries began to promote implementation.
In addition, a Christian's life is inseparable from the arrangement of the church, and birth, marriage, childbirth, and death must be presided over by the church. What a Christian fears most is not that there is no place to die, but that there is no priest to pray for him when he dies. Therefore, there is often such a scene in European film and television dramas: a person who has been cut to a blur of flesh and blood is dying, and then must persist until the priest arrives, and then the priest repents, and then the priest prays for him, so that he can go on the road with peace of mind.
Catholicism is most notorious for selling "indulgences" to Christians, according to Christian doctrine, human beings are born sinful, and when they grow up, they constantly disobey God's will, constantly superimpose sins, such as their first ancestors, Eve and Adam, and the original original sin was to steal the forbidden fruit. Maybe your entire life of repentance will not be able to wash away your sins, and when the end times come, you still can't escape God's judgment, and if you don't do it, you will go to hell, that young man, I have an exclusive indulgence here that can spare you the sins that you have not been atoned for, just one dollar, do you want to think about it? Spending money to atone for sins is not too shameless in the eyes of Buddhists and Muslims who admire asceticism.
And then this muddle logic was embraced by many people, and became an important means for the church to accumulate money.
The church only needs to provide spiritual protection to Christians and ensure that they go to heaven after death, and can exploit them before they die and ensure that they go on the road worthless.
Another influence of Catholicism on Western Europe was to imprison people's minds and limit the development of new ideas, and for this reason even established the Inquisition as the judicial body of the Catholic world to censor all kinds of heresy. Galileo, as we know it, was sentenced to house arrest, and Bruno, who adhered to Copernicus' heliocentrism, was tied to the Roman Forum and burned to death.
Under the rule of Catholicism, the whole of Western Europe took on a situation of 10,000 horses, so it was later known as the dark Middle Ages by Europeans. Christianity went from being oppressed wretched in its early days to becoming a dragon slayer boy in the long history of the Middle Ages, trampling the entire European civilization under its feet.
In particular, it should be mentioned that the Jews who sent Jesus to the gallows in the first place with the Romans have long since disappeared, and after the fall of the country, they were exiled all over Europe, and were isolated by Catholic European countries to live in special Jewish ghettos, becoming synonymous with poverty and heresy. Friends familiar with European medieval literature should be familiar with this phenomenon.
Shakespeare's literary work "The Merchant of Venice" stage play, look for which is the Jewish Sherlock.
In the late Middle Ages, with the rise of the Renaissance movement, people's minds began to be liberated, coupled with the strengthening of the centralization of power in various kingdoms, the monarchy gradually won the victory over the clerical power, and a religious reform that was pedantic, hypocritical, contrived, and unrealistic to Catholicism was gradually set off.
The reforms took place mainly in Germany and Northern Europe, as well as in England, and were initiated by Martin Luther and John Calvin and King Henry VIII of England. The first two roughly core ideas are that Christians do not need to go through the church, only need to read the Bible to communicate directly with God, whether people can be saved depends on God, and no longer need the Holy See blind Bibi, which is a bit similar to the Sunnis in Islam, according to this logic, I myself study the Bible well at home, try to be a good person, I can redeem myself, then what indulgences and tithes no longer have to pay to the church. Therefore, this reform dealt a huge blow to Catholicism. At that time, capitalism was rising in various countries, new science and technology had broken people's superstitions about theology, and the authority of the Holy See had plummeted.
(Protestant clergy can marry, while Catholic and Orthodox clergy cannot marry.) ）
Unlike the reforms of Martin and Calvin, two Catholic scholars, Henry VIII's reforms were mainly based on political interests.
Perhaps coveting the large amount of taxes collected by the Holy See from England every year, Henry VIII, after consolidating power, declared that the English king was the supreme leader of the English Church, and the English Church only needed to obey the king's will, and used secular means to cut off the relationship between the Church of England and the Holy See, and in retaliation, the Pope excommunicated Henry VIII. But nothing is useful. Henry VIII's reform of Christianity, known as Anglicanism, was praised by the English aristocracy because it retained a large amount of wealth that originally flowed to the Holy See.
The above types of religious reforms, the content of which is different or different, but without exception they all deny the status of the Holy See, do not recognize the papacy, and are unified into the third largest denomination independent of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity - Protestantism.
There are three major denominations of Christianity
The narrow sense of Christianity we are now referring to is Protestantism, with the pace of British colonization after the Reformation, Protestantism has further spread in North America, Australia, South Africa and other places, so today's Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, etc. are basically Protestant.
The distribution of the three major Christian denominations in the world
Having written this, our discussion today is basically coming to an end. In my opinion, compared to Islam and Buddhism, Christianity is arguably the most hypocritical religion in the world. They preach that people are born guilty, but they've spent their entire lives doing evil things, their slogan is to save the world, but in modern times they're keen to colonize foreign nations and slaughter aliens. Their teachings have always been meant to restrain others, and in fact they have not followed them for a single day.
If there is God in the world, why have they never been punished?
If there really is Christ in the world, when the end times come, it is these European primitives who should be judged the most.
End of full text.