A Different Jesus, Part 1: The Beginnings of Christianity

 It was a series of strange and unexpected circumstances that led me to answering a question about the doctrine of the Trinity one Sunday. My ward’s building had been vandalized and our meetings were cancelled while the meetinghouse was cleaned up. The bishopric suggested going to the ward that meets at the stake center, half an hour from where I live. When I got to Relief Society, a male investigator who identified as a woman walked into Relief Society and sat down a few seats away from me. The teacher split us into groups to discuss a question for the lesson and the male investigator was in my group. At one point, he suddenly asked, “Do Mormons believe in the Trinity?” I waited a second to see if anyone else wanted to answer him, but there was just an awkward silence. So I responded, “We don’t accept the concept of a Trinity because it’s not biblically based and Jesus never taught it.” He was satisfied with that answer and the lesson continued on. I suppose by some unexpected plan, I was in the right place at the right time to answer a question that might have otherwise gone unanswered.

As Latter Day Saints we’re not obligated to have a deep knowledge of other Christian faiths’ beliefs and doctrines. Our Sunday school and other meetings should be devoted to teaching our own doctrines so we can become better converted to the gospel ourselves. However, having a basic (or even detailed) understanding of what our Christian brothers and sisters from other faiths believe can help us understand them better and can help them understand us better. Especially since the Michigan church shooting, I think that being able to explain why we as Latter Day Saints don’t accept some of the foundational teachings of Catholicism, Protestant denominations, and the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. It can also help strengthen our own testimonies as well. 

“You believe in a different Jesus”

This statement is probably very puzzling for many Latter Day Saints. Which Jesus do they think we believe in? Isn’t there only one Jesus in the Bible who is the Son of God and atoned for our sins and rose from the dead? Latter Day Saints might find it even more puzzling if a Protestant says something like “Mormons need to accept the true, biblical Jesus”. If you’re a Latter Day Saint and someone says this to you, you might be thinking, “We believe what the Bible says about Jesus!” Without understanding what other Christians mean by “a different Jesus” or a “true, biblical Jesus”, it can be very difficult to reach across the aisle and have productive conversations with our brothers and sisters of other Christian faiths. So what do other Christians mean by “a different Jesus”? 

When other Christians say “You Mormons believe in a different Jesus”, they don’t mean a different person, but rather they seem to feel that we are misunderstanding Jesus Christ’s divinity or what He accomplished through the suffering in the final hours of His mortal life and that their beliefs are the original form of Christianity dating back from the early Christian church in the time of the Apostles.

 

So what did early Christians believe? This is an interesting question because most people probably think ancient Christians’ beliefs are pretty self-evident. “Just read the Bible! That tells you what ancient Christians believe!” Or someone with a little more theological background

might say that ancient Christians believed in the creeds. But ancient Christians didn’t have the Bible and they didn’t have the Creeds. This is where the “Who is a Christian?” question gets tricky if your definition depends on the Bible (particularly the King James Bible) or the Creeds.

Christianity’s Earliest Beginnings

Catholics, Orthodox Christian and Protestants believe in a tenant called the Nicene Creed which was created by a council of Nicea in the 4th century— 300 years after the Ascension and about 200 years after several Christian congregations had significant conflicts about authority. As described in an early Christian letter called 1 Clement from somewhere between 75 and 90 CE, the congregation in Corinth that earlier had been full of faithful followers of Christ’s gospel had now forced out their priesthood leaders and replaced them with new ones of their own choosing. They weren’t alone in doing this. 3 John 1:9-10 says that a man named Diotrephes who had once been a member of a congregation of believers and had begun spreading malicious lies about the priesthood leaders and seems to have cast them out of the congregation: 

I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not.

Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the church.

In his epistles John repeatedly warns against antichrists (people teaching apostasy) among the early Christian congregations. After the epistle of Clement, conflict, opposition to ordained authority within the early Christian church continued. The epistles of Ignatius repeatedly said to be unified with bishops. In other epistles, the congregations at Magnesia and Philadelphia were admonished for taking on Jewish customs. The Trallians and Smyrnans started ascribing to a belief that Jesus wasn’t human. Polycarp addressed the same issue with the Philippians.

In his epistle, Papias said Christians should believe in a literal Millennium and resurrection despite opposition. Furthermore, changes to the rites of Christianity were creeping in around 100 AD (end of first century to beginning of 2nd century). The Didache, an early Christian church handbook states that baptism by sprinkling of water is acceptable if a large enough amount of water isn’t at hand, though it still sets forth baptism by immersion as the first option. (Ehrman, 2003). So doctrinal issues were a problem from almost the very beginning with Christianity. 

I remember always hearing that the early Christian church had fallen away because the apostles had been martyred and the priesthood was lost when they were killed, but looking at the early Christian epistles I think the greatest threats were coming from members falling away and casting out their ordained leadership to replace them with more popular individuals who were teaching ideas that were more popular. Catholics often point to a line of continuous authority as the reason why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can’t have God’s authority (or Protestant denominations for the matter), but it is indisputable though that by the end of the 2nd century AD, a number of doctrinal controversies had arisen among the early Christian congregations and I think that claiming a line of unbroken authority from this time period is questionable. And I’m not alone in my opinion either. Orthodox Christians point out that the basis of the Catholic Church’s line of authority is whoever was bishop of Rome, starting with Peter, but the Bible never states that to be the case (“10 Differences Between Orthodox and Catholic Churches”).

The conflicts didn’t stop in the 2nd century and competing ideas about Christ’s divinity, the relationship between the Father and the Son, the Second Coming and a host of other doctrinal controversies continued to circulate. And that’s where the Council of Nicea comes in. Arias, an early Christian, preached a sermon that espoused the idea that Jesus was subservient to God the Father— something many other Christian bishops disagreed with — and this seems to have been something like a straw that broke the camel’s back. In 325 A.D. two hundred Christian bishops gathered in Nicea (in modern day Turkey) to decide what Christians would believe. They deliberated and decided on a set of beliefs about the Godhead that would define Christianity for the next 1,500 years. The Nicene Creed states that God the Father and the Son are of the same substance and that nothing could have existed before God (creatio ex nihilo). This is the origin of the doctrine of the Trinity, that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are one essence but three Persons. The creed also stated that anyone who did not ascribe to the beliefs decided upon in the Council of Nicea would not be accepted as a Christian. Arius and other Christian like Secundus and Theonas refused to adhere to the Nicene Creed and were excommunicated and their written works burned. 

Most of the tenets of the Nicene Creed are things that Latter Day Saints agree with: we worship one God the Father— not a pantheon of gods; God created the universe through His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ; Christ was human, conceived through the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary; He came to work out our salvation; He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, was buried, rose on the third day, ascended to Heaven, sits on the Right Hand of the Father and will return to Earth one day; He will judge the living and dead and His Kingdom will be eternal; the Holy Spirit is from God and that the prophets have spoken through the Holy Ghost; the dead will be resurrected and there is a life after death. With so much in common with Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Protestants, you might be wondering what about our faith could possibly be so divisive and contentious to preclude us as Christians? When we agree on so much, what could possibly prompt some people to think it’s appropriate to protest in front of our houses of worship, distribute pamphlets with false information about our faith, and even crash into one of our meetinghouses and shoot a congregation of worshipping Latter Day Saints because we are supposedly “the antichrist”? The answer to those questions starts with some small and, at first glance insignificant, parts of the Nicene Creed, one is creatio ex nihilo and the other is the doctrine of consubstantiality.